Let me start with congratulating the SharePoint Framework team on an amazing job and an amazing journey reaching this GA milestone.

A Big Thanks from the team here in Redmond to everyone who helped us to get to GA! #SPFx #SharePoint #SharePointFramework pic.twitter.com/czo2Duon7z

— Chakkaradeep (@chakkaradeep) February 24, 2017

The SharePoint Framework plays a significant part of the SharePoint future, yes - this is only the first version with a lot of new features on the way, and it is a part of the new SharePoint wave. I’ve haven’t seen this interest in SharePoint for many years and I’m glad I’m still in this business. Delivering top notch collaboration solutions for our clients at Avanade. The SharePoint Framework will make it easier for us to customize SharePoint and it will also bring a lot more value for our clients in the end allowing them to stay evergreen and not being tied into “workarounds” and pesky SharePoint Designer hacks or arbitrary JavaScript snippets.

I’m extremely glad that I’ve been a part of this journey, seeing the team making the awesome stuff they’ve done. For me it started back in the fall of 2015 when we we’re shown some very early ideas on where to go next and also some whiteboard sessions where we had an open and frank discussion about what the requirements were from the field. This openness is something that I think has made the difference this time and made the SharePoint Framework into what it is. All discussions was kept very secret and I’ll tell you it was hard not to cry out to everyone how excited I was on the progress.

Early 2016 I was part of the first DevKitchen, where we had the opportunity to use SharePoint Framework for the first time. The team had only in a couple of months created something that actually worked! It was very satisfying to build that first web part (I do think that I was the first outside of Microsoft that actually built a client-side Web Part!).  The framework had its quirks and issues back then, but they kept the speed up and delivered. A few more DevKitchens were hosted and finally in May they revealed the SharePoint Framework to the public.

Just after the summer everyone could get their hands on the first public release of the SharePoint Framework and the SPFx Team opened the floodgates of feedback through their Github repository. It has been fantastic to see all the support, wishes, bugfixes, samples and documentation that the public (and specifically Waldek) has produced to support the SharePoint Framework. And how fast and agile the team has responded to all the requests and issues. This is how Microsoft should build more stuff!

I’ve tried to do my best giving feedback as a consultant, developer and things my clients need. I’m particular proud of the enterprise guidance documentation that I’ve helped with. I absolutely love being part of this community.

Now, we’re here, within a few weeks all tenants in Office 365 should be able to use the SharePoint Framework to build great stuff and awesome client-side Web Parts. We’re already in the midst of porting our solutions to take advantage of the SharePoint Framework and getting it in the hands of our clients.

Thank you to the SharePoint Framework Team - I’m so looking forward to what’s happening next. See you in a few weeks in Redmond ;-).

Let’s make SharePoint great again!