Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 11 May 2022

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From YouTube: Office Add-ins community call – May 2022

Description

This month's community call topics: AppSource Add-in Validation Improvements – including browser support update, top failure outcomes to avoid and communicating directly with your validation team, Blazor in Office Add-ins - step through creating a Blazor Webassembly Word add-in, Add-in command changes - how to update and register your add-ins commands that use ExecuteFunction, by the October 30th deadline, and Community ideas - help shape how we gather and prioritize Microsoft 365 development suggestions. Q&A at end of call and in chat throughout call. The call was hosted by David Chesnut (Microsoft) | @davidchesnut. Recorded May 11, 2022.

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• See the full blog post for this call in the Microsoft 365 platform community blog - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/blog
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/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 – June 8th at 08:00am PT - https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall

A

Hello, everyone and welcome to the microsoft office add-ins community call. My name is david chestnut and I am your host for this call. Let's take a look at the agenda for today. Joining us today is juan bamari who's going to be talking about some ad invalidation improvements on appsource also joining us is uh our special guest martin von stamp who's, an mvp on office add-ins and he's going to be showing a really cool demo of blazer and office add-ins.

A

Also abeed ramon is joining us today to talk about some add-in command changes. Also, linda cannon will be talking about some community ideas and uh then we'll have some q a at the end. If you have any questions, just go ahead and type them into the chat as we go along and we'll answer those as we go through the call.

A

If there's any questions we're able to get to today, um we post a blog summary of the call several days afterwards and anything that didn't get answered, we'll answer it there also this call is being recorded and we post it within about 24 hours to our microsoft community, youtube channel.

A

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

B

Hello, hey david, thank you very much all right, so I'm going to take control of the presentation for a bit and good morning, everyone uh good afternoon good evening, depending where you are so. This is juan valmoria. Here I have an update for you with appsource appsource validation, just to set up some context here. If you want to deploy your admin using appsource, basically our store, there is a validation process that is going on. We have a team of people who are validating that add-ins meet certain policies and we have been making some improvements here.

B

You know these processes around taking. I don't know, depending on on the type of filing you submit between three and two weeks, and basically we work to try to validate your audience as soon as we can right. So in order. I have a few updates here. Just take a couple of minutes so yeah I will cover three topics. Basically, first of all, uh the most important update is that we have a browser, support, update. So in a nutshell, we will no longer reject add-ins that are not supporting trident or basically internet explorer.

B

That's huge news here and then I'm going to talk a little bit also about validation failures. You know what our top issues that the team is finding, so that when you submit an add-in, you kind of pay special attention to these issues, so that uh your bureau, I mean, if you help us, your writing- will be validated way faster.

B

So we're going to talk a little bit about that. So, first of all the context about the trident support. uh So many months ago, uh if you can recall we microsoft, we announced that ie will no longer be supported for office web applications.

B

That didn't mean that add-ins were not supported in ie. It basically meant that the web apps, so if you were, if you went to office for the web, you know basically word will not be supported anymore in internet explorer right and many people assume that that was the same for office ads and that's not the case. So we we continue.

B

In fact today we continue to support ie in guevara's and we need to support it. Believe me, if it was a choice of my team, we will say is no longer supported. Everything is in webv2, but, however, that's not possible because we have office 2013 office, 2016, 2019, msi uh that they still we are still supporting these products until, as you can see on this slide office, 2013 it's going to be supported until april. 11, 2023, 2016 and 2019 are gonna, be supported until 2025..

B

So, basically, there's still an universe of users that are on these products and they they don't have other browser options but tried it. So that's why we were still requiring it now. The good news here is that you know uh well, if you're in network 365 subscription, if you have a subscription for 365, whether that subscription is a monthly subscription or a semi-annual subscription or a mech subscription.

B

Most of you folks, and by most I mean more than 95, are now running on webview 2.. So, basically, we were monitoring how you know how active was the the activations going on in web youtube versus all the other engines, and we finally are happy to announce that you know webv2 has become the mainstream in the office adding world, so a very, very significant percentage of office add-ins are activated in webview 2.

B

and then the result of this. What we are deciding in the store is that we are not. Basically now we are recommending you to support trident. We are not enforcing it. So, basically, if you submit and add into the store- and it fails loading in trident, we are not going to reject your add-in, but we are going to basically what we call soft fail. It, which means it's going to be approved, you're going to be in the store, and we will recommend you.

B

You know to support trident, because you know your adding is not working in trident and maybe you will have a customer that is in 2016 or 2019 that they want to use your ad, adding, though that is the this decision, is made effective immediately. So if any add-ins you submit today to the store will no longer be rejected, based on lack of support for trident, so those are the news for today.

B

I personally recommend you to I mean if you feel that you have a universe of users who are very active in 2013 or 2016. I recommend you to support it and basically you will get the feedback. You know we have a review system in the store. So I think at this point you know you will hear from customers. If you really need to do it and it's up to you to you know how do you react to that feedback?

B

So that's the news number one. Oh, by the way we already updated our documentation. If you go to our website and ricky, just yesterday uh changed this paragraph. That is basically summarizing. What I just said here, so it's now public policy is updated. It's all done so moving on. I just want to talk to you about uh two topics here uh number one top failures were about when validating addicts, so the top failure up to recently was lack of lack of support of trident.

B

That was the number one reason of failing and adding in the store, but not now. That is no longer an issue today, so that the the top eight issues that come after that one are these ones right and the first four are kind of the concentrating the vast majority of of the cases.

B

So if uh and by the way, this is, if you want to help us help you. This is basically what you need to do. Put special focus on number one. The number one reason of failing an add-in is the testing notes right. So basically people submit add-ins and they don't include how we can test them. So we don't have a test account that we can log into the add-in.

B

So we don't know we don't have a very good idea of how to try your ad in the different environments right and if we don't have this information, evidently, because we cannot continue the validation right. So please be as detailed as as you can, sharing the details on how we should test your add-ins, give us the accounts, uh the users and passwords we need. You know to test it or how can we create a test account for it?

B

Simplify our lives in this sense, and basically you should be fine. There is a very large volume of offers that have this issue and it's basically I mean. Maybe your rating is working perfectly, but just because our team is not able to load it, but we need to reject it right, uh and I have seen you know many times that we reject many times an adding that doesn't have clear testing notes, the second top failure, which is very related to the first one, is the first run experience.

B

So many addings don't have a clear. uh This is a bit subjective. um I would I would admit, but you know many times we we don't know how to use an allen. I mean it's like the ux, the experience. There are no enough instructions on how to use it. There are some add-ins that are really beautiful and the design is kind of it's very intuitive and it's kind of obvious what you need to do, and there are other cases where we will have. We don't know what to do. First.

B

You know so providing a good instructions on the first run experience it's going to help a lot, your validation right. If you are using an external service, many people forget to other way to sign in sign out of that service or to sign up. You know if you don't have an account on that service. uh You know a way to kind of start an account. It's not exposed you know, and then the one that I want to also chat more here is the additional charges. So there are many offers in the store that require.

B

You know they have like a free experience, but then require users to buy a subscription to a service or stuff like that, and you don't disclose that you know in your in your submission. So every time you submit your ad into appsource and you're charging at some point for additional services, you need to tell us. I mean this is kind of a legal thing we need to. We need to support so so we appreciate that you, you help us with this.

B

If you help us with those two four issues, I am pretty sure that your planning is going to be validated in less than one or two days: okay, okay, so and the third thing that that was the second topic. The third thing that I want to talk to you about is that now we have like a direct engagement with the validation team mechanism in place.

B

So uh what used to happen in this until recently was that you know say you submit an adding and we find an issue and we are rejected and you want to challenge that decision. You're saying hey guys, uh I mean. Why are you reacting and basically you escalated the situation right.

B

What used to happen is that we were creating a support ticket in css, so we so we were involving our support organization here and evidently that came with a little bit of you know that our response time was increased significantly just by involving the support organization, but now there's a way that you can actually contact us directly right. So the way this works is that every time that we send you an email after your certification or your validation, we send your report know that what happened?

B

Why we rejected your add-in? What were the policies that were kind of violated that you needed to fix and then we are including a link? You know to a form to contact my team directly.

B

So basically, if you, if you fill up this form, that you will find the link in your email, we will get your case directly. uh The validation team and we will have. We will immediately start working on your on your case and, if needed, we can meet with you and talk about what's going on right.

B

So that's also good news that I have to share with you and in fact that's what I have for today.

B

um I see there are a few comments in the chat that I will address in the chat, but other than that david. I think I'm done with my content.

A

Cool, thank you very much juan it's great to see the improvements coming for appsource validation. Thank you all right, and uh so now we have martin von staum who's going to be talking about blazer in office add-ins. Take it away, martin.

C

Well, good afternoon, it's afternoon in the netherlands, where I'm located currently, my point of my presentation is going into blazer office add-ins.

C

My problem with the office add-ins usually was, and I gave a little bit of history. You started with vba and freestudio.net and complex. That's where I come from and office javascript apis were not really my thing, so I really had to struggle with that and the solution for the com, add-ins and vba ideas, obviously, is that the office javascript apis across platform and using generic web technologies, but problem with that is, if you are a regular.net developer, you're, really not adopting this api.

C

um In the beginning, it was kind of incomplete it's now getting better and in in especially in excel. It's uh almost in part with the uh with what we have with uh with fisto and um but the real adoption rate for net and net developers stay behind, including me myself, and um that was making it hard to adopt the the office javascript api.

C

It's by now it's getting more complete, but I was still thinking about how to get net developers involved in this and the way to do that. I was thinking what, if we can create blazer add-ins within office and obviously blazer started as a server technology and, as you know, offers javascript apis required the code to run on the client and when that happened, blazer also developed the blazer web assembly option and the blazer web assembly option is really on the client side.

C

So if I move over to my screen, there we'll go to the demo.

C

What I developed in my life coding sessions on twitch and youtube is building an office add-in based on blazer webassembly technologies, and I created a pull request for that by now. So you can see that over here and so let's try build that thing. If you go to the office, add-ins samples, repo just go to the root and you copy the github clone commands and you go into a new folder.

C

We're starting just from scratch, there's nothing in here and we pull in the github command pulling in the full getup repository from the office add-ins.

C

This will pull in all the code from the from the current uh office headings that are available um that are developed right now, but this will show you that um it's not adding the pull request in yet. So you have to do a little bit of an extra step to get that if you go to the folder.

C

Let's see the samples.

C

You will see, there's no blazer adding in here. So if we go to github again and we go to pull requests, then the fourth option is there is my pull request, select that and do and again copy the code here. Go back to the thing in here run the commands.

C

This will check out the pull request and immediately shift over to the um to the to the pull request that was created. If I now go to the samples folder again.

C

Now you will see there is a wordplacer add-in, so we go into your wordpress already.

B

C

And in here there are two solutions: there's basically one solution. I can open that in for studio.

C

Pick the solution just.

D

C

I'm running the first studio preview, 2022.

C

This will load the project.

C

Let me pull this a little bit to the side here.

C

C

In the solution there is a blazer heading, that's actually the blazer heading that will be hosted in the task pane and there's a second project in in here that will be providing the site loading of this project inside word. So, if all goes right, we just have to hit a 5 here.

C

If the demo gods are with us, it should trigger words and load.

B

C

C

There is word- and you already see, that it's loading the add-in in the back. You see here it's starting the blazer server, but it's a web assembly. So it's running on the client. If you open word here.

C

And show task pane. You should actually see exactly the same thing here, and this is basically the same thing that you see over here, and this is a webassembly application.

C

The reason why this is working is because the code that is running here is actually running on the client, so it is possible to interact with the host in here. In this case, it's the host is word, but we can do things with that. Like setting up the document where you put in let's say five paragraphs in here, I'm going to convert these to content controls.

C

And put the tag on the content controls if we go in here and show the default design mode and have a property. You see now that I put a tag in here like odd for each of the content, controls or odd, even odd, even etc.

C

If I modify content controls, I make it visible, actually that they are tagged and put some things in there. Let's move that a little bit bigger.

C

That's not all. You can also put a event handler on the content controls and for this I need to open the inspector.

C

Otherwise, there's no.

B

C

Of showing what's happening.

C

Sure, if I can make that bigger, we can make that bigger as well.

C

So now you can see that the undeleted handlers and the on selection change handlers are added to the content controls. So now, if I delete one of the contact controls, let's say the delete, the first event, even content control. It will show you that the even content control is triggered, so the event is handler is actually handled.

C

This is something that um that is only available in the preview at this time um for forward. That is uh so be careful that you have the the preview bits running for that, but merely for this demo, it's just showing what is possible and what you can do with it. If I now remove the event handlers again- and I do basically just select first even contact control again for deletion, it will now not show any events any anymore in this uh this place.

C

What I did with this my little demo, I added a couple of small demos. I picked with randomly some some small samples from the year from from the repo, and you see while I'm switching, it's actually loading again.

C

This is something that you probably want to avoid, but for demo purpose, I put this. This in because you basically want to make this a single page application instead of five separate applications, if you, if you run this each time, it's loading again. So if I pick the quotes one and clear the document here, we can just add in some quotes all from the blazer add-in or you can put in some paragraphs.

C

If you go over the code, you will see that we I'm using some different methods to do this. In certain paragraphs, I'm now inserting five paragraphs and it also returns the count of the paragraph. So it's actually interacting with the task pane.

C

So to show you how this is done, we go back to fish studio, let's close this one so that we leave the debug mode, don't save and you can see it as is it's you, you just hit f5 and it should be running. um So if it's not running, then please contact us and we can investigate that. But the laser thing, if you go to the blazer application, I'm not sure if I can make that a little bit bigger. I don't think so.

C

What you see here is the actual dub dub dub, with the static items in there and a blazer application actually consists of a special file. That's named like the blazer add-in dot lib.module.js, and this is needed to pre-load the office host before of before a blazer kicks in.

C

So if I make this a little bit bigger and you will see that there is a before start so before blazer is starting, we are preparing office to run and it will actually detect if it's work working in word or in the browser.

C

And when it's terminating when blazer is stopping, then you can do other things. If you need it, there's nothing in there at this time.

C

The actual, adding consists of pages like the um the index page. That is the one that we showed the first one.

C

When I did content control stuff, let's see if we can make this a little bit readable. What you see here is the office layout, the the blazer layout, that is, with the page identifiers. If you go to the website and you type in content controls app after your url. You will go to this page.

C

If you go to hello world, there's a different page based page name there, but this all uh perform the the blazer programming standards and the way this is done is that the markup is actually in the razer page and the code is in the code behind page. You can also do this inside the razor page by an add code tag, but I prefer to put it back into the code behind.

C

The way it's interacting with office is using the javascript interop option it's using the microsoft.js intro and, as you can see here with the second the setup document, if I go to the razor page, you will see that the setup button this one will trigger the setup function on the ccr file.

C

That's this one and the c-sharp file in this case will run the setup document javascript function, that is in the isolated javascript file in this javascript file. The the function is really exported, and this one, as you can see, this will ever interact with with word the run thing on word and by accessing the context from from this environment.

C

It's able to do things like inserting paragraphs or inserting text and things like that and do much more complicated things like the event handlers. Let's see if we can find that part here, register events that will add the handle content, delete and handle selection change events to the 2d context, so that whenever the content control is deleted or changed from selection, you will get a notification from that.

C

That's about it. uh For now. uh The demo, I think, is fairly trivial, um and um so you have to have a look.

B

C

And uh whenever I'm not sure when it's uh merged in the um in the full repo, but for now you can use the same trick. I said it clone the the repo and then go to the pull request and get the command from that as well.

C

So with that, I want to finalize it with my own information there quickly. That should be this one.

C

So, who am I I'm a marvel storm I've been an mp since 20 2006 and I'm live streaming all these things with the uh like the office add-ins, usually on thursday um building office, audience using blazer and net technologies on youtube.

C

If you search me for a soft testing software, that's the name that I'm using to do my live streaming or you can contact me on twitter on aafvsdam.

C

So if you have questions just let me know and that's about about it, I think for now.

A

Cool, thank you, martin. We really appreciate your uh going into this space and putting together this really cool sample, especially because I've seen lots of questions out there from folks of hey. We want to use blazer. How do we get this to work? And uh you know so. I think this it's a step forward in that space.

A

Hopefully we can get that merged today, so hopefully, that sample will be out there very soon yeah. I believe we are up to the add-in command changes by abeed.

D

Hello thanks david hello. Everyone thank you for joining us today, I'll be going through some changes that we're making to how you register your add-in commands. So for a quick summary, what are add-in commands? I'm sure everyone is familiar with them, but essentially we have two main types of add-in commands uh and add-in commands can be used to extend native parts of office applications.

D

I think the most common type is the the one that is essentially a ribbon button, and then you can use the add-in commands to invoke uh two different things. One is you can either show a task pane on the side or you also have adding commands that actually go and execute a certain javascript function without showing any kind of ui.

D

So the changes we're introducing is just for that second type. So that's the execute function, type of add-in command. So inside of your manifest um this, if you're using these types of add-in commands, they will be shown like the one I have on the screen. You'll have an action with the type execute function, and then you define your function name. So this is the name of the actual javascript function that will be that will be executed when, when the user clicks on that ribbon button.

D

So in this case, for this example, our function name is right text, so everything here stays the same. But what we are changing is how you actually register those handler functions or those callback functions so to improve security in office. Add-Ins we're going to be requiring you to register those callback functions with the associate api.

D

So if you have used some of the some of the events in outlook or if you're familiar with keyboard shortcuts in excel, this is very similar to to that same paradigm. So all you have to do is essentially add a call of office.actions.associate give it that for the first parameter, give it the name of the function that you have defined in your manifest and then for the second parameter. Just have uh essentially have a pointer to the the handler function.

D

So as an example of this I'll show you what this looks like in code, so this is taken directly from our documentation. This is just an example of a handler function. That's writing text to the document, and then all you have to do is I've highlighted it in blue at the very bottom. Is after you define your function, just go ahead and register it with the associate api.

D

So you just have to add that one line of code that says hey this is the the handler function for my add-in command. That's in the manifest the first parameter should match exactly the the name of the function that you have in in the manifest and then the second parameter is essentially the function pointer to the function. Definition itself.

D

You can also do anonymous functions in the same way and then just kind of put the definition of the function inside of the associate call all right. So how do you actually test this so this? This will eventually be a breaking change. uh We're going to be giving the community about six months um to adopt this new paradigm, but after those six months on october 30th, you will any any any adding commands that use execute function. If your handler function is not being registered, it will fail to run.

D

I will note that this does not require a resubmission of your add-in you're, just simply making a change in your javascript function itself. So in order to test this method, we have added a new parameter to the script, to the actual office.js script. How I recommend you you go about this is that you make this parameter change first and then you try to run your add-in.

D

You will notice that the execute function, app commands fail to run and then, when you go and actually make those changes- and you add the registration with the office.actions.associate api, you will notice that it continues to run as expected. So this this parameter, I recommend you use for testing only because on october 30th it will essentially become obsolete, as as all old execute function, commands will will fail to run so as eugene just posted in the chat. We did announce this change on a recent blog post.

D

You can click the link in the slide directly at the top to go and read that blog post. It has a bit more information there, but, as I mentioned, these changes must be made before october 30th and on that date, any functions with your execute function. Type adding commands that are not registered will no longer run. We have updated the documentation, as well as the samples in our github repo, so feel free to go check. Those out to see where you need to add the call. It's very simple.

D

You just need to add one line of code after your function, definitions, but if you have any questions at all feel free to post them in the chat, if you run across any issues, feel free to report them in the in the github repo, but essentially yeah that that's that's the main change here. It is important because, as I mentioned it will be, it will eventually be a breaking change.

D

Over the next few weeks we will start to reach out directly to some of our partners that that we have identified is using these types of add-in commands. But if you have some time now, please do go and make that change as soon as possible, and then you have nothing else to to really worry about so yeah. That's mostly that's mostly what I have for adding command changes. Thank you. Thank you. So much for your time and then back to you, david.

A

Thanks abeed appreciate the update, um looks like there might be one or two questions in the chat, and I think next up is linda.

E

A

You want to just take control of the slide deck from here.

E

Sure I'll do that hi everybody, my name's linda cannon and I'm a senior content project manager in the developer platform engagement group, so my team is responsible for things like the microsoft 365 developer program and all of our dev center sites, like developer.microsoft.com, microsoft, 365 that sort of thing, and I work with juan and david and abeed anyway. I understand that some of our community members are concerned about our responsiveness to your ideas for our platform and I'm here to tell you that. Yes, we are very much aware of the situation.

E

I wanted to give you a little bit of backstory for people who didn't know why we moved away from user voice that happened last year. Sadly, they they meaning the powers that be at microsoft, kind of pulled the plug on us and surprised us and left us, without uh with a very very few days to migrate the ideas that we did have on uservoice to a new platform.

E

The reason why they closed down uservoice is because microsoft is committed to privacy and compliance for our customers. Data and uservoice was not complying with that. So they were, they were not keeping your personal information private, and so we, uh it was a legal reason, even though, on this support page that I'm showing you kind of, has a blase answer. Why microsoft is moving away a couple. People ask well what happened to the feedback we did provide.

E

Our team was basically focusing on any suggestion that had over 100 votes, there was a whole bunch of data on uservoice and we did not save all of it, but we did migrate.

E

Every suggestion for office, developer platform or sharepoint developer platform graph and teams over to a new site and what we did was we created and because the new developer, the new feedback community, wasn't ready. Yet we kind of on the fly created this place on the tech community and we created what we're calling the microsoft 365 developer platform ideas forum, where you can submit ideas and we have about 627 at the moment now.

E

A couple of you have pointed out: well hey: what's the point of doing that because there's 621 new and it doesn't look like anybody's paying any attention- and I hear that and I tend to agree- I don't think we did a very good job on user voice either.

E

So we need to figure out how we can follow up and hear you and you felt heard I think, that's the main problem, another problem we have with this platform by the way I'm trying to be as transparent as I can just so you guys know what our current situation is. So for the benefit of honesty, I'm just going to keep at that. So what we have here is the new developer platform.

E

You can see I can sort by most upvotes and if I, if I choose a label office, add-ins development, for example, we have we have fewer and you can see that out of all the ideas shown here, there's the top up vote is 27.

E

now, given that user voice was gigantic and this little corner of the world is much smaller. Clearly, we're not going to have as many people seeing this as many to be able to upvote these ideas, so therein lies another problem. Is we need to figure out? What is a good vote cut off to start paying attention?

E

Another thing we have a problem with: is the developers and the program managers getting their eyes on it? One of the things we do successfully very successfully. Is we have a feedback coordinator that rotates through our team of about 30 pms?

E

Everybody has a week about twice a year and they go to our office js site, which I'm sure all of you know about and anything that bought will triage a new idea so every day, somebody's looking at all these new issues and assigning them out, so I'm skipping ahead.

E

You might be able to figure out where I'm going with this, but I wanted to share a couple other things with you, so we migrated off of uservoice for our ideas and suggestions onto this interim developer platform, and now microsoft has rolled out ta-da their corporate wide feedback. This was just released back in october and they've created all these sub forums um for teams for all the microsoft products. uh The link is in the slide, so you can have a look at this new thing, even though we have products listed here.

E

This is all product centric and they only like just recently, I'm clicking on outlook added a category for developers.

E

So the reason why we have withheld migrating to this yet a third place for ideas and whatnot is because we didn't have a developer category and them adding. This is a result of me, literally nagging them to death, so we now have some place where you can check and say: okay, I have a developer idea this. This particular microsoft feedback forum has a lot more traffic than what we're currently using.

E

So one of our options is to take everything here and migrate it over there and start from there, but there and still lies the problem. Well, that's great sending customers to yet a third place. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to get eyes on this engineering eyes pmis?

E

So my suggestion would be to my team is to add to our weekly feedback process coordinator. That person would go over to one of these feedback forms, whichever we decide and triage those ideas as well. That way, we don't have I'm flipping tabs again 621 new untriaged ideas. People would at least know what you know if we're working on it, and we could, you know cross-reference if it's in the backlog, all that kind of stuff, so that this is the new feedback forum from microsoft.

E

It does have all of the office products in here and each one of them does have a developer tool category. So you know it's possible to use this up until recently, I felt it wasn't very easy to use because it didn't have developer tools. So if you're a product, for example like um sharepoint with 4000 feedback, how do you know you know what the developer ideas are, but now we can filter on that. So that does make this much more usable, although we haven't migrated to it yet.

E

So, let's see, we've talked about what the current state is. We've talked about. What some of the problems are and we've talked about, what these areas are, where we can have feedback currently we're here. We've got this new community, but we also have our our github repo and we do have a label uh that has let's see this is getting slow. One of the one of our labels is a type. Let's see, let's see if I can go to the next page here, product feature request.

E

What we do here is we say: hey, that's a great product feature request, go to one of these forums and submit your idea and then get everybody to upload it.

E

So I don't know if it's possible or not, because github does not have an upvote per se, although it does have a thumbs up- and I know that somebody's written a plugin that if you say plus one in the comments, it will count all those. So we would be able to know you know the popular ideas, but the benefit of this site is that it does have people looking at it internally. It does have the engineers it does. Have the pms perusing all these issues in github.

E

So now you know kind of where we're at and the the things that we are uh discussing internally. I don't think I've left anything out. We are trying to decide and we really really do value what you think about this situation. So again, we currently have this interim place. That is not getting a lot of eyes and not getting a lot of processing.

E

We do have the new community that now has a developer area for all of our areas, and then we also have github with the potential to move issues and ideas there, because we do have the tab. We do have problems to solve. If you have any ideas, such as how we should regulate or count votes how we can get more eyes how we can be more responsive, what it is you need from us david and my colleague elizabeth.

E

I don't know if she's on this call, but the three of us are really paying attention to this process and trying to figure out what is the best for you. So I've shared everything that I can think of david did. I leave anything out.

A

No, I don't think so. Did you want any feedback from folks if they would.

E

A

Yeah yeah, maybe it's just a chat.

E

Or I don't know if we have time for questions right now, but we're.

A

Already awesome on time.

E

Yeah, okay, yeah: let's have people put things in the chat and I'll review it with you and we can figure out where to go from here. Hopefully we'll have this ironed out for you folks by next month. That's knock on wood.

A

Yeah, I thanks linda. I think you know it's it's. uh I know this is a really important space for folks and I'm often I think, with three or four q a's per call like saying: hey, that's a great idea. Can you can you put it in the idea.

C

A

So you know, I also want to be sure these things are getting attention. I'd also be kind of curious to hear from folks like, I think there are github repos out there that do track ideas like this and have some sort of voting system. So if anybody has experience with that or has participated in it, and you have thoughts on that, it'd be curious. We'd be curious to hear from you as well.

E

Thanks, everyone have a great rest of your week, thanks, linda.

A

All right, so I tacked on one slide to the interior, which is kind of related to community. So um I've set up a meeting on june 15th. It's a teams meeting which is the wednesday after the next to call community call, which is on june 8th, so we're looking for feedback from folks on samples specifically, and so this will be kind of a deep dive with folks to just chat about samples and see what you need.

A

We can see the traffic to the repo for samples and it was about 5 000 folks, a month roughly that are going to look into samples, but you know we can't tell are folks being satisfied with what they see are. Is the sample code copyable into your own projects and helping you know, do we have gaps that we need to look at? Are there challenging parts of the of the development experience that you know? Maybe samples could help in some space I mean there's a lot.

A

We don't know, and so it'd be great to hear from folks from all you developers. You know what would you like to see in the samples over the next six months to year, in terms of where you think we should go with it? So there's a link there, uh the aka dot, ms slash office ad and samples dash call. So that will take you to the team meeting. Of course, it doesn't start until june 15th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. So please join us.

A

If you can some q a that came in on the q, a forum for this last month. I wanted to go through some of these things, real quick before I get to this first one.

A

I do want to mention that there's quite a bit of discussion on the last call that was in the chat around outlook, add-ins uh the outlook, rest api deprecation in november coming up and migrating to microsoft, graph sso, there's kind of like this, a bunch of questions in that space, and so I just want to let folks know like we're still looking into that and we're hoping probably on the june call, maybe to to offer some more guidance in that space. So I just didn't want you to think.

A

Like we forgot about that, we just haven't got to the final part of that with sharing out some more info. So this first question here is I'd love to follow up on this feature request, and this is the feature request to implement officegs, save and close methods across word excel and powerpoint.

A

It says: apologies for my persistence, but this is literally the only blocking issue for us to move from old add-ins to the gs adams platform. We'd really really appreciate. If you could push this into the roadmap, represent many clients with many employees, so do not take the 20 up. Votes at face value represent hundreds of users and the deployments of the old, add-ins and updates are not ideal. Thank you.

A

So much so yeah we're sorry you're being blocked by this, and I chatted with the team, uh and you know, unfortunately, this isn't something we can put on the road map at this time. It's not saying we're, not gonna, do it, but it's just not there right now, uh we'll continue to keep an eye on the request, and we appreciate your persistence.

A

It's a tough answer to give, because I mean you could say well, you know if you beat some threshold above votes, it should happen, but there you know, there's more factors in deciding how things get on the roadmap. You know, sometimes something that looks really simple to do- might turn out to be really complex, because you know there's some unknown security thing that has been dealt with to make the implementation happen, or maybe the effort involved would come at the expense of five other features that are going to unblock a bunch of other people.

A

So you know there's a lot of factors go into this, so just I just didn't want anyone to take this. Like hey we're ignoring you, you know when you you ask for some feature that we can't get on the roadmap. You know it said working with limited resources, but what I would say in the meantime is a workaround. You might want to explore continuing to use your command in since it looks like you have that, so you can have full functionality in windows on desktop and then you can have the web.

A

Add-In version have partial functionality, you know where it wouldn't necessarily have save and close everywhere and there's a way to make it so that, when someone opens, you know word or excel on desktop it'll use the combat, and instead of the web add-in version, and so there's a link to an article here that explains how to set that up, but I hope that helps so next question was on opening outlook mobile api to compose scenarios to insert attachments in emails.

A

Currently, third-party cloud storage companies cannot integrate directly into outlook mobile with this api we'd, be able to click a button and insert files from private cloud storage providers in the emails. Thank you yeah. This is very interesting and we'd be curious to know more about this scenario, so I put in a link here to the m365 dev suggestion site. Let us know more about it about that scenario.

A

Next question was how to communicate from word add-in to an officejs task. Pane, for example, on content enter, highlight one html control in the task pane. I saw that this question was also posted to the q a site, so I did follow up with a comment there, just kind of looking for more information. It seems like you should be able to use the on selection changed event, but if not just follow up on the question, that's on the q a site and we can try to help you there and then another question below that one.

A

Are you planning on upgrading the visual studio web add-in templates to asp.net core? So, yes, we're looking into some updates to the visual studio office and templates? I asked the team about this. We don't have anything on the roadmap right now, but it would be great to know more like are there? You know if we do updates? Are there specific things you're looking for? Is it just asp.net core other things? So definitely let us know at m365 dash suggestions and another question.

B

Maybe can I add more details to a question.

A

B

You go to the previous slide. Please, the sweaty uh yeah question number three. You can definitely do it like like suggested here. uh You know, content controls, but it's a bit tricky because we don't have an event on the content control and so basically, what you need to do is to create a binding and basically on the in the on the word api. When you create a binding, actually a content control, it's you can a content, control is created and then bindings have an unselected event.

B

So, basically, once you have a content control, you can create a binding by id by using the content control title and then you can subscribe to the unselected unbinding selected, and that will give you the event you need to communicate with that aspect. ah Sorry, we just uh wanted to clarify that.

A

Okay, cool thanks wand, so the question came in: has the powerpoint api 1.3 beneficially released all platforms, it is supported on windows, mac and the web, but it's not on ios or mobile at this time, and I put in a link to the powerpoint javascript api requirement sets page which tracks you know which platforms it's on. If you, if you want to follow that this question came in just today, I think I have two questions relating to get access, token and I'll.

A

Just kind of summarize this, since we're running short on time, but basically comes down to. Are we supposed to use when we call get access token? Are we supposed to use office runtime dot, off. get access token? Are we supposed to use office dot author get access? Token, there's also a way you can call into context author texas token.

A

So, basically, the answer is you can use officeruntime.auth.get access token or you can use office.off dot, get access token under the hood. They they call the same thing they're equivalent, so feel free to use either one, but to be consistent. We're in the process of opening all the docs and samples to be sure they always use office.off.getxstoken, because I know as a developer, if you see two ways to do something you're going to ask well- which one should I use so in this case they're both equivalent, don't use context.off dot, get access token.

A

I don't believe that works in all scenarios. So I'll. Thank you for the links to the docs and the stack overflow post I'll go. Take a look at those make sure we've provided the correct and latest guidance there.

A

So hopefully it helps and there's also a question that came in this came in kind of late, so we haven't really had any time to dig into it. Basically, during the last call there's a question that came up about programmatically letting the compose window disappear after the user, clicks on a custom encrypt and send button.

A

So I'm, following up with the with juan nailed the team to try to help with more info there and then is there a way for the admin to install an excel added for the user group that will show only for some excel files generated by application and not when the user creates a new excel file or some other excel files opened by the user, and this is another question that came in I think like just this morning, so I haven't had a chance to really dig into it, so we'll follow up in the blog post with more info and finally just kind of wrap things up here if you're new to office add-ins on this call welcome to the call and there's some additional resources here.

A

You can take a look at for some documentation. We have different quick starts for the different products. That'll get you up and running in five minutes. You can use script lab to try out samples without requiring to set up a dev environment. We also have a link to our samples.

A

You can get a free, microsoft, 665, developer, tenant to the developer program, which is highly useful for testing and building your add-ins and, of course, we also have office scripts. If you want to do automation of your documents and if you need to engage with the team we have, if you have technical questions about office add-ins, you can either go to our office at instead of questions, q, a page and there's two tapes there.

A

You can use to take those questions or you can go to stackoverflow.com and there's some additional tags there, depending on what info you're looking for. If you found what looks to be a product bug, let us know on the office js repo, and if you have feature requests and ideas, you can go to m365, dash suggestions and, let us know, of course you can always send a small.

C

A

Inside office, oh thanks, linda and of course this isn't, the only developer community call that's out there. We have additional calls across microsoft, 365 on adaptive cards and powerapps, and if any of these calls look interesting, please go check them out and finally, just say: thanks: everyone for attending the recording will be available in 24 hours on the microsoft 365 community, pnp youtube channel. You can follow us on twitter, at 365 dev or at m365 pmp.

A

The next call will be june, 8 8 a.m, pacific time and the agenda will be posted at that agenda, link below usually about a week before the call the agenda's out and if you have any questions and answer the call, let us know at the aka dot. Ms slash office add-ins form. So thank you. Everyone and we will see you on the next call.