Microsoft has announced the beta of Fluid Framework 2, its development platform for collaborative ways to work with documents. Fluid Framework was first announced at the 2019 Ignite conference.

Fluid Framework is supported by Microsoft's Office apps including Outlook and Office 365. 

Fluid Framework is a client/server tech stack that can be used for real-time collaboration. The framework provides developers with data structures that Fluid automatically keeps in sync between clients. Microsoft says Fluid handles the complexity of merging changes from multiple clients. This means that application teams do not need to write any custom server code or complex merge semantics to enable collaboration. Behind the scenes Fluid Framework is partially based on Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Teams and Outlook, with the addition of coauthoring, AI and bots that collaborate with you.

The improvements to the new version start with the addition of support for the recently announced SharePoint Embedded service. This joins Fluid Framework's existing Azure Fluid Relay support. SharedPoint Embedded lets end users collaborate on content stored inside their organization's Microsoft 365 tenant. The addition of the support to Fluid Framework means developers can offer more choices for the storage and handling of their end users' collaborative data.

The new release also has an easier way to model collaborative data. The new SharedTree Distributed Data Structure (DDS) provides a programming interface for working with data and supports a broad range of data types including objects, arrays, and maps.

SharedTree is designed to use the same patterns developers would use when working with local data structures such as an object model, but the data can be changed remotely and is kept in sync by the Fluid Framework. Microsoft says SharedTree includes sophisticated merge semantics for working with arrays and supports features like atomic move operations that make working with collaborative data much simpler.

More Information

Fluid Framework

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