Wictor Wilen

Today at //Build we at Microsoft announced that the long awaited support for Collaborative apps in Teams Personal Tabs and Messaging Extensions now is available for usage in Office.com, Outlook and Outlook on the web. This update to Teams apps is based on the new Promise based Teams JS SDK version 2.0 and the just published Teams Manifest 1.13. Announcing Yo Teams version 4 Through the Microsoft 365 Platform Community (PnP) we have also released a brand new (preview) version of yo teams that supports both this new Teams JS SDK as well as the updated schema. All so you can build Teams applications, on your terms, that also works in Outlook, Office.com and Outlook on the web.

Five years! It’s been five years seen I first published the Microsoft Teams apps generator - yo teams, and in a few days we also have the 5th anniversary for the official Microsoft Teams launch. It’s been five very interesting years that has changed how we collaborate and communicate. It all started long before March of 2017. I had the opportunity to work for an organization that was one of the early adopters of Microsoft Teams, and driven by my curiosity I immediately saw that with this new tool had some amazing opportunities to create even better experiences for my customers. Without essentially any documentation, and without no tooling whatsoever I handed responded to a couple of call for papers for conferences during 2017 on the topic on how to extend Microsoft Teams (at that time only with Tabs, Connectors and Bots). And that’s where my struggles started - I had to build everything from scratch all the time, working on plumbing, packaging, deployment and it took ages before I could create the real solution. With the experience from the beta and the version 1 release of SharePoint Framework in February that same year - I decided that why don’t I use the same tech stack as SPFx and create a generator to scaffold out all that plumbing for my Teams tabs. That would be a great challenge, and something that would allow me to create demos for conferences and customers faster as well as something I could share with the broader community. And that’s how the Yeoman generator for Teams Tabs was birthed.

Today I thought that I should step out of my normal blogging content and share some of my personal pet project and hobbies. I always been keen of tinkering, testing and building things - being software, hardware, or our house or garden. Over the last few years I’ve been trying to make as much things as possible “smart” in our houses, and particularly in my home office. This home automation project consists of tons of different third party options, but also quite a few devices and gadgets that I built myself. A couple of examples; I’ve built quite a few temperature and humidity sensors that are placed around the houses, door sensors, I have a few old refurbished computer fans that are controlled by these sensors to force air in or out of the rooms, I have a custom built “meeting traffic light”, a purpose built screen with sensor details and notifications. Most of these custom devices has one thing in common - they are based around the ESP8266/ESP32 chip, programmed with ESPHome and orchestrated by Home Assistant.

We’re getting closer to the holidays and we all like to both give and receive gifts at this time of the year. Here is an early Christmas gift from me, and the amazing Microsoft teams that’s been building out these new features, to all of you fantastic people out there. A few months ago Microsoft announced the capabilities where we can deploy Microsoft Teams apps and use them across other high-usage areas of Microsoft 365 and now those areas has been extended even further and covers Office.com, Outlook web and the old fat Outlook client. This great feature allows us to create a personal tab, that when deployed can be used inside Microsoft Teams just as normal, but also in the Office.com portal (if you haven’t visited that portal in a while - do it, there’s some great new features in there) and Outlook (both web and desktop).

When building applications for Microsoft Teams, the very first hurdle essentially all developers will try to jump over is the one with getting an access token to be able to communicate with Microsoft Graph. This is something that can be done fairly easy, if you know what to do, but requires you as a developer to connect a few dots. Over the last year this has become way easier, and there are a few great examples out there - you can find some great ones in the PnP Teams Samples.

Today I handed in my Orange badge to Avanade and signed out of my Avanade account. It’s been a six and a half year long adventure where I had the opportunity work with amazing colleagues and exciting clients. I’ve been given the opportunity to grow my career and skills in directions I did not think about, and I’m very proud of what we achieved and what we delivered to clients. It has been so much fun representing Avanade in client meetings, and at conferences. And I’ve been working with some great teams that delivered solutions that literally changed peoples lives. I’ve also had a blast for the last two years taking a crazy idea about a revolutionary service into something real, a new service for Avanades client that will impact their workplace experience for the next few years.

I’ve been using Ring cameras for several years now and a while back they introduced the option to have the cameras take snapshots periodically. This is awesome as you can fire up the Ring app and see a timelapse of your cameras. However, this only works in the app, you can’t export a timelapse! But, as a proud geek this should not be a problem to me and can be solved!

Yesterday Microsoft released the anticipated set of scripts required for you to add the Microsoft Viva Connections app to your Microsoft Teams environment. It’s a very simple approach that only requires you to download a PowerShell script, install the latest Microsoft SharePoint Online PowerShell module and then answer a set of questions, and voila you have the Viva Connections Desktop app ready for installation in Microsoft Teams. Note: as the time of writing this and testing the PowerShell script, I was not able to download the required SharePoint Online PowerShell module and received an error while running the script. The latest module I could install/find did not have the Get-SPOIsCommSite cmdlet. However, it’s only required for validation that the site you specify is a Communications Site, and if you’re sure about this you can safely just comment out those lines in the beginning of the script.

When building software the most common scenario is that you have a team building the solution, application and/or service. You typically have front-end, back-end and full-stack developers, you have testers and designers, and more. However, working in a team is not always easy. Back in the days we could all have our software running locally and we just grabbed the latest version/commit and hacked away. For web applications the use of localhost worked just fine for almost everyone. But with cloud based solutions where you have a strong connection to one or more cloud services, it becomes a little bit more complex - you might have connections to cloud services such as storage, databases, web service and more. In most cases these resources can be spun up by each developer or shared and then managed by a configuration/environment file.