For a growing number of organizations, Microsoft Teams provides a hub for communications, tools, and work.  As developers integrate and deploy more tools to Microsoft Teams, it becomes easier for every user to stay in the flow of their work when tools are close at hand.  Creating tailored Microsoft Teams experiences can be at the center of unlocking creativity and transforming teamwork. With SharePoint Framework v1.7 and upcoming releases in Microsoft Teams, you can now share some of your best customizations across SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

Web Parts in Microsoft Teams

Web parts are one of the most popular ways to customize SharePoint – providing page authors with building blocks they can use to create customized pages. With the release of SharePoint Framework 1.7   and new integrations in preview, you can take the web parts built with SharePoint Framework and make them available as applications for Microsoft Teams.  One key advantage is that, with built-in CDN capabilities, lists, and page hosting, you can host many or all of your application components on SharePoint, which reduces operational costs and minimizes deployment complexity. With some adjustments to the package metadata, every web part you’ve built can become a Tab in Microsoft Teams, made available via the Microsoft Teams Tenant App Catalog.  Find out more information around how you can adapt both new and existing web parts to support both Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

Deliver complete applications with Application Pages

In many cases, users want to consolidate more experiences into SharePoint – including bringing in dashboards, tools, and full applications. To support a great user experience, developers need to work with a “full page” experience, with enough room to expose the power of applications while retaining the context and familiarity of a SharePoint site.

With SharePoint Framework version 1.7, developers can now choose to create these full application experiences with the SharePoint Framework in much the same way as you would create web parts or extensions.  Developers can leverage all of SharePoint’s capabilities, including lists, files, security, CDNs, and integration with Microsoft Graph and Azure Active-Directory secured APIs, to deliver full end-to-end applications for their organization.  Find out more about how you can get started creating SharePoint Framework application experiences.

Host Microsoft Teams Tabs as Application Pages and Web Parts

In Microsoft Teams, Tabs bring the user experience of entire applications alongside the conversations that drive action in a team.  When opened, Tabs occupy a substantial amount of visual space inside of the Microsoft Teams user experience – Tabs provide a full application experience. In addition to creating new application page experiences in using SharePoint Framework. with SharePoint Framework v.1.7, you can also choose to take Teams Tab experiences and host them in SharePoint – both as full application pages, and as web parts.

Whether you have built a Teams Tab or a SharePoint web part, you’ll be able to reach much large audiences with these new developer preview capabilities in SharePoint Framework 1.7.

New hosting options for web parts

New isolated web parts gives administrator 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 — that is, have a different set 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.

Stream updates with list subscriptions

As people use applications, they expect full application experiences: for example, that the data that is displayed should be fresh and always up to date.  This is especially true for SharePoint – because SharePoint is inherently collaborative, files and list items an app might be working may be frequently updated by others during the lifetime of an application.  For developers, making sure that your web applications always reflect the latest status becomes a key part of delivering the full application experience.

Enter List Subscriptions.  List subscriptions leverage Socket.io, a framework for developers to access updated lists of changes within web browser script, without needing to inefficiently poll back-end web services. In SharePoint Framework version 1.7, take advantage of a new preview of list subscription support for list item and file changes to build truly reactive and collaborative applications.  Find out more about developing with list subscriptions and Socket.io via this dev article.

All of these capabilities – Teams application sharing, isolated web parts, and stream.io support – are available now, in developer preview, with SharePoint Framework version 1.7.  The ability to use SharePoint Framework web parts in Microsoft Teams will be coming very soon.

Now generally available: Web Part Connections, Dynamic Data and SharePoint 2019 support

In addition to new preview technologies, some preview technologies are also now generally available. Dynamic data provides a calling pattern and infrastructure for web parts and extensions to bind and share data, as well as consume live information from the page context.  Web parts can, for example, become more performant and efficient by making a single call to retrieve data from a web service, and then share that data with any other similar web parts on the page. Dynamic data provides the foundation for web part connections, allowing page authors to connect data and user experience state across parts.

Finally – there is one more place where you can take your SharePoint Framework web parts and extensions.  SharePoint Framework version 1.7 includes new developer tools, that are generally available, that let you target the SharePoint Server 2019 by creating projects designed for the level of compatibility that SharePoint Server 2019 supports.  These web parts and extensions will also work seamlessly with SharePoint in Office 365.

Across all of these updates in SharePoint Framework version 1.7, there are new opportunities to target new applications and platforms, further broadening your investments in Microsoft 365 development.  New capabilities like web part isolation and Socket.io support solve common administrative and development requests.  Get started on building your next SharePoint Framework web parts today!