Microsoft 365 PnP Community -- May 2021 update

Microsoft 365 PnP Community -- May 2021 update

Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices (PnP) Community April 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, 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. Getting started on deploying Viva Connections for Microsoft Teams desktop | 10,040
  2. Microsoft Teams community call - April 2021 | 6,917
  3. Building a beautifully designed Intranet with SharePoint - latest design and branding capabilities | Cathy Dew (Microsoft) & Katie Swanson (Microsoft) | 3,235
  4. Getting started with Site Designs in SharePoint Online - Laura Kokkarinen (Sulava) | 3,085
  5. Working with Microsoft Lists (webinar) - Harini Saladi, Miceile Barrett, Chakkaradeep Chandran and Mark Kashman | 2,930
  6. Your intranet is now in Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Viva Connections | 2,195
  7. Introducing: New Employee Onboarding - a Microsoft Teams app template | Nidhi Sharma (Microsoft) | 2,109
  8. Architecting Your Intranet | Melissa Torres (Microsoft) | 2,104
  9. SharePoint Framework Tutorial 1 - HelloWorld WebPart | 1,856
  10. Microsoft Teams Meeting Questionnaire App with SharePoint Framework | Nanddeep Nachan | 1,717

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

  1. Authenticate and connect with Microsoft Graph - June 2019 | 1,316
  2. Build Outlook Add-ins that integrate your solution seamlessly into your users’ Outlook experience​ | Juan Balmori, Hitesh Manwar - 1,197
  3. An introduction to Microsoft Graph for developers - Part I - Getting started - October 2019 | 1,175
  4. Demo: Getting started with Power Apps Portals | Brian Knight (Pragmatic Works) | 929
  5. Getting Started with Microsoft Graph and Application Registration | 926
  6. Build and Office add-in using modern JavaScript tools and technologies | 839
  7. Getting Started with Microsoft Graph | 817
  8. Create interactive conversational bots for Microsoft Teams | 803
  9. Accessing Files with Microsoft Graph | 754
  10. Develop multi-tenant applications with Microsoft Identity Platform - April 2020 | 725 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.

  • Adaptive Cards  https://aka.ms/adaptivecardscommunitycall - Updates and news around Adaptive Cards with live demos
  • Microsoft Graph  https://aka.ms/microsoftgraphcall - Updates and news from Microsoft Graph with live demos
  • Microsoft identity platform  https://aka.ms/IDDevCommunityCalendar - Latest on the identity side
  • Microsoft Teams  https://aka.ms/microsoftteamscommunitycall - Microsoft Teams monthly update with live demos
  • 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
  • SharePoint   https://aka.ms/spdev-call - Consists of the latest news, providing credits for all community contributors and live demos typically by SharePoint engineering.
  • M365 General Dev SIG    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 SIG  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.

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!

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.

Latest updates on this area as follows:

SharePoint Framework development samples

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

  • New sample react-teams-membership-updater by Nick Brown which can be used to update the membership of a team based on the contents of a CSV file, can be hosted in a SharePoint site where a list can be defined for logging purposes or run inside teams as a personal app.
  • New sample react-application-news-ticker by Ari Gunawan that displays news as a running text at the top of every modern page
  • Updates to react-staffdirectory by Tristian O’Brien which is a web part shows the current user’s colleagues, and allows the user to search AD directory.
  • Updates to react-datatable by Chandani Prajapati which provides easy way to render SharePoint custom list in datatable view with all the necessary features.
  • Other to numerous SPFx web part and extension samples by our awesome community members! How to find what’s relevant for you? Take advantage of our SharePoint Framework web part and extension sample galleries - includes also solutions which work in Microsoft Teams
  • Web Part sample gallery - https://aka.ms/spfx-webparts
  • Extensions sample gallery - https://aka.ms/spfx-extensions

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 msgext-bot-SPUploader by Sathya Raveendran and Varaprasad SSLN which is a document manager solution
  • New sample tab-activity-feed by Sébastien Levert (Microsoft) which shows on how to build a solution leveraging the Teams Activity Feed API to send notifications to other users
  • Updates to tab-sso by Shama which shows how to create a tab for Teams that uses the built-in Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities
  • Numerous updates on the existing samples provided by community and Microsoft 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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These are the updated Power Platform samples which are available from the new Power Platform sample gallery.

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 Dev and Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) 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 May 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.

PnP 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) – May11th 2021