Blog Archives
What are Microsoft Teams Messaging Extensions and why you should consider building one
It’s no secret that I think Microsoft Teams is an awesome product. I’ve written in the past about how I believe Teams is a great enabler for making people more productive and brings the right tools together in a place that makes a lot of sense.
What are messaging extensions?
Message extensions are available when you are creating a chat message (either a new conversation, or when replying to an existing message). Message extensions assist you by inserting content into the chat message you are composing.
Below is the Giphy messaging extension that allows you to search for an animated image and insert it into your message.
Why develop a messaging extension?
One of the resounding benefits of the Microsoft Teams client is being able to extend the out-of-the-box capabilities and integrate with your existing line of business (LOB) applications. Usually the benefit gain in integrating LOB applications into Teams is that it reduces the context switching for users and they spend more time actually getting work done, and less time moving between application, copying/pasting data or links.
Take a CRM application as an example, if you are discussing a customer in a conversation in Teams and needed to explain where that customer was located, or what the contact details were. The steps you would normally go through would be to open your CRM application, search for the customer, find the relevant details, then cut and paste multiple fields of text switching back and forth between the customer details in the CRM app and the conversation in Teams.
By extending Teams with Messaging Extensions, it is possible to provide an integration into your CRM system that would allow a user to search for a customer in Teams while composing a chat message, select the customer and have the details formatted nicely and inserted in the chat message all without having to leave Teams or even open the CRM application.
When you look at the core LOB applications within your organisation there are some key integrations such as this that can bring about real productivity gains.
Where to start with messaging extension development?
Developing messaging extensions for Microsoft Team (overview)
Training Content / Bots, Messaging Extensions and Cards (Github)
Office Add-in Manifest Updates – Deployment timing and potential URL issues
One of the critical components of an Office Add-in is the add-in manifest. This is the xml file that describes how your add-in should be activated when an end user installs and uses it with Office documents and applications. This manifest contains references to URLs where your web application resides and also to other resources for your add-in such as images to show on ribbon buttons and task panes.
Your manifest.xml file is uploaded to a central location where it is made available to users of your add-in (this may be a public location such as AppSource or the Office Store).
When users acquire your add-in a copy of the manifest.xml file is cached onto the host device and is only periodically resynced if the manifest.xml file is subsequently updated in AppSource/Office Store. I have seen this take weeks on some combinations of host products/devices.
You need to be careful if you are modifying your application and the changes involve modifications to the URLs in the manfiest.xml file. Imagine your add-in has been deployed and is in use by many users. The manifest.xml file might look similar to the fragment below (notice the SourceLocation URL on line 13).
That SourceLocation URL (line 13) is the main page of the add-in that gets loaded into the Task Pane when the add-in is launched. Lets imagine you change the structure of this add-in so that the starting page of the app is now https://www.contoso.com/apps/search/index.html
For this we would change the SourceLocation DefaultValue from “https://www.contoso.com/search_app/Default.aspx”
to “https://www.contoso.com/apps/search/index.html”
How do you go about deploying the updated manifest file that points to this new URL?
If you update the manifest.xml file with the new URL you then have to go through the AppSource/Office Store submission process to get the new manifest approved. You are far from 100% in control of the approval process so you don’t know when the new manifest will get approved and thus when the new URL will come into effect. So do you need to keep your application running at both the old and the new URL at least until the new manifest is approved? It gets a little worse than that though, it seems the deployment of a manifest change can take weeks to reach “saturation” whereby it had propagated down to all client host product caches and the old manifest is no longer being used. I can’t exactly tell you how long this process takes and if it ever fully reaches “saturation” as I’m still seeing some users hitting my service on a URL in a manifest that was superseded almost 3 months ago!
Rather than keeping your old and new application running side by side, the approach I have taken that works quite nicely is to put in place temporary redirects from any URLs that were present in the old manifest and have changed in the new manifest. I suggest creating these as temporary redirects as you will be able to monitor your traffic over time and know when you have reached saturation and you stop getting users coming in on URLs from old manifests. If you use permanent redirects, this may get cached by the client and next time the client will have done the redirect itself and you will no longer be able to track if the new manifest has been deployed or it’s an old manifest being redirected via a client side cached redirect.
How do you go about implementing temporary redirects? Well this depends on what you’ve developed your website using and how you are hosting it. In my case I am hosting the app as a Web App in Azure, redirects can be configured in the web.config file that is located in the root folder of the Web App.
Below is an example web.config file that would achieve that temporary redirection.
Microsoft Insider Dev Tour – Sydney 2018
The Insider Dev Tour is such a great event for Microsoft developers, you get the key announcements and latest news that came out of the Build Conference, delivered locally in a more intimate and interactive environment. Best of all it’s a free event put on by Microsoft.
I was very grateful for the opportunity to present two sessions at the Insider Dev Tour in Sydney last week.
- Create Productive Apps with Office 365
- Drive User Engagement Across all your Devices with Microsoft Graph
If you attended I hope you enjoyed the experience as much as I did. The following are links to the resources mentioned during the presentations.
Github repo of demos from the Create Productive Apps with Office 365 session
Github repo of demos from the Microsoft Graph session
View My Office 365 Apps (add-ins) and remove consent
If you would like to see what add-ins and other apps you have consented to (and what permissions you have granted) you can visit this magic URL
You should see a list of all add-in and apps from where you have the option to ‘Remove’ or ‘Get Info’.
Selecting ‘Get Info’ lists all the permissions granted:
The remove option allows you to remove (revoke) consent. If you were to use the Office app again you would be prompted for consent (permissions) again.
Sydney SharePoint User Group – The Transition to Modern Office Add-in Development
I had the pleasure this week of speaking at the Sydney SharePoint User Group on the topic of transitioning to the modern Office Add-in development model.
We discussed:
- The existing COM/VSTO Office Add-in development model
- The reasons and drivers for needing a new development model
- What the modern Office Add-in development is and how it works
- Benefits of the modern model
- What this transition means for Office developers
- A look at the typical modern add-in technology stack and discussing some of the options
- The wider Office Developer Vision (Extending Office through add-ins + accessing Office 365 data via Graph)
Thanks to those who attended and as promised here’s a link to the slide deck from the nights presentation.
Transitioning to Modern Office Add-in Development (slide deck)
Beware the Office.js Dialog API falling silent under IE11
Issue Description
I’ve been leveraging the Office.js Dialog API recently and found a scenario where I just couldn’t get it to behave properly. At the moment this appears to be either a bug or limitation of the Dialog API. I found that the calling MessageParent() from the dialog fails to trigger the registered callback method in the host add-in when running in IE11 (on both Win 7 and Win 8.1)
Following are the steps to reproduce the issue with the Dialog API under IE11 where the messageParent() method fails to trigger the corresponding event back in the host add-in.
Steps to Reproduce
To reproduce the issue I’ve taken the Dialog API example from dev.office.com and hosted in Azure.
https://github.com/OfficeDev/Office-Add-in-Dialog-API-Simple-Example
Then I updated the manifest to point to the location where I hosted it, and then tried to use it in the different environments (I made no code changes to the example).
For these repo steps I just opened Word Online in IE11 and side loaded the manifest. The issue also exists using Office Desktop on a machine with IE11 installed (but not Edge) as Office will then be trying to use IE11 and you get a similar issue.
On Windows 10 in Chrome or Edge (works as expected)
On IE11 on WIn 7 & Win 8.1 Fails to Communicate back to Parent Add-in
Now if I use the same manifest and try it from Win 8.1 IE11 the pop up dialog fails to send the message back to the parent add-in when you press a button.
If you close the dialog, the dialog close event method does get triggered back in the parent add-in (this is the same behaviour that we observed when developing our add-in).
I am aware of the documented issue of the Dialog API not working in mixed zones under IE (especially with difference in protected mode between the host page and the add-in/dialog URLs).
In the scenario above the host (Word Online) page is in the Internet Zone with Protected Mode off
And the add-in is also running in the Internet Zone with Protected Mode off
