Not long ago I started an internship at a company that supplies SharePoint consultancy, hosting and development. While their consultancy seems to be pretty good and solid, I feel their development department lacks direction. The reason for this, most likely, is that they stopped outsourcing not too long ago.

One thing that I've frequently bumped my head into is the following:

My supervisor strongly insists that everything that can be done natively in SharePoint (somehow this includes editing xslt files in Designer) should be done in SharePoint. Even if this results in longer development time (at least when they make me write XSLT) and reduced usability.

Her main arguments for this are:

• Better maintainability
• Editing the functionality doesn't require programming knowledge

I feel the company is a little biassed and I am unable to get a decent discussion going. This is why I am looking for other places to get some responses on the subject (and not only on the arguments of my supervisor, but more on the subject in general).

Kind regards