Considerations for Sandboxed Solutions

With SharePoint 2010, there’s a new functionality that allows for developers to create solutions that are scoped at the site collection level with a limited portion of the SharePoint API. Better yet they can deploy these solutions without bothering their IT Pro brethren. This is awesome! Course it bypasses some of the governance that you might have in place regarding solutions deployment. Course it is possible to turn them off or block certain ones.

There have been several great discussions by Sahil Malik, Jeremy Thake, Srini Sistla, Mike Watson and many others about the power of Sandboxed Solutions. All great points regarding their power – and trust me, in many ways it’s a game changer in delegating the ability to devs to write extensible code that can do more than what SharePoint Designer was ever meant for.

There are some considerations to think about however… and if you’re wondering, “Well what are they?” then I recommend hopping on over to MSDN to read more at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee231562.aspx

A closing thought though… if you’re looking for complete freedom with your solutions and have the need to arch across site collections… then you need something that’s freeing and non-restricting. So for those of you that are studying for your SATs or GREs, you could use the analogy that Sandboxed Solutions are to Briefs as Farm Solutions are to Boxers. 🙂

Happy Developing!