Latest Microsoft 365 topics

I’m excited to share this latest update to my course, Mastering the SharePoint Framework for developers. Today’s update, packaged as sprint 13, includes two new chapters and a few updates… and it’s a huge release… the biggest yet adding over 3 hours of new content!

Sprint 13 also marks a milestone: the Fundamentals Bundle of the course is now content complete! This means all planned chapters are now published. I will continue to make edits to existing chapters updating content when circumstances warrant, but at this time no new chapters or lessons are planned.

A few months ago, we partnered up with Rencore on their third annual State of SharePoint and Office 365 customizations survey. The point of this survey was to learn and share how customers were customizing SharePoint & Office 365.

Today, continuing our partnership, I’m launching the first annual comprehensive State of SharePoint Development survey. This survey is for developers with the goal of obtaining and sharing the technical state of SharePoint developers around the world. The findings of this survey will then be summarized into a report that provides valuable insights.

Microsoft gives us a few options for managing our SharePoint Online environments. We can use the SharePoint Admin center, REST APIs, the CSOM and the SharePoint Online PowerShell. To fill the gaps, the SharePoint PnP group has created PowerShell cmdlets that cover additional tasks not covered by the Microsoft provided PowerShell. While these are good options, they aren’t very friendly to those who aren’t on the Windows platform. These two PowerShell options don’t leverage the cross-platform PowerShell, rather they are only available for the Windows platform.

Ever wonder how your organization compares with other organizations in the same space? Have you sat at your desk and thought “I wonder if the challenges we are facing are the same as what others in the industry are facing?”

Now is your chance to find out!

I’m teaming up with Rencore this year to co-host two surveys.

State of SharePoint & Office 365 Customizations 2018 Survey

In this first survey by Rencore, you can share some information about your organization (anonymously of course) and learn how your organization compares to others in the industry on topics such as:

I’m sitting here with a smile on my face as I sit back in these last few days of 2017, reflecting on the previous year and looking forward to next year. It’s been quite a ride, finally getting Voitanos off the ground and working up production. While the stakes are not comparable, I cannot help but see similarities with my experience this past year and what Tesla has been doing with their Model 3 sedan. From delays in the ramp up, to launch and now working through issues to increase production and output, I’m working through similar things at Voitanos on a much smaller scale.

Many developers picking up the SharePoint Framework are coming from a traditional SharePoint development background. Some of these people server-side developers primarily who may have some client-side development experience while others may have been customizing SharePoint using client-side development techniques for a while.

In the most recent SharePoint Patterns & Practices - JavaScript Special Interest Group meeting, Microsoft shared some news on the SharePoint Framework. The news fell into three buckets:

• Recent Updates
• Update on SPFx Modern UI Extensions
• SharePoint Framework Engineering Backlog

Recent Updates

The big news that in the last few weeks Microsoft introduced a new, and often requested, feature for SPFx: **tenant-scoped deployment for SPFx client-side web parts and extensions. This means addins or extensions can be deployed to all sites within your tenant just a single time!

Today Microsoft announced new updates coming to the SharePoint Framework ahead of their sessions at the Build Conference. In a blog post, Build integrated user experiences with new capabilities of SharePoint and OneDrive, they talked about four big additions that engineering is working on and will make it into a new developer preview of the SharePoint Framework by the end of May 2017.

So… what’s new you ask? Some of these things were teased up a bit in the last SharePoint JavaScript/SPFx PnP SIG meeting that I covered in a previous blog post.

In last week’s SharePoint Framework & JavaScript Special Interest Group meeting, Microsoft’s Vesa Juvonen shared what’s the engineering team at Microsoft is working on and more!

Updated SharePoint Framework Yeoman Generator

In early April, Microsoft quietly shipped two updates to the Yeoman generator for the SharePoint Framework, @microsoft/generator-sharepoint. The latest version is v1.0.2. The updates were fairly minor… I recently blogged about what you will find in the updates and how I figured out what the updates were as they aren’t well documented: SharePoint Framework Generator Updated to v1.0.2.

Did you know the SharePoint team at Microsoft updated the Yeoman generator, @microsoft/generator-sharepoint, twice in the last month? Yeah… I didn’t either until yesterday.

The final version was released on February 23, 2017, as version 1.0.0. They then slipped two more updates in early April in quick succession as versions 1.0.1 & 1.0.2. Unfortunately, Microsoft still hasn’t published the repo for the generator or made the homepage for it in the NPMJS registry of any use… just some boilerplate copy… so it’s not easy to figure out what’s changed.

Earlier this week I presented a session at the Atlanta SharePoint User Group on Building Client Side Web Parts with the SharePoint Framework. I had my session planned well in advance, out but wanted to build the demos while they were fresh in my head. Last week I was out of work mode with my family relaxing on a beach in Mexico for Spring Break, so I planned to do build my demos yesterday morning, on Sunday. While we were supposed to return home Saturday night, we missed our international connection and got stuck overnight, not making it home until about 12pm EDT Sunday.

Yesterday Microsoft announced that the SharePoint Framework has reached the Generally Available milestone. That means we’re at v1! The development tools have been updated to v1 and the v1 bits are rolling out to Office 365 SharePoint Online tenants now. Microsoft said it will take about a week or so for it to reach all Office 365 tenancies.

You can get the details of this update from their wiki page in the main sp-dev-docs repo. So what change from RC0 to GA?

Last week I was in New Orleans presenting at the Nintex InspireX conference on building apps using the microservice approach with containers and Docker. During that week I sat down with Jeremy Thake of Hyperfish to talk about the SharePoint Framework and what it means for end users of SharePoint.

During this discussion we discussed:

• what is the new SharePoint Framework
• how the SharePoint Framework will effect the SharePoint user experience
• some tips on how to keep up with the SharePoint Framework

You can listen to the whole discussion on the Hypefish podcast.

If you are a SharePoint developer doing any work in SharePoint Online and you have held out on taking a look at the SharePoint Framework, now is a good time to start taking a look. We are currently at the release candidate 0 (RC0) and in the coming weeks, we can expect to see the generally available (GA) release. This release will support client-side web parts as Microsoft wanted to make sure they got that capability perfected… but they won’t stop there!