Since the General availability of Fluid Framework 2 earlier this year, the Fluid team at Microsoft has been hard at work on a broad set of improvements to the platform.

Here are the announcements that we recently highlighted at the Microsoft Ignite conference last month:

AI Collab library

Many applications are now utilizing Gen AI to enhance their features. With the AI Collab library, we’ve made it easier for developers to use Gen AI APIs to operate on their SharedTree-based data.

The AI Collab library allows developers to operate on SharedTree node or subtree data given a prompt. For example, if developers want to let their users leverage Gen AI to brainstorm ideas in their app, they can call the aiCollab API and pass their brainstorm app’s SharedTree root along with a system and user prompt like “generate new gardening ideas”. The same mechanism can also be used to modify existing data.

The AI Collab library uses all the information provided to craft a prompt that enables the Gen AI API to reliably act on the Fluid data. It uses the app’s schema including the new metadata parameter on SharedTree nodes that allows Gen AI to understand the nature of the data, the existing data in the app, system prompt provided in the API call that describes the developer’s app and a user prompt that is the requested action.

The AI Collab library currently works with the Azure OpenAI service for Gen AI workloads and developers will have to provide their own API keys to use this new library. Contributions and feature requests are welcome on GitHub.

Presence library

User presence is one of the most visible parts of a real-time collaboration app that makes the app feel alive. The new Fluid Presence library provides session-focused utilities for lightweight ephemeral data sharing and messaging. The data is only relevant during a collab session and gets cleared once the session ends. This contrasts with the persistent data stored in the Fluid containers and is ordered, stored and available across collab sessions.

A screenshot of a sample Fluid-based HR app showing real-time collab with user presence

The key scenarios that we’re targeting for the Presence APIs are:

• User Presence in the app or in subsections of the app
• Collaborative cursors that can be used to show user’s cursor position in near real-time
• Notifications allow developers to broadcast events to all connected clients in a session

SharedTree Branching

The new SharedTree Branching capability allows developers to fork a local copy of the Fluid data to work on. This branch is only visible locally and developers can continue to rebase changes that other clients are making on the main branch. Developers can merge the local branch back into the main branch once they are ready to share these changes with other clients.

Website refresh

We have significantly improved the framework documentation and accessibility on the newly refreshed fluidframework.com. The website offers an updated design with dark/light themes and improved discoverability of documentation with search capability.

Visit the following resources to learn more:

• Get Started with Fluid Framework 2.0
• HR Recruitment Fluid sample app using Presence and AI Collab libraries
• Fluid Sample app code using SharedTree and SharePoint Embedded
• For questions or feedback, reach out via Github
• Connect directly with the Fluid team, we would love to hear what you are building!
• Follow @FluidFramework on X (Twitter) to stay updated