In my last newsletter, I shared with you a few resources to help you get started building apps for Microsoft 365. If you work with an organization that uses Microsoft 365 for work, you've got a great opportunity to use your developer skills and bring data and insights stored on Microsoft 365 into your work apps. Recently I've been working on another app that shows how you'd find meeting times and schedule a meeting for you and other people in your organization. This is a common scenario for work apps, and while it's available in Outlook, having it directly in the work app helps your colleague ..read more

Many work apps need the ability to schedule a meeting with others in their organization. Here's how to do it for apps connected to Microsoft 365. Work apps need work data Work apps serve a specific purpose: they help you track projects, follow orders or manage resources. But rarely do they contain all the information that users need to complete their work. Typically, information about people, their calendars, or communication is stored elsewhere, like in Microsoft 365. And that's a shame because completing a task requires users to switch between different apps, which is detrimental to their p ..read more

Recently, I showed you how you can build in under 10 minutes a simple personal assistant that shows users meetings they have left for the day. Here's an even easier way to do it using the Microsoft Graph Toolkit. Show upcoming meetings for a Microsoft 365 user Showing upcoming meetings is a common scenario when integrating Microsoft 365 in work applications. Using Microsoft Graph, your app can connect to Microsoft 365 and access a user's calendar. By building a specific query, you can retrieve meetings between now and the end of the day. Recently, I walked you step by step how to complete thi ..read more

Learning something new is often daunting, especially when it's something like developing for a new platform. Building for a platform comes with all kinds of specific knowledge like what tooling, SDKs, and APIs to use, how to integrate your app, and how to package and distribute it. The great thing is though, that platforms are multipliers that allow you to tap into an existing audience. Yes, you need to learn a lot to truly benefit from a platform, but the great thing is that you can start small and build your way up. ? Get started To help you get started, I recently published a tutorial that ..read more

Learn how you can build a simple personal assistant in under 10 minutes that'll show a Microsoft 365 user the meetings they have left for the day. Show upcoming meetings for a Microsoft 365 user Recently, I published an article on freeCodeCamp that shows you how you can build in just 10 minutes a simple personal assistant that shows upcoming meetings for the signed-in user. Showing upcoming meetings is a common scenario when integrating Microsoft 365 in work applications. It shows you how to get information from the user's calendar and check their availability for a particular time slot. And ..read more

Learning something new is often daunting, especially when it's something like developing for a new platform. But that doesn't have to be the case. Let me show you, how you can build your first Microsoft 365 app in just 10 minutes. Building for a platform Building for a platform isn't trivial. It comes with all kinds of specific knowledge you have to have like what tooling, SDKs, and APIs to use, how to integrate your app, and finally how to package and distribute it. And I haven't even mentioned auth. It's a lot to learn, and it's easy to get overwhelmed. The trick is though, that you don't h ..read more

Last week at the Viva Connections & SharePoint Framework Community Call I had the pleasure of presenting how to use the SharePoint Framework to customize list forms. Here's a quick overview of the topics we covered. Form customizers - a new type of SPFx extension In SharePoint Framework (SPFx) v1.15, which was released in July '22, Microsoft introduced form customizers - a new type of extension that allows you to extend list forms. Using form customizers, you can build a custom experience for New, Edit, and View forms of a list. Anatomy of an SPFx form customizer Form customizers are in e ..read more

When you use apps for work, they rarely show you all the data that you need to get the full context of your work. And that's a shame because that information is often readily available to you, and could be integrated into your app. Last week, I wrote an article about what I've been seeing a lot in the ecosystem: most work apps focus on their purpose, but miss context data from the workplace, that people need to complete the scenario. As a result, we need to open multiple apps and switch between them back and forth to complete our work. And that's a shame, because it comes at a high cost of fo ..read more

When you use apps for work, they rarely show you all the data that you need to get the full context of your work. And that's a shame because that information is often readily available to you, and could be integrated into your app. It's all about the context Say you're asked to build an app to manage projects for your organization. You build a web app, and host it in the cloud. Using the app you can store information about projects, customers, and project teams. Your organization uses another app for communication, and another for storing files, so rather than duplicate the functionality you ..read more

How many different apps do you use at work? How hard is it for you to stay up-to-date on what's going on in all of them? I bet the answers are a lot and hard. If your organization is on Microsoft 365, there's a better way, though. Hear me out. If your organization is on Microsoft 365, you're probably using Microsoft Teams. Most likely you use it for chat and video calls. Probably you use it to communicate with your colleagues and work together on files. Did you know though, that you can extend Teams with custom apps? Did you know, that these apps can help you stay up-to-date on what's going o ..read more