Fluid Framework Comes Into Focus (Premium)

Announced at Build 2019, Microsoft’s Fluid Framework is now available in preview. But what is it? And what will it become?

It’s OK to be confused. Looking back at how Microsoft has spoken and written about the Fluid Framework, I see some confused messaging that’s painfully similar to the “it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping” SNL skit. It’s either going to be everything. Or nothing.

When Microsoft announced the Fluid Framework last year, it was positioned it as a “people-centric” computing model for developers and “a new web-based platform and componentized document model for shared, interactive experiences.” Fluid seemed like a modern take on OLE, and if successful, I remarked at the time, it could mean the end of standalone, monolithic apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

As originally described, Fluid Framework would provide three core capabilities:

Multi-person coauthoring. Experiences “powered by the Fluid Framework,” in Microsoft’s words, would “support multi-person coauthoring on web and document content at a speed and scale not yet achieved in the industry.” Given Microsoft’s spotty support for this capability in its current flagship productivity apps across desktop, mobile, and web, the appeal of this capability is obvious.

Componentized document model. Fluid’s new document model would “allow authors to deconstruct content into collaborative building blocks, use them across applications, and combine them in a new, more flexible kind of document.” In keeping with the theme of Fluid as a modern OLE, this sounds an awful lot like the Office compound document capabilities of 25 years ago, doesn’t it?

Intelligent agents.  The Fluid Framework would provide “intelligent agents” that would “work alongside humans to translate text, fetch content, suggest edits, perform compliance checks, and more.”

Microsoft promised to make the Fluid Framework “broadly available to developers” via a software developer kit (SDK) by the end of 2019. The firm likewise promised to provide “the first experiences powered by the Fluid Framework” sometime last year, and to “integrate it into Microsoft 365 experiences like Word, Teams, and Outlook to transform the way that you work with these tools.”

At Ignite 2019 in November, Microsoft delivered on both of these promises, albeit in limited ways. Developers could sign-up for a private preview of the Fluid Framework Developer Preview. And Microsoft 365 customers could likewise sign-up to test what Microsoft called “the Fluid Framework end-user experience.” However, it also noted that the promised integration bits with existing solutions—“chat in Teams, mail in Outlook, portals in SharePoint, notes in OneNote, and documents in Office”—would come later. Which leads to my opening question. What exactly is the Fluid Framework Preview that users can now test?

You may be able to find out for yourself. Since the original sign-up phase, Microsoft has begun rolling out the preview experience to “all commercial customers” in phases. I signed-in using my Office 365 Business Premium account this week and was granted immediate access. But it’s possible that you’ll need to check back periodically, Microsoft says in a FAQ, if you have a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 commercial account and can’t get in today.

Here’s what you’ll see.

When you sign-in to the Fluid Framework Preview, you’ll be presented with a blank workspace and a minimalist interface.

There are a few options over on the left, but the big green “Start collaborating” button seemed like an obvious place to start, so I clicked that and was presented with a “Create new file” dialog. That wording is interesting: Unlike, say, OneNote, Fluid works with documents, and that I figured that meant we could examine the resulting files and see what’s going on. I had a few predictions about that, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

My initial foray into Fluid resulted in something that at least looked familiar: As noted in the shot below, it appears to be a Markdown-like editor that creates a document with a title and body text, and there’s an Add Component (“+”) button next to the document that lets you insert other types of objects.

That Add Component button provides a menu of choices that includes At Mentions (@ing, or “At-ing” a person), Action Items, Table, Date, Check List, Bulleted List, Numbered List, and Image. Collectively, that points to a very simple note-taking solution, basically, with the ability to collaborate with other: As in other Microsoft apps, when you At Mention someone, they will be notified, and they can jump in and see what’s up, finish their part of the project, or whatever.

I added an image from my PC just to test it.

And even though I’m an enterprise of one, I At Mentioned myself to see what that was like.

Aside from document creation, editing, and collaboration, there are only a few additional functions: You can view your At Mentions and your recent documents, and create new documents using the expandable pane on the left. And you can access Share and Go to File Location options in the upper-right.

Choosing the latter, I found that Fluid Framework documents are saved to a Fluid Preview Docs folder in your default Save location in OneDrive for Business.

But I was surprised to discover that I couldn’t download the document: That option is not available when you select a Fluid document in OneDrive’s website. My expectation was/is that these documents are XML of some kind, but I’d love to prove that theory and see the structure. So I tried the OneDrive desktop, and sure enough: The file does appear.

Obviously, I don’t have an application that can open a *.fluid file at the moment, so I tried Notepad. And imagine my surprise when it revealed that this isn’t XML- or even text-based at all. It’s a new proprietary document format. Disappointing.

There are still so many questions, of course, key among them whether this Fluid Framework Preview web app is intended to stick around as a standalone thing or whether this is just for testing Fluid components. My guess is that it could live on, and I could see using this as a lightweight replacement for Word, OneNote, and maybe even Excel. But perhaps we’ll learn more at Build or at some future milestone. For now, it’s just a curiosity.