Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 19 Nov 2021

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Office Add-ins community call – November 2021

Description

This month's community call features a customer presentation - CodeTwo Outlook Add-in for email signature management - (email signature manager designed for Microsoft 365), Microsoft 365 instant sandbox (turnkey E5 developer sandbox all M365 workloads and Sample Data Packs), and a demo - Unit testing Office JavaScript with Office-Addin-Mock library (an NPM library to facilitate unit testing. This month’s Community spotlight recognizes MVP Maarten van Stam and Eric Legault for their continued contributions to this community. Register for the PnP Recognition Program. Q&A in chat throughout call. The call was hosted by David Chesnut (Microsoft) | @davidchesnut. Recorded November 10, 2021.

Stay connected:
• See the full blog post for this call at - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
• YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos
• Link to all Microsoft Developer Community calls - https://aka.ms/M365DevCalls
• Submit questions for next community call - https://aka.ms/officeaddinsform
• Next community call – December 8th at 08:00am PST - https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall

A

Hello, everyone and welcome to the microsoft office add-ins community call. I am your host david chestnut and let's take a look at the agenda for today.

A

I'm very excited to welcome to the call today uh michael kolovics, who is a technical marketing manager at code2 and co2, is a microsoft partner and they've been working on integrating apis around signatures in outlook to create a solution around outlook add-in for email, signature management, so michael's going to be sharing their experience with that and then up next uh michael aldridge who's.

A

The principal content program manager on the team will be talking about microsoft, 365, instant sandbox and then finally, uh igor ribeiro, who is a software engineer on the team, will be doing a demo of unit testing the office javascript apis with office ad in mock library.

A

If you have any questions, please type them into the chat and we'll keep an eye on the chat and try to answer those questions as we go along. If there aren't any questions uh or if there are questions that we're unable to get to today, we post a blog summary of this call a few weeks afterwards and we catch up with all the questions there and post a q, a summary.

A

So with that said, let's go ahead and get started with michael.

B

Thanks david hi, everyone I'm the first michael presenting here today. I'm gonna talk to you about uh some new exciting features that microsoft released to their outlook web adding api last week at microsoft, ignite and we've actually already implemented those features to our uh signatures. Outlook web add-in.

B

For those of you who don't know code 2, we are just as david said, microsoft's partner. We are an independent software vendor from poland, europe and for over 14 years, we've been developing software solutions for microsoft, 365 exchange, formerly also for outlook, and what we do is uh we help organization administrators manage centrally manage email signatures, legal disclaimers and branding.

B

We held them with data migration to microsoft cloud and we have cloud backup and currently more than 100 000 companies worldwide use our software, including facebook or samsung, and today I'm gonna talk about our flagship product, which is code to email, signatures for office 365, and it's uh it's basically an email, signature manager uh which allows an organization like one person, an admin or delegated people like marketing, guys to centrally manage email, signatures, legal disclaimers, marketing campaigns and automate them in a few clicks, and a key feature of this solution is that is that it supports all email, apps and devices, and it's because it can work in two modes.

B

One mode: is you get the signature as you type an email in outlook and outlook on the web, and the second mode adds signatures in the cloud. So for those of you who are not familiar with email, signature software principles, let me summarize how it works so that the first mode, the cloud mode it works like this, uh when a user sends an email from any email, app or device. As long as it's hooked up to their microsoft, 365 email account.

B

This email goes through a microsoft, 365 tenant, that's how it works normally, but what we do here is we have a cloud service in the same microsoft, azure data center as the customer tenant tenants to ensure full security so that your data never leaves microsoft data center and we add the signature uh using our service and then the email with a signature is delivered to recipients.

B

So when a user types, their email that they do not get the signature, it's added in the cloud later on and the second like more traditional mode- is that you get signatures directly in outlook as you type and it uses uh modern signatures web add-in for outlook. So the add-in adds your signature. Then the email goes through your microsoft, 365, tenant and then to recipients. So it's like a traditional way and uh actually with some of the news, uh microsoft release last week at their uh outlook web add-in api.

B

They changed a lot for us for the signature, vendors and uh so we're focused on our signatures web, adding for outlook which can actually thanks to those uh recent events that microsoft introduced it can handle both of these modes. So both outlook modes and the cloud mode I've been working closely with microsoft to first release this outlook modern web, adding last year at microsoft, ignite we were proud to be the world's first signature vendor to to release the add-in that supports both outlook, desktop and outlook on the web, but well, let's see it in action.

B

So, first of all, let me show you how the signature management interface looks like. So, if you are an admin or a person responsible to manage signatures in your organizations, you can use the simple web user interface to manage your signatures or actually signature rules, because they include several different conditions that help you automate how signatures are added. So we've got both cloud or server side. That's the former name signatures here and also client-side signatures, which will be added directly in outlook.

B

Let's start with those outlook signatures, so we've prepared a sample, microsoft, 365, tenant, that's got three signatures: free client-side signatures and internal for internal users and external and then optional. uh Let's see how the signature is created or is edited so it's got you can create uh you. Can you need to give a name to your signature, that's kind of obvious and you can specify senders who will get the signatures?

B

Of course, these need to be the users who have the modern outlook web ad in deployed. Well, actually, what microsoft gave us here with their modern outlook web adding technology is the deployment is much easier than before, because an admin can deploy the add-in for the whole organization and users do not need to install anything. It just uh automatically appears in their outlook account.

B

So we can select senders. Who will get this signature? You can select all senders like specific users or use even an advanced azure actives are actually filter to add signatures, for example, only to your managers and the new thing here that microsoft new events released last week, which is called on message, recipients change events, helps us also automatically automatically change and add email signatures based on recipients. So we can define those recipients as internal recipients, external recipients, any recipients we can even provide specific email addresses and the add-in will automatically detect.

B

We can schedule uh if signatures should be active all the time or for specific time frames only. We can also uh set up signature behavior with outlook if it should be added automatically as default for new messages, replies and forwards. And finally, the signature needs to be designed using a simple. What you see is what you get editor.

B

What might be interesting for you is that the signature template is actually composed of placeholders and these placeholders, which will be automatically replaced with sender's details like first name last name, job, title, etc when the signature is added to outlook okay. So what we have here is we have three signatures: a simple internal signature for internal emails, an external signature with like more contact details with legal disclaimers and an optional signature. So let's see how it works in outlook with our modern web outlook, add-in installed.

B

So when the user creates a new email boom, their signature automatically appears. So what happened here is that an on new message compose event released last year by microsoft in their outlook, web add-in api was triggered and it added a signature and what's new here, is this new event released last week and it's called on message: recipients change event, and it works like this that it reacts to the email recipients you type here since we added an internal recipient. Adele is also from my organization.

B

The event was triggered, but nothing changed here right, but when I type, let's say an external user, the second signature, let me show you once more here, so the external signature, the one with more details, was automatically added here to my email and if a user wants to preview signatures available to them, they can just simply launch the the add-in pane to see these are the signatures based on the recipients.

B

You currently uh selected in your message, so the external signature, which was automatically selected and added to email and an optional signature which was set up by your admin. You can also just use this signature instead, so, as you can see, it's pretty responsive and dynamic.

B

So this is basically how how these uh outlook signatures work. What might be a disadvantage for some organizations is that you can tamper with your signatures, so a user can delete some elements and send an email without their photo. For example, that's why a lot of organizations prefer those cloud signatures, and we also want to show you that this modern outlook web adding can also support uh these cloud signatures.

B

So we prepared uh an external signature template for another user and see how it, let's see how it works, like that's another microsoft, 365 user in the same organization. So let's say christy prepares a new email and she selects any recipients.

B

Nothing changes here. Why is that? Because this is the cloud signature mode, so christy's signature will be actually added in the cloud with the modern outlook web add-in, we can preview the cloud signatures actually by opening the encode signatures pane.

B

So, let's add an external another external user here from poland, so uh christie can preview server, side or cloud signatures, so they will be added later to their email. These signatures will also be added if kristi uses another device like her smartphone, because this mode adds signatures in the cloud. So all devices are supported.

B

What's also pretty interesting, that this feature this this mode, uh if you use koto software, also get a nice feature that allows recipients to get different signatures. So when this email is sent, megan will see this signature and another external user will get and see this signature in the same message: pretty neat right: okay, so that's basically uh how these two modes are handled uh using the new events, basically, the on message: recipients change event released by microsoft, and just so you don't get bored and can try it yourself.

B

We prepared a simple, simple add-in sample like an example adding that adds signatures so we'll provide a link to our github account in the chat window in a moment after the meeting.

B

So let me explain how this works so the code you can check later on, it's pretty simply just 56 lines of codes and we prepared the sample in such a way that we've got two elements here: a signature and disclaimer. These are static elements and the disclaimer, so they do not change dynamically or anything like this. It's just a sample signature we got here and uh the adding can actually or the sample add-in we prepared can actually load those signatures uh into outlook's session data object.

B

That's also actually a new thing here, because microsoft's outlook, adding team released this session data object also a week ago at microsoft, ignite, okay, so let's check yet another user has got this simple sample code, adding deployed.

B

So when you select an internal recipient once again, the on message, recipients, change event is called and it adds the signature. But when you type an external user.

B

The event once again is triggered and it adds the disclaimer. So it's a pretty simple example, but you can check how this event-based activation and how these new events released by uh microsoft's uh work yourself. So that will be all on my part. If you want to contact me directly, just go ahead and we encourage you to check our products and if you've got any questions, just type them in the chat window. We've got a few developers here with us who will be able to answer like more technical questions, because I'm the marketing manager here.

B

Okay, thanks a lot for listening guys uh over to you, david.

A

All right, thank you, michael, that is very cool, to see it's very interesting to see or how you can coordinate uh between, like what the admin wants to control and users being able to see and have some flexibility, depending on how everything's set up it's uh pretty neat, to see how that's managed and thanks for sharing the code sample, I think that'll be super useful to people who want to try it out and kind of see how that works.

A

I'll also add you know in our blog summary that comes out in a couple of weeks, we'll we'll put in some more links to related information around all of that, so you can kind of go, dig around through documentation or related samples as well, if you want to so. Thank you very much. So, let's move on to michael aldridge, I believe, is up next to talk about microsoft, 365, instant sandbox,.

C

Great um david, are you running the presentation or.

A

Should I run it, um I'm happy to let you run it.

C

Okay, let me let me just put my I'm gonna share my screen with everybody and we'll start off um with uh a little quick, exciting um intro for everybody here um so good morning. Everybody. Thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here. First of all, that was an amazing demo. I want to thank michael um for for doing that. That was that was incredible, really shows the power of add-ins and what you can do. I never thought an email signature could be so powerful for an organization particularly being able to measure customer satisfaction.

C

That was very cool example, and I was excited to see michael in his demo was using his own sandbox, um which is you know his own developer, sandbox or tenant to be able to create a prototype environment. And that's what I'm here to talk about today and we have uh some exciting news that we announced last week at ignite, which you may not have heard of, because there's just so much news at ignite.

C

But I wanted to um make sure that everyone on this call was aware of it and um instead of really talking about it, I thought I'd show you our new movie, trailer that we just produced and so I'll play this and then we'll talk about. On the other side.

D

If you're a developer, you're, probably familiar with the pain of spending, your valuable time trying to get a developer sandbox up and running, trying to get a microsoft, 365 subscription trying to get administrator permissions waiting for apps to be installed or provisioned or configuring side loading.

D

Then, just when you think you are ready, it can be hours before you can finally start experimenting and developing not to mention the time spent, creating your own sample users and data to simulate a business environment. So many steps so little time.

D

Don't you wish you could have an easy and instant way to get your own microsoft, 365, e5, developer, subscription with microsoft teams, sharepoint and office apps to test and model your ideas well, stop churning and start learning.

D

The microsoft 365 developer program gives you an instant, fully functional microsoft, 365 e5 sandbox, including a team sample data pack, no waiting, no provisioning, it's pre-made, so you can start learning and building your ideas quickly by making you the administrator of your own developer, sandbox pre-provisioning services like office, apps, sharepoint and microsoft, teams, pre-installing 16 sample users and data for microsoft, graph outlook and sharepoint and offering you a team sample data pack that is pre-installed and pre-configured for app side loading with the teams developer portal.

D

This is a fully functional teams: developer environment with simulated teams, channels and chats. So what are you waiting for? Join the hundreds of thousands of developers participating in the microsoft 365 developer program and get the benefits of an instant sandbox, simply go to aka dot. Ms slash m365 dev program and click join now, instant sandbox.

D

It's your friction free way to learn and build microsoft, 365, apps and solutions, including microsoft teams, sharepoint, microsoft, graph and power platform.

C

So that was our uh debut of the instant sandbox and just to kind of give you a little bit of background on the history of this, which I will be presenting.

C

Been using this for some time what's new from last week, that's a great question. Actually so, what's new from last week is that while we provided you a tenant before that, tenant in many cases took a long time to provision. In some cases it could take up to a day or two to actually get the tenant provisioned, and then it also took time to actually install sample data.

C

We had three sample data packs and we just added a new one for teams, and that took a long time and in many cases people ran up against the fact that they couldn't add their sample data packs until their workloads were provisioned.

C

So, if you wanted to add the sharepoint sample data pack and sharepoint was a provision you basically were told to come back and when we talked to developers last summer, they were really frustrated with the fact that, even though we could give them a tenant pretty quickly that tenant really wasn't in a turnkey state.

C

So what we're doing here is really providing an instant turnkey developer experience so that when you get an instant sandbox you're actually going to have it pre-provisioned with all of the different services that you would need, so you can jump right in and start using teams. You could jump right in and start using sharepoint. You could jump right in and start using office, and it's also going to have all of our sample data packs pre-installed so that you don't have to do any of that work.

C

So literally it is instantaneous and you're going to be able to actually get going and jump into whatever you want to do quickly and easily. So you know that's that's kind of you know why it's different and it's new and it it may seem like a simple thing, but for us to build this was incredibly complex.

C

Not that you care about that, but been about a year of work for us to actually be able to pre-build all of these tenants so that when you come and you join the program or you're an existing user we'll be able to take one off the shelf. That's pre-made hand it to you all you're doing is essentially defining your admin password and then you just have to get going.

C

So um it's it's super simple and really easy, and so we wanted to just make sure you were aware of this now, some of you who are existing users that are on this call you're not going to be able to actually take advantage of this. Quite yet, by the end of november, all the existing customers will be able to access this.

C

But if some of you haven't ever joined the dev program as a new customer, you can actually get this today we launched last week and you can go to aka.msm365 dev program to to get it and for those of you that are existing customers. What you'll see next week is you're going to see next to your next, your existing tenant you'll see a box. That'll actually say: do you want an instant sandbox and then you click here. It's going to have a plus sign on it.

C

Hopefully, that's going to be happening in the next couple of weeks, we're still working through the capacity issues and we want to make sure that we don't have, but with 404 errors or running out of tenants and so we're working through that and scaling this out to new customers first and then to existing customers. So that's really the the news I have today and I hope uh you can give us feedback as you try it.

C

Please don't hesitate to reach out and give us feedback if there's things that you see that you wish you had that you don't have or issues that you have so that we can make sure that we're delivering this and improving on it. So, thanks for your time this morning, uh there's a good question and by the way, if anybody has questions, I'm happy to take them now, is it as persistent as a normal subscription to mimic a real environment. I also attacked my office dev domain. Is that still possible? That's a great question.

C

So it is a normal subscription. It acts the same way as the subscriptions have acted over the last two or three years. If you're coming from visual studio, the subscription is automatically updated with your visual studio subscription. So as long as you have a visual studio pro or visual studio enterprise account, it automatically renews if you're, not a visual studio, pro or enterprise member- and you come in through the normal program, then it will basically expire after 90 days unless you're showing dev activity.

C

So you do have to show dev activity in order for it to get renewed. You can also appeal, just like you've been able to do related to your question around domain.

C

um I think one of the things that is different is that, in order for us to provide this instantaneous pre-provisioned experience, we have to actually assign a domain name, so you don't have control over the domain name.

C

So if you prefer to control your own domain name, then you will want to still get the what we call the configurable sandbox and that basically is exactly what you've been used to over the last few years and that's what what is essentially a naked tenant that doesn't have any provisioning done and doesn't have any sample data installed, and so you'd have to do that all yourself. But if you want complete control over your domain name, then you'd want to go down the configurable route.

C

But if you want that instantaneous experience and you don't mind having the domain name pre-configured, then all you have to do is is figure out what your administrator password is and and you're good to go.

C

So the other good question now: can we get two sandboxes using one dev account? Yes, so for existing customers you will be able to actually get your own second m365 e5 instant sandbox subscription, um so that that's that's how we make it easier for you to just be able to to to get this option and then there's another question. So when you enroll you can select naked or provisioned account yeah. We don't call it naked, that's my bad terminology, but um we call it.

C

um You basically have instant sandbox as one choice or you have a configurable sandbox, so there'll be a dialog box there and you'll be able to see that.

C

Glad I made everybody laugh with my naked terminology, any other questions that people want to raise either in the chat or verbally. Okay, if not, I will hand everything back to david.

A

Thank you, michael yeah. That's super exciting. To see it's great to see. uh You know we're making things easier for developers, and I use that uh that I have one of those accounts. I use it like almost every day. It's like one of the most useful tools out there, so uh I believe up next is igor who's. Gonna talk about a new unit, testing mock library for unit testing, officejs apis, yeah, hey.

E

Everyone yeah hello good morning. It's like evenings last night to everyone, so yeah like I'll, be talking about news testing the office.js api, which is the office javascript api with this new library we created, which is this offset mock uh yeah. This would be like a follow-up from a few months ago, where we presented that we wanted your feedback. So thanks very well like for giving feedback and yeah helping us in this journey, and now we are presenting the solution we created to help you volumes tests uh of settings so yeah.

E

What we did is we created an npm library to facilitate human testing. uh The idea is just like to provide an easy way and quick to use test. The office javascript api, the api, pretty much you guys already use like when developing of settings our goal on creating this api is for it to not depend on us.

E

That is because we didn't want you to require enough subscription, because sometimes you have a dev machine which doesn't have subscript or have like a lot of dev machines on the clouds we don't have of subscription. So yeah we didn't want you to have it so yeah, it doesn't depend on office and it this means that it does not actually test interactions with folks. So like it's kind of of like mocking everything, this api is compatible with any major units test.

E

Javascript framework we tested majorly more code just but any other set like any unstats framework should work. We just answered the major ones it supports all of hosts, I'm just naming a few so like excel outlook, powerpoint and word, but should work on all of the hosts and works for javascript and typescript for now, yeah, I'm gonna run a little bit of like how to use it. Just for you to have all a few, but then you can try it out on your own time later.

E

So, as in any npm package, you can just install it as normally so, like you run the install command. This is the name of the library you later send down links for you to try it out and after that you have you import it as normal. So, like you install and now it's on your dev environment, you import it, and now you can start using the package.

E

So now I will run through like and small example. This is the example that we currently have on our templates. So if you download that templates right now, you'll find similar functions to this one, and I just wanted to show like how to test a function that was already like in production, meaning that, like it already existed, let's test it out, so the function to be test in this case would be this get selected range address.

E

So, like you are in an excel document, you have arranged a cell selected and you just want to find the address of this of the cell this. This is what this function is doing like it gets. The range, which is the photo, get selected range it loads, an address it syncs and returns the range address.

E

One thing that was also like from this library is through help testing load and sync so like. If you mess up your load, call where you forget the sync: this will be caught on our testing code. So that would be a good example. So then you have your testing function and, after that you start with your testing codes, and for that you create first, a mock object, which is pretty much an object like structure in javascript.

E

So here I'm creating a mock data and I'm pretty much mocking all the structure that I'm gonna use to the code. So I'm creating a workbook, arrange I'm putting an address to be situ. It's just a dummy string so like when I call address, I will actually receive situ and I'm mocking the get selected range function to return. This new range that I just created, which will return the addresses to for testing. I created some testing code. This is done in mocha, but like we all right, we also support jess.

E

As I have talked so here, we pretty much have a standard test suite so with the describe here testing for excel uh today. It's testing for the function name that we are creating. So this gets selected range, and here we are creating this context, mock uh with the mock data that we just created.

E

This is calling the of smock object as in our package, and then we are just like asserting, which is like testing if the values are equal, so we are testing this get selected range address, which is the function we previously discussed it with, and it should return c2, because that's what our mock data actually created for executing tests like, as I said, that's like what we created is just this package to help use testing and like helping mocking the of cjs api.

E

So yeah you can just run us normally like with jess, it would be just would just be jazzed and with mocha, it's just standard mocha ways to run so when executing tests. Here, I'm just calling and cameron test and yeah you receive the feedback here. Let's say the test is passing because it's just returning the object c2, which is what it should return yeah like this. Just talking about release schedule. We just talked about it. On previous weeks ignite. We released a blog post about it.

E

I I know that not everyone might have seen it so like we are saying it again, so yeah it's already available. I have the link here for the npm package. So yeah you can already start using start downloading, like it's a hundred percent up yeah later. I have also some other test examples, so it already has some text example. I can read me, but if you need more, I just link down here so like you, can try more see for more hosts or like javascript versus typescript.

E

You can find a lot of more examples and yeah like feel free to.

E

If you face issues like any problems at all, please raise them on our github issue. Space and yeah, we'll gladly address them and like see them are they that we have some future art work ideas. So just gonna talk them briefly. So, like yeah, you already have this api right now with all the functional site tools but like we are still planning to develop more. So the first is more of a feature which is: we are planning to kind of create, like mockable templates, which is like already give you.

E

This object structure like you, saw me creating like this mock data with workbook range address. It's like you. You right now have to create a smart structure, but in the future we plan, your a give it to you and already have like some dummy values like you can already put like address, is already 83 or something just for the developer, to not have the hassle to create those object structures.

E

So that's something we wanted to address other things just to add more documentation like this is still a very new feature, so we might not have all cases documented or like some specific case that you might have been going through, might not be documented yet so this is just documenting more and lastly, it's not directly related to june's testing, but another feature that we are hearing new developers are needing is the ui integration tests? So I just wanted to talk briefly about them.

E

So currently we don't have like a solution in the near term like you're, not planning on developing anything for ui integration tests, and yes, sorry about that, for everyone and yeah. We are aware that you guys are complaining and, like I've heard already that's this might have been problems to some of you to testing integration. Like testing ui your headings, you ever have some ideas for the future, but yeah. There is nothing like in your term for us to be developing so yeah. That's all that I have.

E

I will just see if we got, we have any questions. Okay, I see one. How do you test if we are using excel run? It is possible like um on the examples page on the test examples you see examples where we test excel run here on the slides presentation I didn't show, but yeah it's possible. You can test on excel run on office.

E

Initialize, like you, can test functions pretty much anywhere in your code, so yeah it should work so yeah like if you you have any other question like feel free to put in the chat. I can answer that offline later or speak out and yeah I'll be easier than right. Now.

A

Cool, thank you igor. It's really cool to see this. I know this has been a big area of interest for developers for quite some time so seeing this mock library out there to start helping people with unit testing is really awesome.

A

I'll just add to folks I'm going to reload the slide deck here, but these links are all clickable or, if not clickable, in this one, they will be in the main deck I'm going to load and we'll also put these links for people to go check them out afterwards in the blog, so community spotlight.

A

I just want to say thank you to martin von stam and eric legal for their help with our samples, they've been reviewing pr's and doing sample work and helping out there, and they both earned this badge that you can see on the bottom right. The m365 patterns and practices community contributor 2021., if you want to help with our open source efforts, take a look at the first link there.

A

That's where the code samples repo is for the pnp office add-ins and then, if you want to participate in the recognition program and get your own badge, there's.

C

A

There for that at pnp.github.io recognition program. So thank you again and let's do some q a so. I saw folks have been asking questions in the chat. Please continue to do so. We've got some folks from the team here on the call, so we can answer those as we go along, and I also had some questions that came in online on our uh on our forms, request which I'll have a link to later.

A

If you want to ask questions there for the next community call one area that says question one, but actually we had several questions that came in that were all kind of about the same thing and I sort of collapsed them here. Basically, it's asking with the outlook rest api being decommissioned in november 2022 in favor of graph api. What happens to on-premises exchange rest api support? At that time we have add-ins that use the rest. Api for mobile will rest api still be usable at that time, and the decommissioning just applies to office. 365.

A

and kind of in a related space was. Are there any plans to publish a migration guide or best practices to microsoft? Graph from the outlook rest api, which will be decommissioned november 2022., so yeah that's only a year out, so this is definitely yeah. We understand, like you, know, folks that are using these apis realize you know it's kind of complex, there's a lot of variables involved in trying to move off of one resty api to another.

A

So we are definitely working on guidance in that space and we hope to have that out soon and in the meantime, we still encourage folks to look at the microsoft graph apis for new solutions. So I'd say just stay tuned. Hopefully we'll have a update, uh sometime soon and and we'll. Let folks know on this call and then the next question is we had a question about unit testing and integrating cyprus into an outlook plug-in.

A

So with regards to what igor was just showing with the unit testing mock library, it doesn't seem likely that that would work if you try to do unit testing, since cyprus is a little more focused on end-to-end kind of testing and the one we're providing right now is just unit testing frameworks. So, unfortunately, it's probably not easy to use it right.

A

Now is basically the bottom line for that one, but we definitely encourage you to go check out the mock library and and and work with the frameworks, the unit testing frameworks that are out there available and and give us more feedback.

A

The next question was asking: what's the best approach to follow, to distribute an office add-in in a single tenant scenario, as every customer has a different url, every manifest should be customized for communication with customers web app instance.

A

So here, if you're working with a single tenant, the best approach is typically to have the admin distributor added by using centralized deployment, and I put a link here the answer to how you can deploy add-ins in the admin center on your microsoft 365 tenant. That would be the way to go.

A

If you're planning to use a separate manifest for each customer, then you would still want to use centralized deployment basically give the correct version of the manifest to each customer, so they can deploy it centrally and the the third option would be if you want to support multiple customers. But you only want to be using one manifest, then what we'd recommend is you want to publish your ad in a microsoft, app source? There's a link there to the steps you go through to do that and then admins or users could basically install from appsource.

A

So hopefully it helps answer that question and next question question: four: I'm an office add-in developer, you eager to work with the new powerpoint shape api and after the office adams community call in august 2021 I'm having trouble doing so so when I run the insert shape line and text box sample code on script lab. Unlike what happens with other samples there, I get an error and can it be because I'm not on the office insider program and it's like yeah, most likely you're going to need the office insider program.

A

You need to sign up for that because those are preview apis at the moment, so you'll need to get to a preview, build to use those so I'll put a link here to insider.office.com, where you can sign up for that and of course you can use that on your dev tenant. If you're working with a dev tenant and access those apis and finally there's a question of, is there an api we can use for previewing files in office on the web, and I was a little uncertain. What the intent of this question was.

A

So if, if what you're trying to do is something like render a file in preview like maybe in your task pane or something like that, that's not really a possible thing to do right now, and I would say just please submit a feature request and let us know more about this scenario: there's a aka ms link to the microsoft 365 developer, suggestions there.

A

If the intent was to maybe like just read a file, then you can definitely do that and for that you'd want to refer to the onedrive file storage, api overview and there's a link to that there, which will allow you to go into folders and open files and look at office files.

A

So I hope that helps and then um q and a wise. Hopefully that answers all the questions that came in and alex. Were there any additional questions?

A

Oh, we had one question any news: when the current powerpoint preview api will go live, um that's a great question. If someone from the powerpoint team is on the call, if they're not there, to answer we'll answer that in the blog post afterwards, because I don't know, do we have any other questions.

F

Alex that we didn't get to um there's a question earlier in the chat, if premium power platform features are included in the sandbox, I believe michael had to run we'll make sure to get that answered in the blog post, as well as any updates on the powerpoint preview. Apis.

F

A

That sounds good all right, then so moving along. I just want to mention for folks. If you're new to office, add-ins there's some resources here, you can go check out to get started. There's a link to aka dot. Ms slash office dash ad dash ins dash docs, which will take you to the documentation and there you can find five minute quick starts.

A

You can see a list of them on the right side of the slide there to help you get going with your first office ad in under five minutes, so you can start off with excel or outlook. Or what have you there's? Also lots of developer resources?

A

You can get go check out so there's the microsoft 365 developer program, which michael was just talking about today, so there's the link for that you can go, try script lab, which is an actual office add-in that you can add to your office host and then there's samples in it that you can just try out in the context of the host. So you don't have to go set up a dev environment. You can just try out your samples and and learn a little bit about them.

A

There's, of course, the office add-ins documentation in terms of uh engaging with the team. There's. If you have technical questions about the office javascript api, there's a link there uh aka dot. Ms slash office, dash js, dev questions. If you have technical questions about developing office, add-ins then go check out, aka dot. Ms slash office dash add-ins dash dev dash questions, then you can also go to stack overflow.com. There's some tags listed there of the common ones. People are usually asking questions about.

A

If you have bugs you think you found a product bug, go to github.com officedev office, dash js, where you can submit an issue and let us know you're, seeing some buggy behavior and we'll investigate it and track down what's going on. um If you have any future requests and ideas, you can go to aka dot. Ms slash m365 dev dash suggestions and, of course you can always send a smile or frown through office itself.

A

So that brings us to the call I thought I saw another question pop up here. That I just want to check uh is there a team's dev community call like this? I want to say there was let's see one of these links here will take you to that information.

A

There's a list of all of our calls that we have, because this isn't the only call we have. We have microsoft. 365 all up calls. There's the office add-ins and teams rolled into just the microsoft 365 developer platform call.

A

So if I go take a look at that and get the calendars for all those calls any other questions here. Any news on changes to the community call so yeah, I'm not sure. If you're referencing like we did a little survey, a camera for this last month or the month before, but we're asking folks about hey, there's microsoft, 365 calls and we have the office add-ins call.

A

So there's no change right now, we'll still have office add-ins specific calls, which are the second ones day of every month, and then, of course there will be. You know the microsoft 365 calls are there as well. So that's the plan for now, but we appreciate everybody's feedback. It was super helpful to see that feedback and it helped us think about the space and what would work best for everybody and that kind of helped us stick with the decision of keeping the office adam's call for now.

A

So I think that's it with that I'll say. Thank you to everybody. The recording will be available soon on our microsoft 365 community youtube channel, which is at aka dot. Ms slash m365 pnp slash videos. You can also follow us on twitter at microsoft, 365 dev. The next call will be december, 8th at 8 a.m, pacific time, and you can also get the link the invite the calendar invite at aka.ms office. Add-Ins community call, if you don't already have it. If you want to keep an eye on the agenda, I based on the feedback.

A

Actually from that survey, I started publishing the agenda on the community call page and that's the link there to the agenda. The aka.ms office add-ins agenda, so that will stay tbd until about a week before the call, and then you should see an agenda appear there. You can also submit questions in advance of the call on aka dot, msl office add-ins form, and we will answer those on the next call. So once again, thank you. Everyone for attending hope. You have a great day and we will see you on the next call.