Let's start by the SharePoint
customization options. From a historical
perspective, SharePoint was always a
customizable platform and the reason why
it became so popular is because every
company could turn SharePoint into their
SharePoint by building line of business
applications and integrating other systems
in order to increase the return on
investment on the platform. Historically,
we had four options to customize
SharePoint; farm solutions, sandbox
solutions, apps which later got renamed to
add-ins, and SharePoint framework
solutions. Today in SharePoint Online the
two options that we have are only add-ins
and SharePoint Framework, which you will
often see shortened to SPFx in the
community and some documentation. Now let
me clarify something as this has been
really made confusing by Microsoft, is it
apps or add-ins? Well, the correct term
now is add-ins; however, in the admin
center, PowerShell cmdlets, and a lot of
the technical documentation and technical
things, you will see apps in a lot of
places. So which one is the correct one?
Well, my advice would be to use add-ins
wherever you can, but as you will see in
this module, we have no choice but to use
the word apps, quite a lot of times,
especially when we talk about the back end
of things, and there's still a lot of
things that are referred to as apps in
Microsoft documentation, but just know
that apps or add-ins are the same thing
inside of SharePoint. Now that we know
what type of customizations we have, where
are they deployed? Most SharePoint
customizations are deployed in the
SharePoint App Catalog, which you have at
the tenant level, but you can also have at
the site level. While not covered in this
course in detail, a note for a SharePoint
administrators who come from on-premises
and we used to have a lot of
customizations like say at the timer job
level. So we had timer jobs, things like
that on SharePoint Server, but of course
we cannot do that anymore in SharePoint
Online. Now a lot of the back end stuff is
done in Azure and more specifically, Azure
Functions and Azure Web Apps, and using
the SharePoint Framework and modern dev
technologies makes it easy for SharePoint
customizations to call stuff in Azure for
the back end, but this is more for a dev
topic and there are SharePoint development
courses on Pluralsight which cover it, but
today we're really going to focus on the stuff deployed in SharePoint Online.