PnP Virtual Conference – September 2020 – Summary and Recordings

Microsoft 365 PnP Team

Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices (PnP) virtual team executed a virtual conference on 1st of September concentering on the extensibility topics around Microsoft 365. Conference was free for all attendees and was delivered using Microsoft Teams Live Events. Thanks everyone for being involved and providing feedback during and after the conference. We had a lively Q&A going on with all of the sessions and it was great to see the excitement and feedback at social media (#PnPVirtualConference).

Here are some high level numbers around the conference:

  • 1 Day
  • 2 tracks
  • 4 VMs in Azure (Live Event management)
  • 16 speakers
  • 18 sessions
  • 540 minutes of technical content
  • More than 2.200 registered attendees
  • More than 5000 meeting joins in Teams Live Events during the conference
  • Average eval score – 4.72 (scale being 1-5)
  • Highest score for a presenter – Chris Kent (DMI)

We are still looking into collecting more feedback around the overall setup and would request you to answer on the following form. Your input is welcome also if you only saw the recordings from YouTube and could not join the live sessions. We are looking into doing similar setup also in the future and your input helps us to make decisions on the conference size, timing and the frequency. Thank you for your input advance.

Here’s a sub set of the already received feedback:

  • Pure gold 🙂
  • Fantastic Session!
  • I learned a lot of hard to find tipps and tricks!”
  • Great session! Exactly what I needed! Thank you!
  • We have a lot answers to my organization from your session. Thank you Marc
  • Sound wasn’t optimal. I would use a headset next time.
  • This is one of the most densely packed, content and information rich sessions I have seen in a long time. Fantastic job Garry!
  • Just a great intro demo on using graph components… Thanks!
  • Fantastic session, Bob, really! Good pace, detailed, not much left open…!
  • Can’t believe I’ve not seen Chris present before, will be hitting up his youtube and anywhere else I can find him, amazing energy and amazing content!
  • Fantastic event, more of those! ☺️
  • I had been wanting to learn Microsoft Graphics, and this is the perfect introductory session.

Thanks everyone for your feedback.

Recorded virtual conference sessions

Keynote – Getting started with the Microsoft 365 Community – Guidance, components and assets

Session was mainly an introduction on where we are with the Microsoft 365 community – what’s available, how to use it and how to get involved. Learn, reuse, share.

PnP PowerShell: become a scripting hero!

PnP PowerShell, since it’s release more than 6 years ago, has become the de-facto standard for serious scripting towards SharePoint Online. All open source, all community work, the PnP PowerShell cmdlets are used more than 1 billion times per month!

Join me in this session to get your environment up running and learn to how to use PnP PowerShell on your computer, but also how to use it in Azure Functions.

Architecture of Custom Microsoft 365 Solutions

Microsoft 365 is not just one of the best set of collaboration tools to realize the modern digital workplace. Microsoft 365 is a great platform for building business-level solutions, too. In this session, you will understand how to define the architecture of a Microsoft 365 custom developed solution, how to leverage the infrastructural services that are at the basis of Microsoft 365, and how to leverage the full ecosystem of services provided in the Microsoft 365 offering. You will understand what is the right location in a business-level architecture for services like Azure AD, Microsoft Graph, Azure App Services, Azure Functions, etc.

Ways to optimize SPFx highly customized Intranet homepage

I will share with you development techniques that our teams used to optimize for better performance SPFx highly customized Intranet homepage used than more than 40 000 users on daily basis.

Getting started with Yo Teams

How do you get started with Microsoft Teams Apps development – well, you use the Yo Teams generator. Come along on the ride to get you all up to speed on how to build awesome Teams apps.

Information Architecture Provisioning: Content Type Hub vs. Site Designs vs. PnP Provisioning

Provisioning in Microsoft 365 has become a broader concern than just SharePoint sites or Teams. Information architecture artifacts we have considered to be SharePoint only in the past are growing broader and more multi-purpose across Microsoft 365. We have a mix of legacy and newer toolsets, but each has its strengths and weaknesses.

In this session we’ll compare and contrast three popular methods for laying down parts of your information architecture inside your Microsoft 6365 tenant. None of the three solve every problem, and they each have their plusses and minuses. We’ll compare them using some tangible examples from real world scenarios.

Implementing customizations for Microsoft Teams with Azure PaaS services

Microsoft Teams is the ultimate tool for modern workplace collaboration, and we developers have the power to make people’s daily lives even more productive through Teams customizations! We can bring content where it is needed the most, and reduce the time it takes to perform frequent tasks from minutes to seconds. For example, wouldn’t it be great to be able to just click on a Teams message and have an option to add it as a new task in Microsoft To Do?

If that got you all hyped up, this is the session for you! Learn how you can create Teams tabs, bots, messaging extensions, webhooks and connectors by utilizing the Azure PaaS services, and how to further enrich these customizations with adaptive cards and notifications.

In addition to the technical knowledge, you’ll also get some exciting solution ideas to take back home and suggest to your customers. The goal of this session is to make it as easy as possible for you to start developing customizations for Teams from the technical perspective, and spark up some great development ideas to get you started.

PnPJS and Async/Await: A Powerful Combination to Make your SharePoint Framework code Sing

Do Promises make async code look like spaghetti? Is it painful to build REST URLs to read and write data to Office 365? Maybe it’s time for some updated coding practices. This session will cover the use of the fluent programming style with the PnPjs library and how to make asynchronous code look synchronous by leveraging the async/await pattern with try..catch blocks instead of promise chaining and error blocks. The result is a lot less code that is simpler and easier to follow, and much easier to maintain.

Keyless authentication with Azure Managed Identity

A common challenge when building cloud integrations is how to manage the credentials needed by your code to authenticate with cloud services. Azure solves this problem by providing a way to securely authenticate with any service that supports Azure AD authentication, without having to store any credentials in your code.

In this session, you will learn: What Azure Managed Identity is. How to enable and configure Azure Managed Identity to gain access to other Azure resources. How to use Azure Managed Identity in Azure Functions and Logic Apps to call Azure AD backed APIs such as SharePoint Online and the Microsoft Graph. How to configure your local machine for developing with Azure Managed Identity.

Increase productivity with PnP/SPFx Yeoman Generator

PnP/SPFx comes with many enhancements that allows you to increase your productivity for any kind of project. Consistent CSS Formating. Improve Solution versioning. Common used addons.

Learn how you can start UI testing your solutions

Testing, testing, and testing. Testing is the key to the success of building great solutions, but eventually, things might fail. Are you prepared for it? These problems could be related to a new implementation which you did incorrectly, or something changed on the platform. Being prepared for these changes is very important. UI Testing provides you this capability, but it is not a click-click solution. You will require some tools and practices to get you started.

In this session, Elio will guide you through the process of setting up a UI testing process with Cypress, writing your first tests, and showing the results to your developers and testers. Are you interested in how UI testing can improve your quality? Come and check out this session.

Create Beautiful Web Part in Minutes Using PnP Reusable Controls

The session shows how to use PnP Reusable Controls to quickly create beautiful and functional SharePoint Framework web parts.

Integrate Microsoft Graph in your solutions using Microsoft Graph Toolkit

Microsoft Graph is the “glue” that binds many of the Office and SharePoint components together, but it can be daunting for a developer to start using it. But it does not need to be!

In this session, you’ll learn how you can use the Microsoft Graph Toolkit in your SharePoint web parts to display data from Microsoft Graph with little or no code.

Upgrade your SharePoint Framework projects using CLI for Microsoft 365

Since the first developer preview in 2016, the SharePoint Framework has released over 10 major releases and many minor releases, adding new functionality and improvements along the way. But how do you keep your SPFx solutions up-to-date with the latest version of SPFx?

Luckily, Office 365 CLI makes it easy to upgrade your SPFx projects with minimum efforts! In this session, we’ll show you how to the Office 365 CLI SPFx project upgrade command, some of the configuration options, and how to solve issues you may encounter along the way.

Calling Microsoft Graph from your Teams application

Need information about the person using your Bot? Want details about the Team your Bot is running in? Want to send an email, create a Teams channel, update SharePoint content, or set up tasks in Planner? The key to all these common tasks is Microsoft Graph API.

In this session you’ll learn about the Microsoft Graph and how to call it from various kinds of Teams application features, including tabs, bots, and task modules. You’ll learn how to call the Graph on behalf of a user, or how to elevate permissions to do something the user isn’t able to do on their own. Don’t miss this opportunity to unlock the power of Microsoft Graph in your Teams application!

Make the SP Starter Kit Your Own

The SP Starter Kit provides a compressive provisioning and customization framework for your SharePoint projects and deployments. Join us and get a jump start on how best to take this project and make it your own. See how the provisioning process works and make it work for you. Learn how the SPFx components fit together and how best to extend them for your organization.

List Formatting Magic with column and view formatting

Did you know you can quickly and easily provide dynamic visualizations directly in List views? Both non developers and developers can change how fields and rows look in modern list views. We’ll cover the basics of getting started and provide tools and resources to take your lists from simple tables to meaningful views that create joy and happiness in the hearts of your users.

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Microsoft 365 PnP team, Microsoft – 8th of September 2020

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