It’s only been a few weeks since I published the 4-part blog series on Teams provisioning, and already I’ve learned a lot. So here is part 5 of the 4-part series, which will explore early learning and begin to discuss future directions for the project.
ALSO – the code has moved to an official PnP repository! Please update your links accordingly.
In old-school SharePoint, if you wanted to run some custom code in a web part, workflow, form, or event handler, you wrote either a sandboxed or a farm solution. Neither of these are supported in SharePoint Online. So what are developers supposed to do when they need to run some code somewhere other than the web browser? How can they run code in the background, elevate permissions, or fill gaps in the “out of the box” configuration options?
The modern answer is Azure Functions. It’s a much better sandbox than SharePoint used to have, yet, like a sandboxed solution, you don’t have to worry about where to put it. Just choose what will trigger your function, such as a web service request, web hook, Service Bus message, or a time schedule. Then pop in your code and you’re good to go. They call it “serverless” computing, but there are servers somewhere! You just don’t need to worry about it.
Bob German's Vantage Point 