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 s...