What is Modern SharePoint and Why Should I care?

This article is quite inaccurate as shows one, very bright side of Modern SharePoint sites. Unfortunately Modern SharePoint sites are immature at the moment, which can impact user adoption and impact costs of customization. It is worth to take a look at some limitations or ‘features’ of Modern SharePoint sites.

Below I have listed just few things, I have found surprising or annoying.

Usage

• List view – you don’t have for instance grouped metadata totals. Yes, you can develop your own modern web part with SharePoint Framework.
• Mixed user experience on ‘classic sites’ – list views are modern, but everything else is classic. Confusing.
• Branding is fairly limited at the moment, there is new JSON schema, but still it only allows to change colors.
• Navigation – you can edit and sort, but that is all. It is fairly limited on mobile devices and very hard to use. Not possible to replace with anything else at the moment.
• Different way of creating modern sites – you can do that through Office 365 groups or Teams. They are not listed in SharePoint in SharePoint administration site collection list.
• Different way of managing access to site – through Office 365 Groups. Can be confusing for SharePoint users and business administrators.
• Microsoft Teams – Yes, content is stored on modern SharePoint site including Team’s Wiki. And Wiki is .mhtlm page…which cannot be viewed from SharePoint site. Only from Teams client. It really was nasty surprise for me. I hope Microsoft would fix it.

Customization and Development

You can take a look at customization limitation here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/solution-guidance/modern-experience-customizations-customize-sites

• Little support for Application Lifecycle Management for SharePoint Framework – it is work in progress. I think, that SharePoint PnP team do a lot of good things around it. We will see.
• Office UI Fabric – recommended as JavaScript UI Framework for SharePoint Framework - have many bugs, and does not develop as fast as other similar ones. A lot of information is outdated on the Office UI Fabrice page. Overall not so bad, but not really impressive comparing with others. Needs improvement – means ‘Hey Microsoft, you should invest more money in this!’.
  Unfortunately you really have no choice as all SharePoint Modern sites are built around Office UI Fabric. (and seems slow)
• You need many tools to develop solutions. If you just need web part – you are lucky. You can use Visual Studio Code or something like that and that is all. If you need some more complicated logic behind, or long running operation (like creating few artefacts in SharePoint), you need some more tools, like Microsoft Flow, or Visual Studio (not Visual Studio Code) to develop e.g. SharePoint Add-In.
• You never know if Microsoft is not going to abandon idea of SharePoint Framework like it did with e.g. jslink, Autohosted Add-Ins, sandboxed solutions and few more things.

Good things

Overall experience with Modern SharePoint sites is better than with classic ones, and I hope Microsoft is not going to abandon Modern SharePoint sites in the favor of something like ‘Most Modern SharePoint Site, but Completely Different’.

There are also some useful things like, right pane where you can fill e.g. document properties to be able to check it in.

Rich Text Editor looks familiar and yes, this is The Best JavaScript RTE – CKEditor. As CKEditor offers a lot of customization options, I hope Microsoft is going to give us ability to use them. (By the way, if you visit Warsaw, Poland you can meet with developers of CKEditor. I am sure they will help you if you have any questions).

This is not the end of the story of the SharePoint Modern sites. This just the begging, I hope.
Yes, take a look at SharePoint modern sites, knowing that they are not perfect and have some limitations. You can be better prepared for user adoption, customization, development etc.

Bob German - 'More Secure’ – Joe E. as Administrator can actually do even nastier things in SharePoint Modern sites in many different ways. So the whole story is just fake. If you have Joe E. as administrator you should replace him with Joe T. (everybody knows that T is for “Trusted”). That solves the problem.