SharePoint Framework on Microsoft Teams, what’s the hype about?

In case you’ve missed the buzz around SharePoint Framework (SPFx) on Teams, here’s a rundown of what all the excitements about.

The ability to create SharePoint tabs in Teams, means that users can stay in one desktop app and access libraries and lists, straight from their organisations intranet.

The SPFx 1.8 Teams tabs, function as SharePoint webparts, meaning that development is simplified because it’s all hosted within SharePoint, bringing us a step closer to writing code once and running it everywhere, which as developers is great. With SPFx extending to all Office 365 products in future updates, we’ll get there soon! 

There’s already a huge library of open source components available for developers. If you need something, it’s probably already been written.

The messaging extensions in particular, can greatly increase the richness of the Teams experience. These extensions allow users to do all sorts of things within a Teams channel or in the top bar, such as reserve resources in a calendar and inform the channel with an adaptive card, or search and share work items from Azure DevOps.

You can even create your own chat bots. There are plenty of bots available to do things like calendar management, but creating your own bot gives you the ability to tailor it to your organisation’s needs. For example, you could write a bot to answer FAQs or chat with customers and open and log support tickets in your system. And all within a Teams chat!

Fluid Framework, which has been previewed for SPFx 1.10, goes even further and will allow users to co-author documents with near real-time communication, giving the feeling that they could be working on the same device. Not to mention the addition of agents that can translate text or suggest edits as you work. These are just some of the features coming in SPFx 1.10 and beyond, we’re eagerly awaiting what Microsoft will come up with next!