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Monthly Update 2016 April

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VesaJuvonen edited this page Apr 12, 2016 · 6 revisions

The Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices (PnP) program was announced at the end of July 2014 and has been great tool for Microsoft to engage with the community and vice versa. PnP program is community driven program driven by the community for the community. PnP guidance has concentrated heavily on the SharePoint development models, but we are looking to extend the guidance more towards MIcrosoft Graph, Office client add-ins and how you can take advantage in general capabilities in the Office 365 platform. All contributions on this area are more than welcome.

We will also cover the details of the latest release during our April 2016 monthly community call on Tuesday April 12th. If you are interested on seeing some of the new samples in action and hear about the future fo this program, then feel free to join that call. You can download monthly recurring invite from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.

April 2016 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 12th of April community call at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CET:

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please participate in our discussions in the Office 365 Patterns and Practices Yammer group at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPYammer. We already have more than 4000 members in this group with lively discussions on different SharePoint and Office 365 development related topics. This is the most active developer group in the Office 365 Technical network and we are definitely proud and thankful of this.

Spring 2016 PnP community Survey Results

We conducated short community survey during March 2016 for getting additional input around the future direction of the PnP and to collect your feedback around the different aspects of PnP. Here's some high level results from the survey. We'll also cover the results more detailed in our monthly community call on 12th of April more detailed.

PnP Office Hours and Special Interest Group (SIG) for JavaScript development

We started bi-weekly PnP Office Hours during February for addressing questions on how to contribute towards PnP. These are open discussions around what the Core team is doing and where the community members can assist. This time is also open for discussing aroung design decisions, challenges and possible issues in the PnP deliverables. You can download invite for the bi-weekly invite from following location. Recording of these Office Hours are shared in the PnP Yammer group within 24 hours after the recording was done.

Due constantly growing interest on the PnP program, we also are piloting Special Interest Groups (PnP SIGs), which are more targeted on specicic topic, like SharePoint Client Side (JavaScript) development or other areas. We are currently piloting this model with SIG for Client Side development, which have had great interest. Client Side Development SIG has already started building generalized library to be used with JavaScript development using TypeScript and with modern development practices. If you're interested of joinign this effort, please use following resources.

Objective of this JavaScript SIG work is to produce a modular, flexible and developer focused JavaScript library for simplifying interactions with SharePoint. This development is done with modern web tooling, including TypeScript, Node.js, Gulp and other similar tooling. This means that secondary objective for this work is to introduce this tooling also for classic SharePoint developers.

Please read more around PnP Office Hours and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) from following blog post or check the web cast around the JavaScript SIG for the specific details.

PnP Weekly Web Casts during last month

We started new PnP Weekly Web Cast on October 2015 and have continued releasing new video web casts for each week. All web casts will be to the PnP Channel 9 section. Here's the new web casts released after the last monthly release.

PnP repositories in GitHub

There are quite a few different GitHub repositories under the PnP brand since we wanted to ensure that you can easily find and reuse what's relevant for you. We do also combine multiple solutions to one repository, so that you can more easily sync and get latest chanages of our released guidance and samples.

In general, we do recommend you to use the PnP sample search tool at dev.office.com for locating relevant material for you. This should be easier and faster than trying to locate relevant material from GitHub.

Here's the current repository structure, including short description for each of them.

  • PnP - Main repository for SP add-in, Office 365, Unified API etc. samples
  • PnP-Guidance - Guidance, presentations and articles which are partly sync'd to MSDN
  • PnP-Sites-Core - Office Dev PnP Core component
  • PnP-PowerShell - Office Dev PnP PowerShell Cmdlets
  • PnP-JS-Core - Office Dev PnP Core component for JavaScript
  • PnP-Tools - New repository for tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro's and for on-premises for SP2013 and SP2016
  • PnP-Office-Addins - Office Add-in samples and models (starting)
  • PnP-Partner-Pack - Packaged guidance with detailed instructions on setting things up in Office 365 and in Azure.
  • PnP-Transformation - Material specifically for the transformation process. Currently includes samples around InfoPath replacement. Some tools coming also soon.
  • PnP-OfficeAddins - Samples for the Office Add-ins development
  • PnP-Provisioning-Schema - PnP Provisioning engine schema repository

Latest changes

Provisioning Engine

The first version of the PnP remote provisioning engine was released with the April 2015 release. For the April 2016 release we have continued to add new supported capabilities and made significant improvements from stability perspective for both Office 365 and on-premises. This list contains the main updates that have been added in the April release:

  • Significant overall quality and performance improvements
  • Added support for Cross-Tenant provisioning of taxonomy fields (extract-import cross tenants)
  • Included Extensibility Handler support also for template extraction time
  • Parse subfolders when exporting master pages and page layouts
  • Added support for the EnableModeration property on extracting list instances
  • Parse subfolders when exporting masterpages and pagelayouts
  • Excluded Orphaned Terms termset from extraction
  • Improved support and bug fixes with publishing sites and pages
  • Bug fixes on the welcome page extraction, theme handling, workflow handling and custom action handling
  • Updated base templates for the SPO and 2016 - used in delta handling

We are planning to release new schema version and some new capabilities as part of the May 2016 release. Please join to monthly community call for discussing the planned changes.

PnP sample library

We have done general cleaning in the repository related on Nuget package updates and also removed some samples, which are no longer releavant. We are planning to continue these cleaning activities during the next months as well to streamline the repository and to combine some samples for reducing the overall number of similar samples and ot make more room for Graph and Office 365 API related content. Currently repository is still heavily bias for the SharePoint related samples.

There's also significant amount of general updates on the existing samples done by the community on the code and documentation, which is great way to contribute as well.

PnP Guidance articles

The PnP Guidance repository contains guidance articles which are mostly being published at MSDN and more will follow. Everyone can contribute or update these articles via updating them in GitHub and the changes will flow back to MSDN once the synchronization setup has been completed.

During this month there was significant effort on synchronizing the MSDN and GitHub artciles to ensure that both sides are in sync and there's matching page in the GitHub. Targe is to update the MSDN based on community contributions.

See MSDN artciles from the PnP MSDN section at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPMSDN

PnP Guidance videos

We did release one new guidance video during this month on top of the new web cast videos mentioned already above in this blog post. You can find all PnP videos from our Channel 9 section at http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPVideos. This location contains already significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos and community call recordings.

Key contributors for the April 2016 release

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) during past month in PnP repositories. PnP is really about building tooling togther with teh community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued cross the Office 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.

Thank you for your assistance and contributions from the behalf of the community. You are making a difference!

Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved on the PnP work during last month.

Latest statistics

Here's some statistics from the PnP, PnP PowerShell and PnP Sites Core (core component) repository.

Statistics from PnP repository

PnP Sites Core repository

PnP PowerShell repository

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • April 2016 monthly community call is on 12th of April at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CET for latest release details with demos - Download invite with detailed schedule for your time zone from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.
  • Following master merge will happen on 6th of May and May community call is on 10th of May 2016

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