Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future

Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Earlier in 2021, we had discussed how retailers can create an intelligent supply chain to successfully navigate through the disruptions and quickly adapt to changing customer behavior. As our retail customers embarked on the journey to create a resilient and intelligent supply chain, there were three key areas that emerged where our customers prioritized their investmentsoptimizing fulfillment, predicting supply chain risks, and enhancing supply chain visibility. Let’s take a look at some of Microsoft’s recent innovations in these areas that enable retailers to create a supply chain of the future.

Turning order fulfillment into a competitive advantage

A retailer’s success hinges on having the right inventory at the right place at the right time. As retailers and brands continue to adapt to meeting the growing e-commerce demand, determining where the inventory is fulfilled for e-commerce versus in-store orders becomes critical to ensure that customer demands are met on time and in a profitable manner.

As a recent Gartner report found, one of the ways to achieve supply chain excellence is by holding distribution center inventory in a channel-agnostic manner for flexible use of inventory to fulfill online and in-store demand effectively1. To achieve this level of flexibility, retailers need a system that offers rules-based order orchestration leveraging AI and real-time omnichannel inventory data to proactively address constraints and profitably fulfill orders on time and in full.

At Microsoft, we are at the forefront of these efforts, investing in solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management that help retailers reimagine the future of global supply chains and turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.

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Predict risk and enhance visibility with AI-powered insights

According to Gartner, 76 percent of supply chain executives indicated that compared to three years ago, their company today faces more frequent disruptions in their supply chain. Meanwhile, another 72 percent reported that the impact of disruptive events has increased.2

Retailers have made significant strides in 2021 to create resiliency in their supply chains but the response has still been very reactive in nature. Slow digitization of the supply chain continues to inhibit organizations from proactively planning for changing customer demand and supply challenges. With an increase in e-commerce, it is imperative to gain real-time visibility into inventory at every node of the supply chain, all the way from the manufacturer to shipping ports to distribution centers to stores and finally to the consumer. Brands gain affinity when they consistently deliver on their order promise to their customers.

With this need for increased visibility and consistency in mind, we recently launched Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights in preview that enables organizations to predict risks in their supply chain based on news, weather, geo-political events, etc., and enables them to make better supply chain decisions with proactive risk mitigation via prescriptive insights powered by AI.

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights, retailers and consumer goods companies can create a digital representation of their physical supply chain. This enables them to simulate different scenarios at different nodes along the value chain and make well-informed decisions to mitigate any disruption. They can further gain visibility into the supply chains of their multiple tiers of suppliers, and improve the effectiveness of their demand and supply planning to ensure a delightful customer experience.

We also made significant enhancements to the Inventory Visibility add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Retailers can now get near real-time inventory visibility across all their internal channels and disparate third-party supply chain systems in a single place. Adding multiple systems in a scalable manner allows them to add new third-party integrations as they grow their supplier network or acquire new businesses. The enhanced visibility enables businesses to proactively mitigate any out-of-stock situations. Furthermore, they can perform soft reservations based on omnichannel sales demand so that they do not incorrectly commit to a customer.

Retailers can further leverage enhanced planning capabilities to enable near real-time inventory planning by prioritizing certain orders over others with ease. For example, they can prioritize orders for products that are low on stock versus the ones that are not. Lastly, retailers can optimize and streamline back-of-house operations like receiving and replenishment using the Warehouse Management mobile app. The mobile app empowers distribution centers, warehouses, and brick-and-mortar locations to make inventory decisions like transferring goods from one location to another simply by scanning the items. By running critical warehouse operations on Edge, retailers can ensure business continuity across all locations despite latency or network issues at HQ.

All the supply chain solutions from Dynamics 365 are not only interoperable with each other but also seamlessly work with other third-party ERP, commerce, and supply chain systems.

Take the Supply Chain Visibility Guided Tour to see how a retailer can enhance supply chain visibility using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

Here are some recent examples of our retail customers who have created a resilient supply chain this past year using Dynamics 365.

Servis Industries Limited powers direct-to-consumer expansion by moving to the cloud

Established more than 50 years ago, Servis Industries Limited (SIL) is a leading manufacturer and exporter in Pakistan. To achieve its goal of becoming a global, world-class, and diversified company, SIL moved its on-premises infrastructure to the cloud by adopting Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Commerce. Now, the company has a holistic overview of its retail stores and an infrastructure management system that can support rapid national and international growth.

“To achieve our goal, we need to open 40 to 50 outlets per year. It used to be that with each new store, our team had to be on-site to provide technical support. Now, everything is cloud-based, so we don’t have to travel. The new stores can just access the systems and start their operations almost immediately.”Faisal Rizvi, Head of IT, Servis Industries Limited.  

Another challenge that SIL encountered in its journey was the need to meet the evolving customer expectation for personalized engagement, omnichannel experiences, and frictionless interactions. For this, the company turned to Distributed Order Management to deliver smooth order processing between its e-commerce platform and physical stores and to optimize order fulfillment across their network by utilizing AI, automation, and real-time inventory.

Khaadi delivers rapid omnichannel success

Founded in 1998, Khaadi is Pakistan’s premier fashion retailer with more than 70 physical stores across Pakistan, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the United Kingdom, and online stores in more than 12 countries. With its growing network of physical and online storefronts, the company needed a solution that could streamline its omnichannel sales delivery and empower its daily operations with actionable store-level insights for managers. The drive towards omnichannel was forced into overdrive when pandemic lockdowns moved all of Khaadi’s operations online. Suddenly, they needed to pivot to leverage a single inventory across the business and use their stores as fulfillment hubs.

To meet this challenge, Khaadi turned to Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI, alongside Dynamics 365 Commerce, Dynamics 365 Finance, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. With this technology in place, Khaadi successfully transitioned to omnichannel.

“We were able to draw up a blueprint for omnichannel sales rapidly and implemented a complete enterprise-level scenario in just in one weekend. IT was able to transform the dynamics of our business within just a week’s time, making Khaadi a truly omnichannel enabled retailer. From there, it was only a matter of three months before we scaled the roll out ten times with help of Dynamics 365 Commerce Distributed Order Management.”Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer, Khaadi.

As you can see by these recent customer success stories, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is helping companies to deliver the retail supply chain of the future by empowering direct-to-consumer expansion and accelerating omnichannel success.

What’s next?

The events of the past two years have made it essential for businesses to invest in technology that can help them sense supply chain constraints and disruptions and predict spikes and troughs in demand. Microsoft Dynamics 365 assists companies in integrating these types of new capabilities, such as real-time, end-to-end visibility, priority-based planning, and AI-empowered insights so that they can effectively compete in this new normal. As we have seen here, this can take the form of accelerating direct-to-consumer and omnichannel success, empowering retailers to turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage, and integrating advanced warehousing solutions to improve distribution processes.  

To learn more, join the Ask the Experts session on how to automate and optimize fulfillment on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. You can watch the on-demand webinar on how to create a resilient and sustainable supply chain and the total economic impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. You can also watch the on-demand webinar on how to enhance the visibility of your supply chain by taking a composable approach to rapidly deploy a Supply Chain Control Tower.


Sources:

1- Gartner: The Contemporary Guide to Retail Supply Chain Excellence: Part 1 Inventory and Assortment Published 22 November 2021 – ID G00743960

2- Gartner, Six Ways Supply Chain Analytics Mitigate Business Disruptions, 2021

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 helps build the retail supply chain of the future appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Achieving Zero Trust readiness in your apps #2: Designing for Least Privilege

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Hello again! I’m Jeff Sakowicz, Principal Program Management Lead for Application Platform Security within the Microsoft Identity team. Our team’s goal is to foster a secure, trustworthy, and thriving app ecosystem. Part of achieving this goal is enabling apps to support a Zero Trust security model.


 


This is the second post in our series on why Zero Trust matters for developers. In the previous post, I introduced the Zero Trust principles and how they apply to identity and access management. In this post, I will focus on how you can design apps using the principle of least privileged access with the Microsoft identity platform.


 


Why should you care about using least privileged access?


In short, by limiting what your app has permission to do, you reduce the potential blast radius of attacks and increase adoption of your apps by customers. In our experience, IT administrators are sensitive to the levels of permission being requested by applications and are applying more scrutiny when deciding whether to grant a given app permissions. When you create an app that asks for a lot of permissions, it will be less likely to be approved or could be denied altogether.


 


What is overprivilege and what is an overprivileged app?


When an entity asks for, and in some cases is granted, more permissions than it needs, we call it “overprivileged.” In this post we will focus exclusively on overprivileged applications with respect to OAuth2.0 permissions in the Microsoft Identity platform and use example scenarios of client apps that call the Microsoft Graph API. That said, principles in this blog do apply to other permission models and APIs – we’ll cover this more in future posts.


 


Overprivilege occurs when an app has requested and been granted unused or reducible permissions:


 



  1. Unused permission: Permission that is not necessary at all for the desired tasks. For example, a calendar app that obtains the Files.ReadWrite.All permission but doesn’t integrate with any Files APIs has unused permissions.

  2. Reducible permission: Permission that has a lower-privileged alternative that would still provide the access for required tasks. For example, consider an application that needs to read files from the signed-in user’s OneDrive, but never needs to create new files or modify existing ones. If this app has requested and been granted Files.ReadWrite.All, it has a reducible permission. Instead, it should be requesting Files.Read.   


 


What are the goals in combatting overprivileged apps?


There are three main goals for us in the Microsoft Identity team in terms of combatting overprivileged apps:


 



  1. Help developers to build trustworthy apps that are adopted smoothly by avoiding excessive permissions, since requesting unnecessary privileges creates friction with users, IT, and policies applied to app consent within an environment.

  2. Help IT Admins and other decision makers understand how to identify, request, and grant least privileged permissions in their organization to limit overprivileged apps.

  3. Prevent attackers from gaining elevated privileges that increase the scope of compromise and enable lateral movement within an environment.


 


How can you ensure your apps become least privileged?


Here are three high level best practices for developers and IT Admins to keep in mind when thinking about adhering to the least privileged principle for applications:


 



  1. Prevent overprivilege by avoiding unused and reducible permissions. Fully understand the permissions required for the API calls that your application needs to make, and only request what is necessary to enable your scenario.

  2. Audit the privileges that have been previously granted to existing apps in your app portfolio on a regular basis, identifying opportunities for privilege reduction or removal. This means IT admins audit the permissions consent granted to apps within their tenant and developers review the permissions that their apps are requesting.

  3. Remediate by updating apps to stop requesting unused and reducible permissions and revoke previously granted permissions that are no longer necessary.


 


Microsoft has tools that help you with this process. For example, when Then, you can find the corresponding permissions from least to most privileged for Microsoft Graph by using this handy permissions reference.


Learn more about specific steps in the documentation here: https://aka.ms/least-privilege.


 


How to start building Zero Trust readiness


To even learn more, check out the new guidance for developers we’ve published to the Zero Trust Guidance Center. It includes new development and integration resources for developing Zero Trust-ready apps.


For more details, read the full whitepaper for developers that can be downloaded here: Zero Trust for the Microsoft Identity developer


 


 


Learn more about Microsoft identity:



 

Bridging the omnichannel gap in retail with Dynamics 365

Bridging the omnichannel gap in retail with Dynamics 365

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Omnichannel has been around for more than a decade now, so it might be surprising to realize that there are still gaps in a strategy that has become table stakes for most retailers. The gap that does exist presents a lack of clarity about what omnichannel retail is and the inability of organizations to deliver on the strategy. With retail in the midst of one the largest transformations we have seen in decades, many organizations are trying to understand where to start bridging the gap between traditional and modern retail experiences. Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings together a unique set of capabilities and services that allow retailers to streamline buying experiences for customers across channels while empowering organizations to gain a deeper understanding and ownership of their sales, operations, and customer data. 

Disconnected data disrupts the modern buying journey

The lack of unified data in a retailer’s current systems still proves to be a significant roadblock to providing omnichannel experiences to consumers. Like many retailers, the U.S. national retailer GNC, which specializes in health and nutrition-related products, also struggled with disconnected data across its systems. This meant, among other things, that GNC found it challenging to provide a single source of truth about its customers that would allow them to communicate efficiently and effectively. The siloed data affected customer communications, but it also kept the retailer from gaining real-time insights into things like customer preferences and inventory.

The ultimate solution for GNC and for any business looking to leverage data across systems is to use a single collection of data automatically updated across applications in real-time. This is one reason why GNC deployed Dynamics 365.

“With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, we’re going to have a single, reliable view of each customer that updates in real-timeWe’ll use the AI capabilities in Customer Insights to better define our customer segments and ensure that every customer gets the right communication at the right time.”Lauren Mannetti, Vice President, Marketing, GNC.

Microsoft also continues to help retailers adjust to customer needs with tools like intuitive customer segmentation and experimentation capabilities. Dynamics 365 Commerce enables organizations to increase customer engagement and satisfaction by using tools in e-commerce site builder to target specific customer segments with different experiences based on the shopper’s device, geo-location, and other dynamically derived attributes from their browser request.

Regardless of the solution you choose, you need to be able to pinpoint a customer all the way through their journey, from browsing online to asking each customer for feedback. Increasingly, retailers will be tasked with offering ever-more personalized experiencesand that requires sophisticated and connected data that overcomes the limitation of siloed separate systems.

Complexity of legacy solutions

Many businesses have invested heavily in their current legacy solutions. Rightly so, most wish to maximize the benefit of these investments. Unfortunately, businesses can end up dealing with the complexity of their existing systems far longer than necessary as they attempt to avoid investing in a new unified solution. Sometimes, though, adding additional visibility and integration on top of existing solutions works well to address this problem without having to scrap the current systems being run for separate functions.

This is how Khaadi, a large Pakistani fashion retailer, figured out how to get its complex incumbent solutions to work together to keep operations going during the pandemic. It needed to be able to integrate data so that it could continue selling in-store inventory online during pandemic shutdowns.

To make this pivot, the company chose Microsoft Power Apps, which helps companies build custom apps that connect existing data, to create the brand’s integrated sales services in-house. Then, three months later, the company scaled the roll out ten times with the help of Dynamics 365 Commerce to make these capabilitiesand morepart of its new operating norm.

“It’s incredible because we know of some similar retail businesses who started their omnichannel journey 14 to 15 months back but have not yet implemented similar capabilities.”Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer, Khaadi.

Using Microsoft Power Apps coupled with Dynamics 365 Commerce allowed the company to continue using its existing systems by allowing those systems to better “talk to each other” and leverage the data across them. This provides a solution that many other retailers can turn to make immediate use of their data that otherwise is isolated in separate systemswithout replacing those systems.

Inability to adapt to changing customer habits

Another roadblock to providing omnichannel experiences is an inability to adapt to changing customer needs. This can result from a business that isn’t using the right technology to streamline operations and connect all of its data. The need to streamline backend operations is just as critical to customer experience when the goal is being able to adapt to rapidly changing customer behaviors and habits.

Now, more than ever, consumers seek out reviews and social proof before making a purchase. In fact, social commerce sales in the U.S. were an estimated $36.62 billion in 2021.1 It is not surprising then that businesses without the technology infrastructure required to connect these new sources of demand and customer intelligence may fall behind.

Dynamics 365 enables retailers to easily adjust and meet customers where they are through a common data model and a natively headless commerce engine. Easily connect with customers on new and emerging platforms to ensure your business stays competitive and relevant in an ever more competitive retail environment.

Along with this, it is essential for retailers to be able to automatically track reviews across platforms, monitor them, and automate the solicitation of reviews from customers through post-shipping emails and other such activities. Also, monitoring and identifying how specific customers respond to social storytelling requires deep data that connects across platforms. This is another area where Dynamics 365 Commerce can help.

Learn more in our recent blog, Exceed customer expectations with seamless and unified commerce experiences.

Increased demands and customer expectations

Consumers today understand that retailers can capture data of how, what, when, and where they make purchases. Not only do they understand this point, but they also expect it. This is one reason retailers face increased demands to understand consumers better and personalize experiences accordingly.

An area where customer expectations have evolved and increased is the desire for convenience. According to the National Retail Federation, 97 percent of consumers have backed out of a purchase because it was inconvenient to them.2  This can be seen by the popularity of curbside pickup, next-day delivery, and easy returns. Yet even though businesses can lose sales if they inconvenience consumers, many companies are still challenged to provide the options that customers have come to expect.

Retailers like Aubainerie are using Dynamics 365 to improve customer experience and personalize customer engagements across channels. The company’s apparel designers are using Dynamics 365 Commerce combined with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to include more product information for staff and customers at the point of purchase. They are also able to fine-tune their understanding of customer needs to deliver more personal customer buying experiences and exceed customer expectations.  

“We can designate activity filters in Dynamics 365 and then plan in advance for e-commerce and in-store displays based on those data points, which improves our omnichannel capabilities.”Simon Jacobsen, Director of e-commerce, Aubainerie.

For companies to offer these convenience features to customers and meet the expectations for personalized and relevant shopping experiences, retailers can look to Dynamics 365 to help bridge the omnichannel gap for long-term business success.

Learn more in our blog, Deliver personalized customer engagement with Dynamics 365.

What’s next

We’re ready to help you evaluate the best ways to unify and connect data by leveraging technology to overcome these four major roadblocks so that you can bridge the omnichannel gap in retail. To see how Dynamics 365 can help your retail business succeed, see how you can get started with Dynamics 365 or give our Dynamics 365 Commerce free trial a try today.


Sources:

1- eMarketer, 2021. Social commerce surpasses $30 billion in the US.

2- National Retail Federation, 2020. Consumer View Winter 2020: Convenience and the Consumer. January 14, 2020.

The post Bridging the omnichannel gap in retail with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Microsoft 365 PnP Community – January 2022 update

Microsoft 365 PnP Community – January 2022 update

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

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Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) January 2021 update is out with a summary of the latest guidance, samples, and solutions from Microsoft or from the community for the community. This article is a summary of all the different areas and topics around the community work we do around Microsoft 365 ecosystem during the past month. Thank you for being part of this success.

 

Sharing is caring!

 

What is Microsoft 365 Community (PnP)

Microsoft 365 PnP is a nick-name for Microsoft 365 platform community activities coordinated by numerous teams inside of the Microsoft 365 engineering organizations. PnP is a community-driven open-source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for Microsoft 365.

 

Topics vary from Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, OneDrive and SharePoint. Active development and contributions happen in GitHub by providing contributions to the samples, reusable components, and documentation for different areas. PnP is owned and coordinated by Microsoft engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community.

 

 

The initiative is facilitated by Microsoft, but we have multiple community members as part of the PnP team (see team details in end of the article) and we are always looking to extend the PnP team with more community members. Notice that since this is open-source community initiative, so there’s no SLAs for the support for the samples provided through GitHub. Obviously, all officially released components and libraries are under official support from Microsoft.

 

Main resources around Microsoft 365 Community:

 

 

✍ Latest Dev Blog posts

Here are the latest blog posts and announcements around Microsoft 365 development topics from https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blogs.

 

 

Latest community posts at https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog

 

 

Community call recording blog posts:

 

 

Microsoft 365 Developer Podcasts

 

In the Microsoft 365 Developer Podcast, Jeremy Thake and Paul Schaeflein talk Microsoft 365 with fellow industry experts. The show formerly known as Office 365 Podcast is back! New episodes out soon!

blog

Microsoft 365 PnP Weekly Podcasts and vlogs

 

PnP Weekly is a recurrent podcast with visitors where Vesa and Waldek talk about the latest news and announcements in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint areas. 

 

 

Community Calls

There are numerous different community calls on different areas. All calls are being recorded and published either from Microsoft 365 Developer or Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) YouTube channels. Recordings are typically released within the following 24 hours after the call. You can find a detailed agenda and links to specific covered topics on blog post articles at the Microsoft 365 developer blog when the videos are published.

 

 

If you are interested in doing a live demo of your solution or sample in these calls, please do reach out to the PnP  Team members (contacts later in this post) and they are able to help with the right setup. These are great opportunities to gain visibility for example for existing MVPs, for community members who would like to be MVPs in the future or any community member who’d like to share some of their learnings.

 

Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) Ecosystem in GitHub

Most of the community driven repositories are in the PnP GitHub organization as samples are not product specifics as they can contain numerous different solutions or the solution works in multiple different applications.

 

  • Microsoft Graph Toolkit – Repository and project on Microsoft Graph Toolkit controls – welcomes community contributors
  • PnPjs – PnPjs Framework repository
  • CLI Microsoft 365 – Cross-OS command line interface to manage Office 365 tenant settings
  • generator-spfx – Open-source Yeoman generator which extends the out-of-the-box Yeoman generator for SharePoint with additional capabilities
  • generator-teams – Open-source Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator – Bots, Messaging Extensions, Tabs, Connectors, Outgoing Web hooks and more
  • teams-dev-samples – Microsoft Teams targeted samples from community and Microsoft engineering
  • script-samples – Scripting samples for automating operations in Microsoft 365 with PowerShell modules or CLIs
  • Sharing is Caring – Getting started on learning how to contribute and be active on the community from GitHub perspective.
  • pnpcore – The PnP Core SDK is an SDK designed to work against Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Graph API first approach
  • powershell –  PnP PowerShell module which is PowerShell Core module targeted for Microsoft 365
  • pnpframework – PnP Framework is a .Net Standard 2.0 library targeting Microsoft 365 containing the PnP Provisioning engine and a ton of other useful extensions
  • spfx-reference-scenarios – Samples for the Microsoft Teams and Viva Connections, implemented using SharePoint Framework
  • sp-dev-fx-aces – Samples on the Adaptive Card Extensions for Microsoft Viva
  • sp-dev-fx-webparts – Client-side web part samples from community and Microsoft engineering
  • sp-dev-fx-extensions – Samples and tutorial code around SharePoint Framework Extensions
  • sp-dev-fx-library-components – Samples and tutorial code around the SharePoint Framework library components
  • sp-starter-kit – Starter kit solution for SharePoint modern experiences
  • sp-dev-build-extensions – Different build extensions like gulp tasks and gulp plugins from the community and engineering around SharePoint development
  • sp-dev-solutions – Repository for more polished and fine-tuned reusable solutions build with SharePoint Framework
  • sp-dev-samples – Repository for other samples related on the SharePoint development topics – WebHooks etc.
  • sp-dev-fx-controls-react – Reusable content controls for SharePoint Framework solutions build with React
  • sp-dev-fx-property-controls – Reusable property pane controls to be used in web parts
  • list-formatting – Open-source community-driven repository for the column and view formatting JSON definitions
  • sp-dev-site-scripts – Open-source community-driven repository for community Site Designs and Site Scripts
  • sp-dev-modernization – Tooling and guidance around modernizing SharePoint from classic to modern
  • sp-power-platform-solutions – Solution and sample code for SharePoint Power Platform solutions
  • powerfx-samples – Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for the Power Fx low-code programming language
  • powerapps-samples – Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for Power Apps
  • powerautomate-samples – Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for Power Automate
  • powerva-samples – Samples that demonstrate different usage patterns for Power Virtual Agents
  • AdaptiveCards-Templates – Samples on showcasing the art of possible with adaptive cards

 

All SharePoint specific repositories or services supported directly by Microsoft are located in the SharePoint GitHub organization

 

Classic PnP named repositories – older tooling

 

  • PnP-Tools – Tools and scripts targeted more for IT Pro’s and for on-premises for SP2013 and SP2016
  • PnP-Provisioning-Schema – PnP Provisioning engine schema repository

 

Repositories in the GitHub Microsoft Search organization controlled by the PnP initiative

 

 

Other related resources from GitHub

 

What’s supportability story around the community tooling and assets?

Following statements apply across all of the community lead and contributed samples and solutions, including samples, core component(s) and solutions, like SharePoint Starter Kit, yo teams or PnP PowerShell. All Microsoft released SDKs and tools are supported based on the specific tool policies.

 

  • PnP guidance and samples are created by Microsoft & by the Community
  • PnP guidance and samples are maintained by Microsoft & community
  • PnP uses supported and recommended techniques
  • PnP is an open-source initiative by the community – people who work on the initiative for the benefit of others, have their normal day job as well
  • PnP is NOT a product and therefore it’s not supported by Premier Support or other official support channels
  • PnP is supported in similar ways as other open source projects done by Microsoft with support from the community by the community
  • There are numerous partners that utilize PnP within their solutions for customers. Support for this is provided by the Partner. When PnP material is used in deployments, we recommend being clear with your customer/deployment owner on the support model

 

Please see the specifics on the supportability on the tool, SDK or  component repository or download page.

 

Microsoft 365 PnP team model

 

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In April 2020 we announced our new Microsoft 365 PnP team model and grew the MVP team quite significantly. PnP model exists for having more efficient engagement between Microsoft engineering and community members. Let’s build things together. Your contributions and feedback is always welcome! During August, we also crew the team with 5 new members. PnP Team coordinates and leads the different open-source and community efforts we execute in the Microsoft 365 platform.

 

We welcome all community members to get involved on the community and open-source efforts. Your input do matter!

 

 

Got feedback, suggestions or ideas? – Please let us know. Everything we do in this program is for your benefit. Feedback and ideas are more than welcome so that we can adjust the process for benefitting you even more.

 

 

Microsoft 365 PnP Recognition Program

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We are excited to announce new community contributor program for all the active community members. Through this program you can get officially acknowledged with the a Credly badge around your work on our open-source and community channels. See more from

https://aka.ms/m365pnp-recognition. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

 

⚙ Area-specific updates

These are different areas which are closely involved on the community work across the PnP initiative. Some are lead and coordinated by engineering organizations, some are coordinated by the community and MVPs.

 

Microsoft Graph Toolkit

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Microsoft Graph Toolkit is engineering lead initiative, which works closely with the community on the open-source areas. The Microsoft Graph Toolkit is a collection of reusable, framework-agnostic web components and helpers for accessing and working with Microsoft Graph. The components are fully functional right of out of the box, with built in providers that authenticate with and fetch data from Microsoft Graph.

 

 

All the latest updates on the Microsoft Graph Toolkit is being presented in our bi-weekly Microsoft 365 Generic Dev community call, including the latest community contributors.

 

Microsoft 365 Community docs

 

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Community docs model was announced in the April 2020 and it’s great to see the interest for community to help each other by providing new guidance on the non-dev areas. See more on the announcement from the SharePoint blog – Announcing the Microsoft 365 Community Docs. We do welcome contributions from the community – our objective is to build a valuable location for articles from Microsoft and community together.

 

New articles

 

 

Have ideas for articles or want to contribute yourself? – Get involved! Here are also some additional resources explaining the model more detailed.

 

 

SharePoint Framework development samples

 

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These are the updated SharePoint Framework samples which are available from the different repositories.

 

 

How to find what’s relevant for you? Take advantage of our SharePoint Framework web part and extension sample galleries – also includes solutions which work in Microsoft Teams

 

 

Microsoft Teams community samples

 

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These are samples which have been contributed on the community samples since last summary. We do welcome all Microsoft Teams samples to this gallery. They can be implemented using in any technology.

 

  • Numerous adjustments on existing samples and solutions

 

If you are interested on Microsoft Teams samples, we have just released also new Microsoft Teams sample gallery. Contributions to Microsoft Teams samples is also more than welcome. This gallery already surfaces all Microsoft samples, Microsoft Teams app templates and community samples.

 

Power Platform samples

 

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There was also numerous smaller updates on the different Power Platforms samples. See more details on available samples from following location

 

If you have any existing samples which you’d be willing to share with others – please submit a pull request or contact the PnP team members to get started on getting more closely involved on this initiative. Here to help.

 

Microsoft 365 Script Samples

 

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We have released new Microsoft 365 Script Sample gallery within past month. We welcome all scripts on Microsoft 365 automation to this centralized repository, targeted to help to manage and automate day-to-day operations.

 

Here are the latest updates on the Script Samples

 

 

If you have any existing scripts which you’d be willing to share with others – please submit a pull request or contact the PnP team members to get started on getting more closely involved on this initiative. 

 

 

Independent Connectors Program

 

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Microsoft Power Platform comes with a huge variety of already built-in connectors and also provides you with the ability of creating your own custom connectors. As of July 2021, anyone can submit the connectors they built to Microsoft Power Platform so that they can be used by others as well. Previously, only API owners could publish their connectors. The Independent Publisher Connector Program’s mission is to bring the best together: the best people, connecting great ideas to data, apps, and flows. We want to make it easier for connector developers to collaborate on connectors.

 

For more information, you can watch this video on Publish a connector to the Publish a connector to the Power Platform with Independent Publisher Connector Program gram and check out Microsoft Power Platform Connectors on GitHub

 

These are the latest connectors: 

 

 

Sharing is Caring initiative

 

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The “Sharing Is Caring” imitative is targeted for learning the basics around making changes in Microsoft Docs, in GitHub, submitting pull requests to the PnP repositories and in GitHub in general. Take advantage of this instructor lead training for learning how to contribute to docs or to open-source solutions. Everyone is welcome to learn how to get started on contributing to open-source docs or code!

 

  • See more from the guidance documentation – including all upcoming instructor lead sessions which you can participate!

 

✍ Different Microsoft 365 related open-source initiatives build together with the community

See exact details on the latest updates from the specific open-source project release notes. You can also follow up on the project updates from our community calls. There are numerous active projects which are releasing new versions with the community even on weekly basis. Get involved!

 

  • Microsoft Look Book – Discover the modern experiences you can build with SharePoint in Microsoft 365. Look book provides design examples for SharePoint Online which can be automatically provisioned to any tenant in the world. See more from https://lookbook.microsoft.com. This service is also provided as open-source solution sample from GitHub.
  • yo teams – Open-source Yeoman generator for Microsoft Teams extensibility. Supports creation of bots, messaging extensions, tabs (with SSO), connectors and outgoing Webhooks. See more from https://aka.ms/yoteams.
  • PnP Framework – .NET Standard 2.0 SDK containing the classic PnP Sites Core features for SharePoint Online. More around this package from GitHub.
  • PnP Core SDK – The PnP Core SDK is an SDK designed to work for Microsoft 365 with Graph API first approach. It provides a unified object model for working with SharePoint Online and Teams which is agnostic to the underlying API’s being called. See more around the SDK from documentation.
  • PnP PowerShell – PnP PowerShell is a .NET Core 3.1 / .NET Framework 4.6.1 based PowerShell Module providing over 400 cmdlets that work with Microsoft 365 environments and more specifically SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. See more details from documentation.
  • Reusable SharePoint Framework controls – Reusable controls for SharePoint Framework web part and extension development. Separate projects for React content controls and Property Pane controls for web parts. These controls are using Office UI Fabric React controls under the covers and they are SharePoint aware to increase the productivity of developers.
  • CLI for Microsoft 365 – Cross-OS command line interface to manage Office 365 tenant settings. See release notes for latest updates. 
  • PnPJs – PnPJs encapsulates SharePoint REST APIs and provides a fluent and easily usable interface for querying data from SharePoint sites. It’s a replacement of already deprecated pnp-js-core library. See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP Provisioning Engine and PnP CSOM Core – PnP provisioning engine is part of the PnP CSOM extension. They encapsulate complex business driven operations behind easily usable API surface, which extends out-of-the-box CSOM NuGet packages. See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP PowerShell – PnP PowerShell cmdlets are open-source complement for the SharePoint Online cmdlets. There are more than 300 different cmdlets to use and you can use them to manage tenant settings or to manipulate actual SharePoint sites. They See changelog for the latest updates.
  • PnP Modern Search solution – The PnP ‘Modern Search’ solution is a set of SharePoint Online modern Web Parts allowing SharePoint super users, webmasters and developers to create highly flexible and personalized search based experiences in minutes. See more details on the different supported capabilities from https://aka.ms/pnp-search.
  • Modernization tooling – All tools and guidance on helping you to transform you SharePoint to modern experiences from http://aka.ms/sppnp-modernize.
  • SharePoint Starter Kit v2 – Building modern experiences with Microsoft Teams flavors for SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019 – reference solution in GitHub.
  • List formatting definitions – Community contributed samples around the column and view formatting in GitHub.
  • Site Designs and Site Scripts – Community contributed samples around SharePoint Site Designs and Site Scripts in GitHub.
  • DevOps tooling and scripts – Community contributed scripts and tooling automation around DevOps topics (CI/CD) in GitHub.
  • Teams provisioning solution – Set of open-source Azure Functions for Microsoft Teams provisioning. See more details from GitHub.

 

✍ Documentation updates

Please see all the Microsoft 365 development documentation updates from the related documentation sets and repositories as listed below:

 

 

Microsoft 365 Developer and Microsoft 365 Community YouTube video channels

You can find all Microsoft 365 related videos on our YouTube Channel at http://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos or at Microsoft 365 Dev. These channels contains already a significant amount of detailed training material, demo videos, and community call recordings.

 

Here are the new Microsoft demo or guidance videos released since the last monthly summary:

 

 

Community demos as following: 

 

 

Key contributors to the January 2021 update

Here’s the list of active contributors (in alphabetical order) since last release details in GitHub repositories or community channels. PnP is really about building tooling and knowledge together with the community for the community, so your contributions are highly valued across the Microsoft 365 customers, partners and obviously also at Microsoft.

 

Thank you for your assistance and contributions on behalf of the community. You are truly making a difference! If we missed someone, please let us know.

 

 

Companies: Here’s the companies, which provided support the community initiative for this month by allowing their employees working for the benefit of others in the community. There were also people who contributed from other companies during last month, but we did not get their logos and approval to show them in time for these communications. If you still want your logo for this month’s release, please let us know and share the logo with us. Thx.

 

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Microsoft people: Here’s the list of Microsoft people who have been closely involved with the PnP work during last month.

 

MVP Community team

MVP Community team (PnP Team) manages the PnP community work in the GitHub and also coordinates different open-source projects around Microsoft 365 topics. PnP Team members have a significant impact on driving adoption of Microsoft 365  topics. They have shown their commitment to the open-source and community-driven work by constantly contributing to the benefit of the others in the community.

 

Thank you for all that you do!

 

 

Here are the Microsoft Internal PnP Core team members:

 

Next steps

See all of the available community calls, tools, components and other assets from https://aka.ms/m365pnp. Get involved!

 

Got ideas or feedback on the topics to cover, additional partnerships, product feature capabilities? – let us know. Your input is important for us, so that we can support your journey in Microsoft 365.

 

“Sharing is caring!”

 


Microsoft 365 Community (PnP) – January 13th 2021

 

Experiencing Data Access Issue in Azure portal for Log Analytics – 01/16 – Resolved

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Final Update: Sunday, 16 January 2022 14:18 UTC

We’ve confirmed that all systems are back to normal with no customer impact as of 01/16, 13:40 UTC. Our logs show the incident started on 01/16, 10:50 UTC and that during the 2 hours and 50 minutes that it took to resolve the issue some of the customers may have experienced intermittent failures when querying data and missed or delayed alerts for resources hosted in West Central US region .
  • Root Cause: The failure was due to a backend dependency failure.
  • Incident Timeline: 2 Hours & 50 minutes – 01/16, 10:50 UTC through 01/16, 13:40 UTC
We understand that customers rely on Azure Log Analytics as a critical service and apologize for any impact this incident caused.

-Soumyajeet

Initial Update: Sunday, 16 January 2022 13:17 UTC

We are aware of issues within Log Analytics and are actively investigating. Some customers may experience data access and delayed or missed Log Search Alerts in West Central US region.
  • Work Around: None
  • Next Update: Before 01/16 15:30 UTC
We are working hard to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.
-Soumyajeet