Blog

Microsoft Teams Now Generally Available to Office 365 Customers Worldwide

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 03:35:00 GMT

Today, we announced that Microsoft Teams, the chat-based workspace in Office 365, is now generally available in 181 markets and in 19 languages. Since announcing the Preview in November, more than 50,000 organizations have started using Teams, including Alaska Airlines, Conoco Phillips, Deloitte, Expedia, J.B. Hunt, J. Walter Thompson, Hendrick Motorsports, Trek Bicycle and Three UK.

With 85 million monthly active users, Office 365 empowers individuals, teams and entire organizations with the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration on the market. As the latest addition to that toolkit, Teams provides an exciting new opportunity to reach end users with your apps and services. Take advantage of the Microsoft Teams developer platform and get started today.

Microsoft Teams is built to be customizable to meet the unique needs of every team. This means making it easy to use the tools and resources they depend on right within Teams. More than 150 integrations are available or coming soon, including bots from Hipmunk, Growbot and ModuleQ; and tabs from Wrike, Smartsheet and Sapho. We’re also partnering with SAP SuccessFactors and Trello to build new integrations that let users bring important apps and services into Microsoft Teams, truly making it their own hub for teamwork.

Of course, a rich developer platform and capabilities are core to building integrations that teams love and make getting work done easy. In February, we added ‘bots in channels’ and ‘deep link to items in a tab’ to our developer platform. Today’s release introduces these new features:

Bots can now @mention users. Your bot can call out specific users, or even @mention the entire channel, to call attention to important events generated by your experience.
The new Invoke action type allows you to create a silent call-back from a user to your bot, via a button press or card tap. This allows your bot to receive messages – confirmation or item selection – in a schema you define, allowing much more control in message handling than the current imBack action supports.
New conversation update events like teamMemberAdded and channelCreated allow your bot to keep track of the events happening within the teams they have been added to.
A brand-new side loading process allows you to easily add both bots and tabs to your team, with a consolidated manifest format that supports bots and tabs in a single package.
We’ve also added the ability to pin a tab to your bot conversation view. For example, imagine a task management bot with a tab containing a list of the user’s assigned tasks.

We will continue to evolve developer capabilities and incorporate feedback from our developer community. We’ll have more to share at our annual developer conference, Microsoft Build, so stay tuned.

Sign up for the Microsoft Office 365 Developer Program for access to the Office 365 developer subscription and Microsoft Teams to start building your integrations.

Richard Moe, Microsoft Teams Developer Community Manager

SharePoint Patterns & Practices – March 2017 release

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 06:00:00 GMT

SharePoint / Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices (PnP) March 2017 release is out with new contributions from community for the community. This post contains all the details related on what was included with the release and what else has been happening in the PnP world during the past month.

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP)?

PnP is community driven open source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning's around implementation practices for SharePoint and Office 365. Active development and contributions happen our GitHub projects under 'dev' branch and each month there will be a master merge (monthly release) with more comprehensive testing and communications.

PnP is owned and coordinated by SharePoint engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community. It’s been great to find both internal and external people who are willing to assist and share their learning's for the benefit of others. This way we can build on the common knowledge of us all. Currently program is facilitated by Microsoft, but already at this point we have multiple community members as part of the PnP Core team and we are looking to extend the Core team with more community members.

Notice that since this is open source community program, there’s no SLAs for the support what we provide from program. You can use SharePoint Developer group in the Microsoft Tech Community for providing input and to ask any questions around the existing materials. If you are interested on getting more closely involved, please check the following guidance from our GitHub wiki or a referenced PnP Webcast.

Some key statistics around PnP program from February 2017

GitHub repository forks at different repositories
- PnP main repository - 2129
- PnP Sites Core - 335
- PnP PowerShell - 267
- PnP JS Core - 120
- SP Dev Docs - 111
- SP Dev FX Web Parts - 123
Unique visitors during past 2 weeks' cross PnP repositories - 16098
Unique visitors during past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories - 4791
Merged pull requests cross PnP repositories (cumulative) - 3645
Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross PnP repositories (cumulative) - 1602
PnP Core component NuGet package downloads (cumulative) - 79463
Unique visitors in PnP MSDN pages during February 2017 - 43929
Unique tenants using PnP CSOM Core component during February 2017 - 3998
Http requests towards SharePoint Online from PnP CSOM Core Component during January 2017 - 1522948035
PnP YouTube channel had 13560 views with 100030 minutes watch time during February 2017

Main resources around PnP program

PnP under dev.office.com – http://aka.ms/SPPnP- One location for all the resources and news around PnP
PnP GitHub - http://aka.ms/SPPnP-GitHub - main repository
PnP MSDN pages - http://aka.ms/SPPnP-MSDN
PnP Community Discussions - http://aka.ms/SPPnP-Community
PnP Videos at YouTube - http://aka.ms/SPPnP-Videos
PnP training package (videos in Channel 9) - http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPTraining
Presentations at docs.com - http://aka.ms/SPPnP-Docs

March 2017 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 14th of March community call at 9 AM PST / 5 PM CET:

Summary on the March 2017 release and other program updates - Vesa Juvonen ~20 min
Building custom script editor web part (React-Script-Editor) with SharePoint Framework - Mikael Svenson ~15 min
Provisioning options for "modern" SharePoint sites (using new SP REST APIs or Microsoft Graph) - Vesa Juvonen ~15 min
Q&A

Monthly community call will get recorded and release to PnP YouTube channel typically within 24 hours after the recording is ended. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please participate in our discussions in the Microsoft Tech Community under SharePoint developer group. Notice that there's one hour change for the PST time due different schedules around the daylight savings between Europe and US.

PnP Sites Core, PnP PowerShell and provisioning engine Special Interest Group (SIG)

PnP Sites Core, PowerShell and Provisioning Special Interest Group (SIG) has bi-weekly meetings to cover latest development in the PnP CSOM core component, PnP PowerShell and in the PnP remote provisioning engine. We do touch also generic SharePoint development practices around remote APIs in these calls. These calls have also free Q&A section, if you have any questions around SharePoint development in on-premises or in cloud. Need to get recommendation to your design or having hard time with some APIs? - Drop by, ask a question and we'll help you.

You can download invite for the bi-weekly meeting from following location.

https://aka.ms/sppnp-core-sig-call

All SIG meetings are being recorded and are available for view from PnP YouTube Channel. Here's the latest recordings from the SIG calls.

8th of March - Quick look on Feb 2017 statistics. Demos on "modern" SP site creation using SharePoint REST APIs and programmatically detect list rendering style in SharePoint Online (classic or modern)
22nd of February - PnP PowerShell documentation in MSDN. Demos on managing modern SP pages programmatically and on automation wizard for PnP Partner Pack deployment (Office 365 and Azure configuration)
8th of February - PnP usage in SPO with conclusions on metrics. Demos on latest changes in PnP PowerShell and on PnP Provisioning Engine refactoring (500 level)

Notice. Next SIG for PnP Component / PowerShell will be on Wednesday 22nd of February - If you have questions around these topics, please join this call and use the opportunity to ask questions from SP engineering and PnP Core team.

SharePoint Framework (SPFX) and JavaScript Special Interest Group (SIG)

SharePoint Framework and JavaScript Special Interest Group (SIG) has bi-weekly meetings to cover latest changes in the SharePoint Framework side, from engineering perspective and to cover also latest development related on the PnP JS Core library. These calls are designed to have 50%/50% of content and demos and there has been already great community demos on the new SharePoint Framework Client-side web parts. If you're interested on showing your code, just let us know.

Invite to bi-weekly call - https://aka.ms/sppnp-js-sig-call
Gitter (Around the PnP JS Core) - https://gitter.im/OfficeDev/PnP-JS-Core

All SPFx and JS SIG meetings are recorded, so that you can check the demos and discussions, if you can't make the actual call. You can find the latest recordings from the PnP YouTube Channel. Here's the latest recordings.

2nd of March - Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Demos on TravisCI integration in SP JS Core project and JS Link cusotmization automation for classic sites
16th of February - Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Concentration on what SP engineering has in the backlog around SPFx and what are we planning to delivery in future
2nd of February - Latest on SPFx and PnP JS Core. Demos on Vue.js with SPFx and Movie Carosel implementation with SPFx

Notice. Next SIG for SharePoint Framework and JavaScript development will be on Thursday 16th of February - If you have questions around these topics, please join this call and use the opportunity to ask questions from SP engineering and PnP Core team.

PnP Weekly Webcasts

We started new PnP Weekly Webcast series on October 2015 and have continued releasing new videos since that. All new webcasts are released in PnP YouTube Channel. Old webcasts and other demo videos are also found from the PnP Channel 9 section. Here's the new web casts released after the last monthly release.

13th of March - Accessing data in SharePoint from SharePoint Framework solution
6th of March - Provisioning SharePoint assets for your SharePoint Framework solution
27th of February - Automate custom solution deployment steps at Office 365 and Azure
20th of February - Business Value of PnP assets - Why to use reusable components?
13th of February - SharePoint Customizations - When to use which model?

PnP repositories in GitHub

There are quite a few different GitHub repositories under the PnP brand since we wanted to ensure that you can easily find and reuse what's relevant for you. We do also combine multiple solutions to one repository, so that you can more easily sync and get latest changes of our released guidance and samples. In general we do recommend you to use the PnP sample search tool at dev.office.com for locating relevant material for you. This should be easier and faster than trying to locate relevant material from GitHub.

During November, majority of the PnP repositories were moved to SharePoint GitHub organization.

Here's the current repository structure, including short description for each of them.

PnP - Main repository for SP add-in, Microsoft Graph etc. samples
PnP-Guidance - Guidance, presentations and articles which are partly sync'd to MSDN
PnP-Sites-Core - Office Dev PnP Core component
PnP-JS-Core - Office Dev PnP Core component for JavaScript
PnP-PowerShell - Office Dev PnP PowerShell Cmdlets
PnP-Tools - New repository for tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro's and for on-premises for SP2013 and SP2016
PnP-Partner-Pack - Packaged guidance with detailed instructions on setting things up in Office 365 and in Azure.
PnP-Transformation - Material specifically for the transformation process. Currently includes samples around InfoPath replacement and transformation tooling from farm solutions to add-in model.
PnP-OfficeAddins - Samples for the Office Add-ins development
PnP-Provisioning-Templates - Source for templates available from PnP Template Gallery at http://templates-gallery.sharepointpnp.com
PnP-Provisioning-Schema - PnP Provisioning engine schema repository
PnP-IdentityModel - Open source replacement of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Extensions.dll

On top of the specific PnP repositories, PnP initiative also controls the new repositories under the SharePoint organization. PnP is owned nowadays by SharePoint engineering and we will be using PnP as the channel and forum to facilitate community work.

SP-Dev-Docs - Source for new SharePoint dev center documentation exposed from http://dev.office.com/sharepoint
SP-Dev-Fx-WebParts - Client-side web part samples from community and engineering
SP-Dev-Samples - Samples for add-ins, webhooks and other APIs

What's supportability story around PnP material?

Following statements apply cross all of the PnP samples and solutions, including samples, core component(s) and solutions, like PnP Partner Pack.

PnP guidance and samples are created by Microsoft & by the Community
PnP guidance and samples are maintained by Microsoft & community
PnP uses supported and recommended techniques
PnP implementations are reviewed and approved by Microsoft engineering
PnP is open source initiative by the community – people who work on the initiate for the benefit of others, have their normal day job as well
PnP is NOT a product and therefore it’s not supported through Premier Support or other official support channels
PnP is supported in similar ways as other open source projects done by Microsoft with support from the community by the community
There are numerous partners that utilize PnP within their solutions for customers. Support for this is provided by the Partner. When PnP material is used in deployments, we recommend to be clear with your customer / deployment owner on the support model

Latest changes

SharePoint Framework samples

These are samples which are available from the SharePoint client-side web part sample repository at https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts. We are working on getting samples on the RC0 level and many of them have been already properly updated. You can find supported version always from the readme file of each sample.

New sample react-feature-framework showing how to provision SP assets using feature framework as part of SPFx solution package
New sample knockout-sp-pnp-js showing how to use PnP JS Core library in client-side web part
New sample handlebarsjs-webpack-loader demonstrating how to setup SPFx to use Handlebars through webpack loader
New sample react-script-editor showing how to build custom script editor web part for modern pages
New sample react-modern-charts showing how to integrate chart.js to client-side web part
New sample angular-yammer showing how to build custom Yammer discussion part which integrates to specific Yammer group
New sample js-modern-calendar showing how to build a client-side web part which shows calendar items from SharePoint lists
Updated SPFx tutorials to SharePoint Framework GA version
Updated SharePoint CRUD sample to use SharePoint Framework GA version
Upgrades to numerous other samples for using SPFx GA version

PnP CSOM Core and Provisioning Engine

PnP CSOM Core component is a wrapper on top of native CSOM and REST, which simplifies complex scenarios with remote APIs, one of the example is the PnP Provisioning Engine for remote templates. The first version of the PnP remote provisioning engine was released with the May 2015 release. For the February 2017 release we have continued to add new supported capabilities and made significant improvements from stability perspective for both SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises (2013 and 2016). This list contains the main updates that have been added in the March 2017 release:

General overall quality and performance improvements for on-premises and online
Modern SharePoint pages creation and modification APIs
Improved support for group creation using Graph API
Added support to get list of OneDrive sites from Tenant.GetSiteCollections() method
Improved logic for server side version detection for better handling on different on-premises versions
Refactoring of Responsive UI (removed dependency on jQuery, better support for SharePoint 2013, and improved performances)
Updated to use latest SPO CSOM NuGet package
Unit/integration test improvements
Updated base templates for the SPO, 2013 and 2016 - used in delta handling

See also https://testautomation.sharepointpnp.com for day-to-day results and executed tests.

PnP JavaScript Core library v2.0.2

The latest release, 2.0.2, of the Patterns and Practices JavaScript Core Library represents an incremental update serving two main purposes. Firstly to align our releases to other releases across the SharePoint PnP program and secondly to include an update described below when working in SharePoint Framework. Thanks to everyone who has provided valuable feedback and helped the library grow. Exact details on the 2.0.2 can be found from following blog post.

This is similar effort as what PnP initiative previously has done with the PnP CSOM Core Component together with community.

Revert to es5 in lib Folder
Optimization for contextinfo calls
Support for Ambient Typings
Updated to Webpack 2
General fixes and updates
Improved developer guidance documentation

PnP PowerShell

PnP PowerShell providers more than two hundred additional PowerShell cmdlets, which can be used to manipulate content in SharePoint Online and in on-premises (SP2013, SP2016). These cmdlet's are addative for SharePoint Online management shell, which concentrate more on the administrative tasks with SharePoint Online.

Here's the latest changes in the PnP PowerShell

Support for setting default column values for people fields added to Set-DefaultColumnValues
Support for setting owners, memebers and visibility for existing group using Set-UnifiedGroup
Support to use app-only connectivity with Connect-PnPMicrosoftGraph cmdlet
Sample on using Connect-PnPMicrosoftGraph cmdlet with app-only permissions
Overall quality improvements and bug fixes
Moved automatically generated PnP PowerShell cmdlet documentation to MSDN

PnP sample library

Here's updates cross the PnP code sample library by the community on the code and documentation, which is great way to contribute as well.

New sample Provisioning.Modern.Console.RESTAPI showing how to use SharePoint REST APIs to provision "modern" SharePoint sites in seconds
Updated Business.StarterIntranet with small bug fixes and improvements
Updates to the PnP Partner Pack
- Introducing PnP Partner Pack installation wizard for easy deployment of PnP Partner Pack
- Fine tuning and polishing based on community input
- Fixed issue when searching for Site Collection Admins

PnP Guidance articles

The PnP Guidance repository contains guidance articles which are published at MSDN. Starting from end of May 2016 this process was changed to be fully automated and there's automatic contributors list in the MSDN side showing who have been providing updates to these documents. We are looking forward on your contributions around real life learnings in different areas. Read more details around this open publishing model from following blog post

Contributing to Office Dev PnP and SharePoint PnP documentation just got easier

Here's the new guidance released since past monthly communications.

Updates on existing SharePoint modern experiences customization guidance

See MSDN articles from the PnP MSDN section at http://aka.ms/sppnp-msdn.

PnP initiative also controls the articles in the dev.office.com around SharePoint development. Here's new/updated articles around the SharePoint Framework client-side web parts.

Updated SharePoint Framework tutorial articles to GA level
Provision SharePoint assets from your SharePoint client-side web part tutorial added
Provision SharePoint assets with your solution package
Optimize SharePoint Framework Builds for production
Sharing data between web parts using glolba variable
Connect to SharePoint using the JavaScript Object Model (JSOM)
Use sp-pnp-js with SharePoint Framework web parts
Updates on the older articles related on the GA change

PnP Guidance videos

You can find all PnP videos from our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/sppnp-vidoes. This location contains already significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos and community call recordings. Since last release communications, we did not release any specific guidance videos on top of weekly web casts.

Notice that ome of the old PnP videos are also in the PnP Channel 9 video blog, which was previously used.

Key contributors for the March 2017 release

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) during past month in PnP repositories. PnP is really about building tooling together with the community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued cross the Office 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.

Thank you for your assistance and contributions from the behalf of the community. You are making a difference!

Bart Donninger - bartdonninger
Bernd Rickenberg (Pointwork) - @berndrickenberg
Bhargav Burramukku - bburramukku
Bruce Albany (Kloud Solutions) - @BruceAlbany
Daniel Laskewitz (Sogeti) - @laskewitz
Erwin van Hunen (Rencore) - @erwinvanhunen
Elio Struyf - @eliostruyf
Franck Cornu - @FranckCornu
Ivan Vagunin (Digia) - ivagunin
Jeremy Coleman (PC Professional, Inc) - jcoleman-pcprofessional
José Quinto (Content and Code) - @jquintozamora
Joseph Velliah (CA Technologies) - sprider
Laurent Sittler (Exakis) - @laul0_68
Luis Mañez (ClearPeople) - @luismanez
Massimo Prota (Rapid Circle) - @massimoprota
Michael Schau (WorkPoint A/S) - @SchauDK
Mikael Svenson (Puzzlepart) - @mikaelsvenson
Mårten af Sandeberg (Knowit) - afsandeberg
Paolo Pialorsi (PiaSys.com) - @PaoloPia
Paul Keijzers (Wortell) - @KbWorks
Pieter Veenstra (Triad) - @PieterVeenstra
Radi Atanassov (OneBit Software) - @RadiAtanassov
Raul Garita Ch - rgarita
Russell Gove - russgove
Sahil Malik - @sahilmalik
Stefan Feenstra - @stefanfeenstra_
Stefan Bauer - @StfBauer
SuleymanA - SuleymanA
Waldek Mastykarz (Rencore) - @waldekm
Vardhaman Deshpande (Content and Code) - @vrdmn
Wictor Wilen (Avanade) - @wictor

Companies: Here's the companies, which provided support for PnP initiative for this month by allowing their employees working for the benefit of others in the PnP initiative. There were also people who contributed from other companies during last month, but we did not get their logos and approval to show them on time for these communications. If you still want your logo for this month's release, please let us know and share the logo with us. Thx.

Microsoft people: Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved on the PnP work during last month.

Antons Mislevics - antonsmislevics
Bert Jansen - @O365Bert
Brian Michely - @brianmichely
Brian T. Jackett - @BrianTJackett
Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran - @chakkaradeep
Chrystal Comley
Dan Budimir - MSDN blog
David Chesnut
Frank Marasco - @frank_marasco
Jonathan Huss - @jonathanhuss
Keyur Patel
Laura Graham - Lauragra
Neil Hodgkinson - @Nellymo
Patrick Rodgers - @mediocrebowler
Ron Tielke - rtielke
Syed Ibrahim Soukath Ali - syedms
Vesa Juvonen - @vesajuvonen

Latest traffic statistics

Here's traffic statistics from the PnP, PnP PowerShell, PnP Sites Core (.NET), JavaScript Core component and SP Dev FX Web Parts repositories.

Traffic at PnP repository

Traffic from PnP CSOM Core repository

Traffic from PnP PowerShell repository

Traffic from PnP JavaScript Core Component repository

Traffic from SharePoint Framework Web Parts repository

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

March 2017 monthly community call is on 14th of March at 9 AM PST / 5 PM CET for latest release details with demos (notice time change in US due different schedules with daylight savings) - Download invite with detailed schedule for your time zone from http://aka.ms/sppnp-call.

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft - 13th of March 2017

SharePoint PnP Webcast – Accessing data in SharePoint from SharePoint Framework solution

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 05:00:00 GMT

In this PnP Webcast, we concentrate on covering what are the different options on accessing SharePoint data from SharePoint Framework solution. There are numerous options for the approach of querying SharePoint APIs from your solution and the right model depends on multiple factors, like on the JavaScript library which you are using. Webcast demonstrates four different options first from the consideration perspective and then showing their usage in practice from a client-side web part. You can find also direct links to used samples and guidance documentation under additional resources section in this blog post.

Presentation covers following topics:

Options to access SharePoint data from SharePoint Framework solution
- JSOM - SharePoint JavaScript Object Model
- Raw REST API
- SPHttpClient class from SharePoint Framework
- SharePoint PnP JS Core library

Web cast demo (16:55) shows following details

Demonstration of the differences between the options
- JSOM data access demonstrated with a model available as guidance from development documentation
- Other options demonstrated using CRUD sample solution available from GitHub

Webcast presenters: Waldek Mastykarz, Vesa Juvonen

Presentation used in this web cast is available from http://docs.com/OfficeDevPnP.

Video at YouTube.

Additional resources

See following resources around the SharePoint Framework.

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP) web cast series?

SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP) webcast series covers different patterns, practices and topics around development with Office 365 and SharePoint. Majority of the topics are valid for the Office 365 and SharePoint on-premises. Our objective is to release new around 30 minute long web cast each Monday with few slides and a live demo on the covered topic. All web casts are published at the PnP YouTube channel with additional references on the existing materials.

PnP is community driven open source project where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning's around implementation practices for Office 365 and SharePoint on-premises (add-in model). Active development and contributions happen in our GitHub repositories under dev branch and each month there will be a master merge (monthly release) with more comprehensive testing and communications. Latest activities and future plans are covered in our monthly community calls which are open for anyone from the community. Download invite from http://aka.ms/SPPnP-Call.

This is work done by the community for the community without any actual full time people. It’s been great to find both internal and external people who are willing to assist and share their learning's for the benefit of others. This way we can build on the common knowledge of us all. Currently program is facilitated by Microsoft, but already at this point we have multiple community members as part of the Core team and we are looking to extend the Core team with more community members.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback around PnP program or this blog post, please use the Microsoft Tech Community (SharePoint Developer group).

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft - 13th of March 2017

Improved Trending Insight

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 10:43:00 GMT

In addition to exposing users’ data, like who they are and what content they work with (files, messages, conversations, tasks, etc.), the Microsoft Graph also exposes calculated insights based on the users’ activity. These insights enable applications to get to relevant data about users. For example, using the Trending API to get documents that are trending or using the People API to get people they closely work with.

Today we are announcing an improvement in our Trending API based on feedback we received from our developer community. This API returns documents that are relevant to users in their organization. The Trending API was initially exposed under the /trendingAround navigation on any user in the beta endpoint. We are removing this navigation over the next few months and the improved version of the Trending API is now available under a new navigation: /insights/trending.

This improved Trending API returns not only the list of relevant documents but also new visualization properties that let you render the documents in your app experiences as cards, the same way we do in Office 365, for example in Delve. And it also returns reference properties, that enable navigations to the actual documents.

The Trending API uses an intelligent background analysis to deliver the most relevant documents. To improve the API further, the analysis now happens in near real-time. This means that users see what is trending around them at the very moment.

Using the improved Trending API

The Trending API is accessible in the Microsoft Graph via /insights/trending, available in the beta namespace.

You can call the API to get documents trending around you:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me/insights/trending

Or around someone in your organization:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/users/anneg@contoso.com/insights/trending

You can try calling the new API right now with our Graph explorer. Try making a call with the demo tenant or log in with your own user and see what documents are currently trending around you.

Working with the results

A call to the improved Trending API returns a set of trending documents – the top 10 documents by default. The API supports the standard ‘top’ and ‘select’ query options. Each document returned by the API has a weight property with a value that shows to what extent the item is trending around the user. The higher the value, the more relevant the item is to the user. The results are sorted by this value in descending order.

Each returned document contains a resourceVisualization and a resourceReference complex value type (CVT).

The resourceVisualization CVT contains properties such as ‘title’ and ‘previewImageUrl’. We use visualization properties to render the files in our experiences:

The resourceReference CVT contains a ‘webUrl’ that allows you to navigate users to the location of the trending document, in either SharePoint, OneDrive or Outlook attachments.

See our documentation for more information on the Trending API. Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Mário Henriques and Jakub Cech on behalf of the Insights team in Microsoft Graph.

Adding custom app data to Microsoft Graph now in preview

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 06:32:00 GMT

Microsoft Graph provides a single API endpoint that gives you access to rich people-centric data and insights, via a number of resources like users and messages. Frequently, developers want to associate additional custom data of their own with these resource types, requiring significant additional infrastructure – until now.

We're happy to announce that there’s now a way for you to extend Microsoft Graph with your own data. Extensions allow you to add custom properties to Microsoft Graph resources without requiring an external data store. For example, you can store app-specific user profile data in Microsoft Graph by extending the user resource, instead of needing to invest in dedicated data-store infrastructure for your app. Alternatively, you might want to retain your app’s existing user profile store and link its records to users in Microsoft Graph by adding an app-specific identifier to the user resource.

Microsoft Graph offers two types of extensions:

Open extensions: A good way for developers to get started with extending resources with custom data.
Schema extensions: A more versatile mechanism for developers who care about storing typed data, making their schema discoverable and shareable, being able to filter, and in the future being able to perform input data validation and authorization.

NOTE: Open extensions (formerly known as Office 365 data extensions) were already available for Outlook resource types like message and event. We're now adding the same capability for directory resource types like user and group.

Let's take a quick look at how you can add custom data with open and schema extensions.

Using open extensions

Let's say you want to let users configure their UI experience so it’s consistent no matter which device they use to sign in to your app. Adding roaming profile information to an existing user resource can be done with a POST.

POST https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me/extensions

{

"@odata.type":"microsoft.graph.openTypeExtension",

"extensionName":"com.contoso.roamingSettings",

"theme":"dark",

"color":"purple",

"lang":"Japanese"

}

When the user signs in to the app from another device, the app can retrieve the user's profile details as well as their roaming settings:

GET https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/me?$select=id,displayName,mail,mobilePhone&$expand=extensions

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

{

"id": "84b80893-8749-40a3-97b7-68513b600544",

"displayName": "John Smith",

"mail": "john@contoso.com",

"mobilePhone": "1-555-6589",

"extensions": [

{

"@odata.type": "#microsoft.graph.openTypeExtension",

"extensionName": "com.contoso.roamingSettings",

"id": "com.contoso.roamingSettings",

"theme": "dark",

"color": "purple",

"lang": "Japanese"

}

]

}

Using schema extensions

Schema extensions allow you to define a schema you can use to extend a resource type. First, you create your schema extension definition and then use it to extend resources with strongly-typed custom data. In this example we'll define a training course extension for groups which specifies new properties for a course ID (courseId) and a course name (courseName).

Create the schema extension definition

POST https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/schemaExtensions

Content-type: application/json

{

"id":"graphlearn_courses",

"description": "Graph Learn training courses extensions",

"targetTypes": [

"Group"

],

"properties": [

{

"name": "courseId",

"type": "Integer"

},

{

"name": "courseName",

"type": "String"

}

]

}

Now we have a schema definition, we can use it to describe our training course.

Add custom data by setting schema extension values

We can add custom data either when creating or when updating a group. When updating an existing group, add the graphlearn_courses schema extension value to the body of the PATCH request:

PATCH https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/groups/dfc8016f-db97-4c47-a582-49cb8f849355

Content-type: application/json

{

"graphlearn_courses":{

"courseId":"123",

"courseName":"New Managers"

}

After adding the extension to the group, we can get the custom data together with other group data by using a $select statement:

GET https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/groups/dfc8016f-db97-4c47-a582-49cb8f849355?$select=displayName,id,description,graphlearn_courses

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

{

"displayName": "New Managers March 2017",

"description": "New Managers training course for March 2017",

"graphlearn_courses": {

"@odata.type": "#microsoft.graph.ComplexExtensionValue",

"courseId":"123",

"courseName":"New Managers"

}

More information

Please take a look at our Extensions overview documentation and try it out using the updated Microsoft Graph UWP Snippets Sample (REST) or by using Microsoft Graph Explorer. Note that you cannot create or manage schema extension definitions through Graph Explorer - for that you'll need to create your own application.

Please let us know what you think and what other things you'd like to see in open and schema extensions.

Happy Anniversary, Visual Studio!

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 18:13:13 GMT

On behalf of the Office developer teams, congratulations to the Visual Studio team on their launch of Visual Studio 2017 and on their 20th anniversary! In those 20 years, Visual Studio has caused big shifts in the developer world. The changes it has ushered in for Office development are no less significant.

Visual Studio and Office: A Productive History

The shared history of Office and Visual Studio really goes back to the 1990s – even before Visual Studio emerged – when Office and Visual Studio shared a foundation of Visual Basic. Visual Basic (and its cousin, Visual Basic for Applications) pioneered many concepts around rapid application design and simple-but-powerful coding. Within Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, hundreds of thousands of developers created simple VB forms and functions to make their jobs easier and their work smarter. The tight connection continued with Visual Studio 2003, which introduced Visual Studio Tools for Office. Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) supported visual designers and integrated projects for creating Office add-ins, document integrations and panes. More importantly, it also brought the innovations of Visual Studio – fantastic .NET support, rich IntelliSense, integrated debugging, and deep software development lifecycle support – all into Office.

Today: Web-based Development is Office Development

Since Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2013, extending Office has centered on building web applications. Add-ins and tools in Visual Studio make it easy to integrate web applications into the Office user experience. In all the ways the Visual Studio family improves and adds new functionality for building web apps, so too will Office development get better.

Visual Studio 2017 – launching today – provides improved refactoring, IntelliSense, and debugging functionality to make everyday development easier. It also includes many new capabilities for cloud development, including refined DevOps flows as well as deeper support for container and microservices that more demanding Office web-based add-ins may use.

Visual Studio 2017 also makes building mobile apps easier, whether you use native, Xamarin, Cordova, or Ionic technologies. Coupled with the Microsoft Graph, where developers can easily work with all types of data from their organization, it’s never been easier to build intelligent cross-platform mobile business applications.

Developing with Xamarin in Visual Studio 2017, including Android emulators and integrated debugging

The Visual Studio family has grown in recent years, as well. Visual Studio for Mac lets developers who use the macOS operating system easily create web and mobile apps. Visual Studio Code specializes in providing a lightweight, flexible code editor for the diverse files you may see in modern, client-oriented web apps. It works well for some types of web projects – particularly those using many different build and compilation tools and formats, such as building new SharePoint Framework web parts.

Editing a TypeScript + React file for a SharePoint Framework Web Part, in Visual Studio Code

With its continued focus on supporting web and mobile development, the Visual Studio family will continue to make all developers – and especially those building Office apps -- more productive at building powerful and engaging applications. Happy Birthday, Visual Studio, and we look forward to many more great years to come!

As part of Visual Studio 2017 Launch activities, you can catch a full day of live training tomorrow, March 8th – including a session on building web apps and Bots with Microsoft Teams, as well as building mobile business applications with Xamarin + Graph. We hope you can make it!

Microsoft Graph portal has a fresh, new look!

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 11:18:00 GMT

Today, we’re announcing that the Microsoft Graph developer portal has a new look, and will redirect to a new home on the Microsoft Developer Center.

Check out the Examples page for inspiration and see how partners are using the Microsoft Graph, the Graph Explorer to try out a few calls, check out the Quick Start, or get going with the Samples and SDKs. As we head to Build, we’ll continue to make improvements based on your feedback across each of these.

We welcome your feedback

Head over to https://developer.microsoft.com/graph today, and let us know what you think by posting your suggestions on UserVoice.

SharePoint PnP Webcast – Provisioning SharePoint assets for your SharePoint Framework solution

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 05:00:00 GMT

In this PnP Webcast, we covered diffrent options around provisioning SharePoint assets to SharePoint sites as part of the SharePoint Framework solution package. Typical scenario would be a requirement to have a list(s) for a client-side web part in the site, when the solution is installed. This list should obviously get provisioned automatically for the site, when package is taken into use. This webcast shows different options on how to make this happen in practice and also specific demo around the feature framework based provisioning from SharePoint Framework solution packages. There are advantages and disadvantages in each of the possible options, so it's important to understand the technical implications in detail when you design your own SharePoint Framework solutions.

Presentation covers following topics:

SharePoint asset provisioning for SPFx solution as part of solution deployment
Different options for provisioning SharePoint assets from SharePoint Framework solution
Supported feature framework elements when declarative option is used
Update and upgrade story for solution packages

Web cast demo (28:10) shows following details

Creating feature framework assets for client-side web part
Showing where the assets are stored in the solution
Feature Framework definitions for field, content types and list instances
Creating schema.xml to have custom list experience
Show needed configuration in package-solution.json file for feature xml elements
Showing how the SPFx is packaging feature xml assets to solution file

Webcast presenters: Vesa Juvonen, Waldek Mastykarz

Presentation used in this web cast is available from http://docs.com/OfficeDevPnP.

Video at YouTube.

Additional resources

See following resources around the SharePoint Framework.

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP) web cast series?

If you have any questions, comments or feedback around PnP program or this blog post, please use the Microsoft Tech Community (SharePoint Developer group).

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft - 6th of March 2017

Visio JavaScript APIs generally available

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 10:01:00 GMT

We’re very excited to announce the release of the Visio JavaScript APIs. You can use the Visio JavaScript APIs to extend Visio Online and build rich mashup scenarios. These APIs are now released and you can start using them today in your production environment. For more information, see Visio Online: anytime, anywhere access to your diagrams

Visio Online is the new way to view and share Visio diagrams on the web. Part of the Office Online ecosystem, Visio Online includes a modern UI and introduces performance improvements and rich consumption capabilities that aren’t available in Visio Web Access.

The Visio JavaScript APIs enables programmatic access to the embedded Visio Online diagrams in a SharePoint page. An embedded Visio diagram is a diagram that is stored in a SharePoint document library and displayed inside a SharePoint web page using an iframe.

Benefits of using the Visio JavaScript APIs

Visio Web Access currently supports viewing Visio diagrams in only part of the SharePoint page and building interactive mashup solutions.

The new Visio JavaScript APIs fill some gaps in Visio Web Access, are more aligned with Office Extensibility and provide solution-building capabilities on par with existing APIs, and more.

Visio Web Access only supports viewing of diagrams and therefore the APIs can only perform read-only operations. Visio Online will support editing capabilities and the creation of diagrams on the web in the future. You will be able to use the Visio JavaScript APIs to programmatically create and edit diagrams in Visio Online.
Visio Web Access is limited to SharePoint and the interactive mashup solutions only work with the Visio Web Access web part. Visio Online will support embedding of Visio diagrams in any web page. Custom solutions that you implement via the Visio JavaScript APIs will work against embedded Visio diagrams in SharePoint Online or any external web page.
Solutions that are built using Visio JavaScript APIs will work across platforms in future.

Get started

Try out Visio JavaScript APIs today and build rich mashup solutions to meet your organization’s specific needs.

You can post your suggestions on Visio Online UserVoice.

SharePoint PnP Webcast – Automate custom solution deployment steps at Office 365 and Azure

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 06:00:00 GMT

In this PnP Webcast, we wanted to concentrate on how you can automate your custom solution deployments to Office 365 and to Azure. We use PnP Partner Pack reference solution as the example case, which also contains now the updated wizard steps, which you can use in your solutions as well. PnP Partner Pack has simple UI to sign-in to Office 365 and to Azure subscription and will then fully take care of the deployment steps to the specific Office 365 tenant. Automation will compile latest version of the available code, create needed site collections and takes care of the Azure configuration for app-only access to SharePoint Online.

Solution is combination of SharePoint PnP PowerShell, usage of Microsoft Graph APIs and API calls to Microsoft Azure management APIs.

Presentation covers following topics:

Introduction to reference solution - PnP Partner Pack
- Ready to use reference solution for Office 365 and SharePoint Online
- Open source solution available from GitHub
- Based on SharePoint PnP samples, guidance and processes
- Based on community efforts
- Easy to setup and maintain
Web cast demo (11:08) shows following details
- Demonstration of the UI elements around the automation
- Walkthrough of the key areas in the code

Webcast presenters: Vesa Juvonen, Paolo Pialorsi

Presentation used in this web cast is available from http://docs.com/OfficeDevPnP.

Video at YouTube.

Additional resources

See following resources around the different covered topics.

PnP Partner Pack v2.0
PnP Partner Pack - Manual Installation Guide
PnP Sites Core - Provides easy extension methods on top of out-of-the-box CSOM
PnP PowerShell
PnP Webcast - Introduction to PnP Partner Pack v2.0
SharePoint PnP Customer Story - Using PnP Partner Pack at Weleda AG

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP) web cast series?

If you have any questions, comments or feedback around PnP program or this blog post, please use the Microsoft Tech Community (SharePoint Developer group).

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft - 27th of February 2017

ISV GTM (Go to Market) Series : How to run effective campaigns with campaign tracking and acquire new users

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 12:59:00 GMT

This blog post is part of a new series based on our newly published guide for being effective in “Going to Market” with your Office add-in or service. We’ll follow up in later blogs with a deep dive on different campaign types, how to best upsell to a new add-in user, how to encourage them to deploy that add-in to others within that user’s organisation and more. This blog series is targeted for people developing add-ins and apps for Office.

Search, web, social and email campaigns are a standard part of how all software companies drive users to discover their new apps or services. This blog describes how regardless of the size of your company, you can build campaigns to effectively drive users to try your Office add-in, including how to target users effectively and how to track campaign success.

Why run campaigns?

The Office Store that is embedded within the Microsoft Office apps like Excel or Outlook has many visitors each day. Simply listing your app in the Store and waiting for “organic” visitors will yield some new customers each day. However there are many competing available services within categories such as CRM or data visualisation, and it can be hard to attract a user’s attention so they can understand why your service is better than that of the competitors. The bottom-line is, waiting for organic visitors will only get you a certain level of success.

Also many of your customers have a “set way” of achieving important tasks within Microsoft Office, and don’t go out of their way to fundamentally change how they complete those tasks, even though they may benefit by doing so. There is huge opportunity for you to reach these users by using standard web marketing mediums – search, web, social and email campaigns. By not relying solely on ‘organic visitors’, you can take back control of your add-in’s success by running your own marketing and winning more users for your add-in’s and apps.

Step 1: Plan your campaign end to end and identify the right audience

Before rushing into channels, ads and budgets, you should outline the goals for your campaigns. In addition to expanding your user base, do you plan to target users who work in a specific field or organisations? Will you be generating leads within your add-in? Are you planning to upsell users once they have become engaged with your solution? And will these users be potential candidates to share your solution within their organisation?

Based on these answers you can move forward to plan the best marketing activities fitting to your goals.

Step 2: Focus on right channels and optimize for success

Invest in channels that yield the best results – you may have historical data from previous campaigns you have run what works, but do expect a period of learning and trying variations, as you explore multiple strategies to see how best your customers respond.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

If you don’t have an existing customer base, it’s good to start building awareness by running campaigns that allow you to learn about the audience, messaging and creatives with low cost. SEM is a good place to start since it allows you to easily set keywords and control your budget.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Once you have a good understanding of your audience, you can expand your marketing to include different social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Those platforms allow you to do specific targeting beyond geo-location, device and age. You can target users who have interests related to your add-in or who work in a field that is relevant to the core use-case of your add-in.

EMAIL MARKETING

Engaging and re-engaging with your users is commonly done using direct email marketing. Setting up email campaigns is fast and cheap, but stay mindful of not overly spamming your users. Keeping your style and messaging consistent and relevant is key, otherwise you’ll see users opting out from the email list.

DIGITAL MARKETING

A blog can be a perfect place to let people know about your add-in and all the great capabilities it has. You can highlight specific features and give tips on getting the most out of your solution and share news and updates. Your blog, landing page or web page is also a great place to get people to try your add-in. The pages you host yourself will also enable you to collect more insights on visitors who have expressed interest towards your solution.

We will do a deeper dive into different marketing channels and share more insights & best practices in our later posts.

Step 3: Track success of your efforts with Campaign Tracking

Whatever channels you choose to use, tracking your marketing efforts will help you understand what works or doesn’t work about a campaign, and evaluate the return on investment for the campaign cost.

Use a unique Campaign ID to allow you to better understand the impact of your individual marketing efforts. When you link from your promotional campaigns to your add-in page in the Office Store, include the following query parameters at the end of the URL:

mktcmpid=Your marketing campaign ID, which can include up to 16 characters (any letter, number, _ , and -). For example, blogpost_12. This is a parameter you can design based on your campaign sources.
mktvid=Your Store Provider ID, which is included in the URL of your Store Provider page. For example, PN102957641. (To find your Store Provider page, go to the Add-in details page on Store.Office.Com and click on your company/provider name. It always begins with the letters PN.)

Find the Provider ID by selecting the link from your listing’s ‘Details’ section

The following example shows a URL that includes the two query parameters:

https://store.office.com/app.aspx?assetid=WA102957661&mktcmpid=refexample&mktvid=PN102957641

Adding these parameters to your campaign URL, will enable insights into your campaign's user funnel. You will have access to the number of users who visited your add-in page in the Office Store, number of users who clicked to acquire the add-in and finally the number of users who successfully installed and launched the add-in inside Office.

Tip: Bookmark this guidance page on how to create links with Campaign ID!

(NOTE: this campaign tracking capability is currently available for FREE Word, Excel and PowerPoint add-ins listed in Store.Office.Com.)

Step 4: Monitor success

Coming soon, we will share campaign insights with you on Seller Dashboard. This will give you the tools needed to analyse the success of each campaign and focus your efforts on channels and messaging that works. Until this is available, you can contact us at omexdatarequests@microsoft.com to get your campaign tracking analytics from the campaign tracking URL’s.

Call to action

To gain more customers for your add-in, plan your campaigns today and leverage campaign tracking URL’s. See the Go to Market Guide for more strategies.

Yammer Partner Q&A: Process Street’s CTO, Cameron McKay

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 12:24:00 GMT

The benefit of online forums is that developers can learn from each other. At Yammer, we expand on this knowledge sharing by publishing interviews with the developers of successful Yammer integrations.

The latest Partner Q&A is with Cameron McKay, the CTO of Process Street. Cameron, with a strong focus on UX, explains how using the Yammer Platform has helped their users:

“The best ‘experience improver’ for our product has been the ability to suggest other [Yammer] team members – we use this both within the invite flow and to help users assign members to tasks/workflows.”

Elaborating, Cameron details which REST API endpoints have been most useful, and how they relate to Process Street’s features. Visit developer.yammer.com/blog to read more about Process Street and the specific endpoints they recommend.

New SharePoint CSOM version released for SharePoint Online - February 2017

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 06:00:00 GMT

We are happy to announce availability of new SharePoint Client Side Object Model (CSOM) version targeted for the Office 365 or more specifically for SharePoint and Project Online. This release again contains few updates on the existing SharePoint CSOM assemblies and some maintenance changes. Key changes in this release is the updates around the CSOM alert APIs.

You can find the latest CSOM package for SharePoint Online, including the Project Online CSOM assembly, from the NuGet gallery with an id of 'Microsoft.SharePointOnline.CSOM'. We are also working on updating the redistributable package at some point, but you can already right now start using some of these new capabilities in your solutions. We do recommend you to use the NuGet Package to gain access on latest version, rather than downloading the SDK to your machine.

Version of the newly released CSOM package is 16.1.6216.1200. Previous versions of the NuGet have not been removed, so that your existing solutions will continue working without issues and you can decide when the new version is taken into use. Notice that even though the Nuget version is increased to 16.1.6216.1200, actual assembly version of the released assemblies is 16.1.0.0. You can also check the version of the assemblies from the File Version attribute, which aligns with the NuGet version.

SharePoint Online Management Shell will be also updated around the 1st of March to match on the CSOM version. We are also working on getting the MSDN reference API documentation updated with the latest release with additional documentation on new APIs, so that you can more easily see all the latest and supported APIs for SharePoint Online.

Notice that since this NuGet package is targeted to SharePoint Online, you cannot use it directly in on-premises environments (SharePoint 2013 or 2016). This is because of the server side dependencies of the APIs. CSOM versioning model and dependency to your target environment is clarified in following blog post - Using correct Client Side Object Model (CSOM) version for SharePoint customizations. We have released separate NuGet packages for on-premises. See following blog post for additional details - SharePoint CSOM versions for on-premises released as NuGet packages.

Creating Alerts using CSOM

We released original support for creating Alerts in the SharePoint Online with the January 2017 release of the CSOM, but unfortunately this release had a bug related on the defining the alert details and only way you could create them, was not optimal, like explained in Todd Baginski's blog post. Here's updated example on how to create Alerts using CSOM in SharePoint Online.


   // Load needed information from SharePoint Online
   User currentUser = ctx.Web.CurrentUser;
   ctx.Load(currentUser);
   ctx.Load(currentUser.Alerts);
   ctx.Load(currentUser.Alerts,
       lists => lists.Include(
           list => list.Title,
               list => list.ListID));

   ctx.ExecuteQuery();

   // Create new alert using CSOM for the user
   AlertCreationInformation newAlert = new AlertCreationInformation();
   newAlert.List = ctx.Web.Lists.GetByTitle("Documents");
   newAlert.AlertFrequency = AlertFrequency.Daily;
   newAlert.AlertTime = DateTime.Today.AddDays(1);
   newAlert.AlertType = AlertType.List;
   newAlert.AlwaysNotify = false;
   newAlert.DeliveryChannels = AlertDeliveryChannel.Email;
   newAlert.Status = AlertStatus.On;
   newAlert.Title = "New alert created at : " + DateTime.Now.ToString();
   newAlert.User = currentUser;
   newAlert.EventType = AlertEventType.All;
   newAlert.Filter = "0"; 
   // 0 = Anything Changes
   // 1 = Someone else changes a document
   // 2 = Someone else changes a document created by me
   // 3 = Someone else changes a document modified by me

   // add the alert for the user
   var newAlertGuid = currentUser.Alerts.Add(newAlert);
   currentUser.Update();
 
   //Execute creation request to the SPO
   ctx.ExecuteQuery();

New properties and methods cross assemblies

Here's a raw list of all the changes in the classes, properties and methods within this package.