This month’s Office 365 Dev Digest was written by Jeremy Thake, technical product manager for the Office 365 Dev team.
Welcome to the ninth edition of Dev Digest, designed to help you—the Office 365 developer—keep up to date with what’s new in Office 365 development.
This week has been an exciting week, with the Microsoft Graph being announced as generally available. It’s a great time for developers to start exploring our production ready APIs and also to start experimenting with the new APIs that have been introduced into Preview. There is a ton of great content published on the Connect(); Channel 9 site that can be consumed in video format too.
I have attended some hackathon events this month that produced some exciting results. Check out the submissions from the European SharePoint Conference in Stockholm, the AngularConnect conference in London and DevIntersections in Amsterdam.
I encourage you all to engage with us on the Office 365 Technical Network with your questions.
Dev documentation
The Microsoft Content Publishing team works hard producing documentation to help developers learn our platform. Here are the key new and updated articles for this month:
Microsoft Graph
Office add-ins
- Office add-in requirement sets
- Best practices for developing Office add-ins
- Add license checks to Office and SharePoint add-ins
- Office and SharePoint add-in license XML schema structure
- Validation policies for apps and add-ins submitted to the Office Store (version 1.9)
Office 365 APIs
- New:
- Updates to:
New OneDrive SDKs are available for:
For more documentation check out Office developer documentation.
Code samples
Our team is continually on the lookout for new code samples to help you jump-start your own projects. Here is a list of the most recent new and updated samples from Microsoft as well as the dev community.
- Repo Report—Repo Report is an Outlook add-in made with Angular that scans your emails for GitHub repository links and displays information about the ones it finds.
- OneDriveAPIBrowser—A Windows Forms app that allows you to browse your OneDrive files and metadata. This sample uses the OneDrive SDK for C#.
Most recent Office 365 Dev podcasts
Since joining Microsoft last year, I have been running around campus interviewing people about various dev topics. If you would like to hear me interview someone on a particular topic, please submit your suggestions in the Yammer group, and I’ll go hunt the relevant people down to interview.
Here are the most recent podcast interviews:
- Episode 068 on the Angular Connect event
- Episode 069 with Bradly Green on AngularJS
- Episode 070 at the MVP Summit
- Episode 071 on the PNP Partner Pack with Paolo Pialorsi
- Episode 072 on SharePoint dev with Chris O’Brien
For more podcasts check out dev.office.com/podcasts.
Patterns and practices
The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working hard to release samples to show the power of SharePoint add-ins, and we have started to grow the program to other topics as well. Don’t forget to join the monthly community calls to hear the updates from them directly with demos on latest released samples and solutions.
Here are the latest updates from the team:
- PnP November 2015 monthly release notes at dev.office.com.
- PnP November 2015 community call recording at Channel 9.
- New weekly PnP webcast series released with following recordings now available:
- Numerous updates and new articles to PnP section in MSDN at OfficeDevPnPMSDN.
For more on patterns and practices, check out dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices. All questions related on released materials and guidance can be added to our Yammer group at OfficeDevPnPYammer.
Dev community blog posts
The Office 365 dev community has been busy this month. It is exciting to see the effort people put into their posts in their spare time to share with the community.
Check out these articles from the Microsoft field, MVPs and more:
- Social Share makes it easy to distribute slides and decks to more people through social networks
- Getting started with yo office for web dev n00bs
- Simplifying Office 365 Unified API calls with Postman and OAuth 2
- Update 4 on Office 365 unified API
- Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices—November 2015 release
- Office add-in with Knockout.js
- Outlook REST API changes to beta endpoint: Part II
- Update 2 on the Office 365 unified API
- Add-in command sample
- App registration tool
- Retrieving posts from blogs available in Delve with Office 365 REST API
- com/OfficeDev/SayMyName-Mail-add-in
- com/thm1118/Provider-Host-App-java-Sharepoint-OnPremise-HighTrust
- $ yo office v0.4 released
- Implementing admin consent in multi-tenant Office 365 applications using implicit OAuth flow
- Versioning SharePoint add-ins in your VSO Scripted build
- Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices graphics presentation
- Two practical things about the new Group Files API
- Office Dev Show—Episode 17: Grace Hopper Celebration
- Office Dev Show—Episode 16: Getting Started with Android Studio
- Display Events from an Outlook Calendar in SharePoint using Office 365 APIs
- The new Office—October feature update
Office Store
First, some news: the Store is revamping its merchandizing algorithm to improve relevance and accuracy of top results—and is planning to roll out features that better spotlight our top-ranked solutions and Office App Award winners. Stay tuned for more info on this in the next month or so.
Next, pay a visit to betterwith.office.com to see the latest version of our customer evidence videos. We have just published our first in a series of education-focused videos with a look at how a Florida aeronautics school uses Poll Everywhere in the classroom.
Meanwhile, developers have published a raft of top-quality new add-ins and web apps in the Store—nearly two dozen in the last month have won top or near-top ratings from the Store Validation team for performance, business value, ease of use and other metrics. Some of our longtime partners, like Smartsheet, DocuSign, PayPal, Salesforce, iGlobe and Sensei, published updates that also won top marks.
Some of the top new entries include:
Smart Connect for Oracle Sales Cloud
By InvisibleSolutions
This free Outlook add-in instantly connects Exchange and Office 365 with the Oracle Sales Cloud.
SPZip Lib
By ItsZap Inc.
SPZip Lib is a paid SharePoint add-in utility (with a free trial) that allows users to download files or folders from SharePoint as a ZIP file. It’s offered in several languages and is one of a half-dozen Store add-ins by this developer.
BeyondCore Analyst for Office
By BeyondCore (with a second add-in for Outlook)
This ISV has produced two top add-ins that help users with one-click statistical analysis and validation with explanatory text right within the body of the Office document. This version works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint; a second version works with Outlook.
Other highly regarded new offerings include:
- Goodpoint CSV Uploader—A SharePoint add-in that enables users to export CSV files into SharePoint lists.
- Sharefile Connector for Office 365—Enables users to access and edit SharePoint and OneDrive for Business accounts from Sharefile, enabling greater organizational flexibility on where to store files.
- Sage Live Reporter—The latest addition to the Sage accounting-system family of add-ins that enables users to do financial reporting within Excel, based on objects in their Sage Live application.
- Annotate by NomisClature, which enables users of Word and Excel to annotate sections of their documents with text, images, videos, lists and links.
- Jedox Social Analytics for Excel—Lets users analyze data from Twitter with the help of the Jedox GPU Accelerator. Includes geographic analysis and provides analysis of what people are saying about your brand or company.
- Officelink—A Word and Excel add-in that enables authorized access to report data and layout objects from the IDL-Report-Catalog, a service from Germany’s IDL Beratung.
Upcoming events
There are plenty of events on the horizon. Don’t miss out on these great events with Office 365 content. Our team looks forward to meeting you all, so don’t be shy—come say hello at the Office 365 booth!
| December 1–3, 2015 | AnDevCon 2015: Office 365 Developer Hackathon Santa Clara, California |
| February 21–24, 2016 | SPTechCon: The SharePoint Technology Conference Austin, Texas |
For more events, check out dev.office.com/events.
Until next month, please join our community discussions at www.yammer.com/itpronetwork and follow us at @OfficeDev on Twitter and on Facebook.
Also, be sure to follow along with us on our daily developer mission: Jeremy Thake (@jthake), Sonya Koptyev (@SonyaKoptyev), Richard DiZerega (@richdizz), Vesa Juvonen (@vesajuvonen) and Jim Epes (@j_epes).
—Jeremy Thake
