Published: Mar 02, 2020
This month, the news is mostly around the Office clients and the Power Platform. I guess those teams decided to work harder than the rest or it could be that teams like the SharePoint group are busy delivering on a lot of new features they had already teased. Either way, some fun, quick nuggets this month. Also, a shout out to Daniel Christian for the assist pulling all of this content together. The short month also meant I was short on time.
Okay, this may be a bit nerdy but I am kind of jazzed. The Graph API, if you are not familiar, is the API that glues Office 365 together that you can access. This means when you get stuck not being able to do something in the UI, if you are brave, you can often find a way to do it via the API. And even non-developers can do so. I know business users that use it to manipulate SharePoint all of the time. To make it even more accessible Microsoft is rolling out PowerShell Cmdlets that Tony helps you understand how to get started with.
Apparently the Office clients are pretty popular on mobile devices. If you are one of those people, then make sure you go out to your store and search for the new app. Instead of a bunch of separate apps, it is now just one big app with more big cool features. Lens technology is integrated for taking pictures and turning it into data, there is a new action pane, and even Sticky Notes to make note-taking on the go easier. Though I thought that was what OneDrive was for? But I guess it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there wasn’t at least two ways to do what you want. If you love the existing clients Microsoft still plans to invest in them for the foreseeable future; Brad has more info here.
Remember that time I said that Yammer was just another form of email? Well, good news or bad news, not when you get those Yammer notifications in your email you can see them as fully interactive Yammer threads. This only works with Outlook on the web but I am guessing if that goes well, they will fatten up the fat client with it in due time. I have never really used Yammer or been a fan so I will let you decide if this is cool or not. I am just the messenger.
Do you like Power Apps? You better or we are not friends. Well, the announcement of components going into preview and the component framework are both big deals. The idea is they continue to drive Power Apps to a more unified code base between canvas and model apps and increase the extensibility story. This lets more people like me and you (not developers) build really awesome business solutions where the sky is the limit. I love Power Apps and I love the continual growth the platform continues to enjoy. Check them out today, build something cool, and then tweet me with it.
Make sure to check out the rest of Petri’s coverage for Office 365, here.
Microsoft is hosting a free all-day online-only conference for you to learn more about Power Apps and Power Automate on March 20th starting at 9 am. But don’t worry, it isn’t a big long commercial pitch, instead, they have over a dozen community members hosting a 30-minute session on their specialty. Very exciting! You can get more info and register here. More awesome? I am kicking the conference off so you can see me first.