Developers are increasingly working on systems that abstract the underlying mechanisms they depend upon. SharePoint was the catalyst for this observation as I increasingly see development implementations that just don't seem to work out as hoped, with misunderstandings or in some cases bugs causing the issues.

The fact that SharePoint 2007 is new (relatively) is a big part of the problem, of course, but the divergence between what the people who set up the systems know and what those who program against them know is greater than ever. The solution isn't as clear cut as we might hope. I think a part of the solution is for developers to dive in a bit to the way the platform works, including installation, to get a greater understanding for the way things are stored and retrieved. I find that the developers who follow this advice are much less likely to run astray.

We hope that our articles in this issue also help prevent these kinds of problems since SharePoint is well covered in this issue. Over the years I have consistently heard of studies that show that an alarmingly high percentage of development projects fail. I think it's time that we figure out how to fix that problem. Often, after looking at project failures, it is communication that's the leading cause. Sometimes communication with the customer, sometimes with management, but the most preventable is when the devs don't get how things tick and don't talk to the people who do the care and feeding for the system and likely understand how it actually works.