Today, we launched SharePoint Framework version 1.8, bringing a number of preview technologies to general availability, and updating unified extensibility options across Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. With these updates – you can provide new flexibility in how you deploy your customizations. In addition, you can bring your best SharePoint customizations to Microsoft Teams – now generally available – and your favorite Teams tabs to SharePoint, in a preview. SharePoint Framework v. 1.8 also brings new application page and web part experiences to SharePoint, giving your team an expansive view into every application your team needs.

Taken together, SharePoint Framework v1.8 brings many new broad options for productivity – for both teams and for developers. Alongside APIs like Microsoft Graph, these new integrations continue the direction of providing consistent and pervasive ways to customize more experiences in Microsoft 365.

App pages are now generally available

As you bring more experiences into SharePoint – frequently you’ll want to bring a “full page” experience, with enough room to display a full application user experience while retaining the context and familiarity of a SharePoint site.

You can now create and deploy full application experiences with the SharePoint Framework in much the same way as you would create web parts or extensions, with the general availability of App pages. Use SharePoint’s capabilities, including lists, files, security, CDNs, and integration with Microsoft Graph to deliver full end-to-end applications for your organization.

Over the coming weeks, a new add page experience will be rolling out that allows you to select from a list of Teams tabs you can add within SharePoint. In just a few clicks, you can add a wide range of solutions and tools to sites.

Updates to applications across SharePoint and Microsoft Teams

App pages and an updated page creation experiences provide the foundation for technology that let you share SharePoint Framework experiences in Teams – now generally available – and Teams tabs in SharePoint – in a preview. Many ISVs and consulting have started working with this preview, to bring their capabilities to more places.

Teams Tabs in SharePoint

Many powerful applications – existing tabs – will soon be possible to use within SharePoint.

For example, Wrike is a powerful online project management solution that enables every type of team to accomplish more, at scale. Within SharePoint, you can create, access, and update Wrike projects and tasks.

Lucidchart empowers teams to collaborate on visuals in real time. By bringing Teams Tabs into SharePoint, users can incorporate Lucidchart diagrams within their SharePoint sites. With the embedded editor, edit or comment on your document without leaving the SharePoint site.

Many existing providers, listed below, deliver SharePoint integrations and are working to bring existing and new offerings to Microsoft Teams.

These solutions show many different scenarios for extending and building across Office 365. Many of the solutions provide additional information display options – including activity streams that display personalized news (2toLead) as well as Team News (Valo Intranet), customer information (Portiva) and data viewers (Lightning Tools). Document processes can also be hosted in Teams, including Statement of Work dashboards (PAIT Group) and document management tools (Puzzlepart). Office 365 display and management tools include SharePoint administration (Cognizant) and a Group Explorer (ClearPeople). Managing and monitoring expertise in your organization is possible with Expertise Monitoring (Campana & Schott), information discovery (Pixelmill), as well as lightweight project management (Sympraxis Consulting).

Taken together, these solutions represent are the first wave that shows how software vendors, consultants, and integrators can deliver a wide range of solutions, simply, across Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

More flexibility for developers

For developers, this cross-compatibility gives you more flexibility. Both Teams Tabs and SharePoint Framework extension mechanisms has a unique set of advantages for developers. Microsoft Teams tabs are web pages with additional capabilities added through a JavaScript API. With this, you can easily bring existing web content and applications and host them with minimal adaptions and customizations.   You can choose to host your Teams tab with any available web infrastructure, including using server-side web application frameworks like ASP.NET or Node.js.

By contrast, SharePoint Framework provides a set of dedicated tools, a build pipeline, debugging options that help developers create new web parts, extensions, and applications from scratch with TypeScript. With support and compatibility for many JavaScript libraries and frameworks, you can mix in existing web elements, like React-framework components. Altogether, SharePoint Framework provides excellent scaffolding for new projects. SharePoint also provides facilities for easily hosting and deploying your applications, including content delivery network hosting of application resources and easily managing needed permissions for your solution.

Library Components preview

A common request for developers creating multiple SharePoint Framework applications is more flexibility for code re-use. In SharePoint Framework 1.8, you can use new preview support for library components (via the plusbeta option), which allow you to create libraries of functions that can be re-used across multiple solutions. With library functionality, create one SharePoint Framework solution with all your main reusable functions – and other components in other solutions can call and re-use them.

New hosting options for web parts, now generally available

A new capability – isolated web parts – gives administrators the ability to manage, on a part by part basis, whether a web part should be able to use all of the context and permissions granted to the page, or whether a web part should be isolated with differing grants of permissions and capabilities.

For developers, no changes should generally be required to have your web part run in isolation. The web part will run within an IFRAME, which means that access to ambient page variables and context may be different. Note that web parts should generally not take advantage of ambient page variables and DOM structure outside of the structure of their own web part.

With the general availability of app pages, isolated web parts, updated support for SharePoint Framework development for Teams, and Teams tabs in SharePoint, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem has become more unified and flexible. Developers can work in their preferred development style, bringing in web development techniques of their choice – and their creations can work in more locations. SharePoint gains a focused app page view that makes it easier to manage every facet of work in one place. With these new powers in SharePoint Framework 1.8, and an array of partners deploying their solutions across Microsoft 365, you can make every team space in Microsoft 365 a perfectly tailored hub for teamwork.

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SharePoint Team, Microsoft  – 14th of March 2019