Microsoft Ignite 2017 Highlights for the Office & SharePoint Developer

What a massive week in Orlando for Office developers. So many sessions, so much new information, it really was a case of drinking from the fire hose!

Thankfully most sessions were recorded and are progressively being made available along with the relevant slide decks on https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos

If you only have time to watch one session my pick for the SharePoint/Office Developer would be Accelerate your digital transformation with SharePoint and OneDrive presented by Jeff Teper, Dan Holme, Omar Shahine, Naomi Moneypenny. This session was just non-stop announcements on what’s new in SharePoint, Office and OneDrive. Some of the announcements:

Office 2019 is coming (Office clients, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype for Business servers – all servers to be available on-prem) – preview due mid 2018
A SharePoint specific conference (backed by Microsoft) is coming back in 2018 – and yes it’s going to be in Las Vegas
SharePoint hub sites to group related sites together, share branding and navigation and provide rollup of some information
SharePoint site provisioning model to allow for scripted customizations during the provisioning process
SharePoint Company Theming and an online tool to help (https://aka.ms/spthemebuilder)
SharePoint File Preview webpart (supports over 270 file formats)
SharePoint Migration tool to move SharePoint content from on-prem to the the cloud (Office 365)
Improved external link sharing
OneDrive – deeper integration into Windows 10
Improved large list support
New version of the SharePoint mobile app

Going one level deeper into the Office/SharePoint developer world, here’s some of the news that came out regarding:

Microsoft Graph (Build smarter apps with Office using the Microsoft Graph (Yina Arenas))

Generally Available
- SharePoint Lists
- File Versions
- People API
- App-only support for OneDrive
- Access to Outlook shared calendars, contacts and mail folders
In Preview
- Graph Extensions for Azure Functions
- Outlook Categories
- Outlook Rules
- Outlook Email Headers
- Outlook Rooms

Office Add-ins (What’s new and what’s coming for Outlook add-ins (Wey Love, Harshit Kumur))

Generally Available
- Outlook Add-ins for Android
- Single sign-on API (Web clients)
- Auto-open task pane
Preview
- Single sign-on API for Outlook
- Centralized Deployment for Outlook Add-ins
- Adaptive card support in Outlook (OWA)

SharePoint Framework and Patterns and Practices

SharePoint Framework became available on-prem with SharePoint Server Feature pack 2 (this was released a couple of weeks before Ignite)
SharePoint Framework Extensions – custom snippets on every page (aka delegate controls) context buttons/actions, customized field rendering
Reusable controls and Office Fabric Core

One of the more complex areas of doing modern Office development is authentication and authorization (especially when connection back into Office 365 services). This story is becoming a lot simpler if you can go exclusively through the Graph API. Vittorio Bertocci did a very entertaining session (Office development: Authentication demystified) that really shows you an on-rails experience for how to accomplish this from many different technologies and context. It is well worth a watch and has the potential to save you a lot of time and head scratching. This area of Office development has changed drastically over the last couple of years and there is a lot of conflicting information on the web and much of it is out of date.