The SharePoint modern view, for the modern user

It’s another week and it’s another O365 UI release.   Oh yes……… or Oh dear.

The days of a 3 month wait for a service pack release are long gone and it feels like Christmas every week with new and exciting UI features coming to my SharePoint page every week….

So apart from the no Ribbon option, what does this really mean and how does it affect the O365 custom deployments?

5 Cool modern features

• There’s a file copy feature. Yes it’s taken Microsoft SharePoint 15 years to realize there’s a need to copy and move files, not just to other folders, libraries, and sites, but also OneDrive, which opens up a wonderful user opportunity to share files outside the organization.
• The filters pane on views.  This is a great ad hoc filter for list/ library information and the ultra-cool feature of this, is the Modified Date gauge, so filtering is so much easier.
•   Pin the file to the top of the page. Great for the frequently used one.
• Wizard driven business process, AKA from the browser with Flow.  This includes: Planner tasks, a Trello task, or even a tweet.
• Its responsive.  Unlike the Ribbon, so it works on your smart phone on the subway. A new page model “canvas” – this provides a simple  editing experience for end-users as there is no ribbon, makes easy to author pages.

5 not so cool modern features

Where do I start?

The modern SharePoint Framework is definitely the way to go going forward; it uses a lot of js-centric technologies, but customizing SharePoint Online is all about two things right now:

1. A ton of client-side code. Microsoft has been shifting into using industry-standard technologies in this regard, so learning things such as Angular/React/Type Script is key and this is a steep learning curve to the hard core SharePoint developer. The SharePoint Framework uses Knockout.js  extensively; so 2-way data binding is a good to know.

2. Server code that doesn´t run on the O365 server. Since the bulk of the code interacts with RESTful APIs exposed by SharePoint, this is largely language agnostic. Microsoft tends to favor their own technologies, but you could use any language that you want such as Node.js and Python and they've worked great. .NET is obviously the easiest to start out with, but this is not the future.

That being said, for anything that's actually important, I wouldn´t use SharePoint framework unless it’s a pure moden site; rationale being that it's still new-ish and untested, so it's better suited for small things and one-offs right now.  Remember Content editor and Script Editor web parts can’t be added to a SharePoint library page.

Useful links

Differences between the new and classic experiences for lists and libraries

Office 365 Roadmap

For React : https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Getting-Started-with-REACT-f3e23323