Hey Developers, Plugins for SharePoint Wanted!

If there's one thing I really love, it's SharePoint (well, sometimes). And Plugins. Those cute little furry dll files that you drop into a directory and make programs do cool things. So why not combine the two?

I'm putting together a SharePoint Admin Host tool that's driven entirely by plugins. How so you ask? Well, it's pretty simple. Using my SPS Wrapper classes and connecting to a SharePoint server via web services I have a host that will let you do pretty much whatever you want against the SharePoint information. A Plugin manager inside the host will look for dlls and load them at runtime. They also expose the wrapper classes to your plugin, so you can do things against SharePoint without doing any heavy lifting.

The Host does two things for the plugins. First it connects, via web services, to the server and builds a tree of all areas, sites, lists, etc. (dynamically as you expand nodes on a treeview of your portal/wss site). Second, it communicates the selected node(s) to your plugin as a fully typed class that you can interact with. All without SharePoint on your client desktop.

What can you do with this? You can build plugins for it silly. So lets say the user fires it up and connects to his portal then selects a few areas. You can write a plugin that creates a subarea (based on available templates from the portal) under each of the areas selected. Or the user selects all the sites in the tree. You can write a plugin that applies a theme against all of them in one fell swoop. Want to create client side reports from SharePoint data? No problem. It's all there, waiting to be unlocked. You just have to write the guts.

So what do I need? I need developers to write plugins. Email me and I'll hook you up with a development kit. It includes one PluginInterface.dll that you'll reference in your assembly and derive your plugin classes from the public interface available. An API document on writing plugins with all the methods you need (there are only a few) and classes that you can use to access SharePoint information from. Sample plugins with source (C#). A lifetime subscription to Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat, and the hosting program that will run all this junk (plus my undying support and other good stuff).

Just send me off an email with your info, what plugins you're thinking about writing, your social security number, the number of Senators in Congress today, and anything else you can think of. I'll get you started and we'll look at forming a small community for this where people can download new plugins as they become availalble (much like the add-on community that exists for something like say FireFox).