We are excited to announce upcoming Microsoft Viva Connections developer public preview for building engaging experiences for Microsoft Viva Connections with the widely adopted SharePoint Framework (SPFx). Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern employee experience where you can build and integrate apps that shape culture and foster connections to help employees thrive. With SPFx, you have multiple ways to extend – using the same out-of-the-box or custom SPFx web parts, SPFx extensions (e.g., header, footer), and specific components for optimized mobile experiences.
We announced a private preview for the Viva Connections extensibility in the Build 2021 and reception has been phenomenal across customers and partners in Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Given this huge interest, we are now moving forward on providing a public preview of the Viva Connections Extensibility options. We will include these new extensibility options in upcoming SharePoint Framework 1.13 beta release, scheduled to be available by end of July 2021. As part of the 1.13 beta release, we will allow developers to start building Viva Connections cards which combine Adaptive Cards and SharePoint Framework technologies for optimized and performant end user experience.
What’s SharePoint Framework?
SharePoint Framework is widely used extensibility in Microsoft 365 with tens of millions of end users each month for the custom components built by developers. It’s really the easiest way to get build extensibility for Microsoft 365 and it’s taken advantage by thousands of partners and customers on building custom experiences for end users.
Key capabilities of the SharePoint Framework for Microsoft 365 are following:
- 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.
- Consistent developer experience – Use the same code and development patterns for Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Teams and in SharePoint.
- 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 skills needed, no special skills needed. Anyone can do this.
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.
SharePoint Framework provides multiple shapes and component types across Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva and SharePoint.
Additional resources
- Viva Connections welcomes new partners and opens developer preview – Microsoft Viva Blog
- How to implement Microsoft Viva Connections with Microsoft Mechanics – Adam Harmetz (Microsoft)
- Build solutions that span across Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections and SharePoint – Build 2021 session – Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft)
- SharePoint Framework documentation – Will be including Viva Connections cards tutorials when 1.13 beta is released
- SharePoint Framework tutorial for getting started
- SharePoint Framework web part samples
- Microsoft Graph Toolkit – Reusable, framework-agnostic components and authentication providers for accessing and working with Microsoft Graph
- SharePoint Framework reusable community controls – web part property controls and React controls
If you are looking into building experiences for Microsoft 365, we strongly recommend on joining our community calls and other Microsoft 365 community activities. More details from https://aka.ms/m365pnp.
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