Microsoft announced ‘The Future Of
SharePoint’ which detailed their vision, roadmap and significant investments across user experience in SharePoint Online.
“We’re excited by the potential and ability for our customers and professional developers to innovate on these scenarios and drive them to the next level.”
Introducing the SharePoint Framework
SharePoint Framework is a Page and Part model which enables complete support of the client side development, easy integration with Microsoft Graph and support for open source tooling.
In fact, the company has built the new experience for the mobile app, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business which includes document library and list experiences using SharePoint Framework.
Microsoft states,
“We designed the SharePoint Framework to empower SharePoint developers both inside and outside Microsoft. Our engineers are building our modern experiences using the SharePoint Framework. You can use the same technology, tools and techniques we use to build more productive experiences and apps that are responsive and mobile-ready from day one.”
Image Source: blogs.office.com
Microsoft will now allow their partners, customers, and independent developers to leverage the latest JavaScript framework such as React and Angular. This model provides better experiences, performance, mobile support and much more while broadening their developer ecosystem from .NET and beyond.
The SharePoint Framework and its related toolchain helps developers to solve the challenges which have been recently faced by the company. Now, with the SharePoint Framework, the company has a structured approach to modern app development, end to end, which is not dependent on .NET.
The company states,
“We’re enabling you to choose the framework that you want. We’re evolving SharePoint extensibility to meet the needs of our developer community today and opening up opportunities in the cloud that align more closely to what our customers have on-premises.”
The SharePoint Framework will now be available to the existing SharePoint sites, and you will be able to host client-side web parts developed with new SharePoint Framework on existing SharePoint pages.
The company states,
“The SharePoint Framework allows you to extend your existing tools ad solutions, taking advantage of exciting open source opportunities, from project scaffolding with Yeoman to iterative build-test experiences with Gulp and more. The SharePoint Framework adds to existing, powerful development opportunities with SharePoint—from Full Trust Code on-premises to Office 365 add-ins—to bring a modern client-side approach to enable powerful portal experiences in SharePoint Online.”
New SharePoint Page experience
One of the core components of SharePoint Framework is the new modern SharePoint Page experience, starting with page structure. In the new SharePoint user experience, pages can be technology independent and can also be constructed using any client-side Java Script and templating framework. The page structure also provides numerous new opportunities, along with the ability to host web parts, add-ins and many more.
Image Source: blogs.office.com
The page structure will allow developers and enthusiasts to extend SharePoint capabilities more efficiently, reliably and faster than before; and it's mobile ready and responsive from the very first day.
Aligned and simplified programmability
Microsoft states,
“The SharePoint Framework is just one of the exciting new investments we’re making for our ecosystem. Over time, across OneDrive and SharePoint, we will align to a simple programmability story using the Microsoft Graph, which leverages JavaScript, OAuth, REST, Webhooks, native mobile SDKs and more. We will have the lowest barrier to entry for third-party developers and we will continue embracing and contributing to the open source community as we’ve done with Office Fabric UI.”
SharePoint has been the preferred content and collaboration platform in part through its extensibility, and Microsoft is expanding on that extensibility by opening up new opportunities for developers, whether fluent in SharePoint or just starting to build the next generation of solutions with the rendering framework.
The company states,
“We’re excited to innovate in this space and we can’t wait to see some of the new solutions you build through the SharePoint Framework.”
“Over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll continue to update our developers as we advance the SharePoint Framework towards First Release in summer 2016.”