Citizen developer tools are not just for citizen developers!

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Linette Joseph
5 years ago
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1 Citizen developer tools are not just for citizen developers! a.k.a Using Azure Functions and Cognitive Services Text API to enrich a Flow that fills Metadata for new items in a Modern SharePoint Team Site

2 Session Never before have we, the citizens of Microsoft's ecosystem, had such a flexible and varied arsenal of different tools available for our cloud workloads! This session combines so-called Citizen Development tools with some actual simple development work to provide highly customized, Machine Learning powered analysis workflow for the newly baked Modern Team Sites in SharePoint Online. The session will include a quick overview of the capabilities of Microsoft Flow Modern Team Sites Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics API (using the recently published SDK) Azure Functions (coupled with some helpful libraries).

3 Session Finally, we'll see how to hack all of this together, to automate document management on a Modern SharePoint Team Site's Document library. After this session you'll know how to create rich and customized workflows using the tools shown during the session. All of the code included in the demo will be shared on GitHub afterwards.

4 How does this relate to real-life business problems?

5 The Problem The amount of data is surging (~90% of the data in the world has been created in the last 2 years) To ensure that data in organizations is useful, it needs to be found easily A great Enterprise-y solution has been metadata tagging! However, users generally hate doing that manually Automatic solutions are either cumbersome to maintain, expensive to develop, or both Many required metadata fields will cause users to migrate to shadow IT solutions (like DropBox)

6 The Solution Using Modern Team Sites in SharePoint for document storage enables collaboration SharePoint Search is decent, but thorough metadata tagging makes it a lot more useful Using Azure Cognitive Services we can fill the metadata fields automatically without any user interaction at all! Content will be found and users will be happy

7 Our Stack Today (1/2) Modern SharePoint Team Sites Document Library used as a Data Source The only End-User Facing GUI Microsoft Flow Launches the webhook and finally sends a notification Azure Function Contains the actual program logic Azure Cognitive Services Text API used to analyze text for Key Phrases

8 Our Stack Today (2/2) The whole stack is super cheap! SharePoint Online included in most licenses anyway, standalone $5/user/mo (including 1Tb of OneDrive!) Cognitive Services free (for a small monthly quota commercial plans starting from ~$70/mo) Azure Functions billed per usage, my monthly cost for my demos has been 0.02 See Flow free for personal, basic use

9 How? A Flow attached to Document Library will call the Azure Function that ll do the heavy lifting Could call Azure Function directly (there s a connection for that!) but I repurposed this Flow from calling an external API, so HTTP it is Finally, notifies admin of the execution and the creator of the file.

10 How? An Azure Function will run, extract text, analyze it using Azure Cognitive Services, and then write the info back to SharePoint Online

11 Demo 1: Easy text file Uploading a simple text file to a SharePoint Document Library, and watching it get automatically tagged

13 Demo 2: Let s upload something difficult A scientific article about Game Studies Not easy text to decipher, even for a human Let s see it getting analyzed and tagged!

15 Demo 3: How to debug this stuff? How to develop and debug this stuff? Using Visual Studio for running Azure Functions locally, and Postman instead of Flow, with SharePoint Online

17 Caveats The stack s evolving no telling how long this will be valid or required You could replace text extraction with Azure OCR but last time I tried, the custom library worked better.

18 What s next? Microsoft Flow is getting more Managed Metadata capabilities maybe we won t need the OfficeDev PnP / CSOM library to write to the document library soon?

Presented by. Dheepa Iyer Managing Consultant. Commissioned for. Reston SharePoint User Group. SharePoint Framework. May 2017

Presented by. Dheepa Iyer Managing Consultant. Commissioned for. Reston SharePoint User Group. SharePoint Framework. May 2017 Presented by Dheepa Iyer Managing Consultant Commissioned for Reston SharePoint User Group SharePoint Framework May 2017 About Me Dheepa Iyer Managing Consultant, Washington DC Metro, XGILITY Personal