What to know about the glossary webpart (April 2017)
Probably you already know the SharePoint Add-Ins you can find in the SharePoint Store of Microsoft. Or you already use classic SharePoint solutions you have installed on your on-premise farm. Our new Glossary Webpart is different. It is a completely client-side webpart which uses the new SharePoint Framework (SPFx).
Therefore you should know a little bit more about this framework and what it means for our webpart:
The Future of SharePoint
In May 2016 Microsoft announced the 'Future of SharePoint'. They saw four areas of innovation:
- Simple and powerful file sharing and collaboration on any device.
- The mobile and intelligent intranet, with modern team sites.
- An open and connected platform that evolves SharePoint extensibility to embrace modern web development.
- Investments in security, privacy and compliance across Office 365.
Together with other innovations Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for the OneDrive and SharePoint teams, also announced in this article the modern team sites and the SharePoint Framework.
Modern Team Sites
Today, if you are using team sites in the Office 365 Cloud, you can already work with the modern pages and see what Mircosoft meant in 2016:
"Revitalized libraries and lists enable immediate productivity with an intuitive user experience and provide rich metadata, content management and functionality that can support sophisticated business processes. We're also introducing a new page authoring and publishing experience that allows you to create beautiful, feature-rich pages that are responsive, mobile and easy to share with your team and the organization."
SharePoint Framework (SPFx)
With the SharePoint Framework Microsoft promised an open and connected platform. This framework is a page and part model that enables fully supported client-side development. It delivers a new client-side rendering framework leveraging open source JavaScript technologies. The SharePoint team shows deeper look into the new framework here.
In February 2017 the version 1.0 of SharePoint Framework reaches general availability .
You can find much more information to SPFx on github
What does that mean for our development?
We are developing solutions and webparts for SharePoint since the first version. That means since more than 15 years. We were accustomed to install our solutions directly on the servers, to get access to the server side API and to develop in C# and some other things.
Using the SPFx we entered a new world. A completely different way of developing and it is great.
How can you use the webpart
Today, April 7, 2017 we provide an early version our Glossary webpart. But this webpart requires the SPFx. At the moment only Office 365 Cloud users can install the new webpart. We are hopefully that Microsoft also offers updates for your on-premise installations.
You should also know: The installation is different to the way you probably know from SharePoint Addins, but simple and flexible. We will give you a detailed description, what to do.