The SharePoint Modern Myth

Did you know that in the Microsoft Cloud the SharePoint Modern framework is now older than it's Classic sibling was when 'Modern' was released in 2017 (Publishing/Communication sites that is, not modern lists which were released in 2016)

Although this is not 100% accurate there was light usage of the then Office 365 platform based on SharePoint 2010 but the vast majority of business adopting a cloud strategy started out on SharePoint 2013 (released in 2012).

Many business are still on classic as they wait for Modern to 'mature' to bring some of the functionality that they rely on in Classic SharePoint Publishing sites.

The things that most are waiting for are branding options (custom fonts etc), search configurability, content editor / script editor web parts.

Well I have some bad news for those that are waiting, a glance at a Modern Communication site from 2017 and one created today will show you that they are almost identical (I know there is an org-chart webpart now and a smattering of other less than useful things).

That's right no change in nearly 6 years, a glance at the roadmap will also tell you that there will be no updates for branding options, search or code editing released by Microsoft in the next 18-24 months at which time the unofficial deprecation for Classic Publishing (2026) will be looming large.

So why is this not being updated to include the customisation options lots of customers need? the answer is simple really, with over 1.5 million business worldwide using Microsoft 365 as a platform, the UI needs to stay as vanilla as possible as design preferences vary greatly from one individual to another.

With 1 billion opinions to consider settling an a UI update becomes a time consuming and expensive exercise and with accessibility standards needing to be maintained allowing heavy customisation will result in unintended consequences quite quickly.

In summary, Modern SharePoint is actual quite old now and the upgrade from out of the box classic was at the time significant but it is already looking dated and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future and this is the correct approach from Microsoft, so for those that are waiting for Classic features to be available in Modern may well be waiting forever