Speaking at Valo Online Summit EU 2020

I'm looking forward to speaking at Valo Online Summit EU 2020 on June 3-4, 2020.

The Valo Online Summit EU is an event exclusively dedicated to Valo Partners but this year the keynote ending the actual Summit will be open to everyone. Jeff Teper, the father or SharePoint, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft, will speak in this free keynote about the latest innovations and experiences in the Microsoft 365 world on June 4th at 5 p.m. (CET). This is a big opportunity for Valo partners, their customers and other community members to join this free keynote and learn directly from Jeff! 

I will also contribute to the Valo Online Summit's success with a session about "Extending the Valo Teamwork power using SharePoint Site Designs and Site Scripts". Valo Teamwork helps customers to find and manage Microsoft 365 groups, Microsoft teams and SharePoint sites. My session covers an integration between Valo Teamwork and SharePoint Site Designs. The presentation's history is based on the idea of creating project workspaces with predefined configuration.

I am very happy to be a part of the speakers team! Let's get in touch if you're also going to participate in this event!

Event information:

Home page

Jeff Teper's free keynote registration

Identifying if a Teams personal app runs from Teams Web or Teams Desktop Client

I’ve recently built a Teams personal app that required a different authentication mechanism when running from Teams desktop client. It took me a while to figure out how to distinguish between Teams desktop client and Teams web. As far as I’ve researched, there is no supported way yet to clearly identify where a personal app is running. Hence, I decided to write this blog post which shows how to identify if a Teams personal app runs from Teams web or Teams desktop client.

In my case, I tried to embed a SharePoint page as a Teams personal app. This page had a SharePoint Framework web part which did not run from Teams desktop client without a special authentication algorithm. For different reasons, it was not feasible to utilize this new authentication logic in both scenarios: Teams web and Teams desktop client. Well, it was clear. I had to find a way around this!

After intensive platform comparison, I observed two special characteristics. The document interface (loaded web page representation in the browser) and the navigator interface (identity of the browser):

1. document.referrer

When a Teams personal app runs from Teams web, the referrer can contain a value like: https://teams.microsoft.com/_. When the same personal app runs from Teams desktop client the referrer will then be: https://teams.microsoft.com/iframe-container.html. However, the referrer might change depending on operations executed from the embedded page. Hence, the referrer property is not reliable and didn’t help me in that case. 

2. navigator. userAgent

When a Teams personal app runs from Teams desktop client the userAgent always contain the Teams agent. This is a value which consists of Teams/{version} such as Teams/1.3.00.12058. In case of Teams web, the userAgent property doesn't contain the Teams agent. That made the tweak in my case! 

Summary:

Checking if the value "Teams/" existed in the userAgent property, helped me to identify when my personal app was running from Teams web or Teams desktop client. I am constantly looking for an out of the box solution and hope that Microsoft will provide it soon!

I hope this blog post helps you not spending hours trying to understand the uniqueness of those two platforms.