Coming up, we'll take a look at updates to the Office Add-in model
and what it means for IT pros
from centralized deployment and management
to what's new for developers and Office users.
Microsoft Mechanics
So I'm joined today by Jeremey Thake from the Office Eco System team, welcome.
Thanks, Jeremey.
So, were going to talk about the different updates we've made
from and IT admin perspective
and how we can really use that to push admins out to end users
and some of the updates we've made there.
but it is developer season.
So why don't you give us an update on what has been changed
with the Office Admin model.
Sure, we have three key pillars in Office development.
The first pillar is around Office Add-ins
and basically building a user engaged system around
Outlook, Word, PowerPoint , and Excel
and actually, we introduced One Note as well.
So you can build Add-ins and task panes directly into those products.
And then, the second pillar is really around Microsoft graph
and how you can build into all of our services one unified endpoint graph at Microsoft.com
to get into things like calendar, mail, contacts, files.
With interesting new things like the Office Graph
where you can simulate all the stuff can you do with Delve
but for many things inside your own web applications or your own mobile applications.
And then, a third pillar is engaging users by conversations
We will show you some that today with Zendesk with the users and groups.
But, we are also doing some stuff with Skype around a Web SDK and a Mobile SDK
that allows you to kind of integrate video and audio in chat
into your own mobile applications and web applications.
So lots of great changes on the way
but I want to really focus on what's different from an IT Pro perspective.
If we think about Add-ins in Office and the clients
we have things like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Normally, I would push out things like Com Add-ins to my users.
What that model looks like is I tend to basically
package out that Add-in to an MSI file
maybe an executable file.
Then I would use a software deployment infrastructure like System Center
Configuration Manager deploy to that.
And what that's going to do is push those Add-ins down to those computers.
But, the problem with that is
once I want to update those Add-ins
maybe the code get stale, maybe I don't know who has what installed.
It's really difficult to have to rev how those Add-ins run.
What's behind those add-ins?
I'll have to go and uninstall some maybe
and then supersede them with some newer ones.
That gets really difficult.
so what we've got now in terms of the new Add-in model
is the ability to actually build those Add-ins and so they run in the cloud.
That means that the execution and what's going on with the actual Add-in itself
is not operating at the client level
it is basically an instruction file that is saying
I want to look at a cloud hosted service or an internally hosted service
and have that will operate against my files and my documents.
So on the Office side for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
now we have the ability to push out a manifest file straight from the portal.
and what that's going to do is basically the clients are going to be looking for
and pulling for these new Add-in manifests
and we're going to show what that looks like in a second.
And once ones is available I can just load that in.
Some kind of like the clients now can load
data loss prevention policies
or load the most recently used documents when you boot up Word Excel PowerPoint.
And, the same way we're gonna be able to pull in Add-in manifests
and I can centrally deploy those.
And, I can even update those centrally, right from where that Add-ins running.
Or, I can even disable them from the portal.
So really cool stuff to make it easier for me to get Add-ins out to end users.
So, Jeremy why don't we show what the user experience looks like
before the Add-ins are actually installed.
Sure, so this is Word here. I'm logged in as Shirley here in the top right
as a demo user.
And you can see the different ribbon groups and then so.
You notice that this is kind of the stock standard Word environment
without any additional Add-ins in there.
What we can do is, we can deploy add-ins that show up to Shirley
using this add-in management console inside of the Office 365 administration settings.
And I'll show that.
So, I'm going to hop back over to my machine and actually show what that looks like.
So, here I am in the Admin Center in the preview portal.
I add an Office add-in
and now I have to just basically browse to those XML Manifest files
that I have in order to add those apps.
Here I have a couple, a code format sample
as well as a Pickit Add-in that we're going to see in a minute.
Now once I load those in, I Browse those
and those will basically get uploaded into the portal.
And I can click Next now once I'm ready.
I'm clicking Next and following the normal prompts.
I can enable and disable straight from this portal as well.
I could edit that Add-in if I wanted to.
I can also target based on an individual user or groups.
The nice thing is here I don't have to worry about setting up collections
like I might have to do in System Center Configuration Manager
to determine who gets those Add-ins.
I can just leverage the normal groups with an Azure ID
and target those Add-ins to those users.
So now if we switch back to your machine
you'll be able to see the user experience once those Add-ins are made available to the user.
Right, so when I'm in Word
what you'll notice is I haven't had to close Word or re-open Word.
In the bottom right here, you can see there's a new photo Add-in which is called Pickit.
that is available to me.
In the top right you will actually notice two new icons there for Pickit.
One will find images and one with your images.
And so, it notifies me as an end user of these Add-ins being available.
And then, I can go and explore these Add-ins
by looking in the ribbon to see that I can now use this as a Add-in in my new environment.
and some of the contrast here that are really
important to point out is not only can I use the portal to be able to get these Add-ins out to my users
but, I can keep them up to date.
And, I don't have to worry about having things in the older days, a couple years ago.
You would have to use a Microsoft account to go to the stores typically get the Add-ins loaded.
I can do all of this now at Org ID.
I can push them out to my users to where they're just there.
Kind of like in the com days, it is a very familiar user experience.
but it's just loaded for me directly.
Sure, and then the other benefit really from a development perspective is that
when do updates to the actual Add-in
we don't necessarily have to do a whole push deployment to the client.
Because, I can change the code that is hosted in the internet somewhere
preferably in Azure or in a web server.
It can be in any web server you like.
And that means I can make changes to my code
that will just immediately show up to the end users
without having to worry about doing pushes to all the client's.
Okay, so we pushed out in our case a Pickit Add-in as well as a code formatting Add-in.
A couple of Add-ins to kind of demonstrate
and highlight a couple functionalities and features within Word.
Why don't you show us what those look like?
Sure, so when I jump into Word here
you'll see on the right hand side
I've got this task pane which allows me to go and look and search for images.
But, as an example I've typed the word dog inside of the text file
and I right click and find images based on that key word of dogs
and you'll see on the right hand side of the task pane, the tagged dogs will show
and it will go and find all the images that Pickit has around dogs.
I'll pick a weird photo of a dog there and install that into the document.
And, essentially I can resize that and use all the styling techniques I have in Word
like straight off the bat which is really cool.
You also have more productive uses here beyond dogs.
so whether I'm a developer I can just
I can just scrap all of that there in the Word document
and insert some code that I have in my clipboard.
And then, I can select that text and use in the top right the code format button
and that will actually use some styling to actually number the lines in my code
and give me some highlighting using JavaScript syntax.
I'm doing documentation or training documents inside word I'm able to do that which is really neat.
and these are just a few things we can do in Word.
Of course we can also have Add-ins.
We've seen Add-ins in past shows with SAP inside of Excel.
Or, using Uber inside of Outlook.
One thing to point out from an Outlook perspective in using email
Add-ins are still deployed in the same way against the Exchange server by the exchange admin.
So those are still using the same model for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
This new model makes it really easy to get those Add-ins out to users
and keep them up-to-date importantly.
But, I know from an IT Pro perspective
we often use ticketing systems and things for help desk and I know you've got an example here
using ZENworks, so why don't you show us that?
It is using some of the new capabilities, I think in groups and with connectors.
Sure, yeah so one of the big things is
we work a lot with partners we want to integrate into our product.
And the nice thing with some of the Add-ins is that it's not just for the win 32 desktop.
If you're using Mac Office, Word, PowerPoint, or Excel now
you can also get those Add-ins available in there.
but in addition you can have things like ribbon buttons and integration at that level.
But, we have done some work to integrate other areas to.
With Office 365 groups, which is fairly new
and I know you've had Christopher on the show to talk about groups before.
We have this ability to go to and add partners connectors directly into a particular group.
So I can see things like Twitter or, I can hook up RSS feeds.
And essentially what happens is any events happening in these part of these products
will become available as individual conversations that shop in the conversations feed within groups.
This time we are going to pick Zendesk.
So we Zendesk, I can pick which administration user i'm going to use.
I can say, I want this to be escalated with from within Zendesk into this group.
I can say that whenever a new ticket comes out
it's going to post a conversation in my Office 365 group.
And all I do is close that down
and when I jump over to conversations here in the groups.
You'll see that there's already a conversation saying that configuration has been created
and the connection is there inside this dev intersections group.
Now the other nice part is, just to show of what they have done with Outlook
is they have built this Add-in inside of Outlook.
In this case, I'm doing it right now inside a line in the web browser.
But, this would work in the client too.
It allows me to do things like for this particular email
I want to create a to create a Zendesk ticket.
I'm going to say that I want it to be a high priority
and essentially it is going to be a new ticket.
And then, I can just click the Create ticket button here in the bottom right.
And, what that will do is, it will go and create that ticket
with all the information from email, the body, the title, the two line
and pull that into Zendesk.
Okay.
Then I can go into Zendesk and see that ticket is actually created.
And, what it would do because it's a brand new ticket
it will also show up as a new ticket inside the conversations viewing in groups.
Now, the real benefit of that is I can have a conversation about this ticket
in my Office 365 group in the browser on my mobile version of groups
which Chistopher showed us.
And all that information is accessible to Zendesk
for Microsoft Graph that they can service in there application as well.
This is really good stuff.
Beyond this, we have done quite a bit in terms of getting that Skype work done via the SDK.
And, getting more integration there with conversations you might have in Skype.
These are some of the experiences
and some of the updates we have made from an IT Pro perspective
and end user experience perspective
across Add-ins for office.
So, lots of exciting things there.
Of course, where would somebody get started if they wanted to learn more
and get Add-ins built and deployed?
Sure, dev.office.com is the single point to go to.
We have a great developer program you can sign up for
which will give you a one-year free Office 365 developer tenant.
You can go experiment with these things
bright your connectors, build your office Add-ins
and test those things directly inside of the web experience.
Or, you can download the office client onto your Windows machine
or Mac machine and build those things there.
And as an IT Pro, we have links to dev.office.com
to actually go and see all the documentation
of how to use that new Add-in deployment management.
It is in preview right now.
We are really looking for feedback from people.
We have a user voice link on the homepage of dev.office.com
where if you feel like you need additional features in those types of things
our engineers a really engaged on getting that feedback from them
and improving this before we make that journey available in the fall.
A really great overview on office accessibility.
That's about all the time we have for today.
Of course, you can keep checking back to Microsoft mechanics
Wednesdays or as news breaks.
Thanks for watching and goodbye for now.
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Microsoft Mechanics
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