It was more than 10 years ago when AIS first began to explore and envision the idea of using SharePoint as an application development platform. Although Office was a great product to author content, it did not provide a means to manage that content. From the moment we heard that Microsoft was going to provide a centralized, managed repository for Office and other forms, documents and records we immediately started to envision solutions for our clients, along with a laundry list of new features.

Automated workflow and integration of development tools were immediate needs. It wasn’t until 2007 that we felt we had enough features to address our client’s needs to automate paper-based workflows. You can view the whitepaper we published on January 30, 2007 (the very day SharePoint 2007 was released) on our YouTube channel. We published an updated version on the day of the 2010 release, which was a major release in terms of features and performance that also marked the expansion of Search features.

READ MORE: SharePoint App Dev Platform: The Journey So Far & the Road Ahead

Over the years we have built countless large-scale, human-to-human (and human-to-system) workflow solutions. Some support tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of workflows, and hundreds of millions of documents and records. We’ve built task, event, investigation, legal matter, and assessment management systems (just to name a few) across DoD and the military, many Intel agencies and some civilian agencies in the public sector. In the commercial sector our clients range from the largest law firms, international NGOs with far-flung offices, health plans, wealth and financial management, among many others.

Today, SharePoint 2013 has fully matured.  It finally contains all the features we need for a fully-featured application development platform.  We now have enumerable building blocks which allow us to write less code and deliver solutions for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. Read More…