My thoughts on the SharePoint Framework release - extending more of Microsoft Teams, and publishing to AppSource

We just announced the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) 1.11 supporting apps published to Microsoft AppSource - the commercial marketplace for Microsoft 365 and deepening SharePoint integration with Microsoft Teams. Check out the announcements here.

I am incredibly proud of the team working on SPFx and their collaboration across Microsoft to improve developer opportunities and productivity. I got excited about the possibility of what would become SPFx back in 2014 when I took a year away from product development to lead Corporate Strategy for Microsoft during Satya's first year as CEO. It was an incredible learning experience and, I spent many evenings, and weekends enjoying coding with a variety of open source technologies including TypeScript, Angular, and React, and thinking about the implications for Microsoft. It struck me the next era of SharePoint would be based on a major leap in user experience that was customizable with open source web technologies. The next year, I came back to SharePoint. We designed and wrote a new user experience and platform which we announced at our Future of SharePoint event on May 4, 2016 - yes, Star Wars Day - and have been enhancing ever since. Below is the slide we shared on the new SharePoint Framework in 2016:

Since the announcement four years ago, usage of SharePoint Online has grown over ten times and SPFx went from zero to the largest and fastest growing UX extensibility model in Microsoft 365. My huge thanks to the SharePoint engineering team for delivering eleven releases driven by customer feedback in the last four years. This week's announcement - creating opportunities for developers in AppSource and increasing the integration with Teams - shows we are far from done.

People sometimes asked me when and why use SPFx? The answer is simple and is old as the web - when do you use a higher-level content management system vs. a lower-level web stack - say SharePoint vs. .NET or now client-side web frameworks? When you want end users to create great pages from parts from Microsoft (including Office, Stream, Yammer, Power Platform, views of news, social, photos, and more) and 3rd-parties and you want those pages to go through lifecycle management (templating, publishing, versioning, usage tracking, multi-lingual, etc.). That is when to use SharePoint and when to use SPFX - to help users and developers create both great web sites and great Microsoft Teams solutions leveraging the industry's most flexible content management system. We are excited to make these experiences both more engaging for end users and more powerful for developers and create a bigger revenue opportunity for the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Keep the feedback coming.

yo @microsoft/sharepoint

Jeff