Microsoft 365 Community Adaptive Cards, 12 Sep 2021

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From YouTube: Adaptive Cards community call – September 2021

Description

In this month’s community call: Microsoft Search and Adaptive Cards (Intelligent search for the modern workplace, architecture, Microsoft Graph connectors, rendering using Adaptive Cards, and Search Layout Designer) - Jyoti Pal (Microsoft) A closer look at v1.5 SDK (3 features included in v1.5 preview are Table element; Input.ChoiceSet search, filtering, and auto complete; and ActionSet Overflow due out end of September - J.P. Roca (Microsoft) and finally Q&A – members of the Developer team and PM team fielded questions on a host of topics for 8 minutes. This call was hosted by J.P. Roca (Microsoft). Recorded on September 9, 2021.

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• Blog - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/community/blog
• Recurrent Invite - https://aka.ms/adaptivecardscommunitycall
• Next call – October 14th at 09:00am PDT

A

Hello, everyone, my name, is jp and welcome to the adaptive card september. Community call um as a reminder. This community call is hosted on the second thursday of every month, and this time it looks like we actually got chat working. So that's exciting, we'll, hopefully be able to get some more questions from folks towards the end of the presentation and just to go over what we will be presenting about um I'd like to to give a warm welcome to jody powell from the microsoft search team. um Jody. Are you on the call.

B

Yep, hey everyone, hey jp.

A

So jody today is going to be talking about microsoft, search and how they're powered with adaptive cards and right after that I'll be talking about a closer look at what's coming in 1.5, as well as we'll leave some time towards the end for some q, a without further ado, we'll go ahead and get started.

B

Hi everyone, my name, is jyoti, I'm with the microsoft search team, I'm a pm uh in the microsoft search team and today I'll be talking to you about how we uh in the search product are using adaptive cards. So to begin with, uh you know, before we get started into how exactly adaptive cards are used.

B

I wanted to talk to all of you about microsoft, search set up a little bit of context over here in case you know some folks are not aware of it and that will essentially help you understand um more about how adaptive cards are really being helpful. So, to start with, the microsoft search is an intelligent search for modern workplace.

B

The idea over here is that, for our microsoft users and by microsoft users, I mean our microsoft 365 users, which encompasses a variety of products.

B

On your left hand, side you can see, there's a gamut of products like bing, office.com, sharepoint, outlook themes, and so many more and the idea over here is um how do we have one simple search across all of these microsoft, 365 products and for the enterprise? Also, what microsoft search does is uh it gives you search? That's consistent and familiar from within any app that you're using it also is intelligent search that personalizes results to you and your work and also gives the ability to search from any device anywhere.

B

So in terms of experiences, um you know we have microsoft, search powering the experience for um all of these different microsoft, 365 products, um one of the ideas over here being the uh the essential idea over here, like I called out being that we have a consistent and coherent search experience with all the goodness of search across all of these different products.

B

Now, with this particular context, another important thing to focus on is you know. You're such the users are searching from all of these different places, but the type of content that they are able to search is also of key importance.

B

So traditionally any of the customers um or any of our users will be um able to uh search over typical microsoft content. So I'll, not I'll urge you not to get lost in the diagram, ignore the top uh first half of it, because that's what we I spoke about earlier and focus on the second half of the uh slide, which essentially talks about all the different type of content that a user is able to search for now.

B

Typically, uh what microsoft search used to support was the fact that, because you know, sharepoint teams chat outlook is something which is native to microsoft.

B

All of this content was easily searchable, but we know that users are not just using microsoft products and it's an entire ecosystem of products which are being used by users, and we want microsoft search to be that one single place where you're able to search not just microsoft content, but also external content, with applications and other type of organization data that users are actually using, and that is where this concept of external data sources comes into picture and external data sources are essentially, um you know other products that you're using- and this is where the concept of microsoft graph connectors comes in, and the reason that this is important is that microsoft, graph connectors is essentially the product which is helping bring organizations bring in your external content into microsoft, uh so that that can also now be searched by um our user by the organization's users, so that microsoft search becomes that one single place where the users can go and look for everything that they require instead of having a fragmented search experience.

B

So this is the mechanism of bringing in external sort of content inside of microsoft, search and making it searchable, and this is essentially uh more of the part of bringing in the content and the place where adaptive card comes in is on powering the user experience, and that is where we today are using adaptive cards. So when the content is external content in a way is brought inside of microsoft, the question of how this particular content starts showing up on um the various search.

B

End points is answered by adaptive cards, so we are using uh adaptive cards to show our search results on all of these different kind of experiences.

B

Now now this provides us the capability to essentially allow customers to customize information and layout as per their content, and it lets us essentially allow organizations to tailor the search results as per their needs. So this is where we are essentially are using adaptive cards now. Looking at this particular image, one may wonder why um adaptive cards is even necessary, because this looks like a very typical search result. Experience where, uh which consists of primarily, you know, just key some important information. Like a title.

B

A link and some kind of a description which is associated with it, and um that's where I think that's where it's important to sort of keep in mind and understand all the gamut of different types of um you know, content sources that we were looking at in the previous slide.

B

Where, in that uh you know we, depending on the nature of the content that is being brought in the way the data is presented and the way the uh and the type of information that is presented becomes, starts becoming key to each and every content that is being brought in, and this in itself also varies sometimes from organization to organization, and essentially that is where adaptive card sort of shines uh for us, because it allows us to provide an easy mechanism that is used by our customers to customize.

B

You know the information that is shown and the layouts that are shown as per their needs.

B

So this is essentially how in search we are today using adaptive cards in terms of the tools and capabilities.

B

This is something which is used by, in our case, the search administrators, primarily wherein once they set up a graph connector and they start bringing in data inside of their organization. They have this ability to go ahead and design their search results as per their needs.

B

This is an optional step, uh wherein some kind of a basic layout which was shown to you earlier is provided to them out of box, but as per their needs, the search administrators can go ahead and start. um You know changing the result layout and the information shown um according to so that it suits the customers, need the best any questions so far.

A

It looks like we have some questions here in the chat, I'll just go ahead and read them off and jody that's okay. um One of the questions was, is the whole search out of the box, or is this dependent on an organization embracing search and knowledge management.

B

A search is out of box with a set of you know: microsoft, 365 products, so, for example, if you have your m365 license, the search automatically is available on endpoints like sharepoint, office.com, microsoft, search and bing outlook, themes, etc. So this is the out of box search that we're talking about now the capability of adding connectors and um you know bringing in external content that is more something which is which starts depending on the type of licenses that you have. I hope that answers the question.

A

Thanks jody- and it looks like mike- has his hands up.

C

Yeah, thank you um I was curious is, is the use of adaptive cards for search results? Is that restricted just to external data, or can this be used to customize certain data types that live native to sharepoint online as well.

B

Okay, that's that's a great question so, to start with um today, I'm focusing more on what is available um too broadly to all the customers, and this is more a starting point of you know allowing search customization for external content. However, we are working on making the existing search results, also customizable, um if needed.

B

I can share more details on uh in the chat as well about the uh microsoft search roadmap item that we have, but to start with, uh we are looking at certain type of content like sharepoint list items, sharepoint pages in some cases where we have seen the need where additional information actually needs to be shown on the search result which is currently not present with the default or out of box search results which are shown and the same adaptive cards in the same configuration setup that we are exposing for external content can be leveraged for designing the sharepoint native this specific type of sharepoint native content as well.

A

All right, I think we can go ahead and move on and save some questions for the end of the presentation. Sure.

B

So I think, okay, so uh post this, I, what I wanted to do was actually do a short demo which can help you understand how exactly we are using this and also walk you through the designer tool that we have at present.

B

So let me switch over so in this case uh I am showing you the microsoft 365 administration center. Now um this is just to help. You understand, I will not be going over it in full detail, but then the um you know, the concept of how we are bringing in external sources is sort of something which can be explained over here. So within uh microsoft, 365 admin center we have settings and under that we have the search and intelligence tab and within the search and intelligence tab.

B

We have data sources, and this is essentially the mechanism through which today, if you want to configure your microsoft provided connectors, the add button is helpful for that as well as any um you know, partner, created connections, etc. All of it will show up over here, so this um space is mainly for management. So over here, what I have already done is created two connections. One is for mediawiki, which is conducive wiki, and the second one is for azure devops, which is essentially indexing.

B

Some azure devops project test project that I had created if we go under the customization tab over here, we have this concept of result types. So essentially, this is the configuration or the search configuration which is which needs to be created by the search administrator to define the type of layout that they want to use. So in this case, I have already created um one for the azure devops connection, so this is a default one that I have created over here.

B

um So some of the basic and it's it's a simple, straightforward type of a setup. The basic information which is essentially required over here is tying the content source or the data source in this case, which is the azure devop connection um with the of the connection id along with the result layout. So, if you see over here, this is where the search administration search administrator is providing the search layout, which is essentially the adaptive card json.

B

Now, uh in this particular case, what we have done is that whenever the search administrator is trying to define a search layout, we have provided a layout designer, which is essentially built on top of the typical, the usual adaptive card designer, which is already available. But in this case, because we are tailoring this experience for such administrators and for search, there are some additional things that we have done so to start off with.

B

What we do is provide the search admins with a list of templates so that they can actually go ahead and pick one which suits their needs and, as you can see over here, you know the, depending on the type of content that you have.

B

The search layouts can vary, so in some cases we see that information that needs to be shown is more metadata, driven where it's more of fact, value pairs that need to be actually shown over here, whereas in some cases the results could be pretty simple, with just a title: some additional information and description.

B

So these are the different types of templates which are offered out of box to search admins, and apart from this, once they select a search template. All they need to do is get started, and this is a layout which essentially needs to then be mapped to the uh you know the properties of the search result.

B

So this type of a mapping is something that the search administrators need to do and once all of the mapping is done, the uh you know, let me just do uh just uh which generic one so once all of the mapping is done, the submit button gets enabled and I think I've yeah I've missed out something. So this submit button gets enabled, and this the the json of the layout, is essentially generated.

B

So it's a pretty straightforward um and simple setup for search admins who are looking to use uh the provided templates, as is in some cases. If the search admins actually want to go ahead and make some modifications, then we provide them the option of editing the layout and in which case we actually sort of um we have done some kind of uh we take the adaptive card designer which is present and we are showing it so.

B

It's the same adaptive card designer with slight design changes which can be used by the search administrator to go ahead and make changes as they require and complete the creation of layout json.

B

So once this is done, this entire step is done, and this search result layout is created. The end users will see the exp can see the experience today on sharepoint. um So what happens is in this case? I have already done a query for uh like in this case mark, and what we start seeing over here is. This, is these are the results that are coming from sharepoint?

B

Apart from that, uh you start seeing results which are coming from the media, wiki um media wiki content source, so a media wiki vertical has been created over here, which is this one? On top and the search results from there start showing up and users can just go ahead and click on this, and it will take them to the corresponding wiki page.

B

Now the same experience automatically gets enabled for office.com as well, so you can see over here it's the same set of experience which comes in as well as for microsoft, search in bing. So, essentially, um you know, with one single sort of you know simple configuration. The search admin is able to enable these experiences in different types of places, and another important uh you know point that I wanted to bring out was the one which, where I was talking about, why adaptive card essentially is needed.

B

So in this case this is a wiki result where it's pretty straightforward, the type of information that is being shown. Let me switch to the work items tab over here, which is showing results from um just showing results from azure devops now over here we see that the type of information that is being shown is slightly different, so we want to show much more information to the search. Users, in this case show things uh important metadata related to each and every work item, so that helps the um you know.

B

The users gather more information about what they're searching for- and uh this essentially is, you know possible through the use of the you know, different types of features which are available in adaptive cards, I'll stop here and see if there are any further questions.

A

Thanks a lot jody and I encourage anyone if anyone has any questions here for jody regarding microsoft, search or the demo that was presented, please go ahead and ask them now, instead of at the end of the call jody's actually in ist time, so it's very late for her. So we want to be respectful of time and ask any questions. If we have them now looks like we have one here in the chat from gao, it says: can we design the results of 365 search with adaptive cards.

B

I don't fully understand what 365 search refers to today, essentially, like I showed over here. There are, um you know, different types of I would say, search endpoints, which are powered as a part of microsoft, 365 products, so in a way, yes, search, results which are being shown on these different search and points can be designed using adaptive cards.

B

So maybe, if you can elaborate more on what 365 search exactly means, I can help with that and is dynamics 365 crm, considered external so similar to, I would say the way I'm showing azure devops over here. It's not truly external from a microsoft perspective, but from the perspective of microsoft, 365 products, it is in a way considered external, and that is why, today, um by default, you do not see the search results showing up automatically.

B

There are some plans underway for showing dynamics. 365 results as well I'll have to look at the roadmap, and I can share the roadmap details with you on chat, and I see another question from mike. Is there a way to have people show up in default? All section people who have keywords listed in the ask me about section of their profile are not displayed in the all section and only visible in the people section.

B

Let me try to see this is a test one. So I'm not sure if you guys look at me so generally, okay, I think I think I get what you're talking about. Perhaps this okay, so today people do show up in the all section. uh It's just, I would say the information which is shown on the all section is not what um you show completely on the people, but that's a great feedback mike I'll.

B

Take that back to the respective team to let them know that the other information which is generally provided and ask me about also should surface on the oil vertical, because that's what users are looking for. Thanks for the feedback. Okay, I think if there are no other questions, then I'll hand it back to you jp. That's all from my side.

A

I think we had one more, um it was next, can a power user set this up, or is it mainly I.t driven? I think that was in regards to the his search provided out of the box question.

B

So this sort of depends on the context that you're looking at. If we are talking about this context, for example, sharepoint office.com or microsoft session bing there, it is primarily the search administrators who can design the search result experience because it is something which is managed at an organization level.

B

However, if you are on a given site and if users essentially are the owners of those sites, then they also get the site administrator role, and in that case they can actually go ahead and design the search results. I think that brings up another important point over here that this is not just limited to search admins. This is search admin first, but from a developer perspective, anybody who is developing or building a graph connector is also someone who will be able to define the search result. Experience for the associated graph connector.

B

So there are apis and works which will expose the capability for a developer to be able to build a graph connector to index the content, as well as define the corresponding search result layout for that as well. So that's also an area where we are expanding into.

A

Perfect, it looks like we have one last question here jody. Thank you. So much for your time. Kyle wants to know. Does an external data source need to provide data formatted in adaptive card format to plug into the search service, or does the graph connector ingestion service, slash microsoft, search accept any data format that is then manipulated into an adaptive card format.

B

So, okay, so there are two pieces to this. I think, if I understand the question correctly right, um which are two separate pieces, so the data ingestion happens uh with the help of graph connectors and there there is a certain schema or a format that is actually defined by the developer, so that the data when it is being indexed is not actually coming in using the adaptive cards once the data has been indexed, which is pretty much like a flat schema in case of contoso wiki.

B

You can imagine, let me actually sorry um try to just quickly pull the schema up, because I think this will really make it much more easier to understand. So here you go, so this is the schema which has been defined so the uh media wiki content, which is being indexed by the media, wiki connector, contains the flat schema of title url tag, state, priority, etc, and that is how the data is actually being ingested into microsoft.

B

Once the data is ingested, this result type search configuration is what ties the data with the adaptive card json and in the adaptive card json. Essentially, the tying of you know the layout is happening with the properties or the schema that has been defined. So, if you see over here, I'm sure, um let me just scroll down so yeah over here. You see things like assigned to area path.

B

All of these are actually schema properties that are being tied with the adaptive card json and that's how the time of the adaptive card with the the data which is being ingested, is happening.

A

Perfect, thank you so much jody for any other questions we can follow up offline. This is great great. We really appreciate your time and thank you for joining us in this community call.

B

Thanks trippy I'll I'll, keep answering some of the questions which are there on the chat, but thanks everyone.

A

All right in last community call. We announced the features, but in this one I think it'd be interesting to go ahead and show them in action and the three features that we'll be talking about, which will be included in version 1.5 preview will be the new table element that we have included, input.choiceset, search, filtering and autocomplete, and also action set overflow.

A

So these are all three features that you can expect for version 1.5 preview of the sdk coming out sometime this month. We are targeting end of month for that all right. So here we find ourselves in our nightly build of our designer and we'll be able to find these features here to sort of test out before they go live. I just started out with this template for the calendar. Invite and I've edited it in order to show um these features.

A

So I went ahead and added this update location, which is an input, dot, choice set that has the functionality for for filtering and auto complete and if we we're actually in preview mode here, but if we leave preview mode we'll be able to see these two choices right here reschedule and delete, and these are actually part of our secondary actions that we can take.

A

So if we see right here as part of the the new functionality we have action set, we have our two primary actions and then we have these secondary actions where, if we are constrained by space, we can go ahead and set these and it'll provide us with a flyout menu as we'll be able to see once we enter preview mode.

A

As far as the update location one, we can see that we added a new field for style filtered for input, dot choice, and this will allow us to search and provide us with functionality like autocomplete for our results. So we jump here in preview mode. You can go ahead here.

A

We have the this list of choices, but if we want to quickly navigate the static list of choices, we can just type in 99, for example, and choose conference, room 99 or something like 1500 and we'll be able to to get that choice which was not previously available with input.choice as far as the flyout menu. This is how it works.

A

It'll provide these choices right here, and we can also go ahead and edit these to make them primary actions instead, like so just remove the secondary property, and if we go into preview mode, we now see reschedule as one of the primary choices and the flyout menu is still available, because we have delete as the secondary choice now. As far as what I think is my favorite feature. That's coming is this new table element right here?

A

We start with a blank card and we can just literally drag and drop this table element and we can add rows, and if we go over here to the element properties, we can even go ahead and add columns.

A

We can choose to have grid lines or not a lot of customization and even change. The the grid style effects and even decide if you want this table to show up as visible from the start or if we want to toggle the visibility.

A

So really handy, I wasn't actually on the team prior to this, but I've heard that I think the previous way to achieve this was with something like stacked column sets. So I think this is a a big improvement too to that all right, and I think now we'll go ahead and go into the q and a section we have paul and becky from our developer team as well as I think we also have railwool from the pm team on the call available and we'll all do our best to answer.

A

Questions feel free to raise your hand or just speak up or type your questions in chat.

D

Hi I was asking uh in regards in regarding to the um universal actions in adaptive cards. Oh.

A

I see so regarding universal actions. When will it be supported in power automate, so that would actually be a question for the power automate team. I don't think we have anyone from that team on this call. It would depend on their implementations and how and and their schedule as well. If you are able to send me an email, we can follow up offline with that one and try to get a more concrete answer for that question.

D

All right, yeah.

A

D

A

We have a question from steve: when will adaptive cards support more than 28 kb paul? Would you have some more information on that one? I'm not sure if this is something we currently support yeah, I think so go ahead.

E

Yeah, it's a team's limitation with, uh I think, with the bot framework stuff. I I don't know if you know what what the plan is and what the roadmap is for before getting that limit raised, uh we should follow up with the.

A

Team's team and see see if we can find out perfect. So it is a team's limitation, though correct uh yes sounds good and gao is asking, can a table be filled with rest call results? So I I.

E

Can actually speak to that one too. So, basically, you you can use the results of a rest call in addition to templating adaptive cards, templating, which I will link in the chat here to produce an adaptive card.

E

Now that assumes that you are the host of adaptive cards or or at least have a back-end way of constructing the adaptive card on your side before sending it over to to the host.

A

And I think this one is also in relate relation to the table. Can it support real-time calculation based on the numbers in the table? We do not have that. Currently, that seems like a very interesting functionality and I one thing to see it being very useful. It.

B

A

A little a little complex for for our initial release of the table element.

E

Yeah- and one thing that's probably worth noting here- is that each cell in the table is effectively a container for adaptive card elements, so you can have image elements in there. You can have another table. You can have a text box just kind of whatever, whatever you want to use it, for so you know, having calculations would be perhaps a little complicated given.

A

That thank you paul for that answer. um It looks like we have a question here from tony. Is there a table which client support which version of adaptive cards, so I can actually speak to this one. The table element is something that's not out, yet it will be coming with version 1.5 of our schema, and we do understand that this is a current gap that we have and are trying to work towards the solution for this, but our clients will not have this functionality once like as soon as we release and this these schema changes.

A

It'll take some time for them to be able to consume these changes and implement the functionality for for that on their side. I think we missed my question above well. 1.5 be available for outlook and mike. That would be the the same answer I provided. It will take some time for these hosts to adopt version 1.5 and we we can follow up with them to understand roadmaps for when they plan on on consuming these changes.

A

How will cards interact with the upcoming live component features? I'm not sure. I understand that question mike. Would you be able to elaborate a little on that one.

C

Microsoft recently released uh some sort of a sizzle reel about these, like components that were kind of document segments like the ability to insert an excel table inside a team's chat and the idea being that multiple people could interact with the data on there at the same time, and it just it sounds like there's a lot of overlap between that and the data table that you guys are talking about here. So I was curious uh where those lines were being drawn between these two different products.

F

I think for the other product I can take that jp for that product. It's it's a much more complicated product like I think it involves. Like writing a lot of code. um It's like a completely different beast. I know it's very similar. It looks very similar in terms of like there's this rectangle of goodness, where like stuff is happening, but adaptive cards are pretty like simple to author.

F

They kind of like move between um uh you can like have them adapt to hosts uh what you saw are also kind of like rectangles of goodness but they're they're, more complicated, there's more stuff that you can do there, but it also takes more effort to do that. So there they are kind of different products right now, but this.

C

Yeah, will there be an ability to include like a live component as a as a part of an adaptive card? I think that's really. I wasn't looking to like build anything from scratch. I'm not a developer, but just if they can, if you can attach one or have a link to one or something like that.

F

That's that's an interesting point. I don't know if that's currently on the roadmap, but like that's an interesting thought, let me we can go back and think about that, but I don't think there's any plan for that. Yet right now.

A

It looks like we have a question from steve: does team support 1.4 yet, and I think the answer for this is yes, we actually announced this in last month's community call. um We had a pm from the teams team on the cal and they announced 1.4 support in teams with some limitations. I can't recall the limit. I think it was something to do with action.execute, but I do know that that team support for 1.4 has been announced already.

A

Oh and it looks like steven the the team's pm that we had in last call is here as well, any other questions.

A

I've been trying to keep up with the chat, but if I missed one feel free to ping the question, so I can see it again. Is there a single master list somewhere? That shows what card versions are supported by each office, app which card version supported.

E

I uh linked in the chat current page. I I think it's up today.

A

I'd have to double check, yep that would be the table, it will show every app and the version that it supports as well. Thank you paul. So we have some feedback here from benjamin stating that outlook is still 1.0, teams is 1.3 and flow is 1.2.

A

So that would be something going back to the previous question that I answered. It is a gap that we are aware of and we are working with our partners in order to unify this model a bit more. We understand that it's all over the place right now and it's a pain point for our customers and we have received about this and we are trying to address it. We can't commit to any timelines just yet, but it is something that is in our radar and we are working towards a solution.

A

Thank you for pointing that out benjamin. If there aren't any other questions, here's our list of resources.

A

We have developer community calls found in these links as well, and we also have the recording for this call and the previous calls that have not been uploaded yet posted into our m365 youtube channel right here and thank you for for attending the september community. Caller next community call is scheduled for october 14th at 9. 00 am pst and I'm very happy to to see that the chat work this time and we were able to get a lot of engagement from folks.

A

Thank you so much for joining everyone and have a nice rest of your day.