With Silverlight Gone, Whither SharePoint?

For those unfamiliar with the tool, Microsoft SharePoint 2010   (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/capabilities/Pages/default.aspx) is a web application platform that lets users “set up Web sites to share information with others, manage documents from start to finish, and publish reports to help everyone make better decisions.” First released seven years before Silverlight, more than three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies now use the platform. Because SharePoint 2010 takes advantage of certain Silverlight capabilities, Microsoft's decisions concerning the latter affect every one of those companies – and yours as well, if you use SharePoint.

Just how deeply will users be affected? It's more than look and feel issues, though there are some of those. Consider, for instance, that Silverlight is known for delivering superior video. As Chris Wright (http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/do-sharepoint-silverlight-have-a-future-together-014103.php) points out, “the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 media webpart is a Silverlight control.”

Silverlight allows a certain ease and flexibility when working with SharePoint 2010 that developers would miss. Wright mentioned a Silverlight webpart “which can be used to host a specific Silverlight application by referencing the document library URL it was deployed to. This method allows such applications to be easily added to content pages.”

If Microsoft is truly retiring Silverlight, it will need to come up with some way to fill the feature and capability holes that its absence will leave in SharePoint. And right now, the company isn't talking about it. As Wright notes of Silverlight's future, without official word from Microsoft, the best guess is that “Its lifespan might be prolonged as a Windows Phone platform, but it seems likely it will cease to exist as a browser plugin.”

Under these conditions, continued use of Silverlight as a SharePoint development tool makes no sense. It will need to be replaced in the next version of SharePoint. But with what? Microsoft's plans for Windows 8 provide some clue. The software giant is backing HTML5 as the nascent operating system's application platform. You can probably look forward to seeing it added to the next version of SharePoint as well.
 
Will anything of Silverlight remain in the next release of SharePoint? Wright expects the only remnant of Silverlight to remain to be the “host a Silverlight application” webpart, simply to support legacy implementations. But he expects “the back-end and admin pages to see an overhaul in the next version of SharePoint and for both to use HTML5...SharePoint 2012 (or 2013) will likely adopt HTML5 for everything Silverlight has previously been used for.” In short, though there may be some bumps along the way, SharePoint will survive nicely without Silverlight...and Silverlight will simply fade away.