Microsoft 365 Community Development, 23 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: Microsoft 365 PnP – General Microsoft 365 Developer SIG community call – 23rd of July, 2020

Description

Microsoft 365 PnP Community - General SIG call on July 23. Three demos delivered: 1) List magic without code by using column and view formatting, 2) Demonstration of Microsoft Teams app template, and 3) Introduction to PnP PowerShell cmdlets for Microsoft Teams. Open-source project updates include July releases of PnP CSOM Core library, PowerShell, Modernization tooling (Page Transformation and Modernization scanner). PnP Core SDK (Preview 2) is available as a Nuget package. The host of this call was Bert Jansen (Microsoft) @O365bert. Q&A takes place in chat throughout the call.

Demos:
• List magic without code by using column and view formatting | Chris Kent (DMI) | @theChrisKent
• Demonstration of Microsoft Teams app template | Kiran Thomas (Microsoft) | @NotKiran
• Introduction to PnP PowerShell cmdlets for Microsoft Teams | Erwin van Hunen (Valo Intranet) | @erwinvanhunen

Learn more:
• See the full blog post for this call at: http://aka.ms/spdev-blog.
• Download invite for bi-weekly General M365 Dev SIG call: http://aka.ms/spdev-sig-call
• Learn more about the SharePoint developer community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the SharePoint PnP Developer Community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/spdev-videos

A

Welcome everyone welcome to this general microsoft, 365 development, special interest group today we're july 23rd, and our special interest group is about broader sharepoint development games development, you name it. We can cover it. So, what's on the agenda for today, all right here we go the usual update on the where we are with some of the core open source projects like bnbc, some core powershell monetization and your teams.

A

Then we have chris kent again with list magic is a christmas magician. Today he will maybe kind of make some morses disappear up here. I don't know we'll see it's up to chris to surprise us each time again, then after chris we have kieran thomas from the microsoft teams organization and he will demo the company communicator app template a pretty cool demo and finally, uh erwin will show a really new cool command list in people powershell that enable you to do everything with microsoft teams, so um super super cool stuff from urban as well.

A

So, let's get started.

A

This is a community and we would like you guys to participate, and how can you participate in this community? um If you want to be here in this school demo, something if you build something really cool uh just reach out. Ask us we'll get you a spot on this call, so you can get 15 minutes and demo. Your your the thing that you built uh it might be a sample might be even using a like a in product part functionality. um If it's useful to share, then we can definitely add it in.

A

You can also contribute on github, meaning we have tens of repositories with samples the documentation contributing over. There is great, we love it. uh It's due to your contributions that this community works and drives and that we can keep on growing and providing more value for each other. So thanks for the guys that contributed and the other ones just contributes and finally, feedback, uh there's different feedback channels, user voice uh issue lists.

A

uh If there's something broken, if you have something some feedback about something, uh some great ideas, let us know as well might be that you have good idea, but maybe so you don't have benefit or the time to work or something, but maybe someone else can help you and so together again, you can then create something new and something cool again. So plenty of opportunities for you to participate in this community moving on um what are our kind of resources that we have?

A

We have the micro5 developer, videos, which is a youtube channel with max 365, developer, oriented videos containing the broad 65 ecosystem, including, for example, microsoft graph. Then we have our uh pnp youtube channel, uh also branded max 365 sharepoint community videos. So it's it's more than just sharepoint. Nowadays it covers teams as well, then there's all procedures.

A

We have we're using github, there's plenty of github organizations, the sharepoint organization, the ppp organization, office, f organization. All of them have again like a ton of repositories with cool stuff called google source project, so you can check it out over there.

A

We have a lot of samples, sharepoint framework bars, extensions list, format, examples, team samples, you name it it's all there and finally, in our initiatives, which is a really cool site, if you go to academic m25 pnp, you will get like a really nice overview of what is pnp. You know. Well, everyone in this call is has been seeing these presentations before so if for the new guys, if you want to uh learn what is pnp, what other initiatives, what open source projects are there? What meetings are there then definitely go over to ak dot?

A

Ms m365 pnp and you get like a really nice overview now. Moving on, we have some updates. uh First update I want to talk about.

A

Is our pnp core sdk so for the folks that have been in these calls before you might have seen already like an early early demo, and we talked a little bit about it, but we kept it quite under a radar as well, because we're working hard on getting to a shippable state, and what I want to announce now is that we already are actually shipping in preview to mode.

A

So it's not uh production ready, definitely not it's preview, but at least now we have nuget packages out from the work that we did and then you can use those packages to play around. So it gets really easy for you to install the sdk in your application and try it. This pnp core sdk is like a new sdk that unifies microsoft, graph, sharepoint, rest and even see some gives you like a uni, a unified object model that you can work with.

A

There's the case really built for net five middle ten five in mind. So it's fully modern using dependency injection fully async.

A

It works, for example, with blazer, um so we have a sample showing the sdk in action with blazer uh playsource the new uh way to uh build like uh browser applications with net. So you can actually write dot net code that runs inside the browser in the mono runtime. So it's really really cool stuff and use those preview packages to give it a try and let us know what you think also a it's very call for for more contributors. So we have like several people already actively working on this and taking some cheerings after work.

A

It is a very big project, so, if you're interested in doing really cool net development, uh if you thought that is in your heart, like I'm, an old-school developer, I'm still really kind of linked to the net and bound to.net for some reason. So, but it's just other guys like that. This is a place for you to jump in and start writing something that go to go to this urlgit.com. To learn more about the sdk.

A

If you're new to the pnp and you want to started- and you don't really know how to get started, then uh there is. These uh sharing is caring sessions from david and hugo and the next sessions that they have organized are july, 24th and 27th for the first time contributors and if you're more focused on on the updating documentation, because you see like there's gaps in documentation, you want to improve those, then this july 31st and august 3rd through sessions as well.

A

So if you go to ak dot, ms sharing is caring, then you can sign up and get and you go and david will kind of walk you through the process so again, super cool initiative from hugo and david to help you folks on board and be productive and successful in the pnp community. Thanks for doing that, guys.

A

All right, let's move to the usual uh updates. So let's start with the pnp system, core library, which is our core utility library. um That's, for example, contains the provisioning engine, but many things as well. Many things more now we shipped the july 2020 version which had several improvements. uh The bigger ones are some modern page extraction improvements. So it's if you extract from a root site, collection of things are properly tokenized web plugin improvements, uh a lot of sharepoint 2019 uh improvements for so as like.

A

There are several things that we actually code for sharepoint online, that were kind of blocked for shipping 2019, but actually did workshop on 2019. So these are now unblocked and opened up again and then a ton of other smaller larger fixes future wise still working on v4, which will then be based on season 4. standard. So you will have a pnp size, core library that also will be uh standard 2.0 and as such work across platform and different devices and as already mentioned in in the preview.

A

So we are also in parallel working on pnp korozyk, um walking towards a preview to release, uh probably by the end of this week somewhere next week, we'll kind of declare a preview too and then we'll move to preview three, so there's still loads of rock before we can get to a better but uh working hard and uh with the hell of a fiance paul and jarabas we're again getting up to speed and doing more and more more and not to mention paolo as well bowlers, be very active here as well.

A

One last thing, emp size score, keeps on growing, so forty four thousand tenants in july uh so in june july, will beat that number because it already has beaten this number now at this point in time, and we still have like a week of july data to come. So it keeps on growing, which is great, which is a clear indication that these components, these libraries are really production.

B

A

And used a lot by many.

B

Many customers.

A

um Is urban already in a call, then irwin forbid about pnp powershell? Sure if you do hey irwin, you rock, which is true. I still do that.

B

It just spans months, apparently that, because I was there last month too right um so we did the 2020 release um and the the big addition of the uh july 2020 release is teams which I will show a bit later, how to use them, because there are some some things you have to realize on, especially how to connect um what's happening this month.

B

Actually this is a cleanup month. So we're doing a uh feature, uh merge freeze, so you can still create prs, but we will not merge them this month. So don't get worried. If you see your pr still outstanding, we will get to it, but this month is we're going to do some serious cleanup on the inner workings of pnp powershell. This will not affect you on the outside. We will not change any of the functionality or something like that. It might be some additional functionality, but nothing, nothing shocking different.

B

But internally we do a big cleanup. There are some pieces of code that really need some some refactoring and cleaning up because they become they're on the edge of becoming very difficult to maintain.

B

So that's what we're doing this month, and that is also we're doing that as a preparation for powershell pnp, powershell v4, which will be the net standard version of pnp powershell, which runs on azure functions, for instance, v3, azure, functions, etc. To give you a sneak peak of an idea of the things where we are, we already have it successfully run on the v3 function, so that already works. We just need to make sure there's a couple of scenarios in the standard version that will not work anymore.

B

The bigger one is, for instance, to use web login prompt, um and I actually talked to someone else a few minutes ago I said the use web login is evil. You should actually try not to use it. It's terrible! It's outdated! It's old-fashioned, it's cookie, based authentication, just don't use use web login, and I understand that many of you use it because there is the multi-factor authentication, I'm not saying in your way, but it has been enabled and it's the only way to authenticate towards a tenant by using use replica.

B

But you will have to think about other ways of authenticating being an app only client id client, secret client or within certificates or those kind of things or device. Login is an option too by the way, and that is also will also be fully supported in the net standard version.

B

No stored credential will not work there. It's still using this still username password and there still will be an mfa and an additional step to take by the user to authenticate. But that's it for now cleanup this. This month uh august, we will have hopefully something uh nice and fresh out there again.

A

Well, not for the august release. I would imagine, because that's.

C

D

In two weeks,.

A

But I think, looking towards the september release time window, which is early september, you should should probably be ready to maybe well, let's not discuss the internals, because there's some no some other work to do with it uh just set the expectations. I think august will be quite quite ambitious uh september. Yes, we should be ready to get it out.

B

A

Right, I'm sorry, I'm.

B

Talking about the clean up step.

A

I'm not talking.

B

A

I'm talking about shipping something oh okay,.

B

Yeah yeah; okay, not not a v4 that will not be august. No.

A

Correct right: okay, good, okay, uh quick on modernization, tooling um page transformation july 2020 release actually didn't get any changes, but we anyhow released it just to keep in sync with the powershell and site score.

A

um The monetization scanner, on the other end did got actually two releases already 2.3 and 2.14 to win one week.

A

The reason is because there's a massive amount of folks running the scanner for workflow, which we asked them to do, um because workflow 2010 is being deprecated, and so uh with that in mind, there are several uh feedback items for the scanner and these are implemented in 2.14. So now we have continuous result file writing. So when you do a scan for like a large tenant, this can can run for hours even longer, and the previous scanners would only output results at the very end.

A

Nowadays, the scan has a separate thread which each minute just dumps the results um to the file system. So if, for some reason, scanner gets stuck or crashes or yes terminate your session. At least you do have the currently scanned the sites that data is available for you to use.

A

Scanner also supports other clouds. Besides the what we call the production cloud, so being the us government cloud german cloud and china clouds are now supported, it there's an important improvement for workflow scanning, so workflow scanning by default did analyze the workflow, so it would open up the sample files for 2010 example, files for 2013 and then look inside those files and figure out what are the actions being used and how these actions equivalent are equivalent to flow alternatives for these actions, etc. So you can kind of skip that step.

A

So you get like a more performing scan and there are some workflows some load improvements, so we should be able to find more of those small files to analyze all right, we're at 15 past the hours. So it's about time to start the demo, so click on on teams victorious on vacation as well and there was there- was no new release. So it's still 2.15 um go.

A

Team is being used more and more as well, so growing uh 2.16 is on the horizon, so once victor is back from vacation, I'm pretty sure he will uh finalize and ship 2.16 yeah and if you're interested in in this, your team's uh generator um aka the mess slasher it keeps is the address to go um actually today, it's really like a lot of teams.

A

Love in this community call today, because our two demos involve teams as well, maybe three of christos teams, but I don't think chris that list magic and horses are equal to teams, but you never know chris. Are you on a call yep? I'm here? Can you hear me? Yes? Yes, yes, we can all right feel free to take over the the screen and then start some magic.

D

Okay, here we go I'm chris. Let's do it, let's format stuff, all right, so we go to our classic warrior horses site and our horses. You know they have a lot of things to manage a lot of things to do. uh One of those things is invasions right. So they've got a nice sharepoint list to track their invasion. Progress and they've got campaigns all across the world, so you can see here, they're kind of tracking them, but this is boring right, so we want to spice it up just a little bit right.

D

How do we make this more engaging? So people really want to be involved in these invasions. So one of the things we've looked at a number of times in a number of different ways is icons right, so I'm going to format. This column come down here to advanced mode, so I can write it myself and I'm just going to very quickly throw one in here right. So we're going to say ohm type capitalize that we're going to call this span that sounds great and then we're going to you know add a attributes with our attributes.

D

We can do this nice little thing like add, icon, name here this time, we're going to type in bang body which we have to know the dog all right.

D

So when you preview that I'll get a little dog and just so, we can see that a little better, let's say style and let's throw a little bit of styling on that in this case, we're going to say font size and we're going to make it huge, 40, pixels, we'll preview that there now we can see our dog uh and that's exciting and again, we've shown you this a number of times and there's a lot of cool things we do with icons. We have a ton of samples on them.

D

uh One of the videos we showed demo- I don't know a couple months ago- was this idea of icon overlays right, you can come in here. You can put icons on top of each other. Add some colors. You start to get an interesting emoji territory, it's pretty exciting, but at some point you start to wonder like why? Don't I just use an emoji right? That's what we're going to talk about today, how exciting so what if, instead of saying an icon name here?

D

What if I got rid of that- and I said text content just make sure that's working we'll say the word dog bladder, comma, we'll preview that there's the word dog. But what, if I want to do something different now, if I'm on a windows machine, I can hit windows period and I get these lovely things right. Then I can pick dog directly all right. So let's pick a dog. Let's preview that bam. I got a pretty dog very exciting right.

D

So now you can start to use emoji directly inside your formats, whether you showed or shouldn't I'll leave that up to you videos here, you can do a lot with that right, because they're actually text you'll see that in the format- and you can even do stuff like this right, you can write your formulas with it, so I can say, plus at current field. You know again. Maybe don't do that.

D

The idea is that this opens up some new opportunities, new windows for you, uh because even though there's nearly 2 000 some odd icons available to you, they don't cover everything I mean, for instance, if I try to type horse there, nothing, no matter how many times I ask for that, no horse so again to get the emoji thing right: windows period, all right, that'll, open up in any program, there's all sorts of uh lovely emojis in there. Okay, let's not have these in here. Let's take a look. What can we do?

D

What can we use these in a better way, all right? So, let's close this guy now, let's say I've got my phase here now I've gone over to the formatting repo right now, I've gone over here and I'll go to the home page. Now we have this nice link over. If you haven't seen this before, if you click this, make it a little friendlier to get to things and one of the things we have is this idea of groupings.

D

So if we go to groupings- and we go down to category you see- we've got this category called icons. Look at all these samples, we have that feature using icons now converting these to use emojis isn't too hard. In fact, that's what we're going to do here, so I'm going to grab this number icon progress bar okay. So I've got this. This is a nice one down here by julian uh and if I go ahead- and I just grab this right here- I'm just gonna copy and paste directly out of the browser, all right click.

D

Let me copy that sucker, I'm gonna be here. I've got my phase right so trying to track what phase of the invasion are. We in now format this column again switch to advanced mode? I'm just going to paste that in and preview that that's nice right now. That's using these icons right. These circle ring and the skype circle check. Now, if I wanted to switch that up- and obviously I do uh we're going to take that and we're going to make this a little more horse friendly all right.

D

So if we go up here to the top, we'll just find where it kind of starts pretty much just going to go slightly bigger, so we can see it and then I'm going to come down here so instead of icon name, that's a nice formula right! This is how we determine what icon it should be right. So if it's past step, one show the circle with the check and all that stuff and we've got a class to make those nice green, colors and everything else we can get rid of the class all together.

D

In fact, we're going to just add text content here, right, it'll come over here up a little text. Content in this case we're going to take that same formula that we just had down here for icon, name, we're going to copy it out, I'm actually going to just eliminate icon man. We don't need that anymore, all right, so in this case, I'm going to paste that in here.

D

So it's the same logic right. So if it's less than one instead of circle ring, though now I want to use an emoji. So in this case you know what's better than an egg right, so we're going to use an egg and then over here we're going to say, use a horse if it passed that right. So, let's see, we've got a nice horse. Look at that the emoji respect horses!

D

That's enough! We preview that we suddenly have an egg or a horse depending on what stage you're in all right, so converting that from icon name is too hard. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and take all these down here, blah blah blah, we'll just go ahead and paste them a couple of times three four five. That sounds great, get rid of that last one and then, of course we just say five, four, three there's no there's no rocket launch or anything, unfortunately, but there we go.

D

Let's preview, that look at that now, we've converted it from using our icon names to using a beautiful, uh lovely uh emoji there. So that's cool! That's one way to do it. Now, I'm going to show you a little something else with a bonus tip here. So let's go ahead and save that close this one. Let's go over here our technique, so we've got here a multi-choice.

D

uh You know column here and you can see all the different techniques we're using in the invasion again. Wouldn't that be much nicer with even more emoji, you always could have more emoji and that's a lie also. So what we do here is I'm going to grab another format. So if I go back here so that was a good one. But what if I want to grab?

D

Let's see the multi-choice icons all right, so you can see with this nice one where we're showing preferences and a nice kind of table again, I'm going to grab that copy. That will go back here to avoir horses techniques, column, settings format, this column and go ahead and paste this one and let's preview it now. Obviously we don't have the same kind of styles here. So one of the things I also wanted to show to make this even easier is a tool that was shown a couple of times by sergey sergey.

D

It's a chrome extension sp formatter, I'm just going to turn that on. So if you guys haven't seen this gonna blow your minds turn that on bam now I've got full full formatting here using the monaco editor right, so I get intellisense, I get all sorts of stuff. I get instant preview all right. So as I change things it starts to just work. In fact, I can hit control f here and I get my find and replace all right.

D

So if I want to say yeah we're not using water we're using stabbing all right, we can do that and I'll just go and replace all of those very excited. Now you start to see it recognizes what it was so very, very cool stuff. So I can do the same kind of stuff. I did before right. We've got the icon name, but instead I want to convert that to use emojis instead. So one of the things I can do is, I can add, a text content here.

D

Let's get rid of the icon, you don't need an icon anymore. Let's get rid of that guy.

D

Now, let's add our text here. That's our x content in this case, we're gonna, add um windows, windows period right. We got this and we're talking about stabbing. So that's a knife for sure. By the way, if you start typing, this thing will search. You can search nice and easy through that. So now we've got a knife right, but it's always showing the same way right, because our we're no longer are we able to apply those colors. So that's one of the limitations in emoji.

D

It allows us to have lots of multi colors here, but we don't get some of that same theme support here. So what? If we took this same formula right and instead of applying it as a class? Now we come here to our style attribute and we do an opacity all right. So we'll do an opacity here in this case we'll paste that same one in here.

D

But obviously we don't need to do any of this class building here and we're going to say if it has stabbing right, then we're going to say an opacity of one and if it doesn't we'll say an opacity of say, uh 0.15 there we go so now we can see that we can actually use this stuff in a really nice way. So now I can go through and I can kind of change all these out as needed.

D

So I'm going to do the same thing where I just grab this and I'm just swap it out here. So let's get rid of all these other ones: bam. Okay, okay, so two three four! We got five of them, five, the last one. So now we got all knives everywhere. That's not quite what we wanted right. So again, it's really easy to just fix this, so I'm gonna just change this to exploding all right, we'll change this part to exploding as well.

D

So now what represents a good explosion. So if I type this- and I start typing bomb- let's see yeah there's bomb right. So I just type in bomb there we go and I've got a nice explosion right there and we'll do our next one here, which is seduction all right used by horses all over the world.

D

All right: let's go up here and uh we'll grab a nice one, we'll say: keith, there's a beautiful lips beautiful horse lips! Imagine that moon don't stand a chance with horse lips on the case all right! So then we come down here and we're gonna. Take bribery and we'll do bribery again.

D

And, of course, we gotta pick a cool one for bribery, so we'll type in money all right. We've got a bunch of different money options. Let's choose this guy right here: money bag that makes sense, and then our last one right. So, instead of stabbing, we've got robots right. So we'll come down here now. This is actually one area where there is an icon for robots, uh but in this case we're still gonna use the emoji right so we'll say robot there. It is bam just like that.

D

You notice it's been previewing the whole time and have to do anything and one of the frustrating things. I want to also show that this this sp formatter helps solve right. So when this is turned off, if you're randomly somewhere up there, you remove something. Maybe you've got an extra column somewhere.

D

It just tells you inner, valid column format json. How am I supposed to find that in this you know fairly complex format? If I just turn that on I can see, I've actually got red over here come down here. It highlights it. It even tells me trailing comma all right. So I can just grab that and then everything works again. I get my buttons back. It auto previews fruity's pretty sweet. So I highly recommend this. I don't generally show this in the call just because it is an extra step to install this.

D

um It's it takes like 10 seconds, but I want to show people how you do things out of the box, but I think it's really important to know that an awesome tool like this is available. It's free it installs in chrome, no problem. um In fact, you can find that over here, I'll have a link at the end here, we'll paste in the chat for sp formatter uh go check this out sergey's been on the call a number of times. We should probably get him to come here and demo this a little further as well.

D

Now, okay, so all that to say we got all sorts of beautiful emojis now and wow. Now our invasions can proceed um wonderfully right. Things are nice and cutesy and our sharepoint list, which is what horses love all right. So we come back here. uh I will say: emojis do have their place. For instance, we use them in the uh you see a little horse icon showing up here. We use them in the in github all over the place for our labels and other ideas right so in small amounts. Emoji can be very effective right.

D

So let's come back over here and review what we learned so emojify your list right so again, lots and lots of icons but they're, very focused on on specific business needs or brand icons, or one million different arrows document, icons that kind of stuff right, and so there's going to be some gaps. What, if you want to put a unicorn? What if you want to put a lizard right, what about a pretzel or taco? That's where emoji is going to be your friend right icons are monochrome. So again you can get fancy with those overlays.

D

You can do a lot. You can make them themeable, but if you really want to have lots of color emojis are pretty good way to do that. We've also gone over how to do svgs and how to do images. Those are also very good options so again just use that windows period. I'm sure there's something similar on a mac uh whatever you're using there are differences between devices right. So, for instance, uh one that comes up a lot is a gun sometimes looks like a gun. Sometimes it looks like a squirt gun.

D

Sometimes it looks like a dart gun right, maybe don't use gun, that's not a great suggestion, but the idea here is just be aware that there could be some device differences. So if you're doing something really really specific with colors, I don't know why you're doing that, but if you're doing that, just be aware that- and there is no theme support, because these will just take on the color- they are okay.

D

Finally, a warning: let this slide be a warning to you.

D

Don't do that uh again, small amounts, um that's true of list format in general, but especially when it comes to emojis. I know you want to get those millennials into your sharepoint. uh You really want them using that stuff and that's cool, but uh just use them sparingly. Okay, all right!

D

So, finally, here's some uh resources here, there's the full documentation uh I'll grab this here, I'm gonna paste this in the chat. Everyone can go, get that sp formatter, because you haven't gotten that definitely install that. Well, that's gigantic! There you go everybody that did not copy well david. Will you fix that thanks all right and then check out the samples I showed today again converting those to emojis on any of the icons ones are pretty straightforward.

D

You just switch out icon, name and use text content windows period to get that to come up. Okay, that's what I got today thanks.

A

Thanks chris, this actually really was magic, so the demo title was list magic, but each time you keep on surprising us with the flexibility and the capabilities that the things you can do with list formatting is just crazy, crazy, crazy stuff, um all right so kiran. If you are on the call- and I think I saw you- um feel free to take over sharing and um but take it away with your app template for microsoft teams.

C

Awesome, thank you bert.

C

Well, hello, everyone great to be back after two weeks, I'm kieran thomas I'm a product manager at microsoft teams and I'm going to give you a brief overview of the company, communicator app template and we'll do a little walkthrough of what the ui looks like and yeah, hopefully um show you the first of many more app templates to come.

C

So before we jump into the demo itself a little um overview and reminder of what app templates are so the app templates you can think of them as packaged apps that are open source available on github they're ready to use with, and you can deploy them with minimal configuration almost like ready to go. So they have a lot of the extensibility points and how to use the team's platform examples built in.

C

So you can learn a lot about how the team's platform works and they're meant to be easy to deploy and they're also built to meet our teams. Engineering standards.

C

And uh you know, if you look at the graph on the right, uh you can see where we kind of position our app templates there and not uh they're kind of in the middle of the ability to customize and time to realize, like uh they're, they're, pre-baked and ready to go but they're. Also customizable, you can change the branding.

C

You can change the name, you can add more features to whatever you like, but at the same time uh they're not you know you host, and you deployed yourself and just to summarize, like the key benefits of this. Are this is ready to go uh code. You have to do minimal configuration to be able to get it to work, and you can add your own colors or names to this app and package this your own and deploy it within your team's app store and then they're also built with privacy and security in mind.

C

So you control the data you control um the app and how it changes and how it's maintained and over time, it's not as much manual intervention required, because it's ready to go so now jumping into the app template that we'll be talking about today. It's called the company communicator and this the you know the intent of this app template is to help communicate with different uh communities or teams within your team's organization.

C

So the most common use case that we hear our customers talk about is to use it uh to help with teams adoption or to give ideas on how to best use teams, but you can do it for any kind of company announcement. You can talk about uh learning or developing any ideas like that.

C

So the idea is, you can compose a message just like you would, by composing an email figure out who you're going to send to select those we'll show, walk you through some of the options and then you can send it either as a chat or you can post it to a team's message or you can send it to the entire team's user base and with that, let's jump right in here's. The themes environment opened up on my browser and we're in.

C

Let's pretend that we're the it communications team within the contoso company and I've already installed the app as a tab into a team of folks that I have. I work with so let's pretend that this team called contoso. It admins has all the different folks in here that would be involved with creating these messages and sending them out, and I'm also part of other teams.

C

Myself and, as you can see the you know, the company has pinned the app on the uh left navigation bar, and this is something that you can set with the app policies you don't have to pin this. This is an optional thing. If you want to pre-install it for all your users, you can do that.

C

Otherwise you can also set it so that your users go and install it from the app store from your company app store and let's uh jump right in and because I'm an author I want to you know, create a new message that I'm going to send and today I've decided. I want to help uh users in my tenant with the teams, tips and tricks, so I'm going to call it teams, tips and tricks, and I have the ability to add a header image.

C

So I'm going to paste in a nice header image of microsoft teams to kind of make make clear what it's going to be about and here's.

C

This is the body of the message, so you can add in whatever you'd like so in this case, I'm going to say here are some tips and tricks on how to use teams- and let's say I have like a bloody list of budget stuff, and I have the ability to kind of sign off and let's say I am the contoso I.t team, so just leave that there and have the ability to add a button at the end to learn more about this.

C

So this is the button title and let's say I have found you know either an internal site or I've just found this external site. That has some cool tips. So this is my message pretty simple, pretty straightforward: I'm gonna go ahead and this is a cool part here. I have three different options. I can choose to send it to so I can either send it to a particular. I can post to a channel of a particular team.

C

So now I have all the options of teams that I can send it to, and these teams that you see right here uh are available because they've installed the company communicator app within their team. So if you install it within your team, you can use this to send to them. So let's say I'm sending this to new employees in the organization.

C

Instead, if I, if we're not going to go through it now, but you can also send it as a one-on-one chat in the same group instead of posting it to a channel or you can also send it to everyone in the entire, uh your organization, so it'll send it as a chat to everyone in there.

C

Now I save it as a draft looks good and then before I send it. If I want to preview this, I can also do that. So I can go to this preview option on the under my draft messages and if I click that it'll send it and post it to this channel itself. So if I go in here, you can see it got posted. This is what it's going to look like for my users.

C

Let's say I decided it looks good. I go back now, I'm ready to send it before I send it. If I want to edit it again, I can do that. If I have a draft, I can duplicate it and it'll create a copy just like that.

C

But now, let's pretend we're ready to send. So I'm going to send it to all the new employees and hit the send button and once it starts, you can see the status of that how many successful cents there were. How many failures there were and if there's anything, that's being throttled and it'll. Take time, you'd see those two and it's happening as we speak right now, let's uh refresh and make sure it's sent out.

C

It's still happening but yeah in the meantime. Let me also talk about like how you can get the app for your customers, so as a customer you'll probably want to install it and make it available. It'll show up in your uh in a company app store right here, and you know your users can click it and add it themselves. If you haven't already pre-installed it, let's now go back and check it. Okay looks good.

C

It's sent out, let's now switch over to say one of the new employees in the company, and you can see now this new employee. Let's say it's chris green, it's already been posted to their general channel. So similarly, let's just try another option where we send it directly to this user. So I'm just going to go back. I have this pre-made drafted. What I'm going to do is instead of sending it as a channel post, I'm going to send it specifically to everyone as a one to one-on-one chat.

C

So I'm going to select the same team, but I'm going to select the chat option and, let's say save it as draft and I'm going to click the send button here. Everything looks good.

C

And let me switch over to like it as you can see now. This has been posted by the company communicator app as a chat, but I can either go in to the app itself to see the message.

C

It's get gotten posted here or I can see it in my chat window too, as a one-on-one chat, so you can see there's two different ways to send it and you can also you can choose to send it to a specific team or to as a chat to the folks in that team, or you can also send it to the entire team's group, so that hopefully gives you an idea and, as you can see, there's different ways of um you can have different authors within your team to help you send these messages, you can draft them, compile them and so on, and now, let's switch back, oh yeah.

C

Let me also go into the github repository of where this app is so. This is where it is I'll post a link to where you can find this into the chat after I'm done here. I'll give you a quick walkthrough of the app template itself and some information about that.

C

So you can see in github we have on the homepage with some basic information on how to get started. The whole code base is here, so you can clone it, get started on it and we have a set of detailed documentation available in the wiki section of the app template.

C

There is different categories of documentation here, including the cost estimate, and how to deploy it. Let's jump into that. uh It talks about what your prereqs are. What you want to get set up before you go down and then go through it step by step. So first you'll go through registering your application and then we'll jump this, and then we have this arm template which you can use to do. One click deploy.

C

So if you have your azure subscription set up it'll help you deploy it, and then you set up the authentication for the app finally create the teams packages. So you create two packages, one for the authors which you'll install into the author team and then the other which will make up available for your entire organization and then you're ready to go.

C

Let me also go back here and show you this page, which I like, if you're curious about how this app was built and what the components are. We have the solution, overview page that you can take a look. It gives you a detailed overview and the architecture diagram of what the different components are.

C

So if you have ideas on customizing it changing it, adding new features to it feel free to take a look at this and also wanted to share an update that I'll share at the end of the art, my demo on on this thing. So now switching back here, so that was the end of the demo. So really, if you have any other questions, let me know, but I wanted to cover some of the frequently asked questions so the security of this app. You might be wondering how that works.

C

It's you know, we make sure to build it to ensure that it meets basic security and privacy standards and, like I showed you, the there's a one-click deployment available.

C

So anyone within your org doesn't have to be a technical person can as long as you have the right permissions for your office admin and the azure subscription, you can deploy the app and the cost for these apps um depends on the type of app, but typically they are deployed on azure and so they'll have some azure consumption charges, but we also have some power apps based apps, which uh are typically built with uh no cost basic powerapp licenses.

C

So you won't have to pay for anything like that and that's the end of the demo two updates, I wonder sure we're actually getting ready to add some features to the company communicator to be able to send it to this contact groups.

C

So that's coming out soon and another ask of you if you have ideas or for new app templates and you're super excited about wanting to build it or- and you want to you know, talk to me about it. Please reach out to me on linkedin: let's chat about that I'd love to hear your ideas and yeah beyond that. Thank you for listening. That's my demo.

A

Thank you, kieran. A really useful demo, I think, being able to have targeted communications in organizations is, is important and definitely needed and with this app needed becomes easier and folks can extend it and can make it their own, because it's all open source, which is really great, see that irving starts sharing the screen uh so erin.

A

Let's show some other teams magic, yup right.

B

So, last month last release we released a uh a bunch of uh powershell commandlets in in pnp powershell, and then the question I get quite often is like okay, why pnp powershell? Why do you do teams and there's already teams commandlets out there yeah sure, but it's just that a lot of people find already complex enough to install all these modules and if you have pnp powershell installed it's there, it comes for free with it. We have basically full support for what the the the the microsoft provided teams commandlets do.

B

So all those commanders that you find there you'll find in in bmp powershell 2. They are named differently and they work a tiny bit different. And let me talk you through a scenario where I actually create a team at a channel and that kind of stuff. So if I say new pmp teams team, I thought a bit longer about the name. Should we call it new pnp team, but it's a team in a product called teams, so I decided to go for pnp teams team and you can specify an existing group id.

B

So it will create a theme for that. Existing group, but you don't have to do that- you can just say display name as a pnp rocks mail nickname you can provide. If you don't do it, we will just generate a random one for you. So if I press enter- and I am not connected because I need to connect to my tenant- but I'm not connecting to my sharepoint tenant- I actually have to connect to the graph I'm using using a different way of connecting.

B

So um what you need to do is use the connect bnp online commandlet, and you specify the scopes that you want to connect with. If you're wondering what scopes do I have to provide here, we actually help you with that by just looking into the help of a commandlet. So if I look in the new pnp teams command lit there, and if I look into the help of that one new pnp teams, d and press enter, you see that we actually require group read write all in order for you to create that team.

B

So, let's, let's do that. I'm gonna connect.

B

Scopes group read write all if I would press enter now, I'm not doing that, but if I would press enter now, you will just get a pop-up, a dialog where you can use the name, enter username and password that works with multi-factor, for instance. It will also ask you, if you've never done this before and never used of the other options that we provided. Bp powershell like the office 365 management, shell, you will have to consent the application to have access to your environment. That's a one-time action when you're done with that.

B

If you want to revoke that, you will have to go to your azure ad later, go to enterprise applications and remove the application from there. It's just an entry. It's not a full application that we installed on your tenant. This is an entry in your svad that states like okay, this application id has access to your tenant.

B

You can also specify credentials here and I could just do the classic way get credential. It will point me for username and password, but you can tap into the um credential manager of windows. If you already have that setup, so you can provide a label here and we'll just connect for you to the graph. So now we're connected to the graph, and now I can go back in my history and go to and create a theme.

B

So if I press new pnp team wait a bit there we go, there is my team, so here you see the things pop up teams have created. Now, if I want to add a channel to this team, I say add.

B

Teams channel theme here you can specify this easily rememberable id, not really, but you can also just specify the name of the team. P b rocks display name, let's call the welcome channel and there the hidden channel shows up- and if I look here, you see there's the welcome channel there.

B

So now we have a welcome channel and if I want to add a tab to this channel, for instance, I say: add: pvp teams, sorry tap, which theme p p rocks, which channel the welcome channel. What is the display name, I'm going to pick what type of channel is it in this case? I want a, uh let me go through there. It is a bit difficult to read it wraps, but website and the content. Url is aka.mssppnp press enter and if we navigate here now can take a bit, maybe there we go.

B

There's my pnp tab, click and there's my website relatively easy to add a tab without writing all the complex json code and everything.

B

If I want to write a little message here in this general channel, I can say, add sorry submit pnp themes, channel methods with steam, pnp rocks channel general message, hello, world.

B

Enter and if I look in the general there is my hello world, you can go a bit more advanced if you want to. You can say.

B

I write html here and then I say: content type html press enter.

B

And it didn't work for some reason: that's interesting. It should have converted it to html. Okay, call that the demo effect I will check out what's going on there behind the scenes, but maybe I should have started with html instead of like putting html somewhere in the middle.

B

The idea is that we have all the commands available. So if I do help star pnp teams star, you will get all the commands for pnp teams, so you have the ability to get an overview of all the channels. The channel messages, the teams channels. You can set your channels, you can remove teams, you can remove tabs, you can remove the users. Add users change the archive state, all those things that you might already be familiar with.

B

With the uh the the the micros provided teams commandlets, we have available too, but then we have some additional things like adding and removing tabs, for instance. So a lot of people don't like the wiki tab. You can remove it. Let's see if the demo goals are with me, pnp.

B

Channel general and then we need identity. So if I get to get pvp teams, tab tpp rocks channel general, we get a list of all the tabs. There's the wiki tab. If I remove that tab, remove pnp teams, tab team, channel general identity just use the name.

B

Do you want to remove this app? Yes, and if we go here and refresh this, the wiki tab is gone. So this is what we provide currently more likely, there will be more functionality. There was a question about the templating.

B

If more things come out of that- and there is a good api for us to use, then I don't see any reason for us not to support it.

B

So this is it from the team site: it's not rocket science, it's just using the graph behind the scenes. It's relatively simple. To use it's very easy to script things I saw already a blog post, where someone created a reporting functionality where they loop through all the teams, etc, etc. So you can do quite interesting things with this.

A

Absolutely urban, I think, what's really cool is that you can uh actually combine sharepoint and teams functionality in powershell script and automate things with that. So it's not limited to either teams or sharepoint.

A

Now within the powershell uh you, you can just do anything that that kind of touches sharepoint in this case teams come somewhat touch the sharepoints a bit. This makes it just more broad of more micro65 versus just sharepoint yeah. Indeed, yeah really cool nice stuff.

A

A

All right, I think we have a few minutes left, so we have actually time for a little q a um so if there is specific questions things you want to ask, we have a couple of minutes. If not, then I'll just continue and wrap up the call, let me have, let's have a look in this chat.

A

I just asking where all the pnp teams command, so they already shipped their own right they're already in the current version.

B

Correct yeah, if you have the latest version of people in powershell, you have these commandlets yeah.

A

There's some questions about cadential manager um that works cross-platform right.

B

If we release the net standard version, then yes, it will also work on a mac. By going to the keychain, I think it's called keychain on the mac and on linux we don't really have an answer. Yet. Okay,.

A

Okay, it will be an answer there as well. No, no not yet, unfortunately, good good. It looks good.

A

Also, pp connect fails in powershell 7 bad requests. Well, we didn't really test the powershell 7 right.

B

No, you will have to run. You will have to if you, if you, if you run the current version of pnp powershell in power in powershell 7, it will load, but it will fail horrendously um it will will load. We will not be able to use it um and that's because we need a specific build version for net standard and that's been used in powershell seven.

B

So that's for that. We'll have to wait until we actually release that version.

B

Yep eta. um We had a bit of discussion earlier in the call with me and bert, uh but it's it's september-ish.

A

September I share we need to also, I think our shelves are pretty well tested, but besides core still needs some love to make it ready for tottenham standard and there's some packaging updates. So today we have like a pnp cisco nuker package, uh but we need to update that and then include the net standard versions in there as well and ensure that we don't have any dependency issues. So there are some things to do, but it's progressing nicely and hopefully september will be the the date that we can uh ship it.

B

To answer the questions from russell, if you can find apps that are installed in which teams? No, it can't.

A

It can't not yet maybe it will be in the future.

B

No, I think, that's depending on what api.

A

I'm not even sure that api is available yeah. If there's some apis, then obviously yeah, okay, good um we're about to hit the hour. So um thanks everyone thanks for attending this call uh really great demos again uh today from chris kieran and erwin, the recording of this call will be available 24 hours, a in our pnp youtube channel and next week there is a new call.

A

Next week is the sharepoint framework call july 30th general development call the next one will be two weeks on thursday august 6th and the next monthly call will be on august. The 11th.

A

There are still some information about all the different goals that we host in the community. It's not just about sharepoint the micro65 value communities is growing. Getting bigger.

A

There is graph calls identity, calls teams calls uh office, add-ins powergaps, you name it, there's lots of goals for you to attend, to learn and to share knowledge and just growing in your professional sharepoint and life. That sounds really weird right. Is it okay, never mind.

A

Good with that, I think we can wrap up thanks. Everyone have a nice day nice evening nice morning, depending where you are and see you all later.

C