In our seventh video, Joe explains how you can do a lot with ‘vanilla’ or ‘out-of-the-box’ SharePoint, and how custom coding new solutions for SharePoint goes a step further. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

Joe Perry, Technical Manager
+ 44 20 7471 8500 | jperry@contentformula.com | LinkedIn

As a company that build a lot of SharePoint sites, our clients often ask us about ‘out of the box’ and customisation. There tends to be a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around this subject.

SharePoint comes with a lot of features and tools available out of the box, and there is a lot you can achieve by configuring these features in certain ways. This includes applying branding, different page layouts, and creating functionality — sometimes people confuse this with customisation.

True customisation involves coding new solutions that are either deployed on the server or housed in the SharePoint app, providing you are using SharePoint 2013 or Office 365.

I.T. teams worry about customisation because every time a custom solution is added to SharePoint this will complicate the upgrade to a new version of the core SharePoint platform.

Sometimes customisations are still necessary, depending on the specific requirements, but you have to be ready to spend additional time migrating the customisation during an upgrade. However, most requirements, including an attractive design, can be achieved with out of the box components; this is even true of SharePoint online, or Office 365. Take a look at our recent designs.

View John’s previous video: the importance of good graphic design.
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