Microsoft 365 PnP Community -- August 2021 update

Microsoft 365 PnP Community -- August 2021 update

Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices (PnP) Community August 2021 update is out with a summary of the latest guidance, samples, and solutions from Microsoft or from the community for the community. This article is a summary of all the different areas and topics around the community work we do around Microsoft 365 ecosystem during the past month. Thank you for being part of this success. Sharing is caring! 🧡

What is Microsoft 365 Community (PnP)

Microsoft 365 PnP is a nick-name for Microsoft 365 platform community activities coordinated by numerous teams inside of the Microsoft 365 engineering organizations. PnP is a community-driven open source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for Microsoft 365.

Topics vary from Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, OneDrive and SharePoint. Active development and contributions happen in GitHub by providing contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation for different areas. PnP is owned and coordinated by Microsoft engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community.

  1. Introduction to Microsoft Teams Toolkit v2 - Zhenya Savchenko (Microsoft) | 15,069
  2. Top 10 hidden gems: Microsoft Lists - Mark Kashman | 3,218
  3. Getting started with Site Designs in SharePoint Online - Laura Kokkarinen (Sulava) | 2,828
  4. Working with Microsoft Lists (webinar) - Harini Saladi, Miceile Barrett, Chakkaradeep Chandran and Mark Kashman | 2,370
  5. Building a beautifully designed Intranet with SharePoint - latest design and branding capabilities | Cathy Dew (Microsoft) & Katie Swanson (Microsoft) | 2,244
  6. Introducing: New Employee Onboarding - a Microsoft Teams app template | Nidhi Sharma (Microsoft) | 2,117
  7. SharePoint Framework Tutorial 1 - HelloWorld WebPart | 2,008
  8. Microsoft Lists workshop, part 1: “Creating and collaborating” - Mark Kashman | 1,434
  9. Building a digital asset / document repository management app for Microsoft Teams - Sathya Raveendran (Microsoft), Arun Kumar Anaparthi (Zen3 Infosolutions) | 1,398
  10. Latest on Power Automate integration within SharePoint Online - Chakkaradeep Chandran | 1,368

Most viewed videos in the Microsoft 365 Developer YouTube channel during July 2021:

  1. Microsoft Graph Toolkit can do WHAT? | Tips & Tricks - Ayca Bas | 30,527
  2. Create a chatbot in Microsoft Teams with Power Virtual Agents | Tips & Tricks - April Dunnam | 28,173
  3. Explore Microsoft Graph scenarios for JavaScript development - Dan Wahlin | 20,927
  4. Teams App Dev Challenge winners bring data and dashboards into Teams chats - Bob German and Decision Point | 18,253
  5. Start calling the Microsoft Graph API in under 5 minutes! | Tips & Tricks - Dan Wahlin | 1,812
  6. Demo: Getting started with Power Apps Portals | Brian Knight (Pragmatic Works) | 1,513
  7. Authenticate and connect with Microsoft Graph - June 2019 | 1,380
  8. Build Outlook Add-ins that integrate your solution seamlessly into your users’ Outlook experience​ | Juan Balmori, Hitesh Manwar - 1,049
  9. Getting started with Microsoft Emulator and Windows 10X - Claire Davis | 848
  10. Automate your Excel tasks with Office Scripts | 818 Main resources around Microsoft 365 Community:

Latest Dev Blog posts

Here are the latest blog posts and announcements around Microsoft 365 development topics from https://developer.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/blogs.

Community Calls

There are numerous different community calls on different areas. All calls are being recorded and published either from Microsoft 365 Developer or Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) YouTube channels. Recordings are typically released within the following 24 hours after the call. You can find a detailed agenda and links to specific covered topics on blog post articles at the Microsoft 365 developer blog when the videos are published.

  • Microsoft 365 Platform Call - https://aka.ms/m365-dev-call - Updates and demos from Microsoft as weekly call on Tuesdays - topics vary from Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Graph, Power Platform, SharePoint, OneDrive and more
  • Adaptive Cards  https://aka.ms/adaptivecardscommunitycall - Updates and news around Adaptive Cards with live demos
  • Microsoft identity platform  https://aka.ms/IDDevCommunityCalendar - Latest on the identity side
  • Office Add-ins  https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall - News and community work around Office add-ins with live demos
  • Power Apps   https://aka.ms/PowerAppsMonthlyCall - Monthly summary on Power Apps community with live demos
  • M365 Community Call  https://aka.ms/spdev-sig-call  - Bi-weekly - General topics on Microsoft 365 Dev from various aspects - Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Graph Toolkit, Provisioning, Automation, Scripting, Power Automate, Solution design
  • SharePoint Framework Community call https://aka.ms/spdev-spfx-call - Bi-weekly - Consists of topics around SharePoint Framework and JavaScript-based development in the Microsoft Teams and in SharePoint platform. If you are interested in doing a live demo of your solution or sample in these calls, please do reach out to the PnP  Team members (contacts later in this post) and they are able to help with the right setup. These are great opportunities to gain visibility for example for existing MVPs, for community members who would like to be MVPs in the future or any community member who’d like to share some of their learnings.

Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) Ecosystem in GitHub

Most of the community driven repositories are in the PnP GitHub organization as samples are not product specifics as they can contain numerous different solutions or the solution works in multiple different applications.

  • Microsoft Graph Toolkit - Repository and project on Microsoft Graph Toolkit controls - welcomes community contributors

  • PnPjs - PnPjs Framework repository

  • CLI Microsoft 365 - Cross-OS command line interface to manage Office 365 tenant settings

  • generator-spfx - Open-source Yeoman generator which extends the out-of-the-box Yeoman generator for SharePoint with additional capabilities

  • generator-teams - Open-source Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator - Bots, Messaging Extensions, Tabs, Connectors, Outgoing Web hooks and more

  • teams-dev-samples - Microsoft Teams targeted samples from community and Microsoft engineering

  • Sharing is Caring - Getting started on learning how to contribute and be active on the community from GitHub perspective.

  • pnpcore - The PnP Core SDK is an SDK designed to work against Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Graph API first approach

  • powershell -  PnP PowerShell module which is PowerShell Core module targeted for Microsoft 365

  • pnpframework - PnP Framework is a .Net Standard 2.0 library targeting Microsoft 365 containing the PnP Provisioning engine and a ton of other useful extensions

  • teams-dev-samples - Samples around the Microsoft Teams development models from Microsoft and from the community

  • spfx-teams - Samples for the Microsoft Teams and Viva Connections, implemented using SharePoint Framework

  • sp-dev-fx-webparts - Client-side web part samples from community and Microsoft engineering

  • sp-dev-fx-extensions - Samples and tutorial code around SharePoint Framework Extensions

  • sp-dev-fx-library-components - Samples and tutorial code around the SharePoint Framework library components

  • sp-starter-kit - Starter kit solution for SharePoint modern experiences

  • sp-dev-build-extensions - Different build extensions like gulp tasks and gulp plugins from the community and engineering around SharePoint development

  • sp-dev-solutions - Repository for more polished and fine-tuned reusable solutions build with SharePoint Framework

  • sp-dev-samples - Repository for other samples related on the SharePoint development topics - WebHooks etc.

  • sp-dev-fx-controls-react - Reusable content controls for SharePoint Framework solutions build with React

  • sp-dev-fx-property-controls - Reusable property pane controls to be used in web parts

  • list-formatting - Open-source community-driven repository for the column and view formatting JSON definitions

  • sp-dev-site-scripts - Open-source community-driven repository for community Site Designs and Site Scripts

  • sp-dev-modernization - Tooling and guidance around modernizing SharePoint from classic to modern

  • sp-power-platform-solutions - Solution and sample code for SharePoint Power Platform solutions

  • powerfx-samples - Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for the Power Fx low-code programming language\

  • powerapps-samples - Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for Power Apps

  • powerautomate-samples - Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for Power Automate

  • powerva-samples - Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for Power Virtual Agents All SharePoint specific repositories or services supported directly by Microsoft are located in the SharePoint GitHub organization
    \

  • sp-dev-docs - Source for new SharePoint dev center documentation exposed from https://learn.microsoft.com/sharepoint/dev

  • sp-dev-provisioning-templates - Open-source templates used by the SharePoint Look Book site

  • sp-provisioning-service - Source code of the SharePoint look book site PnP specific repositories - solution designs and tooling

  • PnP - Main repository for SP add-in, Microsoft Graph etc. samples

  • PnP-Sites-Core - Office Dev PnP Core component

  • PnP-PowerShell - Office Dev PnP PowerShell Cmdlets

  • PnP-Tools - Tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro’s and for on-premises for SP2013 and SP2016

  • PnP-Provisioning-Schema - PnP Provisioning engine schema repository

  • PnP-IdentityModel - Open source replacement of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Extensions.dll Repositories in the GitHub Microsoft Search organization controlled by the PnP initiative

  • pnp-modern-search -  Home of PnP Modern Search solutions, see more from the documentation Other related resources from GitHub

  • Office add-in Patterns and Practices in GitHub - Community contributions welcome!

  • Microsoft Graph GitHub organization

  • OfficeDev GitHub organization - Includes all Microsoft Teams samples from Microsoft

What’s supportability story around the community tooling and assets?

Following statements apply across all of the community lead and contributed samples and solutions, including samples, core component(s) and solutions, like SharePoint Starter Kit, yo teams or PnP PowerShell. All Microsoft released SDKs and tools are supported based on the specific tool policies.

  • 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 is an open-source initiative by the community – people who work on the initiative for the benefit of others, have their normal day job as well
  • PnP is NOT a product and therefore it’s not supported by 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 being clear with your customer/deployment owner on the support model Please see the specifics on the supportability on the tool, SDK or  component repository or download page.

Microsoft 365 PnP team model

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In April 2020 we announced our new Microsoft 365 PnP team model and grew the MVP team quite significantly. PnP model exists for having more efficient engagement between Microsoft engineering and community members. Let’s build things together. Your contributions and feedback is always welcome! During August, we also crew the team with 5 new members. PnP Team coordinates and leads the different open-source and community efforts we execute in the Microsoft 365 platform. We welcome all community members to get involved on the community and open-source efforts. Your input do matter!

Microsoft 365 PnP Recognition Program

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We are excited to announce new community contributor program for all the active community members. Through this program you can get officially acknowledged with the a Credly badge around your work on our open-source and community channels. See more from

https://aka.ms/m365pnp-recognition. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

⚙ Area-specific updates

These are different areas which are closely involved on the community work across the PnP initiative. Some are lead and coordinated by engineering organizations, some are coordinated by the community and MVPs.

🦒 Microsoft Graph Toolkit

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Microsoft Graph Toolkit is engineering lead initiative, which works closely with the community on the open-source areas. The Microsoft Graph Toolkit is a collection of reusable, framework-agnostic web components and helpers for accessing and working with Microsoft Graph. The components are fully functional right of out of the box, with built in providers that authenticate with and fetch data from Microsoft Graph.

Microsoft 365 Community docs

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Community docs model was announced in the April 2020 and it’s great to see the interest for community to help each other by providing new guidance on the non-dev areas. See more on the announcement from the SharePoint blog - Announcing the Microsoft 365 Community Docs. We do welcome contributions from the community - our objective is to build a valuable location for articles from Microsoft and community together.

Have ideas for articles or want to contribute yourself? - Get involved! Here are also some additional resources explaining the model more detailed.

SharePoint Framework development samples

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These are the updated SharePoint Framework samples which are available from the the different repositories.

Microsoft Teams community samples

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These are samples which have been contributed on the community samples since last summary. We do welcome all Microsoft Teams samples to this gallery. They can be implemented using in any technology.

  • New sample app-ReporterPlus by Sathya Raveendran and Veera Venkata Sai Pothan Thota which demonstrates the power of integrating Teams platform with device capabilities such as camera, QR or barcode scanner, photo gallery and microphone.
  • New sample bot-teams-incidentmanagement by Nanddeep Nachan and Smita Nachan which illustrates sequential workflow, user specific views, and up to date adaptive cards bot. This bot has been created using Bot Framework, it shows how to create a simple incidence and resolution using Adaptive Cards v1.4.
  • New sample bot-uam-cardbot by Rabia Williams demonstrating Unified Actions for Adaptive Cards capabilities.
  • Updated sample msgext-graph-action-config by Markus Moeller which is a action based messaging extension created using the Teams Yeoman Generator. It authenticates against Microsoft Graph via SSO and on-behalf flow from the frontend and receives documents to be posted as adaptive card to the message compose box of a channel. 
  • Updated sample msgext-action-preview by Markus Moeller which is a small demo sample is a action based messaging extension created using the Teams Yeoman Generator. It posts a simple adaptive card to the Team’s news channel but ‘as a bot’ and with an action to update the same adaptive card again and again. If you are interested on Microsoft Teams samples, we have just released also new Microsoft Teams sample gallery. Contributions to Microsoft Teams samples is also more than welcome. This gallery already surfaces all Microsoft samples, Microsoft Teams app templates and community samples.

Power Platform samples

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There was numerous smaller updates on the different Power Platforms samples. See more details on available samples from following location:

  • Power Platform sample gallery - https://aka.ms/powerplatform-samples If you have any existing samples which you’d be willing to share with others - please submit a pull request or contact the PnP team members to get started on getting more closely involved on this initiative. Here to help.

Microsoft 365 Script Sample

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We have released new Microsoft 365 Script Sample gallery within past month. We welcome all scripts on Microsoft 365 automation to this centralized repository, targeted to help to manage and automate day-to-day operations. Here are the latest updates on the Script Samples

Sharing is Caring initiative

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The “Sharing Is Caring” imitative is targeted for learning the basics around making changes in Microsoft Docs, in GitHub, submitting pull requests to the PnP repositories and in GitHub in general. Take advantage of this instructor lead training for learning how to contribute to docs or to open-source solutions. Everyone is welcome to learn how to get started on contributing to open-source docs or code!

  • See more from the guidance documentation - including all upcoming instructor lead sessions which you can participate!

See exact details on the latest updates from the specific open-source project release notes. You can also follow up on the project updates from our community calls. There are numerous active projects which are releasing new versions with the community even on weekly basis. Get involved!

  • Microsoft Look Book - Discover the modern experiences you can build with SharePoint in Microsoft 365. Look book provides design examples for SharePoint Online which can be automatically provisioned to any tenant in the world. See more from https://lookbook.microsoft.com. This service is also provided as open-source solution sample from GitHub.
  • yo teams - Open-source Yeoman generator for Microsoft Teams extensibility. Supports creation of bots, messaging extensions, tabs (with SSO), connectors and outgoing Webhooks. See more from https://aka.ms/yoteams.
  • PnP Framework - .NET Standard 2.0 SDK containing the classic PnP Sites Core features for SharePoint Online. More around this package from GitHub.
  • PnP Core SDK - The PnP Core SDK is an SDK designed to work for Microsoft 365 with Graph API first approach. It provides a unified object model for working with SharePoint Online and Teams which is agnostic to the underlying API’s being called. See more around the SDK from documentation.
  • PnP PowerShell - PnP PowerShell is a .NET Core 3.1 / .NET Framework 4.6.1 based PowerShell Module providing over 400 cmdlets that work with Microsoft 365 environments and more specifically SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. See more details from documentation.
  • Reusable SharePoint Framework controls - Reusable controls for SharePoint Framework web part and extension development. Separate projects for React content controls and Property Pane controls for web parts. These controls are using Office UI Fabric React controls under the covers and they are SharePoint aware to increase the productivity of developers.
  • CLI for Microsoft 365 - Using the CLI for Microsoft 365, you can manage your Microsoft Office 365 tenant and SharePoint Framework projects on any platform. See release notes for the latest updates.
  • PnPJs - PnPJs encapsulates SharePoint REST APIs and provides a fluent and easily usable interface for querying data from SharePoint sites. It’s a replacement of already deprecated pnp-js-core library. See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP Provisioning Engine and PnP CSOM Core - PnP provisioning engine is part of the PnP CSOM extension. They encapsulate complex business driven operations behind easily usable API surface, which extends out-of-the-box CSOM NuGet packages. See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP PowerShell - PnP PowerShell cmdlets are open-source complement for the SharePoint Online cmdlets. There are more than 300 different cmdlets to use and you can use them to manage tenant settings or to manipulate actual SharePoint sites. They See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP Modern Search solution - The PnP ‘Modern Search’ solution is a set of SharePoint Online modern Web Parts allowing SharePoint super users, webmasters and developers to create highly flexible and personalized search based experiences in minutes. See more details on the different supported capabilities from https://aka.ms/pnp-search.
  • Modernization tooling - All tools and guidance on helping you to transform you SharePoint to modern experiences from https://aka.ms/sppnp-modernize.
  • SharePoint Starter Kit v2 - Building modern experiences with Microsoft Teams flavors for SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019 - reference solution in GitHub.
  • List formatting definitions - Community contributed samples around the column and view formatting in GitHub.
  • Site Designs and Site Scripts - Community contributed samples around SharePoint Site Designs and Site Scripts in GitHub.
  • **DevOps tooling and scripts **- Community contributed scripts and tooling automation around DevOps topics (CI/CD) in GitHub.
  • Teams provisioning solution - Set of open-source Azure Functions for Microsoft Teams provisioning. See more details from GitHub.

✍ Documentation updates

Please see all the Microsoft 365 development documentation updates from the related documentation sets and repositories as listed below:

👀 Microsoft 365 Developer and Microsoft 365 Community YouTube video channels

You can find all Microsoft 365 related videos on our YouTube Channel at https://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos or at Microsoft 365 Dev. These channels contains already a significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos, and community call recordings. Here are the new Microsoft demo or guidance videos released since the last monthly summary:

🧡 Key contributors to the August 2021 update

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) since last release details in GitHub repositories or community channels. PnP is really about building tooling and knowledge together with the community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued across the Microsoft 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft. 👏 Thank you for your assistance and contributions on behalf of the community. You are truly making a difference! If we missed someone, please let us know.

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

MVP Community team

MVP Community team (PnP Team) manages the PnP community work in the GitHub and also coordinates different open-source projects around Microsoft 365 topics. PnP Team members have a significant impact on driving adoption of Microsoft 365  topics. They have shown their commitment to the open-source and community-driven work by constantly contributing to the benefit of the others in the community. Thank you for all that you do! 👏

Next steps

See all of the available community calls, tools, components and other assets from https://aka.ms/m365pnp. Get involved! Got ideas or feedback on the topics to cover, additional partnerships, product feature capabilities? - let us know. Your input is important for us, so that we can support your journey in Microsoft 365. “Sharing is caring” 🧡

Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) – August