We are excited to announce release candidate on the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) 1.17 – with updates for Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365 app and SharePoint Online experiences. SharePoint Framework is the easiest way to build your enterprise solutions for Microsoft 365 with automatic single sign-on, automatic hosting and with industry standard web stack tooling.

This is an updated version of the upcoming general availability of 1.17. This preview is not intended to be used in production but is already matching the planned capabilities.

Focus on 1.17 release will be around following areas:

• Updates and improvements on building Microsoft 365 wide experiences with Microsoft Teams apps build with SharePoint Framework – This model enables you to build auto-hosted apps in Microsoft 365 which are extended across Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Office 365 app (office.com). Any Microsoft Teams app build with SharePoint Framework is automatically now compliant with the requirements to get the app exposed across Microsoft 365.
• Updates and improvements on the Microsoft Viva extensibility build with SharePoint Framework.
• General availability of the top actions for custom web parts (pic below).
• Authentication improvements with popup flow support for API authentication.
• Accessibility improvements for the web part areas.
• Development time improvements with central configuration of developer tenant details.
• Microsoft Teams JS SDK version update to version 2.19.1 to support new APIs, such as LiveShare SDK.
• “Sync to Teams” functionality in SharePoint app catalog update to use Teams Manifest v1.16 for the automatically created Microsoft Teams solution package
• Viva Connections Adaptive Cards Extensions update to support Adaptive Cards schema v1.5.
• Numerous other improvements and adjustments based on the reported issues by customers and partners.
  • If you ran into any issues, please use Premier Support if that’s an option or report your issues at https://aka.ms/spfx-issues.

We are looking into releasing a specific release candidate update for the 1.17, before the general availability (GA) version in early April 2023. As with previous preview releases, our objective is to provide more insights on the upcoming features and to provide our worldwide ecosystem an option to directly influence on the released capabilities. Your feedback is welcomed. 👋

You can find full list of release details from the following documentation:

• SharePoint Framework 1.17 release candidate release notes

Notice. We will also share more details on the bot framework powered Microsoft Viva extensibility – which will enable you to build Viva Connections extensibility with bot framework solutions. As this model is not however dependent on the SharePoint Framework client side packages, it will be released as an isolated version with public preview starting later this spring.

Installing SharePoint Framework 1.17 release candidate👩‍💻

You can install release candidate of the SharePoint Framework 1.17 by using the following command which will always install the latest preview packages.

npm install @microsoft/generator-sharepoint@next --global

What’s SharePoint Framework? 🚀

SharePoint Framework is a widely used extensibility option in Microsoft 365 with tens of millions of end users each month for the custom components built by developers for Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva and SharePoint. It’s the easiest way to build developer extensibility for Microsoft 365 and it’s taken advantage by thousands of partners and customers on building custom experiences for end users.

You can build SharePoint Framework powered solutions by using Microsoft Teams Toolkit, SharePoint Framework Yeoman Generator or with the Microsoft Viva Toolkit. Key advantage is the flexibility of automatic hosting with the option to use the exact same component across the different hosts without any code level changes. This is designed to maximize the value of your development investments regardless of which primary host you are targeting.

Key capabilities of the SharePoint Framework for Microsoft 365 are following:

• Content Driven Applications – SharePoint Framework can be used to build content driven applications on surfacing information easily from Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Graph or to integrate with externally hosted content.
• Automatic Single Sign On – SharePoint Framework components have automatic and seamless SSO included for all platforms they are hosted. No specific consents needed from Microsoft 365 end users.
• Automatic hosting – SharePoint Framework components are automatically hosted in SharePoint without additional maintenance or operational costs.
• Industry standard tooling – SharePoint Framework is using standard web stack tooling with node, npm, TypeScript and any JavaScript framework of your preference. Just standard web skill to succeed without any proprietary tooling.

SharePoint Framework has also made the permission and token management for accessing the data in Microsoft 365 easy. You will be using the awesome Microsoft Graph APIs for accessing business data and you can further simplify the development of SharePoint Framework components by taking advantage of the Microsoft Graph Toolkit, which provides reusable controls with data connectivity to Microsoft Graph.

Additional resources and support 🤝

• • Please report any issues or feedback using following issue list – https://aka.ms/spfx-issues
    • We have engineering people monitoring any incoming issues and helping you to get unblocked or getting your questions answered
  • Overview documentation
  • Getting started documentation
  • Build for Microsoft Teams using SharePoint Framework
  • Extend Outlook and Office with the SharePoint Framework
  • Overview of Viva Connections Extensibility
  • Microsoft Learn – Extend Microsoft Viva Connections
  • Microsoft Learn – Extend Microsoft SharePoint – Associate
  • Microsoft Viva Connections Toolkit – Simplify your development experience for Viva Connections
  • CLI for Microsoft 365 – SharePoint Framework Upgrade tooling from previous versions to latest
  • SharePoint Framework web part samples

If you are looking to build experiences for Microsoft 365, we strongly recommend joining our community calls and other Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community activities covering Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, Microsoft Viva, OneDrive, SharePoint and more… More details here https://aka.ms/community/home 🚀

And, follow us on @Microsoft365Dev)/Twitter to stay up to date on Microsoft 365 Platform announcements.

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