SharePoint extensibility

Ever since SharePoint was introduced, and the add-in model was introduced, the thinking from Microsoft for SharePoint extensibility has been that a supported model must exist, and it should be in the long term. Now, you might be thinking that after the previous chapter, where we had a brief encounter with many different approaches--where is the long-term thinking? Granted, some of those models, such as sandboxed solutions, should maybe have been more refined and possibly even not released in their past forms. But at the same time cloud computing, together with a Platform as a Service (PaaS) thinking, has surged and is constantly evolving.

The qSharePoint Framework aims to mitigate the past mistakes and challenges of SharePoint customization models in two major areas.

First, the SharePoint Framework aligns very closely with current industry standard frameworks and models. As such, Microsoft is not introducing yet another framework from zero and planning to spend the next 3 years refining this model to make a stable version. Instead, the SharePoint Framework has evolved quite rapidly from the initial preview builds to a general availability-stability that enterprise customers require.

Second, the SharePoint Framework is leaning heavily on tried and tested approaches, in that it is built on leading client-side solutions. As such, it will work for both on-premises deployments and in the cloud. The SharePoint Framework is supported in SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2016 with Feature Pack 2.

All solutions built with the SharePoint Framework extend SharePoint, one way or another. Instead of trying to rip out a core piece of SharePoint, and replace that with your custom implementation, the SharePoint Framework will simply inject a new functionality and the existing one could be hidden from users. It's a lightweight approach to a heavyweight problem, and it works.