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First new SharePoint Framework web parts arrived on Office 365

While I was looking at the new SharePoint site content page I asked myself if more can be found that gives an indication of the upcoming framework and future improvements.
First, I took a look at the source code. Not a big surprise the page was built again using Facebooks ‘React‘ for the user interface and ‘Knockout‘ was used for data binding.
After that I came up with the idea to take a closer look at the web part gallery to see if might some web parts have been deployed to. To my big surprise I found overall five new web parts.

Web Parts of the new SharePoint Framework Extension

Web Parts of the new SharePoint Framework Extension

While some web parts are used to provide tips and trick or how to get started. Two other web parts are more interesting.
The ‘Embed Video Web Part’ and the ‘Embed picture library web part’. I populated them to the gallery and added them to a page in SharePoint. Currently they are deployed, but sadly not working yet. There are no web part specific properties to be configure now and I guess they current won’t load any additional Script or CSS.

New webparts embedded on page

New webparts embedded on page

Embed video web part makes sense to me because this is currently handled by a script embedding web part. A web part that is not responsive without customization.
The embed picture library web part is more interesting because the description states that you can use this to create a fancy new slide show.
In addition to those upcoming web parts it is likely that the new namespace of the additional framework will be ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.SPX‘.

Finally

It is great to see at least a glimpse of the upcoming changes and how the new user interface will be built. Waiting until autumn is still such a long way to go. Especially if you use the same mechanism to customize SharePoint for at least two years now.
Let’s hope it will be released sooner than later. I guess many people love to get their hands on it and provide feedback. Even if it is not rock solid yet.
If you are not so familiar with things like Yeoman, Angular, ReactJS, Handlebars or Knockout, please check out some really great web casts done by the Office PNP team.

2 Comments

  1. Great find! Would like to play around with these new webparts but I don’t see them in SharePoint online. Where did you spot them?

    Thx!

    Reply

    • First you need to have your tenant configured to get “First Releases” of updates on Office 365. Second must have been upgraded to the most recent version of SharePoint Online.

      To find those web parts you need to navigate to the Web Part Gallery and click on the “New” button in the Ribbon. This allows you to add web parts of assemblies that are installed on your SharePoint beside the web parts that are already deployed via a feature.

      You will find the web parts because the Namespace of those web parts contains SPX.

      /Stefan

      Reply

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