Using Kendo UI in SharePoint Online—The “How To” Series

In this guide, learn how to use Kendo UI to boost your productivity and create beautiful custom solutions for SharePoint development.

SharePoint MVP Ed Musters has published a practical, detailed series that provides the web developer with a detailed “how to” in using the HTML5 and JavaScript framework Kendo UI by Progress in SharePoint Online within Office 365. The primary target for this resource is the experienced front-end web developer who needs to create a custom solution for SharePoint Online. The series can equally well assist “legacy” SharePoint developers who have been developing full-trust solutions with ASP.NET and C#, helping them modernize their web development stack and use Kendo UI to boost their productivity.

The series, published on the Telerik Developer Network, covers the following key areas:

• Creating, packaging and deploying custom SharePoint solutions
• Referencing Kendo UI components in SharePoint Online
• Using SharePoint Lists as a data source for Kendo UI
• Including other frameworks and tools into your development

Articles in This Series

• Introduction to the series
• How To Create SharePoint Solutions with Visual Studio and VS Code
  • SharePoint Declarative Sandbox Solution
  • SharePoint Hosted Add-In
  • SharePoint Framework (SPFx)
• How To Reference Kendo UI in SharePoint Solutions
  • Declarative Sandbox Solution and Kendo UI References
  • Deploying the Declarative Sandbox Solution
  • Test Using Kendo UI Online Sample
• How To Use a SharePoint List as a Data Source for Kendo UI (new!)
  • A Discussion of SharePoint Lists
  • Creating SharePoint Schema in Visual Studio
  • Deploying the Updated Declarative Sandbox Solution
  • Hooking Kendo UI Data Source to SharePoint List
  • Including SharePoint Web Pages in Your Deployment
  • REST Data Optimization
  • Updating SharePoint Lists
  • Implementing Optimistic Concurrency
  • Working with Document Libraries
• How To Use Kendo UI Office UI Theme and Other Frameworks (coming up)
  • Using The Kendo UI Office UI Theme
  • Incorporating Office UI Fabric
  • Incorporating TypeScript
  • Incorporating Angular 2

What Is Kendo UI and Why Use It in SharePoint/Office 365?

Kendo UI provides the SharePoint developer with a comprehensive library of advanced, responsive HTML5 widgets, such as data grid, charts and scheduler. Importantly, it includes an Office 365-inspired theme to help developers customize Office 365 without having to spend time to write custom CSS and not have your custom UI look out of place. Kendo UI is not a replacement for your favorite JS framework; rather, it is designed to work alongside jQuery, Angular JS and Angular 2 and make web developers more productive. It also works alongside Office UI Fabric. 

Kendo UI can be used not only in SharePoint Online, but also in SharePoint 2010/2013/2016 on-premise. This makes it a suitable choice for your “application modernization strategy.”

In Ed Musters’ experience, “You need not be a JavaScript guru before you can consider the benefits of Kendo UI. Kendo UI will boost your development productivity regardless of your current skill level. Both the beginner and expert will benefit. In fact, Kendo UI has helped accelerate my own modern web development learning curve.”

Learn More

Get started learning how you can use Kendo UI to customize and beautify your SharePoint applications beginning with the introduction, or you can find out more about Kendo UI and SharePoint here.