We are happy to announce a new and improved process for enabling easier way to make documentation contributions around the Office 365 Dev and SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) MSDN section. PnP has many community contribution opportunities. You can contribute to our Core components (JS and .NET), samples, and reusable solutions in GitHub. We have been also having official PnP documentation in MSDN for more than a year with matching GitHub md files at our PnP-Guidance repository. Getting however changes applied from markdown documents (md) updated to MSDN, has been a slow manual process, so the community contributions have not really taken off in this section.

Starting today however, there’s direct connection between the PnP MSDN documentation and the article source files in GitHub. This means that you can easily contribute by suggesting updates to existing documents or even suggesting new articles. Notice that as part of this change, we have also relocated the PnP MSDN content to new location. 

• aka.ms address for PnP documentation – http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPMSDN
• Direct MSDN address for PnP documentation – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/office-365-development-patterns-and-practices-solution-guidance

All articles in the PnP section will have a contribute option in the top right corner, which will redirect you to the original GitHub document in PnP-Guidance repository. When your contributions are merged to official articles, you will be also assigned as a contributor for that article. All contributors to specific article are visible in the page header. Here’s an example article showing the details in practice.

How can I contribute to these articles?

Here’s the steps to start contributing on the PnP Guidance articles.

1. Watch PnP Web Cast on how to contribute to Office Dev PnP initiative – Explains the GitHub process with pull requests, which is valid for guidance articles as well 
2. Read contribution guidance for PnP Guidance repository
3. Fork the PnP-Guidance repository, apply your changes and create a pull request – target master branch in PnP-Guidance repository

After this, your change suggestions will be reviwed by our technical writers and/or engineering resource. If all is good, your pull request will be merged and it will end up to MSDN after next synchronization with you defined as a contributor. If your are providing a new article or significant changes on existing ones, we’ll send a comment in GitHub asking you to submit an online Contribution License Agreement (CLA).

That’s really cool, isn’t it?

What is Office 365 Dev and SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP)?

Office 365 Dev and SharePoint PnP initiative is community driven open source project where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for Office 365 and SharePoint on-premises (add-in model). Active development and contributions happen in our GitHub repositories under dev branch and each month there will be a master merge (monthly release) with more comprehensive testing and communications. Latest activities and future plans are covered in our monthly community calls which are open for anyone from the community. Download invite from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.

This is work done by the community for the community without any actual full time people. It’s been great to find both internal and external people who are willing to assist and share their learning’s for the benefit of others. This way we can build on the common knowledge of us all. Currently program is facilitated by Microsoft, but already at this point we have multiple community members as part of the Core team and we are looking to extend the Core team with more community members.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback around PnP program or this blog post, please use the PnP Yammer group at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPYammer.

“Sharing is caring”

Vesa Juvonen, Senior Program Manager, SharePoint, Microsoft – 27th of May 2016