Using Azure Functions, Cognitive Services and Flow for classifying Office 365 SharePoint Word Documents - Part I

This article series helps us to work on a special use case of extracting information of word documents uploaded to Office 365 SharePoint libraries and then analyze the document content using Azure Cognitive Services.

We have seen before extracting tags and metadata properties of image files from Office 365 SharePoint using Microsoft Flow and Azure Cognitive Services.

Microsoft Flow has a Get File content action, but that doesn't help extracting word documents content. Only it supports extracting content of notepad as straight forward approach. Since Microsoft Flow doesnt provide any option to read the word documents content, we will be using Azure Functions to extract the content. Once we have the content, we will use Azure Cognitive service to get the tags for the content extracted. Here Microsoft Flow is used to manipulate triggers and subsequent actions. So our algorithm is will be as follows.

High level architecture for classifying SharePoint Word Documents

Connecting Office 365 SharePoint with CDS using Microsoft Flow

How many of you have heard about CDM and CDS? These two components are availabe on Microsoft platform. CDM stands for Common Data Model and CDS is Common Data Service.

CDM is a secured database stored on Microsoft Azure, which contains business standard entities. Those entities can be used by users for various purposes including integrations. This is commonly used for integrating two Microsoft Systems, with the help of templates/entities.

CDS is a basically a service, that utilizes common data model to enable cross platform reporting capabilities. It is most commonly used on Power BIs for report generations.

Scenario

Think of a scenario, where some application uses common data service for storing the data. And some application uses Office 365 SharePoint as the storage point. And both of these applications deals with the same data sets. In this case, both of these storage system needs to be synchronized.

The solution which we are looking at may not be a full end to end solution, but let’s see how we can push data from SharePoint to CDS. There might be many ways, but here let’s look how it can be done easily using Microsoft Flow with just configurations.

Error Handling for Office 365 SharePoint Actions on Microsoft Flow

In this post, let us look how we are going to handle the Office 365 SharePoint action errors that occurs on Microsoft Flow platform.

Problem Statement: There is an option to get the user profile property on Microsoft Flow using SharePoint REST API. We need to handle if there is any error to this action. Let us see how to handle/catch the error and send a mail with error details.

Sometime back I have published an article for updating user display names for items created on SharePoint using Microsoft Flow. We will use the same concept here, but only we will see how to catch and send the error details over mail.

The flow to get and update the user profile property is as follows.

• Create a trigger to fire the flow whenever an item is created.
• Create a SharePoint action “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint”, to get the user profile property details as explained in the article mentioned above.
• Parse JSON data to get the exact required property (user display name).
• Update the same item with author name field with the value retrieved.

Handling Error:

The following steps shows how to configure the flow to handle the error and configuring appropriate send email action.

• Just after the “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint” action, add a parallel branch with an action. 

SharePoint Saturday Bangalore Event - Automating SharePoint Processes with Microsoft Flow

SharePoint Saturday Bangalore 2018 is a free and open SharePoint community event to exchange the knowledge and build fellowship.

Developer Track Session at a SharePoint Saturday Bangalore 2018 Event - Automating SharePoint Processes with Microsoft Flow! It was an extended interactive session where the benefits of using MS Flow for SharePoint explained with live demos.

I spoke on Automating SharePoint Processes with Microsoft Flow in a short session. The session was a developer track session, which had lot of tips, and demos. The agenda included,

• Introduction to Flow
• Templates and Connectors Available
• How to create custom connectors
• How to create and integrate flows with SharePoint or other systems
• Data Loss Prevention Policies
• Benefits & Conclusion

Microsoft Flow is a cloud based tool that helps building automated workflows between multiple systems. In the session, I will be explaining the basic understanding on MS FLOW. Further, I will focus more creating the custom connectors, and let us also look at creating flows with the help of custom connectors.

https://www.slideshare.net/NakkeeranNatarajan/automating-sharepoint-processes-with-microsoft-flow-spsbangalore

Provisioning Layout and Static Content for Office 365 SharePoint Wiki Pages Using PnP PowerShell

Here let us look how to add text to the wiki pages using text layouts with predefined text. In the samples, let us use PnP PowerShell scripts to create a wiki page, apply default layout and for adding content.

Problem Statement: Programmatically creating or updating wiki pages which uses OOB wiki page layouts with some predefined text. This is easily possible with manual actions. While creating a page using client side scripts, adding content to the page is not feasible. So, let us look how to add the text to the created wiki pages programmatically using PnP PowerShell scripts.

Applying Wiki Page Layouts with Content

The following are the points to be considered for adding text to wiki pages.

• Create a Wiki Page (This is required if the page doesn’t exist already)
• Retrieve the wiki page to be updated – Using CAML query to get the required page list item.
• Apply text layout with predefined text to a retrieved wiki page.

Before getting into operations, let us connect to the SharePoint site using PnP PowerShell using the following snippet.

Create a wiki page: Let us programmatically add a page to a SharePoint site using PnP PowerShell script. The following snippet creates a page with the required layout.

Note: Skip the above step if wiki page is already created.