Microsoft 365 Community Development, 8 Jun 2023

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From YouTube: Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call – 8th of June, 2023

Description

Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development community call delivered on June 8th.

Demos: Power Platform Custom Connector for Chat GPT, Tracking workflow runs and errors using Power Automate and SharePoint, and Build your own Documentation Website with DocFX on SharePoint.

Released: Microsoft Graph Toolkit (MGT) – v2.11.1 (GA) and v3.0.0 RC.3 as well as 2 scripts, 1 Teams sample & and 4 conversations.

Participate in HackTogether. Article - the Microsoft Teams Global Hack keynote recap and what’s coming

Please see the blog post for this call for project updates, news and events details. The host of this call was David Warner II (Microsoft) | @DavidWarnerII. Q&A takes place in chat throughout the call.

Agenda
00:00 – Intro - David Warner II (Microsoft) | @DavidWarnerII
05:15 – PnP .NET library updates - Bert Jansen (Microsoft) | @O365bert
06:12 – PnP PowerShell updates - Gautam Sheth (Staffbase) | @gautamdsheth
06:57 – yo Teams updates - Rick Van Rousselt (Advantive) | @rickvanrousselt
07:54 – Microsoft Teams Toolkit updates - Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft) | @VesaJuvonen
08:34 – Microsoft Graph Toolkit updates – David Warner II (Microsoft) | @DavidWarnerII
09:11 – Independent Publisher Connectors - Jocelyn Panchal (Microsoft) @JocelynP_PM
10:06 – Microsoft Script Samples - Paul Bullock | @pkbullock
11:37 – Microsoft Teams Samples - Bob German (Microsoft) @Bob1German
12:41 – Microsoft Power Platform Samples - April Dunnam (Microsoft) | @aprildunnam
14:00 – Together mode picture
15:29 – Demo - Power Platform Custom Connector for Chat GPT – Samir Daoudi (LogiSam)
27:29 – Demo - Tracking workflow runs and errors using Power Automate and SharePoint – Jonathan Weaver (WaterOne) | @j_weaver74
41:23 – Demo - Build your own Documentation Website with DocFX on SharePoint – Martin Heusser (Houlihan Lokey) | @mozzeph
56:04 – Closing

Learn more

• See the full blog post for this call in the Microsoft 365 platform community blog - https://aka.ms/community/blog
• Download invite for the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development community call: http://aka.ms/spdev-sig-call
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/community/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/community/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/community/home

A

B

Power Platform development bi-weekly call today is June 8th. We are almost halfway through the year. How did that happen? Time flies when you are having fun hot diggity dog. That's right! Let's talk about some fun. Today we are going to cover the updates with the community. We're going to talk about all our initiatives.

B

We're going to talk about samples, then we're going to have picture time together so get those cameras ready and then we're going to have our three amazing All-Stars of the day we're going to see Samir talking about Power, Platform, custom connector for chat, GPT Jonathan is going to get into tracking workflow runs and errors using power, automate and SharePoint and Martin is going to wrap it up with build your own documentation web part with our website with Doc FX on SharePoint, so so much better together stuff.

B

Today, excellent, let's talk about how you can get engaged in the community. What resources are available? We've got some videos for you a whole plethora of them. It means a lot to us for you to be able to take advantage of those see what I did there, and we also have a LinkedIn group discussion for you to check out. So you can do both of those interactive. Take advantage of that we have open source initiatives and we got just I, don't know a couple of Galleries and by a couple, I mean a whole lot.

B

We've got community samples that span the range of Team samples, spfx web Parts, extensions, Power, Platform samples, and we got an exciting update on that today and lists formatting. So many more team samples, all the above, take advantage of them. All you need to do is remember all these links all the time I'm kidding just one AK dot, Ms, slash, Community Home will get you access to all these resources and I'm going to get. Yes, you like calls why? Because you're here, we've got our Microsoft 365 and Power.

B

Platform Community calls all up available to you. Our Microsoft 365 and Power Platform weekly with Microsoft speakers is our highlight. This is every Tuesday coming at you with presenters directly from Microsoft. Now it's important to know this is going to go on a break. We've got our Power Platform, we've got our office add-ins and we've got our Microsoft 365 Power Platform Community, which you're on now and VP connection SharePoint framework.

B

Those are those two bi-weekly calls and by the way our Power Platform call next month is going to happen at the same time as eppc European Power Platform conference. So, if you're going to be there, let me know we might have a special opportunity for you. You can access all these calls at AKA, dot, Ms, slash, Community, calls and get them added to your calendar.

B

So definitely do that now you may be thinking these are cool calls and I, see cool people on them and I would love to present something we would love you to present something all you need to do is fill out. This form, AK, dot, Ms, slash, Community, request, slash demo, and we will get back with you. We can get you scheduled on a call.

B

It doesn't need to be anything overly complex, don't overthink this, it's absolutely okay to come in and show off a technique, a tip, a trick, a solution that you created, something that you started that you would like to collaborate more with members of the community on don't hesitate, fill in that form. We will absolutely work with you on getting it scheduled and if you need someone to support you on it with a buddy, we got your back. Just let us know, and we will get you hooked up now.

B

Next Tuesday on that Microsoft 365 uh speakers call, we have in store for you. uh Three amazing presenters Mark is going to cover that Microsoft, syntax repository Services, Powers, Microsoft Loop, and then we're going to see Lynn and cashore talking about introduction to power, automate, co-pilot and Paula will be back talking about exposing Microsoft teams apps in Microsoft Viva with spfx cards. So a lot of exciting opportunity to talk about there now, if you're thinking this is a lot to consume, I'm, not quite sure how to take advantage of all this stuff.

B

Our sharing this caring program is here to provide you support in that area. Now this is a program that provides Hands-On guidance in live sessions via teams. These sessions are safe space, meaning we don't record them and we are looking to get them scheduled and scaling. We absolutely have finally been able to start getting more involved for those who haven't already reached out. Take a look at AK dot. Ms sharing is caring volunteer.

B

Let us know if you'd like to help we're scheduling those calls to try and get more calls scaled up around the globe to be friendly to your time zone, and we really appreciate everyone's patience. So thank you so so much for all that you're doing in this area and if you're looking to volunteer, let us know absolutely would love the help now, once you have contributed, we absolutely want to recognize you for that work that you are doing, and that is where our recognition program comes in. This is powered by credly. It showcases your contributions.

B

You can associate these badges, which are formal and official and credited to your LinkedIn profile. Share them on Twitter put them on your blog put them on your resume. Send them in your cards to your friends, put them on the fridge. Mom will be proud and you can join it for free, ak.ms community recognition. Now you may have seen that some areas of Microsoft have been recently announcing that they're degrading or stopping their programs that use credly. We are not in the community, we are actually scaling it up, so don't hesitate to sign up.

B

We've got more campaigns coming soon, we've got hackathons. We've got special uh campaigns coming up that you've. Seen that we've done in the past things like our season of getting in the past and uh hacktober. So even more campaigns we're looking to grow so don't hesitate to get registered there and we moved over to MailChimp for the registration. So it makes it a little easier for you to manage if you've already joined a need to change any of your info information all right.

B

Now, let's get into some Project Specific updates and we'll hand it over to Bert to talk about pnp.net libraries.

C

Thank you, David for the PNP world. uh Sorry pnp.net World a couple of changes uh this uh these two weeks, not that much. uh We had updates in PNP framework from Urban on the teams provisioning pieces in the provisioning engine and got them did some fixes to her uh deal with the creating site collections in non-default clouds. So if you're, a U.S government Cloud for example, then there were some issues and that's been fixed. In course, the gay side ghostg, is our newer Library.

C

um We had a couple of small fixes, mainly around term set of localization, about the get comments methods, so you can get where you can get list comments or page comments and a few other smaller fixes, but overall a pretty, uh stable and then think ready for summer time. Let's move to Powershell, then thank you. Awesome.

B

D

Thanks thanks David thanks bud uh in Powershell as well. We are going into the summer mode, so things have been slightly slower.

D

um So what we did was we added allow deletion parameter to the set PNP list command, so it prevents deletion of the lists from the UI and we also added a vertical Zoom emphasis parameter in that PNP page section commanded. So you can, you know, emphasize a vertical Zone in the page and you can specify the emphasis levels of that particular Zone um yeah.

D

What next I would absolutely love to hear from you on the discussion forums and the and feel free to give us feedback on the discussion forum, as well as on the issue list or on the GitHub yep thanks. What are you David.

B

Awesome stuff, thank you, Adam all right. Let's move on to Yo teams with Rick.

E

Hey so your teams yeah as well we're going to Into Summer mode, but of course we had some support for the team's manifest uh 1.14, 1.5 team and uh yeah. We need to fix some minor bugs. There has been an issue uh reported yesterday, which you know, makes my life pretty hard, but uh we'll we'll get that fixed before the summer and of course we need um your help to help with the visual studio code extension and, of course, for the SSO.

E

So if you want help, please just you know commit go to GitHub commit check out the code do a commit, and you know we were welcome to have you to the team. That's it always John.

B

Awesome, invest is going to cover that today, but I love the commit you got to commit and then just commit thanks. Rick uh vesa is going to cover Microsoft teams toolkit today, I'm.

F

Really competed on this, though this is really good. So you are very committed comment, remember to comment now on the team's talking side and the V5 version one live uh week before uh built and that's now in general availability, which should be the one which we should be using and there's some new Dev tunnels feature uh there's a lot of additional samples available and we are already planning the V 5.1 release coming of course later this year and what's included in there a lot of a lot of cool stuff.

F

uh Please do keep us feedback so we're able to address and make it even better. Thank you for that. Let's move to the next one.

B

Awesome, thank you. Visa. uh Let's jump into Microsoft teams, toolkit uh I, don't see Gavin here they.

F

Will not as committed that's.

B

Right they're busy committing so they.

F

Couldn't commit their committing yeah. That's that's probably I'm sure. That's it.

B

Because they're always committing always committing all right, just ship v2.11.1 is the latest update uh just shipped the release candidate for V3 definitely check that out. Third preview. Lease again is in the making and of course they need your help as well, so don't hesitate. There's Help, Wanted good first issues, absolutely a great way to get involved. Seven Gavin are very welcoming so just reach out. If you have any questions all right, let's get it uh get it over to Jocelyn on connectors, hello.

G

Everybody, as we know, there's over a thousand Power Platform certified connectors now, specifically 1027 with even more made by independent, Publishers and community members, like you guys that were made by Microsoft ourselves. As you guys know, there have been a ton of awesome awesome updates about connectors, since we, since we had billed a few weeks ago, including the fact that connectors are going to be some of that fuel for that M365, co-pilot I would love to dive deeper into this with everybody.

G

So in next week's Labs call specifically focus on connectors I'm, actually bringing the partner director of dataverse to talk about everything you missed to build in the world of Power, Platform and connectors, so we can get into the good stuff, even though we have over a thousand. We still need more, so please check out our GitHub and see how you can create a connector too. Thank you. Everyone awesome.

B

Thanks Josh, that's awesome over a thousand nice, let's get in script samples with Paul Bullock.

H

Hey everybody, so script sounds is a repository for hosting parallel scripts that work with M365, so that can be done in various tools: the PNP Powershell Microsoft graph CLI for example. So we have a couple of new scenarios, which is uh sorry samples which is awesome so allow custom scripts check on online by gonna, snap and uh SharePoint list item version. History retrieval by Casper, Larson I, do have a couple more PRS to process this, so I'm a bit behind on that.

H

A couple of extra things: I just wanted to point out so I I've written a Powershell script to actually generate the sample scaffolding. So uh to save you setting all of the files and the locations and stuff like that, so you can. You can run a parallel script to actually build that out. All you have to do is then then plop in your sample for a couple of details on the Ruby file just to make things a bit easier. uh It is there on the on the route of the repo.

H

If you want to give it a go and just to help speed things up.

H

If, if you're struggling at all reach out to me and I, can always support that um I had some good news as well so well, we got an extra couple of bad types for script, samples as well, so we've now got one two, three star badges, which have been a bit released uh recently, so uh I think you did for David for setting that up it's great to recognize those contributors that do that that extra mile, so with different different levels of contributions, which is super super awesome. So thank you. Everybody uh again reach out.

H

If you need anything um and I'll be happy to support you back to you, David.

B

Awesome, thank you. Paul really well done excellent! Let's go over to Bob German. Let's talk about some team samples, hey.

I

Everybody thanks um and thanks especially to ijaz Hussein, who submitted a great um sample for which is the sample this week. This was written in teams toolkit for visual studio code 5.0, so that new version putting it to good use, and it's also a pretty nice use case. You can enter bookmarks and share them in a SharePoint list. So you know, there's a million ways to display a SharePoint list, but to get people to make it really easy for people to add those handy uh URLs to a bookmarks collection.

I

uh Here's the app to do it. It's a little bot pops right up with a little adaptive card, as you can see right there and it demonstrates Azure ad single sign-on and Microsoft graph access from a team spot. So please check it out at AKA, dot, Ms, slash, bot, graph, bookmark and also our ongoing hackathon is happening. So there's a little info URL for that as well and back to you, Dave.

B

Very, very cool. Thank you. Bob excellent I love the sample of the week nice all right. Well, we also have some exciting new Power Platform. You get a power up with April Dunham. Tell us about this new opportunity.

A

Thanks David I'm really excited about this. Of course, we always have our Power Platform samples, repo, where you can submit all your power, apps automate and all that goodness samples, but we have a brand new repo for you. The Power Platform prompts repository. So, as we all know, AI is taking the World by storm, we're getting co-pilots for everything. So now it's more important than ever to know how to write a good prompt and to just even know what prompts are available and what things you can do with all of this AI goodness.

A

So that's exactly why we created this Power Platform, prompt repo, we've seated it with a few ideas. So wouldn't it be cool if you could proofread the material or the the text that you're going to be sending out in an email inside of power automate before you send it out? Well, you can, with the AI features built in with AI Builder and Azure open Ai, and we have a prompt for that.

A

We have all kinds of different props in there even prompts to help you create props in there that you can use within all the co-pilots and power um apps and automate and virtual agents and pages, and all that and Azure open AI service and there's more to come. We would love to see your contribution so if you're starting to use some of these Pro jobs and the AI features in there, and you have some great ideas for props. Please go to that.

A

Repost submit a request and, of course, we're working on some badges too some more to come with that back to you, David.

B

Hey for badges awesome all right, it is that time everybody picture time get those cameras turned on and those fantastic faces. All ready to smile Nessa will take over.

F

Yep and I somehow magically this game is a surprise again. It's it's meant. You guys have to do with this. uh Let me do that. That's like how how okay, here we go, uh let's wait. Few more few more seats in a room uh I'm not going to enable my camera leave it that open and reek is already being an example on the video really really good. I am not yet recording. Let's actually get that recorder up. I think we are hitting the max 50 and I will start.

D

F

One second one, second one: second, you you think that after all of these years, I would know how to do this. um Okay, so we'll get the recording going three two one and let's do some hand waving everybody, excellent good to see you, everybody in a call, a lot of familiar faces here, really really cool, excellent and good Rick you're still doing it excellent I think! That's it we'll graphic. If animation out of that thanks, everybody absolutely have a great rest of the week as well.

F

Then we'll go to the real stars of the day right, David, absolutely.

B

Awesome yeah Cody brought out by the way uh that you were just busy doing your Legos uh to show Todd that you actually can do them. So that's.

F

True Rick was doing rickrolling right so.

B

F

Right, oh yeah,.

B

All right, yes, we have amazing presenters. Today we are going to start with Samir who's going to talk to us about Power Platform custom connector for chat GPT, so Samir take it on over.

J

Thank you thanks David, so we have a couple of slides, but it's going to be mainly uh a demo. uh Basically, um today we're gonna talk about how we can create an open AI to gbt, connector and and consume that in Power Platform. So the demo will be in two phases. The first phase, we're gonna, create the connector, configure it and do everything with the API key and so on. The second part will be to use this connector, either in powerapps or power automate a little bit about myself.

J

My name is Samuel Dodi I'm, a platform uh architect I've been working with Microsoft Technologies since forever. Since I remember uh I broke frequently, you can hit me on Twitter LinkedIn or you can follow my my blog uh I'm sure you're, not here for this. So let me switch to more important stuffs, as I said, um we'll be doing a uh two things today. So the first thing is to create the custom connector. In order to do that, uh we will go to make.powerapp.com. We are all familiar with that.

J

If you don't see the custom connectors here, you can go to discover more and it should be somewhere here so custom connector. Let me pin this here and we get started so at the moment in this sentence. I don't have any custom. Connector I'm gonna get started with a new custom connector from blank I'm, going to call this demo Dot PT next right. So um when it comes to creating the custom connector, you will be going through a wizard, so I'm gonna quickly go through this the so you can select an icon for your connector.

J

The most important part is to uh to define the API endpoint the way you're going to authenticate with this connector and some details about request, body structure and so on. So the first thing uh here is: is the host the the API endpoint, and this is um API dot. Openai I have blog posts about um uh how to create this custom connector with screenshot step by step instructions. So I'm gonna try to go quickly through uh the steps to create this connector.

J

Next, um it's the way you're going to authenticate with the with this open, AI API and the preferred way is to use an API key. uh The parameter will be, let me call it parameter label. Let me call it API key and the parameter name, which is quite important, I can type that it's authorization. We will be passing the authorization in the header, so I'm, going to leave that uh as it is uh now next is defining the different steps, uh the different actions for my connector.

J

So let me zoom out a little bit so I'm going to have just one action for uh for today's demo and I'm gonna. Call this um yeah ask chart GPT description, more user-friendly way. uh Ask anything.

J

And this is the operation ID. This is the the the action that will be uh calling in powerapps or power automate, and let's call this ask okay now, the way our request will be structured, um I'm gonna import from sample. So this will be a post request in terms of URL. um This keeps changing to bonus video, so you can go back to um the open, API reference site where you can look today, we'll be looking only at the completion.

J

So basically the completion uh endpoints will be this one I'm just gonna copy it, as I said: I have blog posts where I'm going slowly step by step with screenshots and so on, but uh for today, I'm just gonna run through all those steps. So the header structure, it's just depending on the constant type we'll be talking uh with the Json format and um in terms of the the request body, um open, AI uh API, expect at least those five parameters.

J

So basically what we have here, we have the model, which is the language that we'll be interacting with. uh In this case, it's text DaVinci zero, zero, three uh prompt. This is the question or the uh what should be asking chart to create, in this case, I just predefined this for test Purpose with what SharePoint metadata.

J

You have three other important parameters that you need to set max tokens. As the number of tokens you will be you'll be using, you can create a free account with the open AI you get I think 18 credits per month that you can use for all the interactions that you'll be making with openai temperature is a parameter which goes from zero to two, where zero is a very precise answer, two can be very vague and the N is the number of responses that you are expecting from uh from chargpt.

J

In our case, we expect to send uh to ask questions, get one response, so it's going to be always set to one.

J

Structure at this stage, I can just go ahead and create the connector so I'm going to save the chains. It makes it um like, probably in minutes or so to save, and we are ready to start testing.

J

Perfect so I I switched to the test step in order to test this connector um you're going to have to create a new connection, um and this is where you will have to go back to open AI create your account. um Let me find the right URL for that.

J

As I said, you can have a free account once you, you create your account. You go to API keys and you create a new new secret key. So basically I'm going to say M365 demo- and this is my key- so I will copy the the key from here. The the format of the API key has to be the following. So again the prefix it with better space and then the key that you have just generated right so now, I have created the connector. I will go back to my uh the connection.

J

Sorry I will go back to the connector and go back to test here. Is my connection. um I have two options: I can either fill those parameters or I can use the same request body that I use to generate the model, which is this one so again, I'm gonna say the model. Is this prompt? This is my question and I'm gonna test this connector. If everything goes one, it should return a response 200 and there we go some SharePoint metadata is an information blah blah blah. That's fine!

J

Now what we need to do is to copy the um the response body. I will go back to definition. The reason why I'm doing this is because I know I will always be using those parameters. uh I don't need the users to keep feeding me those those details, so um what I will do is I'm going to set some default values here. So, in my request, um sorry in the response section I'm going to import from uh from sample.

J

um Basically I'm saying this is the response that you are expecting, so it says: okay, these are the properties that I expect from uh under the response. Again, I will go back to the request and I'm going to set some default values, so content type uh as I said: it's application Json. So if I can copy that.

J

So this is required and it's internal inteller means that the user will not be able to to change it again. I'm going to go to the request body here, I'm going to set some default values, Max tokens, we said it's a thousand, it is the required parameter and it's internal uh model is text. Davinci.

J

Yeah, it's Acquired, and it's internal so same here and has one okay and the temperature will be zero.

J

Okay, perfect! So visit our connector. It's ready to be used. We can either use it in power, automate powerapps, but for today's demo, I'm gonna use powerapps um I kind of cheated a little bit and I prepared the powerapps canvas application. Here there is nothing it's just the layout, so here we have one screen with the two part cell. You have one text box where the user can ask questions, you have the image of the login user. A nice icon here for the to the bot and the response will be will be added here.

J

There is no code yet in this in this application. So the first thing we need to do. Let me just refresh this.

J

Would be to add my custom connector and this uh and this power up so I'll go to data. Just remember my connected demo demo chart your PT okay.

J

That is my connector all right now, when it comes to uh to using this this connector. uh As I said, we have a question that will be coming from this text. Query and the response will be set to text response. uh I said: I set the default value for the response to be coming from this variable. So basically the button will set the value of this variable. So I'm going to say about a set of R response.

J

To my connector name, don't ask ask: is the um if you remember as the operation ID that we said and then you have the default value? So, um as you can see it's giving me what what the the connector is expecting, you can go with the default values.

J

So this is the top Max tokens thousand temperature zero and one and the most important is the prompt, which is the question that we'll be asking uh chat topt. So this will be coming from text. Query failed right. I would flip quickly uh back to to my connector. Just show you to show you how the response is structured.

J

J

Okay, what's going on here,.

J

Sorry about what's going on here with this connector, but um so basically, even even though we said uh we want one response with the N parameter is going to send us. uh It's gonna return an array of one item so basically I'm going to take the First Response um that will be receiving dot choices. So it's coming from uh from the.

J

Yeah, so the response will contain different parameters and we are only interested in the text value um that we got. What I've done here is I've said to this variable. The first response that I'm getting from this custom connector call.

J

um They said we have the choices array which will give us all the the responses and from that response, I'm taking the text, the text value right. Okay, let's see if this, if this goes well this time so uh I'm gonna test the application and I will try to ask a question: um what is power?

J

J

There we go so basically a call has been made uh using my API to open AI uh via the custom. Connector I got an array of responses which contains just one response: I sweep it everything out of that response and only displaying the text. So you can do a lot with this. I have another demo where I showed where you can keep the history of conversation by using powerapps collections, but the fact that you have this custom connector. It opened the doors to any option, so you can use it in power virtual agent.

J

You can use it in power automate. You can do some translation. You can ask additional details, but um yeah that's pretty much it. Thank you so much over to you. David.

B

Awesome Samir very, very cool, so in less than 15 minutes you have created a connector and used in a PowerApp that is slick, slick slick, so uh lots of questions in the uh in the channel. Let you kind of look at those and I posted the uh blog post for him as well, so definitely check that out. Thank you so much awesome. Next up we have Jonathan, who is tracking workflow, runs and errors using power, automate and SharePoint so John. If you want to take it over and take it away.

K

Awesome, thank you all right. Let's log some workflows and power automate using SharePoint or we'll log them in SharePoint, using power, automate, I'm, Jonathan, Weaver, here's my about me stuff, SharePoint, Power, Platform, Dev, I've, been doing workflows and whatnot for a long time on black belt becompo. Here's my contact information feel free to contact me.

K

So what are we going to talk about? First of all, we're going to tell you I'm going to tell you why we're doing the solution in the first place, which is because in January we had a Microsoft outage broke some of our management of data fields and that started a bunch of workflows that were breaking but I didn't know they were breaking until the users told me: hey I. Have this approval but I never got a request to approve it.

K

We're now five months in working on fixing that and in the meantime, I've created this solution as a real, quick way to track all of the approval, workflows and and other workflows, but specifically saving them into SharePoint into a list with links back so that I can quickly identify what's broken and quickly go back and find them fix them resubmit them.

K

So we're going to look at a global SharePoint site and a list we're going to create a power automate flow, we're going to use scope, actions, I love these scope, actions, they're, basically, containers inside of power, automate or power, yeah, Power automate and we're going to use the get workflow information to be able to track the exact workflow run so Global site every SharePoint environment. I work in I create some sort of a global site. In the old days we had, we had parent child relationships.

K

So if you put a site or a list at the the parent level, all of the child sites, all of the subsites could access that information, which is which was great until Microsoft, said we're not doing that anymore. So now we all know with the flat architecture you can't in a SharePoint list reach over to a SharePoint list in the different site collections. So instead we have to use powerapps power automate, so I create a global site, I like to call it global data.

K

You do you whatever works for your company or your clients, and then inside of that I create a workflow history list. It's also that work from home list. You know you do you again um inside of this list. I have just some basic basic columns. We've got a title: we've got a start time end time timeout. We all know that the power automate flows time out after 28 days, and we know if you've got an extensive approval process and you've got directors and and managers and VPS who have thousands of emails a day.

K

They lose their approvals, they might not get to it within 28 days. So we need to be able to identify which workflows are going to time out soon and uh ping. Those people and say, hey, get on it and we have an outcome field. Did it fail? Did it succeed? Did it other um a link to back to the flow run? Did you know you have?

K

You can have a link that goes straight to the exact flow run that that this item ran against um you don't have to go, find the workflow and then inside the workflow scroll through your 37 flow runs that happened yesterday and find the one that is the issue.

K

I have a resubmitted field, you can say yes, no, if you work on a team, this is imperative, because, if I go back and resubmit, the workflow I'm going to mark that as done so that one of my team members doesn't come in and say: oh, this needs to be done still and resubmit it again.

K

um That really ends up causing service tickets. When directors and managers and VPS get multiple approvals for the same thing, an item info field- this is just a unique it's a field to identify unique information about the specific item. Helps you identify it more quickly. In addition, you'll see two below that. An item link a link back to the exact item that that the workflow is run against and and of course, a workflow name, so that you know which workflow you're working with, um and that is particularly useful for grouping sorting filtering.

K

You might have the same workflow that breaks a lot, because people forget to put a name into the approver field, and so the approval action breaks, no problem. We we know exactly which workflow it is. uh We can and we've got the links to go right back to it.

K

So you'll see I've got the whole demo in the slides and then I'll show you again in real life. So what is the workflow framework? Look like so I put these pieces into every approval workflow that I build. So this workflow is a manually triggered workflow. It would be called get approvals for the thing um I add in my approval or my logging information, which is you can see the initialize string uh called item info.

K

That's that unique, identifying information I like to put in things like the the ID, the title, uh maybe an employee name, if it's a say, a travel request, or if it's approvals, maybe you put in the approver's names into this this field, so you can identify it really quickly.

K

Now here's where we get into the Scopes you notice, I have I, have four scope. Actions here: I have this one called actions right here in the beginning, this is the meat and potatoes of your workflow. This is all the stuff that happens at the end once that action has either succeeded or failed. It jumps down here to these other two Scopes I've got a result for on success and I've got a result for on failure and you'll notice very important. This red dotted line Arrow right here.

K

If you have not set your configure run after that, has failed, it will get through this action. It will come down, it will say: oh I succeeded, oh and I also failed and then you're going to spend 20 30 minutes trying to go through the meat and potatoes of your workflow, trying to figure out what failed and then at the end, you're going to feel really dumb when you realize it's because you forgot to set that run after we'll.

K

Look at that in more details um that log workflow history inside of that and it's a scope inside of a scope- and these are great. These little containers and the beauty of the containers is a you can shrink. You can expand and compress those so that you can see more on the screen, but also when you're, creating a new workflow and you're using the same same actions over and over.

K

Instead of having to copy all four of these actions, I can copy this one scope, action and it will bring all four of the actions with it. I love. It saves me a ton of time, so here's the steps that I do specific to the history. To this.

K

This exact use case I have a convert time zone because we all know the time ends up being in UTC and most of us don't live or work in UTC um get workflow information, that's a compose action and it's literally just workflow parentheses, parentheses, parentheses inside of an expression, and what that does that gets all of the information about this exact workflow run that you can then use this big ugly, concat statement on the left and throw that into an expression in the workflow run, URL compose statement and that's going to be the link to this exact flow run and then I have just your basic SharePoint create work, workflow history item where you're going to use all of these pieces of information to create the list item inside of the list, all right, jumping down once again inside the the result on success and on failure, you've got an update, work, workflow, history item and that basically says that's where we put the end time in that's where we put the completion, is it succeeded?

K

Did it fail the outcome and you know never hurts to throw an email out there that tells your user that it completed, that it succeeded. It failed and once again you notice I've got it's very important that you have this red dotted line arrow and not a black, solid Arrow right here and I'll show you how that works in the demo. So slideshow is done. That's me, that's my blog! That's my email Twitter hit me up. If you see me, live at a conference, uh ask me for a sticker.

K

I've got a dojo dude sticker I've also got whiteboard MVP stickers if you like, Microsoft whiteboard. So let's go demo real, quick all right. So here's my work, my workflow history, workflow, should look familiar. It's exactly what was in that picture.

K

You manually trigger a workflow for the sake of demo. We won't have time to actually run the workflow, but I'll show you the outcomes of it. I always tell people when you're using SharePoint, especially if your trigger is on a new item, but also if it's on a modified item always always use a get item right after it, and anything that you do in the rest of the workflow should be pointing back to that. Get item never point back to your trigger, because the trigger changes the trigger can change.

K

If you need to change your trigger, you need to delete it. You lose all of your stuff from from below, but if you just use the get item and everything below it all the dynamic values. Point back to your get item: all you have to change is the ID, that's it! So that's my my piece of information for that.

K

So here's my item, information again, I said I. Like the idea in the title, the idea is unique. You know it's Unique, it has to be. The title usually is, is important again I'll put like an employee name or the approvers in this case, jump on down to the actions.

K

We've got the scope action right here and if you haven't seen a scope action, if you haven't used one I highly recommend checking them out again: they're just containers scope. It's right here, scope control! You put that in you put all your actions inside of it and then you can use it as a container.

K

So what do we have? We've got the log workflow history scope convert time zone. That's your basic put into UTC! Now tell it what format you want, what time zone you need it to be in get workflow info? This is exactly what it looks like it's an expression that just workflow parentheses parentheses and it gives you all the workflow information workflow run URL. So this is where we have that big ugly concat statement that I showed you in the PowerPoint and then we have the create work.

K

Workflow history item um see: I could put the podcast for the title up here. I just use the title of the workflow and the output from the convert time zone. For me that works great for you. You might need something different um start time UTC now it just needs to be right now for the timeout I told you that's like I do 28 days.

K

um I know, there's you know might be 30 days, but I'd rather catch it early than catch it late. So we're just you doing an ad days. uh The flow run is the output from the workflow run. Url uh compose statement up top resubmitted. Make sure you default that to no. If you default that to yes, then everything shows that it's been resubmitted, and you know no one knows what to do with it and yes uh per the the chat comment set variable um you can do it I believe you can do a set variable.

K

You cannot do a initialized variable inside of a scope for sure, and then we have that stir info the item info right here and the name of the workflow so that you can sort and filter and the link to the item. And then you do all of your approval stuff. At the end, it's going to either succeed or fail got your results on success. Got your result on failure and for those of you who haven't used the configure run after it's right here.

K

You click the three dots configure run after and make sure that the failure one says has failed all right and then real quickly. Here's the output list. This is my workflow history list. You can see. I've got one that failed. I've got one that succeeded. Here's my flow run. So this this link takes me right back into Power.

K

Automate takes me directly to the flow run for that flow, so I can fix it and resubmit it and item information, the workflow name and, of course, I like I love that we can group and filter by this one and then a link back to the exact item back in the in the actual approval process.

K

Whatever the SharePoint list is for the approval process, so that's it in a nutshell: uh there's a blog post out that has all of this information, Dave posted the the link to it as well, and feel free to reach out to me. If you have any questions, that's it.

B

Very, very cool stuff, thanks Jonathan, very, very cool I, really really appreciate how useful this is and using the different Technologies together again love the Better Together scenarios that everyone's bringing together today excellent job, we'll have some opportunities for everybody to ask questions and continue the conversation afterwards. But for now we're going to move into our final demo of the day by Martin and it's going to be build your own documentation website with Doc effects on SharePoint so excited for this one. Take it away.

L

Thank you, David uh yeah. Let's start with a short uh presentation.

L

So uh for anybody who doesn't know me, my name is Martin heusser I work at Julian Doki as a senior Microsoft, 365 engineer and I live in stefa, which is near Zurich in Switzerland, Switzerland, I'm, a Microsoft 365 apps and services MVP, and on the right side you can see some of my favorite Technologies I like to work and Tinker with So. Today we're going to talk about dark effects and why it's.

D

L

Also, what are kind of the the challenges or the Stepping Stones to get started with working with this tool?

L

um What did I do to make it easier for you to get started if you've never worked with it before and we're going to talk about where you can host a doc effects generated website and, of course, there will be a demo time. These are the technologies that that have been used in this project.

L

We got SharePoint online doc effects Powershell and the awesome PMP Powershell module, which is really helpful for all things: SharePoint online and Powershell, so uh doc effects it's a open source static website generator, which is maintained by the.net foundation and the way it works.

L

Is you basically have some markdown files, which are just plain text files with some very light and easy to learn, syntax, which, in the end generates HTML files or a website containing HTML files from set markdown files, and the output you'll see, will look very similar to what you can see, for example, on learn.microsoft.com or also many other documentation websites out there?

L

uh Why I think it's an awesome tool or why documenting in markdown is one of the best things ever? Is that you get a single source for all of your docs? You can change all the you track.

L

All the changes with Git, no matter if they're stored in a GitHub repo or in Azure, devops repo or whatever is git repository, you use you'll be able to track all the changes and contact content is always in plain text, so it's very easy to migrate it to another tool to another solution or whatever you can easily manipulate the text.

L

For example, if you have like a name change or something else like IP addresses or whatever changes inside your technical documentation, just read the files into a memory with Powershell and you can manipulate, replace and do everything in an automated way. Instead of going through each document manually, you can do a continuous integration, continuous deployment. If you set that up later, once you build the site and it's just a very great user experience. If uh consumers of that documentation can read and learn about your product or about your internal I.T environment on a website.

L

So they'll have search functionality, they'll, be able to create and share links to articles or even to sections within articles and all that stuff and if you're a little bit more advanced with markdown, you can also reuse content across different articles. So if you have like sections which are always going to be the same, and you could just reference that part and you only need to change it in in one file, if something changes the so I've been working with dock effects for a couple of.

F

L

I'm building my own documentation websites and there is a learning curve for markdown syntax. So you have to learn how you can create titles tables, how links work and everything, and you also need to take a look at Gannon structure like this- is where you create the table of content files so that every or all the links of your website work properly and you'll have to figure out how to fold the structure inside your project works.

L

And, of course, if you want to publish that website anywhere, you don't need to you'll need some basic web hosting or service skills to get that website published.

L

Now, um because of all these challenges, I initially faced I decided to create some Powershell scripts, which will greatly help you to get started. So, instead of just creating a vanilla, dark effects project, you can use script to generate a pre-populated folder structure from a CSV, so you'll be able to Define your categories and subcategories and everything and the folder structure, all the ml files, all the references and everything will be automatically created for You by The Script and there's also script to upload and update that content.

L

If you decide to put your doc effects page on SharePoint online, but then as an experiment, I'm also working on some partial functions to just make the certain things a little bit easier like creating links to images and stuff like that, I'll show that in the demo as well, so it's in the end once you've generated the site, it's just a static website, so you can host it on any web server really and you can put it on GitHub, Pages or Azure app service, static, web app or even SharePoint online. With a few tweaks.

L

That's what I'm going to show you um if you decide to put it on SharePoint you'll, have no additional hosting fees, because you don't need a server and you'll have built-in authentication from Azure ID already, and you can use your uh or leverage your existing permission. Structures like if you have a team and the team already has members, there's no need to um assign more permissions or whatever and one of the coolest coolest things is that your documentation content will be indexed and searchable across all Microsoft, 365, apps or even Windows start menu search.

L

If you have that setup as well. So let's go to the repository, so everything is available on GitHub. You can just clone the repository and there's also a accompanying documentation website them. I'll show that later. If we still have time so once you've cloned the repository from GitHub, it will look like this. We have a few folders and we have a some some Powershell scripts uh in these, but first I want to show you how it would look like if you decide to just um create a vanilla project with dark effects.

L

um So you uh on on the docs website, I just mentioned everything is noted, what tools you need to install and everything. Of course, I already have everything green start for the demo, so we do it like this, just um doc effects in it and then specify the output folder, and this will generate the project under the docs folder and now you can see there are some markdown files which earns gamma files and stuff.

L

But what I want to show you is how that looks in the web browser if we decide to serve that website locally preview it. So this is going to create a side folder, which is the output, which is also what you would put on a server.

L

Now we can see there is not much on there, that's just how it works when, when you get started with dark effects, so you need to figure out everything yourself if you're not using um my script, so it's pretty empty and we just have to categories here in in the horizontal nav bar. Let's close that go back here and we can delete this folder again now there is a structure uh structure, CSV file.

L

You can put in all the categories you would want to have on your documentation, so this is kind of or kind of assumes you want to document your internal uh it environment or Cloud environment. So we have a couple of other stuff in here: Microsoft 365, with subcategories of Team SharePoint exchange Etc, uh so yeah. Let's just go to um our initialized doc effects script, which is the script that will create the doc effects project for us, we'll have to give it a name.

L

Let's just call that Demo Box, that's the only parameter, that's needed, and now you can see it created a docs folder again. What, if I serve that page, we'll see that it's already way more uh content in there.

L

Browser and now we can see all the categories we have for subcategories. We have the instruction in sub menus, which can be expanded and collapsed, and there is like a demo or an empty file in for each category. So we have the breadcrumbs as well uh yeah. um Now, let's say we don't want this call flows party. We don't need that. So what we can do is just close. The server repeat the folder again go back to our CSV. Remove that line and regenerate the whole thing.

L

L

So you can do this as many times as you like until you're happy with the structure you laid out now you can see the coleslaws menu is gone.

L

Now, um under the the build folder there is another script called build, dockfx or SharePoint online, and this is a script which uses uh the the PMP partial module. And if we go back to docs on the side, we can see that we have all these HTML files. So basically for every article um there is a HTML file. So all the markdown was converted to HTML and the thing with SharePoint online is that it doesn't support HTML. It needs to be aspx.

L

There are a couple of blog posts out there, which mention that you need to rename them and that's basically what um this script does. Is it renames all the HTML file to aspx, so they can run interactively on SharePoint now, I'm going to run that script, which will keep the same. It will build the website again and then all the files will be uh renamed.

L

Now it will start uploading to uh SharePoint online, but it can actually.

L

Stop that, because, for the sake of the demo, I've already uploaded everything, so uh we don't have to wait for all of us to be uploaded now we have basically the same content running on SharePoint online, as you can see from on the address bar. It's also pretty quick.

L

uh So let's go back here, let's just clear that and now I want to add some content to our documentation.

L

So we go back to uh articles and let's go to index, remove that now uh there is the the functions they are inside. This script, I've already imported them. So all I need to do to add something is to say: uh let's uh add an image.

L

So I want a new Doc effects, image link. It says no new images found, but what it did is it created a image index file which basically is just a text file that stores all the images that are there and now I copy this little raccoon image to the attachments. Folder I run that again now I have now I have the uh a markdown compatible image link, part in my clipboard and then I can just paste it uh into my uh file and I. Also want to do some other stuff at.

L

Pnp demo, which will create a note- and it also includes another file which is uh located here, so that's what I meant what I said. We can reuse content across site because we can just use this include part. And now, let's go back to uh the build documents for SPO script.

L

What this also does, is it renames the the last build photo folder to site loss, build and then generates a new one and it compares the file hash so that it knows which files have changed and it only uploads the changed files to sharepoints. So we don't need to upload the whole site every time which makes it just much more efficient.

L

Now we can see which class has changed and which files are new. So if you go search for new, we can see where tune. Jpeg is new, and if you go back to our SharePoint site, we should refresh that and we can see the record is here, and you can also see the other content um that uh was read from the other file.

L

Yeah and everything is working so search as well.

L

Everything is searchable within SharePoint, so everything is working as if this web page was running on any other server.

L

So very quick um recap: if you want to get started with this first, you need to Define your categories in a CSV file.

L

Then you need to run the initialize doc FX project and to lay out the folder structure, write your documentation, content and then review the the content by previewing and verifying the site locally, and then you can publish it to a SharePoint or a web server, and this is my contact card, so I'm very active on Twitter, LinkedIn, uh I blog on medium and, of course, I provide the code I write on on GitHub.

L

So that's it from me and back to you, David.

B

Awesome stuff again Martin very, very cool I love how quickly you're able to show implementing and the benefits as well within uh using it in SharePoint doc effects, so really really great job I'm sure, there's gonna be lots of collaborative uh questions for you. Well again, we want to thank all of our presenters by the way this was Samir and Jonathan's. First presentation on the call, so I think we want to give them a nice round of applause and, of course, Martin rounded it out with some uh with some veteran Excellence there in his demo.

B

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B

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B

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B

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B

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B

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B

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A