Mike Neill

Where are my features!?!

Microsoft has done a really great job over the last 6 months to bring to light all the hard work they are doing within SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. Between the announcements at ignite , various blog posts, twitter users like @anne_michels and @vesajuvonen. There are a ton and I mean a ton of new features coming to teams and SharePoint that we have been asking for since modern sites and teams came into existence.

Now the question is… When are we getting these features? Microsoft has provided a very handy tool called the Microsoft 365 roadmap. You can find it at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/. This site will provide you with an overview of the high-level new features the Microsoft is developing and rolling out to Windows 10, Office 365 and EMS.

If you want to see just SharePoint Online and Microsoft team roadmap you are able to filter your results to return only those. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams%2CSharePoint. This may sound great however how accurate is the roadmap?

Well judging by the top few results for SharePoint.. Not very accurate. According to the roadmap organizational news was released last month and yet is still in development.

What I have noticed is the release date is when Microsoft will start rolling out the feature to tenants that are set up for targeted releases. Even if you are setup for targeted releases you may still be waiting weeks for the feature to make it to your tenant. If you are on the standard release it will be weeks and possibly months before you get it.

Currently there is no way for you to know when the anything will be released to your tenant. So be wary of what you read and try to stem the excitement and set realistic expectations with your business or clients to when they might be able to start implementing these amazing new features.

Mike’s 2019 Predictions

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.