May 12th, 2020

Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Community (PnP) – May 2020 update

SharePoint team
SharePoint team

Microsoft 365 & SharePoint Ecosystem (PnP) May 2020 update is out with a summary of the latest guidance, samples, and solutions from SharePoint engineering or from the community for the community. This article is a summary of all the different areas and topics around the SharePoint Dev ecosystem during the past month.

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP)?

Microsoft 365 / SharePoint PnP is a nick-name for Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Ecosystem activities coordinated by SharePoint engineering together with other Microsoft 365 areas. PnP is a community-driven open source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for SharePoint and Microsoft 365. Topics vary from 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.

The initiative is currently facilitated by Microsoft, but we have multiple community members as part of the PnP team (see team details in end of the article) and we are always looking to extend the PnP team with more community members. Notice that since this is open source community initiative, there’s no SLAs for the support for the samples provided through GitHub. Obviously, all officially released components and libraries are under official support from Microsoft.

Some key statistics around SharePoint Developer topics from April 2020

Most viewed articles in the SharePoint Dev documentation during April 2020:

  1. Use column formatting to customize SharePoint | 28,044
  2. Build your first SharePoint client-side web part (Hello World part 1) | 22,783
  3. SharePoint Site Design and Site Script overview | 22,220
  4. Complete basic operations using SharePoint REST endpoints | 20,544
  5. Set up your SharePoint Framework development environment | 20,133
  6. Working with lists and list items with REST | 19,613
  7. Get to know the SharePoint REST service | 18,834
  8. Working with folders and files with REST | 16,119
  9. Overview of the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) | 15,933
  10. SharePoint Development | 15,329

Most viewed videos in the Microsoft 365 & SharePoint Community (PnP) YouTube channel during April 2020:

  1. Getting started with Site Designs in SharePoint Online – Laura Kokkarinen (Sulava) | 4,257
  2. SharePoint Framework Tutorial 1 – HelloWorld web part | 1,860
  3. Creating multi-tab Microsoft Teams personal app with SharePoint Framework | 1,452
  4. SharePoint Framework Tutorial – Setup your Office 365 tenant for development | 1,426
  5. PnP Webcast – SharePoint Framework Modern Search Web Part – Tarald Gåsbackk (Puzzlepart), Franck Cornu (aequous) | 1,321
  6. SharePoint Framework Training – Using react and Office UI Fabric React components | 1,319
  7. SharePoint Framework Tutorial – Setting up your development environment | 1,118
  8. Building Microsoft teams personal apps using SharePoint Framework | 1,073
  9. SharePoint Framework Tutorial 2 – HelloWorld, talking to SharePoint | 1,058
  10. Community Demo – Building a Q&A solution for SharePoint portals using SharePoint Framework | 953

Main resources around SharePoint PnP and SharePoint development

May 2020 monthly community call

May 2020 monthly community happened on Tuesday 12th of May 9 AM PST with following agenda:

  • Monthly summary of community topics and latest development – Latest news from Microsoft and community news – Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) ~15 min
    • Engineering update with latest news and road map
    • UserVoice status for SharePoint Dev
    • Community contributors and companies for the PnP areas
  • Topic – Securing your data in SharePoint/OneDrive/Teams with Sensitivity Labels
  • Q&A

You can find recording of the community call from PnP YouTube channel. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please participate in our discussions in the Microsoft Tech Community under the SharePoint developer group.

Latest Dev Blog posts

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

PnP Community Calls

SharePoint Dev community has 3 different recurrent community calls, which you can choose to participate based on your interest and availability. All calls are recorded and published in the SharePoint Dev YouTube channel typically 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 SharePoint developer blog when the videos are published.

If you are interested in doing a live demo of your solution or sample in these calls, please do reach out to the PnP Core Team members (contacts later in this post). 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.

SharePoint and PnP community  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. 

  • PnPjs – PnPjs Framework repository
  • o365 CLI – 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 Webhooks and more
  • Sharing is Caring – Getting started on learning how to contribute and be active on the community from GitHub perspective.
  • sp-dev-fx-webparts – Client-side web part samples from community and 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-dev-fx-vs-extension – Open source Visual Studio IDE extension for creating SharePoint Framework solutions in the Visual Studio 2015 or 2017
  • 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
  • sp-dev-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

All SharePoint specific repositories or services supported directly by Microsoft are located in the SharePoint GitHub organization

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-Transformation – Material specifically for the transformation process. Currently, includes samples around InfoPath replacement and transformation tooling from farm solutions to add-in model.
  • 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

What’s supportability story around PnP material?

Following statements apply across all of the PnP samples and solutions, including samples, core component(s) and solutions, like SharePoint Starter Kit.

  • 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

New Microsoft 365 & SharePoint PnP team model

PnP Team announcement

In April we announced our new Microsoft 365 PnP team model and grew the MVP team quite significantly. This team is responsible of coordinating the open-source and community work together with Microsoft employees. 

More details around the new model can be read from following blog post:

Area-specific updates

Microsoft 365 Community docs

Community docs model was announced in the April release 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. You might be interested on following assets to learn amore on this area:

Get involved! All contributors will be also called out in our monthly summary.

Microsoft Look Book – Provisioning service

New version of the SharePoint Provisioning Service has been released together with a seamless integration to SharePoint Look Book (http://lookbook.microsoft.com). Look book exposes numerous new templates which are demonstrating the possibilities of modern SharePoint designs. You will need to be a tenant administrator to be able to provision provided example tenant templates to your own tenant. New SharePoint look book templates (v2 designs) have been released in Ignite 2019 and are available also as open-source assets from the sp-dev-provisioning-templates repository.

SharePoint Provisioning Service source code is also released as an open-source solution at sp-provisioning-service GitHub repository and we keep on evolving the experience further. Changes during the past month:

  • Improved error handling and exception detection
  • Improved exception description
  • Performance improvements

We are working on releasing numerous new templates on this area in upcoming months together with integration with SharePoint Online admin center.

yo Teams – Yeoman generator for Microsoft Teams

PnP Team announcement Yo teams is a Yeoman Generator for Microsoft Teams Apps projects. This generator is for developers who prefers to use TypeScript, React and node as their primary technologies. The generator allows you to simply create and scaffold projects that includes one or more Microsoft Teams features such as: Bots, Messaging Extensions, Tabs, Connectors, Outgoing Webhooks. You can easily get started by following the guidance available from the GitHub wiki.

Latest changes on the project:

  • Move to PnP GitHub repository and move the work model to PnP process
  • Native support for Single Sign On Tabs
  • Switch from request to Axios modules
  • First GA release through the PnP repo, after three previews

Got ideas and suggestions on this side? Please let us know!

SharePoint Starter Kitstarter-kit-v2

SharePoint Starter Kit demonstrates how to extend out of the box modern experiences in the SharePoint. It demonstrates multiple different techniques and uses different patterns and practices to build an end-to-end demonstration solution which can be provisioned to any Office 365 tenant. It contains for example following capabilities, which you can learn from or use them as your reference:

  • Using Microsoft Graph APIs in SharePoint Framework solutions
  • Implementing Microsoft Teams tabs using SharePoint Framework

We are currently building a new version of the SharePoint Starter Kit (v2), which will also support SharePoint 2019 where possible with new updated designs for SharePoint Online. This release will happen soon with new UX design and support for using individual web parts one-by-one in your tenant.

PnP Tenant template updates

PnP tenant templates can be used to create Office 365 scoped templates, which can be applied to any tenant in the world with define configurations. Tenant templates provides a capability to have pre-defined configurations of complex tenant scoped settings in a single pnp file. PnP file is an OpenXml file containing all assets which are part of the template.  Tenant templates can contain form example definitions around multiple site collections, custom tenant themes, SharePoint Framework solutions, site level confirmations etc.

New capabilities as part of the May 2020 release:

  • Fixes and various small improvements

Modernization tooling

SharePoint Online is continuously evolving and improving, which is a great thing for you as a consumer of the service. One of the key improvements is the availability of modern sites, which are modern Office 365 group-connected team sites or communication sites, combined with improved functionality that can be consumed from a beautiful modern user interface. There are however plenty of customers who have already existing content in the classic sites and in classic pages, which would be great to get moved on the modern experience. This is where the open-source modernization tooling will help you.

Following are the key changes in modernization tooling and guidance since the last monthly summary

SharePoint / Office 365 development samples

These are samples which are available from the the different repositories around the SharePoint area samples. Includes though also samples purely targeted for Microsoft Teams or Power Platform samples. Web parts

  • New sample react-global-news by João Mendes show a world news from various sources, it uses the API available on newsapi.org this collect information from news and blog sites arround the world.
  • New sample react-personal-greeting by Zach Roberts pulls in the current user’s name and displays it on the page
  • Updated react-bot-framework by Harsha Vardhini updates the web bot chat web part to SPFx 1.10.0
  • Updated https://github.com/pnp/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/master/samples/react-calendar-feed by Hugo Bernier pulls events from RSS, iCal, Exchange, WordPress and SharePoint calendars. Adds theme support
  • Updated react-kanban-board by Daniel Westerdale shows a Kanban board using jqxKanban ReactJS component
  • New sample react-spupsproperty-sync by Sudharsan K. allows administrator to synchronize specific properties (default or custom) from Azure or maintained in a separate system directly to SharePoint UPS using property import
  • New sample react-teams-personal-app-settings by Alex Terentiev demonstrates how you can store Teams Personal App Web Part’s properties in user’s OneDrive.
  • New sample react-add-js-css-ref by Siddharth Vaghasia allows users to add/modify/delete custom js and css file references using SPFx application customizer extension all modern pages within SP online site
  • New sample react-css-in-js-typestyle by Sergei Sergeev demonstrates the usage of “CSS in JS” pattern with SharePoint Framework
  • New sample react-faqapp by Ashok Swain allows users to create Frequently Asked Questions(Faq App) in modern and classic SharePoint pages
  • Updated react-calendar by Mohamed Derhalli allows you to manage events in a calendar
  • New sample react-adaptivecards-hooks by Paul Schaeflein a version of react-adaptivecards using React Hooks.
  • Updated vuejs-todo-single-file-component by Sergei Sergeev sample web part demonstrating how you can utilize Vue (a progressive framework for building user interfaces) with SharePoint Framework using handy single-file components approach
  • Updated react-my-personal-apps by Zach Roberts allows the user to define links to Applications or Sites for quick access.
  • Updated react-documents-detailslist by Harsha Vardhini implement filtering and sorting. Two data source approaches are demonstrated: items retrieved from the search index and real-time query to a document library.
  • New sample react-pages-hierarchy by Bo George allows users to create a faux page hierarchy in their pages library and use it for page-to-page navigation.
  • Updated react-content-query-webpart by Paolo Pialorsi, David Warner II and Hugo Bernier an updated theme-aware Content Query Web Part with Dynamic Data

Extensions

Other sample solutions

  • Updated LeadsLOBSolution to support multi-tab personal app model
  • Updated ContactManagement solution to SharePoint Framework v1.0 and to work as a Microsoft Teams personal app or as a Microsoft Teams tab
  • Updated InventoryCheckOut solution to SharePoint Framework v1.0 and to work as a Microsoft Teams personal app or as a Microsoft Teams tab
  • Updated TimeAway solution to SharePoint Framework v1.0 and to work as a Microsoft Teams personal app or as a Microsoft Teams tab
  • Numerous other updates on updating solutions to the latest version and other adjustments

How to find what’s relevant for you? Take advantage of our SharePoint Framework web part and extension sample galleries

Sharing is Caring initiative

The “Sharing Is Caring” repository is targeted for learning the basics around making changes in GitHub, submitting pull requests to the PnP repositories and coming soon… PnP Contribution Rewards.

Sharing is caring

PnP Modern Search solution

PnP Modern Search solution allows you to build user friendly SharePoint search experiences using SPFx in the modern interface. The main features include:

  • Fully customizable SharePoint search query like the good old Content Search Web Part.
  • Can either use a static query or be connected to a search box component using SPFx dynamic data.
  • Live templating system with Handlebar to meet your requirements in terms of UI + built-in layouts. Can also use template from an external file.
  • Search results including previews for Office documents and Office 365 videos.
  • Customizable refiners supporting multilingual values for taxonomy based filters.
  • Sortable results (unique field).
  • Refiners Web Part.
  • Pagination Web Part.
  • SharePoint best bets support.
  • Search query enhancement with NLP tools (like Microsoft LUIS).
  • Extensibility model allowing to write your own components.

See more details from the documentation, including latest changes included in the April 2020 release.

Other open-source projects and assets

  • 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.
  • Office 365 CLI – Using the Office 365 CLI, 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.
  • 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.

SharePoint Dev articles

SharePoint Dev articles are surfaced at docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev. Since the last release, also classic SharePoint server-side API reference documentation has been moved to the docs.microsoft.com platform. You can provide contributions to these documents by submitting documentation improvements using GitHub tooling. All of the SharePoint Dev docs are stored and surfaced from the sp-dev-docs repository. Here are new/updated articles on SharePoint Development.

  • Numerous updated articles related on transitioning of the capabilities from targeted release to world wide availability
  • And countless other adjustments and updates on the documentation

Microsoft 365 PnP Dev YouTube video channel

You can find all Microsoft 365 and SharePoint PnP community videos on our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/m365pnp-videos. This location contains already a significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos, and community call recordings.

Here are new Microsoft demo or guidance videos released since the last monthly summary:

Community demos as following:

We also released a new Teams dev training videos as follows – Delivered by Bob German (Microsoft)

Key contributors to the May 2020 update

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) since last release details in SharePoint Dev 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 Office 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.

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 community. There were also people who contributed from other companies during last month, but we did not get their logos and approval to show them in 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.

AddIn365
aequos
Arvo Systems
Catapult Systems
ClearPeople

 

Content and Code
CPS
DMI
Engage Squared
Monday Coffee
N8D
piasys
PixelMill
Portiva
onebit software
Pramerica
PVX Solutions
rencore
SharePointalist
Strom Technology
Sulava
Sympraxis Consulting
ThreeWill
Valo
Voitanos

 

 

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 SharePoint development topics. PnP Team members have a significant impact on driving adoption of Office 365 and SharePoint development 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. More details on updated PnP Team model coming up soon. Thank you for all that you do!

Here are the Microsoft Internal PnP Core team members:

Next steps

learn reuse share
  • May 2020 monthly community call is on Tuesday 12th of May. Weekly SharePoint dev community calls are on Thursday and you can download invite from http://aka.ms/sppnp. Download recurrent invite to monthly community call with a detailed schedule for your time zone from http://aka.ms/sp-call.

“Sharing is caring”

SharePoint Development Community (PnP) – May 12th 2020

Category
Microsoft Teams
Topics
Microsoft Bot Framework

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