At Microsoft Build, we previewed several upcoming changes and improvements coming to SharePoint Framework. You’ll see these changes start to release over the coming weeks, and we’ll go into more detail at the upcoming SharePoint Conference – North America. Watch Vesa Juvonen’s presentation from Build to see more detail around these new components.
SharePoint Framework 1.5 – New Flexibility for Retrieving Packages
SharePoint Framework (SPFx) 1.5 will focus on continuing to respond to feedback and incorporate stability fixes. Numerous issues – based on your feedback – have been addressed and are included.
We are also adding new choices for using different types of package managers within SPFx, to provide more flexibility in how you retrieve new packages. You can get packages via the yarn and pnpm package managers via this new flexibility.
New Releases with Experimental Components
Starting with SharePoint Framework version 1.5, you’ll be able to opt-in to new experimental packages, which extend the set of stable packages that SPFx releases will include.
These experimental packages deliver new features that are still under consideration and under development. For any new experimental component, we really value your feedback via SharePoint GitHub issues. Keep in mind, however – any experimental feature may never be released, or may undergo significant changes before it’s ready to use with your customers – so please don’t release any SharePoint Framework apps that use experimental features.
Global Deployment of SharePoint Framework Extensions
Today, SharePoint Framework Extensions require installing an app within individual site collections. This specificity is useful for departmental scenarios, where you want to have a very extensively customized portal and don’t want the customizations for that portal to become available in other sites.
Deploy standard footers across your tenancy, along with other types of extensions, with global deployment of SharePoint Framework extensions
We’ve also seen that a number of SharePoint Framework Extension scenarios work best when broadly applied across your SharePoint tenancy. For example, customers may want a consistent footer element with disclaimer or confidentiality text. Customers may also want to deploy list view command set extensions broadly across your tenancy to expose new tools. To solve this, global deployment of SharePoint Framework extensions provides new options to broadly deploy items across your tenancy.
Global Deployment of SharePoint Framework extensions will be offered as an experimental component in the coming weeks.
Dynamic Data
Web parts and extensions are designed to work on a page with other web parts. Frequently, these web parts and extensions can benefit from shared data and context – to support consistent preferences, share current user interface state, or at a minimum, avoid retrieving the same data that other components may have retrieved.
To support this, the SharePoint Framework will support a basic event subscription and publishing model. Different web parts and extensions can subscribe to custom-designed events. When data needs to be shared from a web part or extension, it can push the data through an event to any downstream subscribers.
Adding SharePoint Pages as a Tab in Teams
SharePoint Pages provide team leaders with the most flexible canvas and a robust collection of web parts. Over the coming weeks, you can add rich SharePoint Pages directly within Teams channels. This makes your custom designed SharePoint Framework components available in Microsoft Teams, bringing together all of the best tools in one place. Now, as you develop new extensions for Teams, consider using SharePoint pages and SharePoint Framework.
In addition, we’re also working towards directly exposing SharePoint web parts, and their configuration options, directly as a Tab within Microsoft Teams.
Over the coming weeks, these improvements help you get your SharePoint customizations more broadly deployed – across tenancies, and within Microsoft Teams. New developer infrastructure provides new ways to connect parts, and use additional packaging frameworks. Taken together, SharePoint Framework continues to expand with new tools to make development and deployment easier, along with new places where you can share your work across teams. Stay tuned for more updates coming from SharePoint Conference North America – we look forward to your feedback!
