Programmatically add a document to a Delve Board with REST

Microsoft recently launched the Boards feature in Delve, with which you can create Pinterest like boards and add content to them. You can add documents from your SharePoint sites as well as OneDrive for Business sites.  Here is a great introduction to the functionality: http://blogs.office.com/2015/01/07/introducing-boards-office-delve-new-way-organize-share-work/ 
I have been playing around a bit with this feature and have some interesting things to share. So Lets have a look at how this has been implemented under the hood.

1) The same Signals API which I have blogged about here is used in boards. AJAX requests are sent to the /_api/signalstore/signals endpoint when any operations are made in Delve (eg. add document to board)

2) Boards are internally referred to as "Tags". So when you add a document to a board, it gets "Tagged" with the name of the board. More on this later.

3) There seem to be 2 components in play. When you add a document to board, there is an "immediate" add in the front-end as well as a normal add when the incremental crawl adds the document in the Search Index. The front-end immediately  shows the user  that the document is added to a board. This is a very good solution as otherwise the user would have to wait till the incremental crawl has taken place.

Let us have a look at the API now. All the API is doing is adding/removing documents to boards and following/unfollowing boards. Unlike my previous post about modifying relationship signals in the Office Graph, with this API you will not be interfering with your Office Graph relationships so I think you can safely use this API in your solutions.  Now lets take a look at what actually happens under the hood:

There is a new button introduced in the document card. So when you click on "Add to Board" and select a board from the dropdown,  here is the JSON which is sent to the Signals API: 

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Basically, it has 2 Important pieces of data: 

1) The document gets tagged with the name of the board. This tag is then used by Delve to search and get all documents belonging to a certain board. This is done by the first object with ActionType:Tag and Item Id as the absolute url of the document.

2) The current user is made to follow the Tag (which is the board name) so that it shows up on the left hand side in Delve. This is done by the second object with ActionType: Follow and Item Id: ‘Path=”TAG://PUBLIC/?NAME=MY+TEST+BOARD”  where the name of the board I selected was "My Test Board"

If you want to reproduce this exact behavior in your solution, here is the sample code you can start with. Please be aware that that this code only tags the document with the board name so that it is added to the search index and follows the board so that it appears in your boards in Delve. This does not do the front-end add to the board. So you will have to wait for an incremental crawl to run in Office 365 for the document to get added to the board and show up in Delve. I have observed this can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. 

Here is the code:


The document will get added to the board:

Hope you enjoyed this post. I have plans to follow this up with some code samples which show how to remove documents from boards, unfollow boards and some other new functionality. Thanks for reading.

My Colleagues App powered by Office Graph

This will be a very short post following one of my previous posts about the Office Graph and the GQL. I have taken most of the code there and put it inside a SharePoint Hosted App.

The App queries the Office Graph for the colleagues with whom you closely work with and displays them. Basically, it does the same thing which you see on the left hand side when you log in to Delve. This app can be a good starting point if you want to further develop apps which consume the Office Graph API. You can pick and choose the Delve elements which you want in your app. Also, you can create customized scenarios which leverage the Office Graph and deliver them as Apps for SharePoint.

Since the App requires Search permissions to be granted in the AppManifest, you will need to have the Tenant Admin credentials to install the App. I think this might be a blocker for some people in installing the App. Now fortunately, if you just want to test the functionality out, you can take all the code in the App.js and run it from inside a SharePoint Online page. You do not need tenant admin permissions to execute the code in the page.

This App will only work in SharePoint Online (Office 365) as there is no Office Graph for SharePoint On-Premises at the moment.

The code for the App is part of Office Developer Patterns and Practices repository and is available here:

https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/dev/Samples/OfficeGraph.Demo.App

Set another user's profile properties with CSOM

So a while ago, writing User Profile properties via the CSOM was made possible. Vesa Juvonen has a great post about it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2014/11/07/sharepoint-user-profile-properties-now-writable-with-csom.aspx

I have put together some code which will allow a Tenant Administrator to modify the User Profile Properties of another user in the tenant. This could be useful if a batch job has to be performed and profile properties have to be set (or updated) for all the users in a Tenant. The code is only to set the properties of one user but you can easily modify it to do the same for multiple users.

This code can also be found as a part of the Office 365 Patterns and Practices code samples on GitHub:
https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/UserProfile.Manipulation.CSOM.Console

You will need the AccountName of the user whose profile properties you want to modify.  To get the AccountName of all the user's in a Tenant, you can use People search.

Some points to note with this approach:

1) You need to know the credentials of the Tenant Admin

2) I have tried using this code in a Provider Hosted App with App Only Policy but it does not seem to work. It only works in a Console Application for now.

3) This is only available in SharePoint Online for now and not SharePoint 2013 On-Premises.

4) You will need the 16.0.0.0 version of the following libraries:
 Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll
 Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll
 Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.UserProfiles.dll

The code:

1) Set Single Value Profile Property of another user:

2) Set Multiple Value Profile Property of another user:

Writing signals into the Office Graph and Delve

Say you are developing a custom solution in SharePoint Online and you want to integrate data from the Office Graph in it. The method of reading data from the Office Graph is pretty straightforward and I have documented it in my previous post: http://www.vrdmn.com/2014/09/exploring-office-graph-and-graph-query.html

But what if you actually want to send behavior data to the Office Graph? You have a custom link to a User Profile or a document in your solution and when the user clicks the link, you want to send a "Clicked" signal to the Office Graph. If  a User Profile link of a user is clicked, you want to send a signal to increase the "closeness" of the current user to that user.

You want the user's interactions in your solution to affect the data that is stored in the Office Graph.

It is actually possible to push signals into the Office Graph from your custom application. There is actually an endpoint  _api/signalstore/signals to which you can send your custom signals.

Some things to note before we go ahead:

1) This API is not yet documented and might change in the future. It is not recommended for production solutions just as yet. 

2) This API is also throttled at a certain stage to avoid malicious use to provide false data to the Office Graph.

3) It takes about 24 hours for Delve to reflect your changes.

To see how this is done, you can open up Delve in your browser and press F12 to bring up the Developer Tools. When you navigate in various areas of Delve, you can see all the signals which are sent to the Office Graph as a result of your actions. For example, when you click a document, you can see the following request is sent:

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Each signal is made of 3 properties. The Action, the Actor and the Item.

1) Actor: This is always the current user as you cannot send signals on behalf of other users.

2) Item: This is the object against which the signal is performed. This can be a document url in case of a document or it can be the login name of a user if the object is a user.

3) Action: This is the action e.g. Clicked, Shown or Elevate which is used to affect the relationship between the Actor and the Item.

I have put together couple of code samples which could be used as a base in sending custom signals to the Office Graph. These samples work right off the bat but they can be further customized by setting properties to modify the Office Graph behavior. You can find the full list of properties in your Developer Tools.

1) Send a document "Clicked" signal. This will tell the Office Graph that the current user has clicked a particular document. The Office Graph will take into account this action when calculating the closeness of the current user to this document.



2) Elevate a user with respect to the current user. This will increase the closeness and edge weight of the specified user with respect to the current user:



Hope this API will get documented soon. There is a lot of potential here for building custom solutions on top of the Office Graph and Delve.

Exploring Office Graph and the Graph Query Language

So you must have heard about the Office Delve launch recently. I have been trying out my hands at the Office Graph which powers Delve and the Graph Query Language which can be used to get data from the Office Graph. To get a comprehensive idea of how it all works, follow these links:

Developing Apps against the Office Graph - Part 1
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/richard_dizeregas_blog/archive/2014/09/15/developing-apps-against-the-office-graph.aspx

Developing Apps against the Office Graph – Part 2
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/richard_dizeregas_blog/archive/2014/09/17/developing-apps-against-the-office-graph-part-2.aspx

Using Graph Query Language (GQL) with the SharePoint Online Search REST API to query Office graph:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn783218(v=office.15).aspx

So basically we can say that the Graph Query Language can be used to filter normal search queries to return content which is highly relevant to the user. I think the most important thing about the GQL is the EdgeWeight property which can be used to return content sorted by it's "closeness" to the user. This 'magic' property will also return a relevance score of how close the object (content) is to the actor (user).

For example, if  I make a query to get all the people with whom the current user closely works with, the person who will have the highest relevance score will be the person with whom the current user works with most closely. The next person will have a slightly lesser relevance score and so on. This will also be true for other queries such as documents which are most relevant to the current user. This data can be very useful and can be used in a variety of scenarios.

Here is an example of a query to get the users with whom the current user works closely. I have modified the code from Richard diZerega's blog which is linked above.

Deploy Workflows to Host Web with Integrated Workflow Apps

Update (19/08/2015): Integrated Workflow Apps are now part of Visual Studio 2015. You do not need to manually edit any XML files now. You will just need to:

1) Use Visual Studio 2015 (I was using the Enterprise version)

2) Create a SharePoint App (Add-In as it's now called)

3) Add a Workflow to your Add-In Project. (Your Add-In cannot be an Integrated Workflow Add-In unless there is a Workflow in it)

4) Go to the Project Properties and set the "Integrated App" property to True. That's it!

Original Article:

In the recent Office 365 Developer YamJam on the Office 365 Technical Network, there were lots of great questions asked to and answered by the Office 365 Engineering Team. You can view all the questions over here: https://www.yammer.com/itpronetwork/#/threads/inGroup?type=in_group&feedId=4419638

One thing which I was interested in was the Integrated Workflow Apps. I have seen a lot of people ask about this as they want to deploy Workflows to their Host Web (or Content Site) from their Apps. I had known that something was in the pipeline as I had seen a glimpse of it in this video from SPC 2014 http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/SharePoint-Conference/2014/SPC3994 

Luckily, Tim McConnell who is the speaker in the video was part of the YamJam and he answered that Integrated Workflow Apps are already available on SharePoint Online but they are waiting for tooling support so no official announcement has been made till now.

I have tested them on my development Office 365 Tenant and it works! In this post, I will be detailing the process by which you can get it working too. 

You will need to have installed Visual Studio 2013 and Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 for this. My test project is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/vman/Integrated-Workflow-Apps

1) Start Visual Studio 2013 > New Project > App for SharePoint

2) Enter the SharePoint Online Site Url and select the hosting model for your app. I have selected SharePoint Hosted.

3) Right Click App Project > Add > New Item

 4) Select Workflow and type in a name for your Workflow

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5) Select the type of Workflow as Site Workflow

(List Workflow Deployment is shown at the end of the post) 

6) Select "Create New" for History List and Task List.

7) Add some sample activities to your Workflow.

I have added a LookupWorkflowContextProperty to get the current Site Url and a WriteToHistory activity which will write the Current Site Url to the History List

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8) Give your App Manage Permissions on the Web:

9) Right click App Project > Publish > Package the app. A window will pop up showing you the packaged .app file.

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10) Now the interesting part. Open the .app file as an archive with a tool of your choice.

 I have used 7-Zip which is a really awesome tool. You can download it from here: http://www.7-zip.org/

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11) Once opened, look for the WorkflowManifest.xml file and open it. It will be empty to start with. Copy the following in the file and save it.

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12) After Clicking save, you will get the following prompt. Click Ok. 

13) Now your .app package is ready to be deployed to your App Catalog. Go to your App Catalog and upload the .app file in the "Apps for SharePoint" document library. 

14) Once uploaded, go to your Team Site > Site Contents > Add an App > Select your app and add it to your Team Site.

15) You will be prompted to trust your App. Click on "Trust It".

16) Once the App is installed on your site, go to Site Contents > Site Workflows

17) Click on your App to see your Site Workflow deployed on the site. Click on the Workflow to start it. 

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18) Let the workflow complete. After it has completed, click on the Internal Status to see what the workflow logged to the History List 

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19) You can see that the Workflow logged the url of the Team Site on which it was running. 

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This proves that the Workflow was deployed to and ran on the Host Web (Content Site).

Deploy List Workflow:

The process to deploy the list workflow is quite the same except in step 5, select List Workflow.  

Do not associate your workflow to any List. We will do the association after the deployment of the Workflow.

Select when you want your workflow to start. 

Add a Sample Workflow Activity in the Workflow to Log the Current List Name and the Current Item Url:

Steps 8 to 15 are the same as for a Site Workflow. After the Workflow is deployed, Go to a list > List Settings > Workflow Settings > Add a Workflow

Click on your App, Associate your Custom Workflow by giving it a name and configuring other settings. Click on OK.  

After you associate the Workflow, Start it either manually, or create an item, or update an item depending on the method you selected in the Workflow Designer in the App. 

After the Workflow Completes, Click on the Internal Status to see what the Workflow Logged to the History List:

Thanks for reading!

Start SharePoint Workflows with JavaScript Client Object Model

This will be a quick post to follow up on couple of my previous posts. In this post we will see how to start SharePoint 2013 Workflows which are created using the SharePoint 2010 Workflow engine. If you have Workflows created with the SharePoint 2013 engine, please see my previous posts:

1) Managing SharePoint 2013 Workflows with CSOM

2) Using the SharePoint 2013 Workflow Interop Service in CSOM

In this post, I will show you basically the same thing as in the previous posts, but by using the JavaScript Client Object Model (JSOM).

I recently had a requirement for which I had to start a Nintex Site Workflow with JavaScript. Now due to my previous posts, I had an idea that we can use the Managed CSOM to manage workflows but wanted to see if the same is possible from the JavaScript CSOM.  Nintex Workflows utilize the SharePoint 2010 Workflow Engine and hence we require the Interop Service to work with them in JavaScript.

Here is the code I put together to start my Site Workflow:



You can  have a look at my previous posts and the SP.WorkflowServices.debug.js file to see how to start other workflows such as List Workflows or SharePoint 2013 Workflow Engine workflows from the JavaScript Client Object Model.