Microsoft is announcing a massive update for its Fluid Framework at Build 2020. Microsoft first announced the Fluid Framework back at Build 2019 and launched a preview earlier this year. But so far, you could not actually make use of the Fluid Framework on any of Microsoft’s actual apps.

That’s changing today. Microsoft is launching new Fluid Workspaces and Fluid Components, first as a preview for Outlook for the web and Office.com. Microsoft says this is the “first way for end-users to experience the Fluid Framework in Microsoft 365.”

At first, it can be a little hard to understand what the Fluid Framework actually is. Putting the poor branding aside, the benefits of the framework is actually very interesting. You can look at Fluid Framework as a new type of modern editor that focuses on three core ideas: multi-person coauthoring, componentized document model, and intelligent AI agents.

Fluid Framework will essentially pave the way for a new editor within Microsoft 365 apps that will enable a new componentized document model where all the elements will be seen as different components, and the multi-person coauthoring will happen across all apps. So if you share a Word document within a Teams conversation, your colleague can edit that file from within Teams and you will see the changes in real-time on Word Online, for example.

With the availability of Fluid Workspaces and Fluid Components, Microsoft is slowly starting to test the next-gen editing experience for Microsoft 365 with more people. “Fluid Components and Fluid Workspaces will become available in more places over time, and their capabilities will become more powerful over time,” the company said. The initial public preview includes basic text, tables, lists, agendas and action items.

The public preview will start rolling out to Microsoft 365 Enterprise and education subscribers who are enrolled in Targeted Release.

But here is where it gets interesting: the Fluid Framework is not limited to Microsoft 365, and can actually be leveraged by developers to implement some of the key infrastructures from the framework within their own applications. That’s why Microsoft is open-sourcing the Fluid Framework on GitHub today, allowing developers to contribute to the framework. Developers will not only be able to use the framework itself, but also make their own Fluid Components.

“This is an open invitation for developers to join Microsoft on this journey, provide feedback and help shape future capabilities. It will be available to the public and open for any developer to provide feedback, issues and pull requests,” Microsoft said.

The company plans to introduce new features and abilities for the Fluid Framework through the new GitHub repository.

Tagged with Build 2020, Fluid Framework, GitHub, Open Source