SharePoint Development Community (PnP) – October 2018 update

SharePoint team

October 9th, 2018 0

SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) October 2018 update is out with a summary of the latest guidance, samples, and solutions from SharePoint engineering or from the community for the community. This article is a summary of all the different areas and topics around SharePoint Dev ecosystem during the past month.

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP)?

SharePoint / Office Dev Patterns and Practices

SharePoint PnP is a nick-name for SharePoint Dev Ecosystem activities coordinated by SharePoint engineering. SharePoint PnP is community driven open source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for SharePoint and Office 365. Active development and contributions happen in GitHub by providing contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation.

PnP is owned and coordinated by SharePoint engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community. The initiative is currently facilitated by Microsoft, but already at this point, we have multiple community members as part of the PnP Core team (see team details in end of the article) and we are looking to extend the Core team with more community members.

Notice that since this is open source community initiative, there’s no SLAs for the support for the samples provided through GitHub. Obviously, all officially released components and libraries are under official support from Microsoft. You can use the SharePoint Developer group in the Microsoft Tech Community for providing input and to ask any questions about the existing materials.

Some key statistics around SharePoint Developer topics from September 2018

  • GitHub repository forks at most popular repositories in SharePoint GitHub organization
  • Unique visitors during the past 2 weeks in SharePoint organization repositories – 41,707
  • Merged pull requests across SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 5,491
  • Closed issues and enhancements ideas cross SharePoint repositories (cumulative) – 4,777
  • SharePoint Online CSOM NuGet package downloads (cumulative) – 697,762
  • Page views in SharePoint Dev pages at docs.microsoft.com – 884,179
  • Unique tenants using PnP components – 18,785
  • Http requests towards SharePoint Online from PnP components (CSOM Core, PowerShell, PnP JS Core) – 13,258,710,055
  • SharePoint Dev YouTube channel had 32,230 views with 189,364 minutes of watch time

Main resources around SharePoint PnP and SharePoint development

October 2018 monthly community call

Agenda for the Tuesday 9th of October 2018 SharePoint Dev Ecosystem / Patterns and Practices community call at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CEST:

  • Monthly summary of SharePoint Development topics – Latest SharePoint roadmap and community news – Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) ~20 min
  • Demo – Preview of SharePoint Framework 1.7 capabilities – Pat Miller (Microsoft) ~15 min
  • Demo – Branding and Site Script announcements from Ignite – Sean Squires (Microsoft) ~15 min
  • Q&A

Monthly community call will get recorded and release to PnP YouTube channel typically within 24 hours after the recording is ended. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please participate in our discussions in the Microsoft Tech Community under SharePoint developer group.

SharePoint Dev Blog posts

Here are the latest blog posts and announcements around SharePoint development topics from developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/blogs

PnP Community Calls

SharePoint Dev community has 3 different recurrent community calls, which you can choose to participate based on your interest and availability. All calls are recorded and published in the SharePoint Dev YouTube channel typically within the following 24 hours after the call.

If you are interested in doing a live demo of your solution or sample in these calls, please do reach out to the PnP Core Team members (contacts later in this post). These are great opportunities to gain visibility for example for existing MVPs or for community members who would like to be MVPs in the future.

SharePoint Dev Ecosystem in GitHub

There are quite a few different GitHub repositories under the SharePoint brand since we wanted to ensure that you can easily find and reuse what’s relevant to you. We do also combine multiple solutions to one repository so that you can more easily sync and get the latest changes to our released guidance and samples.

PnP specific repositories – solution designs and tooling

  • PnP – Main repository for SP add-in, Microsoft Graph etc. samples
  • PnP-Sites-Core – Office Dev PnP Core component
  • PnP-PowerShell – Office Dev PnP PowerShell Cmdlets
  • PnP-Tools – Tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro’s and for on-premises for SP2013 and SP2016
  • PnP-Partner-Pack – Packaged guidance with detailed instructions on setting things up in Office 365 and in Azure.
  • PnP-Transformation – Material specifically for the transformation process. Currently, includes samples around InfoPath replacement and transformation tooling from farm solutions to add-in model.
  • PnP-Provisioning-Schema – PnP Provisioning engine schema repository
  • PnP-IdentityModel – Open source replacement of Microsoft.IdentityModel.Extensions.dll

Repositories in the PnP organization

  • PnPjs – PnPjs Framework repository
  • o365 CLI – Cross-OS command line interface to manage Office 365 tenant settings
  • generator-spfx – Open-source Yeoman generator which extends the out-of-the-box Yeoman generator for SharePoint with additional capabilities

What’s supportability story around PnP material?

Following statements apply across all of the PnP samples and solutions, including samples, core component(s) and solutions, like SharePoint Starter Kit.

  • PnP guidance and samples are created by Microsoft & by the Community
  • PnP guidance and samples are maintained by Microsoft & community
  • PnP uses supported and recommended techniques
  • PnP implementations are reviewed and approved by Microsoft engineering
  • PnP is an open-source initiative by the community – people who work on the initiative for the benefit of others, have their normal day job as well
  • PnP is NOT a product and therefore it’s not supported by Premier Support or other official support channels
  • PnP is supported in similar ways as other open source projects done by Microsoft with support from the community by the community
  • There are numerous partners that utilize PnP within their solutions for customers. Support for this is provided by the Partner. When PnP material is used in deployments, we recommend being clear with your customer/deployment owner on the support model

Area-specific updates

SharePoint Starter Kit

SP Starter Kit

SharePoint Starter Kit demonstrates how to extend out of the box modern experiences in the SharePoint. It demonstrates multiple different techniques and uses different patterns and practices to build end-to-end demonstration solution which can be provisioned to any Office 365 tenant. It contains for example following capabilities, which you can learn from or use them as your reference:

  • How to provision site collections using PowerShell
  • How to apply content and layouts to site collections
  • How to create and use Site Designs and Site Scripts
  • How to build custom web parts and extensions for your deployment
  • 15 different ready to use web parts
  • 7 different extensions
  • Hub site configuration
  • 3 site collections
  • Automated provisioning of the whole solution with PnP Provisioning engine
  • etc. etc. etc.

Following are the key changes in the Starter Kit since the previous monthly summary

  • New v1.3 release of the Starter Kit updated to use SharePoint Framework 1.6 (we will be aligning the versions in future)
  • Updated branding to align on the Contoso Electronics theme which Microsoft used in Ignite 2018
  • Updated and simplified provisioning logic which uses new hierarchy provisioning capabilities. This means that the PnP Provisioning file (pnp file) contains all needed configurations which are automatically applied on the tenant where the solution is deployed – Notice that this requires PnP PowerShell October 2018 release.

We do welcome contributions on this open-source community project.

SharePoint development samples

These are samples which are available from the SharePoint client-side web part sample repository at https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts or from the SharePoint Framework Extensions repository at https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-extensions.

Web parts

  • New sample js-dynamic-bundling-libraries showing how to dynamically and asynchronously load the needed bundles on runtime to increase the performance of the component
  • New sample react-graph-personalemail showing how to access Microsoft Graph for showing latest emails for the person. This web part originates from SharePoint Starter Kit
  • New sample react-facebook-plugin showing how to implement iFrame-based web parts with dynamic responsive behavior on the example of Facebook Page Social Plugin
  • Numerous other updates on updating solutions to the latest version and other adjustments

SharePoint Framework Extensions

  • New sample react-command-share-pnpjs demonstrating how to use PnPjs in a list view command set to provide enhanced sharing capability
  • Numerous other updates on updating solutions to the latest version and other adjustments

Other samples and solutions

Other open-source projects and assets

  • Reusable SharePoint Framework controls – Reusable controls for SharePoint Framework web part and extension development. Separate projects for React content controls and Property Pane controls for web parts. These controls are using Office UI Fabric React controls under the covers and they are SharePoint aware to increase the productivity of developers.
  • Office 365 CLI – Using the Office 365 CLI, you can manage your Microsoft Office 365 tenant and SharePoint Framework projects on any platform. See release notes for the latest updates.
  • PnPJs – PnPJs encapsulates SharePoint REST APIs and provides a fluent and easily usable interface for querying data from SharePoint sites. It’s a replacement of already deprecated pnp-js-core library. See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP Provisioning Engine and PnP CSOM Core – PnP provisioning engine is part of the PnP CSOM extension. They encapsulate complex business driven operations behind easily usable API surface, which extends out-of-the-box CSOM NuGet packages. See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP PowerShell – PnP PowerShell cmdlets are open-source complement for the SharePointOnlinee cmdlets. There are more than 300 different cmdlets to use and you can use them to manage tenant settings or to manipulate actual SharePoint sites. They See changelog for the latest updates.
  • List formatting definitions – Community contributed samples around the column and view formatting in GitHub.
  • Site Designs and Site Scripts – Community contributed samples around SharePoint Site Designs and Site Scripts in GitHub.

SharePoint Dev articles

SharePoint Dev articles are surfaced at docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev. ´Since the last release, we have now merged also SharePoint PnP Solution guidance to docs.microsoft.com platform, so you’ll only have one location to follow all relevant SharePoint Dev documentation and guidance. You can provide contributions to these documents by submitting documentation improvements using GitHub tooling. All of the SharePoint Dev docs are stored and surfaced from the sp-dev-docs repository.

Here are new/updated articles on the SharePoint Development.

SharePoint Dev YouTube video channel

You can find all SharePoint Dev videos on our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/spdev-videos. This location contains already a significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos, and community call recordings.

Key contributors to the October 2018 update

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) since last release details in SharePoint Dev repositories or community channels. PnP is really about building tooling and knowledge together with the community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued across the Office 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.

Thank you for your assistance and contributions on behalf of the community. You are making a difference!

Companies: Here’s the companies, which provided support for PnP initiative for this month by allowing their employees working for the benefit of others in the PnP initiative. There were also people who contributed from other companies during last month, but we did not get their logos and approval to show them in time for these communications. If you still want your logo for this month’s release, please let us know and share the logo with us. Thx.

2toLead aequos Arvo Systems   Catapult Systems ClearPeople  CPS    DMI    EG A/S   Mavention piasys   Puzzlepart onebit software  Rapid Circlerencore  SharePointalist   Sogeti  Stefan BauerSympraxis Consulting Valo  Voitanos

Microsoft people: Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved with the PnP work during last month.

SharePoint PnP Core Team

SharePoint PnP Core team manages SharePoint PnP community work in the GitHub and also coordinates different open-source projects around SharePoint development topics. PnP Core Team members have a significant impact on driving adoption of the Office 365 and SharePoint development topics. They have shown their commitment to the open-source and community driven work by constantly contributing for the benefit of the others in the community. Thank you for all that you do!

Here are the Microsoft Internal PnP Core team members:

Next steps

  • October 2018 monthly community call is on Tuesday 9th of October at 8 AM PST / 5 PM CEST / 4 PM GMT for latest release details with demos – Download recurrent invite to monthly community call with a detailed schedule for your time zone from http://aka.ms/sppnp-call.

Learn, Reuse, Share - aka.ms/sppnp

 

“Sharing is caring”

 

SharePoint Team, Microsoft – 9th of October 2018

SharePoint team

Read next

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Brian T. Jackett
October 30, 2018

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