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Monthly Update 2015 December

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VesaJuvonen edited this page Dec 9, 2015 · 7 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 December monthly community call on Tuesday December 8th. 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.

December 2015 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 8th of December community call:

  • Summary on the December release and other updates in program - Vesa Juvonen ~30 min
  • Demo on the Core.JavaScript sample - Patrick Rodgers ~15 min
  • Q&A and feedback rounds on few ideas - ~15 min

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 3500 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.

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 repo's 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-Tools - New repository for tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro's
  • 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.

Introducting PnP Tools repository

Like mentioned in the repository list, we have now released a new repository called PnP-Tools which is targeted more for IT Pro's and architects looking for scrips, tools or other solutions supporting administration of SharePoint on-premises and Office 365 in general. This is brand new location and the work has just started, but we are looking for contributors on this side as well.

IT Pro and administration targeted work will be coordinated by Neil Hodgkinson. Right now repository contains scripts for hybrid search configuration and some tooling for the SharePoint 2016 user profile migration side. We are planning to grow this area significantly for helping to evolve the commonly used scripts and to provide easy location for the community to share their learnings also on this side.

New in PnP Tools

  • New solution UserProfile.MIMSync provides a set of powershell commandlets to set-up Microsoft Identity Manager sync engine with SharePoint and to kick off sync on-demand.
  • New script SharePoint.Hybrid.Search.Configuration for use in configuring an outbound search hybrid experience between SharePoint 2013 Server and SharePoint Online. In preliminary testing this also works with TAP builds of SharePoint 2016.

Latest changes

Provisioning Engine

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

  • Overall quality and performance improvements
  • Improved on-premises support with CSOM version detection
  • Improved sub site handling logic
  • Fixes to item level security handling
  • Token handling improvements
  • General bug fixes cross the engine
  • Updated base templates for delta handling

We are looking into implementing more significant update for the engine with new capabilities for the January 2016 release. Target is to support fully new provisioning schema version, which is currently under review.

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.

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 Core: Lots of re-factoring done to improve code quality and completeness:
    • provisioning engine updates (see above)
    • General bug fixing and quality improvements
    • Improved theme / composed looks handling
    • Improvements in user custom action handling
    • Removal of deprecated methods
    • Build and test automation improvements
    • Both PnP Core Nuget packages (cloud and on-premises) have been also updated accordingly.
  • New sample Core.JavaScript is a consolidated set of JavaScript examples for use in your SharePoint/Patterns and Practices projects.
  • Updated PnP-PowerShell Commands with new CommandLets and with few fixes
    • Overall quality improvements
    • Updated Add-SPOFfile CmdLet
    • Updated Set-SPOMasterPage CmdLet
    • Added Samples folder with initial samples - More is welcome
    • Updated documentation for CmdLets
  • Updates to the PnP Partner Pack
    • Code changes
    • Improved documentation based on community input

PnP Guidance articles

The PnP Guidance repository has been setup for working on articles. Part of these articles are already available on 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 we did some general updates on the articles, but there's no actual new guidance published. You can easily find the relevant guidance for you using our search tool at dev.office.com.

There's already a significant amount of articles that has been added to 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 December 2015 release

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) during past month in PnP repositories. It's great to see familiar names and also new people joining on the the community effort and assisting others. We are looking forward to continue working with such a talent and hope to get more additional people involved on this joint effort to help the community in the transition towards Office 365 and SharePoint add-in model/app model techniques.

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.

  • Antons Mislevics (Microsoft)
  • Bert Jansen (Microsoft) - @O365Bert
  • Brian Michely (Microsoft) - @brianmichely
  • Gaurav Doshi (Microsoft)
  • Dan Budimir (Microsoft) - MSDN blog
  • Frank Marasco (Microsoft) - @frank_marasco
  • Gaurav Doshi (Microsoft)
  • Jeremy Thake (Microsoft) - @jthake
  • Kiki Shuxteau (Microsoft)
  • Patrick Rodgers (Microsoft)
  • Ron Tielke (Microsoft)
  • Sami Nieminen (Microsoft)
  • Steve Walker (Microsoft) - @sharepointing
  • Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) - @vesajuvonen

Latest statistics

Here's some statistics from the PnP, PnP PowerShell and PnP Sites Core (core component) repository. There's visible impact of the GitHub re-structuring, which means that traffic and contributions are divided between multiple repositories.

Statistics from PnP repository

Activities are moving more and more to Core and PowerShell repositories, which are growing.

PnP Sites Core repository

PnP PowerShell repository

See About Repository Graphs for more details on above statistics.

Next steps

  • December monthly community call is on 8th of December for latest release details - Download invite from http://aka.ms/OfficeDevPnPCall.
  • Following master merge will happen on 8th of January and January community call is on 12th of January

"Sharing is caring" - Vesa

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