Microsoft 365 Community Office Add-ins, 18 Aug 2021

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

Description

This month's community call features presentations - Shared mailboxes in Outlook (Shared Mailbox vs Delegate Access/Shared Folder, Shared Mailbox design considerations and add-ins) and PnP: Message recipients changed event (Outlook) (If external recipients are detected in an e-mail’s list of recipients, then the message is automatically tagged as External and optionally a disclaimer is appended to message). This month’s Community spotlight recognizes James Wayne (Exclaimer) for his continued contributions. Thank you! Q&A in chat throughout call. The call was hosted by David Chesnut (Microsoft) | @davidchesnut. Microsoft Presenters: Juan Balmori | @juaneloBalmori, Ankush Oberoi, and Elizabeth Samuel. Recorded July 14, 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/M365DevYouTube
• Link to all Microsoft Developer Community calls - https://aka.ms/M365DevCalls
• Submit questions for next community call - https://aka.ms/officeaddinsform
• Next community call – August 11th at 08:00am PDT - https://aka.ms/officeaddinscommunitycall

A

Hello: everyone 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 and our presenters for today joining us are juan balmari and ankush obroy.

A

We're going to be talking about shared mailboxes and outlook and also joining us is elizabeth, samuel who's going to show a new pnp sample that shows how to use the recipient's changed event in outlook.

A

If there's any questions we don't get to today, we post a blog summary of the call in the next week or two so keep an eye out for that. If there's anything, you want to follow up on from the questions.

A

So with that said, let's go ahead and jump into our first presentation uh from juan and on koosh.

B

Okay, let's get started all right. Thank you very much, hello. Everyone. Thank you very much for coming to our community call uh this time around. I'm gonna be talking a little bit about shared mailboxes in outlook.

B

First of all, I want to give you some context of this and why why I feel it's needed to have this conversation.

B

uh First of all, you know long time ago, like two years ago, in build, I know there was an ignite 2018. We actually announced the mailbox 1.8 release of the outlook, javascript api and, as part of that release, we announced uh support for shared folders back then 1.8. uh Basically, we were supporting. uh I think we were clear, but we didn't pass the message clearly to our community. What we claimed to support back then, was that we support uh shareholders and delegates or delegate scenarios.

B

No, so some a few people understood that there were shared mailbox support as well.

B

So the first thing that I want to clarify is that there are two different things in outlook uh very different, actually that uh that have similar names now, so one thing is to have a shared mailbox and another different things to have a shared folder. uh Just for you who probably don't know about this difference, uh the share, basically a shared folder or a delegate access.

B

It's the scenario where someone wants to explicitly share access to his or her folders with someone else like, for example, I want to give access to somebody to be scaling. You know appointments on my behalf or I need to. I have an assistant, and I want to give him or her access to to my my personal mailbox right, so that that's basically what we, what we are now supporting.

B

A very different scenario here is uh shared mailbox, so server mailbox are certainly locks that are set up by an admin, and basically the typical scenario is this: is multiple people accessing the same mailbox? Why? Because you have probably a sales account at your organization and you have a pool of people who are uh responding to the emails that that show up in that mailbox right.

B

So it's very different uh so share my box at that point we weren't supporting it, and so many people were trying it and were not successful uh to some degree using it no uh or we're confused about if we support it or not. uh So today I want to set the record straight and what's what we support, and then you probably have good news for everybody here so well, certainly in the shared mailbox contest.

B

Basically, what I'm going to tell you today is that we support shared mailboxes in preview starting today right and you can actually give it a try uh uh and when people create shared mailboxes and we we have with we've had talked with, probably with some of you in the call about this and with many customers.

B

There are a few design considerations, so the the typical way that you create a shared mailbox in exchange the admin goes and by default. What happens is that you create a shared mailbox in what we call an auto mapping mode, and what that means is that, basically uh there you go so this is. uh I am right now in exchange administration in the new ui, and if you see in the groups category, I have a shared mailbox here and also this is where an uh an exchange administrator actually uh creates and configures shared mailboxes.

B

So if I go inside of this guy, I can see that you know the the basics of the shared mailboxes, including who has access to it. What are the users that that I can actually include to access this shared mailbox and basically, when I, when I add members here what happens, is that by default it's auto mapping equals true, so basically, those users when they start outlook uh they're, basically just gonna, have access to the shared mailbox and it's gonna, be it's gonna, be looking like a separate mailbox uh in their outlook.

B

Ui right, unfortunately, for whatever reason, outlook is not loading right now for me for these profiles- and I cannot show you- I wouldn't want to show a demo here, but I I can't today, but it's basically just shows up now. One downside of of auto mapping is that it uses the same size limit of the user's profile mailbox. So basically your your ost file that I think has a limit of around 50 gigabytes of memory.

B

uh You know it the share mailbox space, it's going to be also eating from that size allocation. You have for your storage, so many people don't like this. No because usually shared mailboxes, I mean use, use a lot of space and they get a lot of communication here right. So the alternative to this is is to to create a shared mailbox without the mapping faults, automapping turned off so basically admin and there's kind of an obscure way to do this. There's no! It's not supported in the ui in exchange by the way.

B

If you want to do it, I have a link here that you can show you how to do it, but basically, and then the automapping is not going to work. So when you start outlook the auto mapping is, is not it's not going to work. um I was going to show you here.

B

As you can see, I have a shared mailbox here. Sales right- and it's just show up this- has the auto mapping option turned on and, as you can see, it just shows up in my list of mailboxes in outlook uh and again I bear with me because outlook is kind of buggy this morning, but uh this is a shared mailbox.

B

Okay, so when automapping is false, the user has to manually mount the mailbox. So it will not happen automatically when you start outlook, but you have to go follow a procedure. I sent a link here on how to create it now. The good news is that what we are announcing today on this call is that uh please try it so it's uh I think we we have uh kush within the call today uh helped to validate that. You know the shirt mailbox scenarios are working both for auto mapping or non-auto mapping cases.

B

So it's in preview right now. Okay, so we're determining it in preview. The preview uh is gonna work for windows, uh online and mac, so give it a try and all the platforms uh you don't need any manifest changes.

B

So if you can recall here, it's important, if you want your adding to show up in the context of a shared mailbox, please make sure to include the support, shared folder, manifest tag in order for your adding to show up in the shared mailbox, and the other thing that I that I, that it's uh you know as part of the shared folder feature that we shipped we provided you javascript api, that it's called get your properties async, where you can actually go and call it and then uh you know get the permissions of you know, get the information about the shared folder uh unshared mailbox.

B

Among other things, you can actually find out what types of permissions you have associated with this this mailbox and, of course, you can use the urls to make rest calls using the our rest apis all right. So and then, finally, we still have a few known issues so mature mailboxes is they have a property that you can actually hide them in the global access list. So if you decide to hide the shared mailbox, then that add-ins are not going to be supported in that case.

B

So if the hidden, we don't support add-ins when the shareball share mailbox is hidden in the global access list. Basically the item is going to be. No, that's one thing that it's a known issue, uh the second known issue, and it's not an issue really, but it's just for for your information. Is that there's another type of of of mailboxes that we know as group mailboxes.

B

Basically, when you create new groups and teams within outlook, we still don't support uh add-ins in that type of mailbox. So, and I see we have a few questions in the chat, uh ibt kun, uh how? How are you uh supports for yes, event, driven add-ins, you know all the events are supposed to work, also in shared mailboxes.

B

Yes, henry we're using event driven now it's called with your mailbox yeah. You got my you got my my love there with that comment, uh but anyways just the idea is that you give it a try and if there are any so the call to action. Folks, uh please hear is that.

B

uh Let me see if I can do that demo later today, uh so please give it a share mailbox a try today uh add the entry on the manifest, try it across platforms and if you find an issue we are at this point super interested in hearing about it.

B

So please go to our issues in github and report an issue around this, and we will immediately engage with you and find out what's going on um right, so, okay, so dustin is asking about all the ma all the new mac, yes 1.8, uh the requirements 1.8 is supported in both the old and the new mac experiences.

B

So we will follow up with your comment that gets shared properties is undefined. uh Thank you for for mentioning that ah there you go okay, public folders next after groups gary. Thank you for asking that wait. Let's talk about it, I it's not in the backlog. Currently, this is what we have right now, but we can certainly take a look into that all right.

B

So that's basically what I have for you guys today. Thank you very much for for listening, david.

A

Yeah, thank you. So next up elizabeth will be talking about the new pnp sample recipients changed event.

C

Good day, everyone or good night, depending on where you are so I'm going to chat about a pnp that I worked on, that's mostly showcasing the message: recipient change event that we have in outlook that's currently in preview on the event-based activation feature, a few things about the pmp itself. So the key features, as I mentioned, is about the event based activation feature on message, recipients, change and we're also using the preview object. That's the session data property bag and a feature: that's been there from 1.9 requirements set, which is apparent.

C

The event that actually this event particularly activates on messages during compost mode. There are new messages. There are replies, they're, empowered, um including replies and palettes. It does not include if you're editing the clients that support this are currently the web browser, and so I'm going to share my screen now, so you can see how that works.

C

Okay, so what's happening here is: I am going to side load.

C

The add-in from the pmp repo.

C

Okay, add from url- and this is directly from the raw url on the repo okay, all right here we go right now, I'm going to do a new message and I'm going to turn on devtools console.

C

So hopefully you can see what's going on with that all right, so let's say we have okay.

C

uh So, as you can see the external tag popped up here and basically I added a whole bunch of vlogging, so you can see really easily what's been happening. This is the method we were in. This is the event object that came back the big event, which shows that in the change recipients we only um then you do some other stuff. This kind of shows that hey at some time, so it's an external user and that I set the session data object to proof.

C

Let's see we had no subject so it was empty, but then we added the tag and set disclaimer. So that's another thing that this does, which is why we do append on send when we actually send this, it should add a disclaimer. So let's say that.

C

All right now, let's remove key, and what we should see is that external goes away from the subject and you notice that played this game. I'm going to put k back.

C

Right back again and let's send it now in sent, we have our disclaimer yeah k is not real, so all right, so the portion here is that this image includes external recipients.

C

This also works in the cc field, vcc view. So we have it checking all those fields in case the recipients change there. Like I mentioned it, it works and replies and reply all of these forward things, and it also all right. So um it does work in windows. So please do try it out. So now what I'm going to do is switch to visual studio code. So you can see what the code looks like.

C

Okay, so in the manifest um there are certain key things that you need to include.

C

For example, you need to include this runtimes node here and define the html file, the location, that's going to be used by owa um or outlook on the web and the override is the javascript link, the link to the javascript file that will be used in outlook on windows.

C

So that's defined later on in the url section, so you'll see webview runtime url is the html and the js1 is the giveaway. You also need to define the launch event that you're supporting. So, as I mentioned in this case, we are talking about we're, supporting or handling the on message recipients change handler.

C

The name of the function in the file is called this tag external and so now I'm going to switch and then, of course here we have the extended permission for append on set because we're using that as well, so in commands.html, this is used by outlook on the web and you'll notice here that we're using the beta version of officejs, because these events, the support for this event, is not yet in the production js and this points to the command gs.

C

So windows directly comes here and over ends up having it go through the html. So we have an associate statement here. That then says: okay from the manifest. This was what we called it. You do not have to call it the same thing. You could call it something else, but this is the association we're making here in the javascript file.

C

So now I'll go back up to the top, and here is our handler.

C

So in a handler it is possible for you to have multiple at least right now, it's possible for you to have multiple fields come back as true at once, um particularly on windows. Right now, so on reply it may come back and say: well, oh you have stuff in the two and the cc, so they both come back as true um for now all right, so in the one that handles two they're, all pretty similar.

C

All that changes is if you're getting your two recipients on the cco, and so basically we say: well, okay, it changed. So let's go get the two recipients and check to see if they have any external users for the purpose of this pmp and to keep it a little simpler. I'm only checking if the recipient type is actually tagged as external user, but depending on how you're implementing it, you may actually want to check for your domain or some other criteria to determine if a user is external to your organization or not.

C

But this was simply so that you can see how you might do it. So if we determine that it does have an external user. However, you define that then we set the session data to true for the to field and if it's not, then we set it to false.

C

So you also get to see how the session data works. So then we have a version of that for the ccc, the cc, sorry and the bcc okay. So, in the set session data method, we then set it to the key and the appropriate value.

C

um If it turns out that the value was true, then we actually just immediately go ahead and tag the subject with the external flag and we um call append on send and tag external. If, however, it ends up being false, then it's possible that the other fields had already been noted as being true. So we go ahead and check the session bag to see. If anything says it was true, and if at least something says it's true, then we go ahead and call tag external.

C

But if, at that point everything says we're false, we go to tag external and say nothing's external go ahead and remove any flag. That's there and clear the disclaimer would append on set. So now in tag external. We say: okay, if it's true then have external. Let's do all that awesome stuff, depending on the subject and if it's false, then we go ahead and trim out the subject, all that good stuff, and then we clear the disclaimer.

C

So that's pretty much the pnp as it stands. I have not been keeping track of the messages, so let me go check that now, but that's pretty much what the pnp entails. So I hope you are going to try it and play around with it and let us know if you have any feedback about that.

C

Thank you so much for your attention.

A

Yeah, thank you. I just kind of want to do a little segway. What elizabeth was talking about with the sample just point out kind of a few other pnp updates just kind of minor news items. Let me minimize this here, so I want to let folks know that we've moved the sso samples.

A

So if you're looking for like the outlook at an sso office at an asp.net sso, these used to be separate, repos we've combined them into pnp, so we can consolidate and track all of the information and issues about any of these samples in one location just makes things easier for everybody, and we also did some updates to these, so they should all have like you know, latest packages and things like that when they're running so take a look if you're looking for them, the old repos actually just will point you here, so um so nobody should get lost and another thing I wanted to point out.

A

Elizabeth was showing this uh in the sample that uh elizabeth is showing like, and this is something we're doing with a lot of the pnp samples. Is we're moving them to not have yo office projects or big project builds around them? Instead, they're just hosted on github through github pages, which means you can take like this manifest and just side load it, and it just runs. You don't have to go through a whole build process.

A

We're finding this just simplifies things so really the code you're going to see here is just more of the sample code. Not a lot of project code also helps us because we don't have to keep tracking down all the security alerts that pop up on the packages that you always have to round have in all these big sort of node js kind of builds. So hopefully that makes it easier for folks.

B

By the way, david, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we can do the demo of the share mailbox review if you have some time for us. Thank you. Oh.

A

Yeah, we definitely have time. Do you want to do that right now,.

B

Sure so uncle she's here in the call and kush if you want to share the demo, would be awesome.

D

I'll go ahead and present my screen uh so yeah here. Basically, I'm logged in as adele as a part of an organization, and here on the left-hand side, the sales and marketing is a shared mailbox that my admin created.

D

uh This shared mailbox that was created has the default auto mapping set to true. So what that basically means is once I have been granted permissions to the shared mailbox after a couple of hours when the permissions trickle down as soon as I reboot outlook, this shared mailbox is automatically visible as an end user. I didn't have to physically go into file options or what have you to add the shared mailbox?

D

um I also have script lab installed for my own profile, so here I'm currently looking at an email that was sent to me. So, as was the case with shared folders, if I go ahead, run the delegate sample from script lab and just do a simple get properties async, which is what this does. Is I get an error message that you need to try the sample on a shared item now.

D

Similarly, if I run the same test against an email on the shared mailbox that I was granted access to, since this is considered a shared item, as was the case which had folders I'm able to get the shared properties with who the owner of the item is, what's the target rest url and the target mailbox that I need to point to in order to construct the rest url make the rest calls if I want to have any rest apis, and here I'm going to run the whole operation, which would basically get a callback token with is rest marked as true construct the full url to get to this item id and return the whole item as an object secure.

D

As we can see, um this call completely succeeded, so in terms of functionality, it should behave the same way as shared folders has been supported up until now.

D

That being said, one caveat, though, is for the case when auto mapping is off, the shared mailbox will not be automatically loaded in your mailbox. The only supported way today in outlook to mount a shared mailbox is actually going into file your account settings. This is your main profile. You hit change, more settings advanced and add. This is where you will add a shared mailbox from if the auto mapping field was um set as false, when the shared mailbox was created by the admin one.

D

Another thing that you can note is because this current shared mailbox that was added in my profile called sales and marketing was with auto mapping. True, it does not show up in this dialog box for open these additional mailboxes.

D

What that means is, if I were to ever, go and remove this from my profile for say the reasons like juan pointed out that it's using too much space for my pst or what have you an admin intervention is required because I physically have no way to remove a shared mailbox for which the automation was set. As true, that is all there is to sharing my boxes.

B

Yeah, thank you very much. uh Hopefully folks, try it and let us know how it is working for you. That's it regarding share mailboxes. Thank you very much ankush for showing the demo back to you, david.

A

Cool, thank you very much for that, so I just wanted to do our community spotlight and send out a thank you to folks that have been helping in the community. So thank you to james wayne, who presented last month on our community, call showing the exclaimer outlook add-in that they put together that works with signature. I put the link here to the youtube video.

A

We recorded that and put it out there if you want to check it out in case you missed it, take a look and then I want to go through some q, a that came up. So these are questions that were submitted through our office add-ins form. So I want to take some time to answer these and then, if you want to ask questions on the next call I'll share a link to that on the last slide here soon. So our first question was we're on the onsen event.

A

I was asking: can some additional handling be added around failure cases for an add-in that uses the onsen event? We have a scenario where, if an onsen add-in failed due to a service outage, for example, the host for the service went down temporarily, users would be unable to send emails unless an admin did a company-wide deactivation of the add-in be helpful to let end users still send their emails if the onsen add-in has failed to load or throw in an unhandled exception.

A

So that's by design for the onset event, as it was designed a couple years ago, as part of the 1.8 requirement set. So the good news is, the team is working on enabling a new flavor of the event that will deal with the added unavailable cases and we're working to get this into preview soon. So just keep an eye out on some future community calls for more info. On that a couple more questions they came in. We had a lot of outlook questions coming in so this next question is also outlook.

A

At the moment on the ios and android platforms, you only support outlook api 1.5. Do you think we'll see support for 1.6 before 2022, so we do have that on the backlog, but unfortunately we don't have an eta yet on what exactly that's coming out? Also outlook mobile still does not support compose mode add-ins or the onsen event after many years of community requests to do so.

A

It was a highly requested feature in the user voice system when will outlook mobile support both of these and how did the exclaimer add in from the june, 2021 community call work on the outlook mobile without support for closed mode add-ins. um So this is another thing, that's also on the backlog and we just don't have an eta for it. Yet, with regard to the disclaimer demo, I I have to go back and look. I don't remember if they were showing this running on outlook mobile.

A

um If, if they were, we could try to follow up and find out if they had some kind of work around.

B

No there's I can tell you that there's there was no. There was. There was some work they were doing on the back end. It's not it's not anything working there. Okay, yeah, sorry to chime in, but just to clarify that that's.

A

Helpful, thank you one um and then finally, there's a question on if there's a way to write a csv file to the local computer, where the add-on is running so basically ideas like you're in excel, and you want to save some data to a csv file from your add-in this. As far as I know, this isn't possible because office add-ins run in a browser, runtime, so they're, just like any web app, that's running a browser. You can only do what the browser is going to allow you to do so.

A

There isn't really a way to write to the disk. You can read files by popping up a dialog, and if the user selects a file, you can go read that file, but writing to it in general, isn't going to work.

A

What I would recommend is looking into using stuff, like microsoft, graph and onedrive to save files, because you can call into graph in onedrive and interact with files there. I will do a double check with the team. Just make sure I'm not missing something. This is one of those like I'm 99 sure it works. This way just be sure, I'm not maybe there was some api I wasn't aware of, but uh and if that's the case, I'll update it in the blog post we put out afterwards.

A

So that was the questions we had come in. I just wanted to say: if you're new to office add-ins on this call and looking for information on getting started, we do have five minute. Quick starts. You can go to the aka dot. Ms link there that goes to office dash had.

C

A

In and that takes your documentation and we have a variety of five minute- quick starts for excel and outlook and uh other platforms so definitely go check that out. We also have additional developer resources. I highly recommend getting a subscription to the microsoft 365 developer program that first aka link. There gives you a free tenant for developing and testing your add-ins, and it's I use it all the time. It's highly useful. You can also check out script lab at the ak link there.

A

That will allow you to load snippets and run them in the context of an office host, but you don't have to go set up a development environment. You just run them which is kind of nice. It's also a nice way just to kind of test out code without having to go set up a project, a link to our office adams, documentation.

A

If you want to engage with us, I I'm going to jump to the bottom of this, because I saw someone was asking the chat about hey. Where do we send our requests and ideas uh now that user voice is no longer where we're doing stuff? So, there's a link there for feature request ideas to an aka, ms and 365 dev suggestions, and you can create ideas there and we'll monitor those and then back to the top of that.

A

If you have any technical questions about the office javascript api or if you have technical questions about developing office add-ins, we have a microsoft q, a site. You can go to there's two links there for that or you can go to stackoverflow.com and there's the various tags you can use there for different parts of the add-ins and if you find a something that looks like a bug, let us know on the officejs repo on the office.org in github.

A

I think that brings us to the end. So I just want to say thank you, everyone for attending we'll post, a recording of the demos and of this call in the next couple of weeks, microsoft, community channel, which is actually where these will go. So you can also follow us on twitter at microsoft, 365 dev and the next call will be coming up. Second wednesday of august, the 11th at 8 a.m: pacific daylight time.

A

There's a link there to the call, and if you have any questions please let us know on the office add-ins form, there's the aka link there and we will address those in the q a on the next call.

A

So with that, thank you, everyone for attending, and we will see you on the next call.