With 2018 over and 2019 just beginning I thought it would be fun to make a few guesses as to what I think will happen around the technologies that I work with on a daily basis.
Predictions
- SharePoint Online Intranet projects move from boxed solutions back to OOTB then back to boxed
- SPFX will play a larger role in a SharePoint Developers toolbox.
- Serverless architectures will move from trial, curiosity and POCs to mainstream first class architectures
Intranet Projects
Currently there are a variety of different boxed solutions for corporate intranets. Examples would be GO, Bonzai, and Sparrow. These are all great solutions to get your intranet done quicker and lower the development time to create an engaging intranet.
The downside is that you are tied to a specific vendor. Locked in for a support contract with no real options to move if you are unhappy with them for what ever reason. These intranets are based off of classic publishing sites templates. While not necessarily bad, Microsoft is just not investing in this space anymore.
Microsoft has rearchitected the way SharePoint sites work. With the release of Hub, Modern Team and Communication sites and with the most recent updates to these site templates. I feel most organizations can finally start to build OOTB Intranets that look custom, look on brand, and are relevant to the users consuming the content.
While the makers of Go, Bonzai, Sparrow and others figure out their best path forward on how to create useful products in this new world. Organizations will start to leverage these new updates in their intranets as first step instead of as an addon.
SPFX — SharePoint Framework
The SharePoint Framework is a client-side development toolkit that allows you to build Webparts and extenstions for SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2016 with FP2 and SharePoint 2019 and most recently Teams.
The ability to write a solution once and have it work in any modern SharePoint environment and Teams is huge win for developers and the money counters. SPFX being entirely TS or JS based fits quite nicely into organizations DevOps strategies.
SPFX is the best way to write web parts for modern SharePoint sites.
Serverless Architectures
As SharePoint developers adopt SPFX as their main way to create web parts for SharePoint and teams. Some functionality will be lost. The ability to run server side code. This is where I think serverless architectures will start to take off more.
Since SPFX is entirely client side facing developers will need a solution to deploy and client side code that they may need. The answer for this in the Azure world will be Functions and Logic Apps. In the amazon world it will be Lambda.
The idea being that instead of creating an entire infrastructure to host what is most likely a small piece of logic. We have these serverless architectures where our logic is hosted and called only when it is needed. Saves a lot of time and money.
Ion All the Things 