Author: Bob German

Working with Teams Content from an SPFx Tab

~ Bob German ~ Leave a comment

This is part 2 of a 3-part article series about building a “360 degree view” mashup for Microsoft Teams using the SharePoint Framework and React. The articles are:

  1. Part 1: 360 Degree Collaboration in Microsoft Teams
    This article introduces the 360 Degree pattern for collaborative applications, and explains a the workings of a sample solution based on SharePoint Framework and React
  2. Part 2: Working with Teams Content from an SPFx Tab (this article)
    This article explains how to access Team and channel content, such as the shared calendar and conversation, from a SharePoint Framework tab in Teams
  3. Part 3: Deep linking to a SharePoint Framework tab
    This article explains how to create a deep link that opens a Team, Channel, and tab, and passes information to your SharePoint Framework tab so you can display specific information

The series is based on a sample Teams tab written in SharePoint Framework which displays a mashup of information about customer visits.

Getting from the Tab to the Team, and beyond

As you may have heard, the great new way to write custom tabs for Microsoft Teams is to use the SharePoint Framework. One big SharePoint Framework web part makes a tab, and SharePoint takes care of hosting, single sign-on, configuration, and more.

To get started, follow this tutorial. It’s a great start, but it might leave you wondering how to interact with the Team your tab is running in, like read the meeting calendar or post a message. This article will explain how you can do that and also unlock the entire Office 365 Group from your code.

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360 Degree Collaboration in Microsoft Teams

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

This is part 1 of a 3-part article series about building a “360 degree view” mashup for Microsoft Teams using the SharePoint Framework and React. The articles are:

  1. Part 1: 360 Degree Collaboration in Microsoft Teams (This article)
    This article introduces the 360 Degree pattern for collaborative applications, and explains a the workings of a sample solution based on SharePoint Framework and React
  2. Part 2: Working with Teams Content from an SPFx Tab
    This article explains how to access Team and channel content, such as the shared calendar and conversation, from a SharePoint Framework tab in Teams
  3. Part 3: Deep linking to a SharePoint Framework tab
    This article explains how to create a deep link that opens a Team, Channel, and tab, and passes information to your SharePoint Framework tab so you can display specific information

The series is based on a sample Teams tab written in SharePoint Framework which displays a mashup of information about customer visits. The Teams tab allows users to see one another’s schedules, and then brings together all the information needed for each visit. The same approach could be used for any kind of mash-up. Users can see at a glance what customer visits are approaching for each team member; when a visit is selected, the solution displays:

  • customer information (from the Northwind database OData service)
  • documents (from SharePoint)
  • recent transactions (mock)
  • a map (Bing maps)
  • current weather (Open Weather Map)
  • photos (from SharePoint)
  • a text box for sending messages to the Teams channel with deep links back to the selected visit

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Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 5: A Change in Direction

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

It’s only been a few weeks since I published the 4-part blog series on Teams provisioning, and already I’ve learned a lot. So here is part 5 of the 4-part series, which will explore early learning and begin to discuss future directions for the project.

  1. Solution Overview
  2. Installing the solution
  3. Building a Flow for the solution
  4. Looking at the code
  5. A Change in Direction (this post)

ALSO – the code has moved to an official PnP repository! Please update your links accordingly.

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Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 4: Looking at the Code

~ Bob German ~ 5 Comments

This is the another article in a blog series explaining a new open source solution (located here) for provisioning Microsoft Teams. The solution is based on Azure Functions which communicate with Microsoft Flow (or really anything) using Azure queues. This allows a Flow, PowerApps, or Logic Apps developer to use whatever logic they wish and, when a Team is to be created, queue a message to an Azure Function which will do the work.

This is Part 4 of the series, which reviews some key areas of the Azure Functions code as well as the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Template which provisions it.

  1. Solution Overview
  2. Installing the solution
  3. Building a Flow for the solution
  4. Looking at the code (this post)
  5. A Change in Direction

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Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 3: Writing the Flow

~ Bob German ~ 6 Comments

This is part of a blog series explaining a new open source solution (located here) for provisioning Microsoft Teams. The solution is based on Azure Functions which communicate with Microsoft Flow (or really anything) using Azure queues. This allows a Flow, PowerApps, or Logic Apps developer to use whatever logic they wish and, when a Team is to be created, queue a message to an Azure Function which will do the work.

This is Part 3 of the series:

  1. Solution Overview
  2. Installing the solution
  3. Building a Flow for the solution (this post)
  4. Looking at the code
  5. A Change in Direction

Continue reading →

Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 2: Installation

~ Bob German ~ 13 Comments

This is part of a blog series explaining a new open source solution (located here) for provisioning Microsoft Teams. The solution is based on Azure Functions which communicate with Microsoft Flow (or really anything) using Azure queues. This allows a Flow, PowerApps, or Logic Apps developer to use whatever logic they wish and, when a Team is to be created, queue a message to an Azure Function which will do the work.

This is Part 2 of the series:

  1. Solution Overview
  2. Installing the solution (this post)
  3. Building a Flow for the solution
  4. Looking at the code
  5. A Change in Direction

Continue reading →

Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 1: Solution Overview

~ Bob German ~ 4 Comments

Today I’m happy to share a new open source solution (located here) I’ve been working on for provisioning Microsoft Teams. The solution is based on Azure Functions which communicate with Microsoft Flow (or really anything) using Azure queues. This allows a Flow, PowerApps, or Logic Apps developer to use whatever logic they wish and, when a Team is to be created, queue a message to an Azure Function which will do the work.

This is Part 1 of a five-part series:

  1. Solution Overview (this post)
  2. Installing the solution
  3. Building a Flow for the solution
  4. Looking at the code
  5. A Change in Direction

Continue reading →

Idempotent Site Scripts for SharePoint

~ Bob German ~ 5 Comments

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Image by geralt on Pixabay

As you probably are aware, SharePoint site scripts are used to set up content and settings in SharePoint sites. They’re applied using site designs, which allow the same script to be reused with different names and permissions. Site designs can be applied when a site is created, when it’s added to a hub site, or on demand via PowerShell or the SharePoint UI.

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Calling Microsoft Graph from a single-page application: Part 2

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

This post was part of the “30 Days Microsoft Graph” blog series, now cross-posted to my personal blog. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to this excellent blog series. Many thanks to Brian Jackett, who organized this excellent blog series, and to Srinivas Varukala, who kindly edited my articles. In addition, thanks to others from the Graph and Azure AD teams who helped to test and QA the articles.

In Part 1 you learned how to register apps for both Azure AD v1 and v2 that can be used from the browser to enable Graph API calls. Today, we’ll use those registrations in some simple applications.

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