Microsoft 365 Community Development, 21 Jul 2022

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From YouTube: Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call – 21st of July, 2022

Description

Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development community call on July 21st. Demos: Document automation using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex Content Assembly, Building a conversational tab in a Microsoft Teams app that captures external event conversations, and Use folders to create a dynamic list filter and Power Automate to populate folders and create pages. Released Microsoft Graph Toolkit (MGT) – v2.6.0 GA. Delivered 8 new/updated Power Platform Independent Publisher Connectors along with 5 script, 1 Microsoft Teams, and 3 Power Platform samples. See blog post for project updates, news and events. The host of this call was David Warner II (Microsoft) | @DavidWarnerII. Q&A takes place in chat throughout the call.

Learn more
• See the full blog post for this call in the Microsoft 365 platform community blog - https://aka.ms/m365pnp/blog
• Download invite for the Microsoft 365 Developer community call: http://aka.ms/spdev-sig-call
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/m365/community

A

Live with the community, this is the microsoft 365 and power platform. Development bi-weekly call today is july 21st. How are we here already halfway through the year more than halfway? My name is david warner. I will be your host today.

A

Let's see what we're going to talk about today, we are going to see the latest on pnp framework core sdk, we're going to talk about mgt, independent publisher, connectors, we're going to see the latest on a variety of sample script, samples, microsoft, team samples, power platform, samples and then it'll be a little time to do our together mode photo time that everybody loves, then we're going to see our all-stars of the day unkit on document automation with syntax content assembly ian is going to cover building it out for microsoft, teams which creates conversational, tops and conversations based on external events and then, of course, we're going to hear the galloping of the warrior horses for some list formatting with chris kent.

A

So we look forward to all that. Let's talk about how you can get involved in this community and we absolutely welcome and want you to get involved. There are a number of opportunities for you, the first of which is, you could absolutely demo a solution or a technical pattern or a project or something cool that you've created or found in the community.

A

We would love to see that in fact, we've made it super easy for you to be able to apply and request a demo spot. To do that, you can do that at aka.ms, m365pnp, slash, request, slash demo, we'd love to see you contribute on github there's a variety of ways in which you can do that places in which you can do that and we'll show you as we move through the slides today and, of course, we'd love to hear feedback.

A

uh We want to hear what you'd like to see more of maybe what's not working for you. We just ask that you keep it positive and constructive, but we're here to support you in the community to help you get the most out of the technology. Now I mentioned a number of resources that are available to you. Let's take a quick look. There are a plethora of videos, developer and community videos.

A

We've got a whole host of open source projects such as uh cli for microsoft, 365 pnpjs, a whole host of additional sample galleries for teams, spfx power platform list formatting. There is no end to the resources that are available to you and you may say wow. That is a lot of links. How do I keep track of that? No need one link to watch ak dot ims forward.

A

Slash m365, slash community will give you access to all of these resources and more now this is one of the community calls that you are on today, but there are lots more. The microsoft 365 platform call, which is a weekly call currently on a summer break between july and the end of august, is a microsoft, hosted call, and that means that all of the presenters are going to come directly from within microsoft.

A

That means that you're going to get it straight from the mothership, which is a fantastic call, make sure you add that to your calendar there are a host of other community calls as well: adaptive cards, microsoft, identity platform, office, add-ins power platform and, of course, the two bi-weekly m365 community calls, which are the one you're on now: microsoft, 365, empower platform, development and viva connections and sharepoint framework, and those are bi-weekly both on thursdays. Both at this exact same time, you can get the recurrent invites from aka dot. Ms four slash m365 slash, calls now.

A

You're gonna see a number of areas uh in which you can contribute and work within today, but you do not need to be intimidated by them. We have a program that is here to provide you support in the form of hands-on guidance, so you can learn how to do things like submit your first pull request help curate community docs. Perhaps you want to learn more about writing for the web, our newest session, with emily mancini and hugo bernier getting rave reviews. You are welcome to join any one of these.

A

They are hands-on, safe space opportunities for you to get more involved in the community, and what that means is that we work together, with you hand in hand showing you how to accomplish a variety of these things, and it is a safe space because we don't record it so you're free to ask any and all questions that you would like it's a great way to collaborate with the community. So we invite you to sign up for the sessions we're getting new august dates for our power platform.

A

Samples contributor that just happened yesterday so be on the lookout for those new dates, and there are already dates for writing for the web. So we invite you to sign up for those once you have contributed. We want to recognize and celebrate all the amazing work that you're doing in the community.

A

The recognition program is here to do just that is a formal and official program in which we partnered with credly to create digital badges. Yes, those same badges that you get when you're microsoft, certified they're, allowing you to associate them to your linkedin profile. You can share them on twitter. You can put them on your blog, you can put them on the fridge.

A

I know I have mom's proud right, so we want you to be able to share them with everyone in a formal and official way, and we know that that's important when you're trying to show that you're making a difference in the community to your managers or your clients. So please don't hesitate. We do need you to opt in aka dot. Ms forward slash m365 pnp dash recognition. You only need to do it once and we will keep track of your contributions.

A

If you have any questions or perhaps you're seeing others get badges and you think that you're eligible for a badge don't hesitate to reach out to myself or hugo bernier we're still working on all the automation. So sometimes things get a little lost between the cracks, but we want to make sure that everyone is recognized.

A

Next up is pnp.net libraries and so we'll hand it over to paulo.

B

Yes, thank you david and this week we just want to remind you that the pmp framework and the pmp core sdk are almost on summer break. So we are still working on these libraries, but we will see new releases right after the summer break.

B

We are working, for example, in the pmp framework to introduce support for form, customize customizers built with sharepoint framework, as well as we are managing the pending pro requests and issues as much as we can and the same happens for the pmp core sdk and please let us know if there is anything that you are really looking for. There is a url here you can see on the github repo.

B

You can submit your proposals for new uh functionalities or new tasks that you want us to take care of in order to improve the core library and the pmp framework library, and thank you back to you, david.

A

Awesome, thank you. Paulo next up is mgt otherwise known as microsoft graph toolkit. This is a program or a toolkit that allows you to tie into the microsoft graph with super easy components. So they are tools that are available to you. In fact, there is a new samples gallery, aka dot, ms forward slash, mgt samples check that out it's one of the newer features of uh mgt and it's super super popular and we're looking for more opportunities for people to get involved and assist there.

A

So please don't hesitate. Next up is independent publisher, connectors with natalie.

C

Hi everyone um so right now we're at 51 awesome, independent publishers, which is incredible and 153 independent, publisher, connectors so again for those who might not be familiar with this program, this allows anyone to be able to submit a connector to the power platform, so these connectors show up in power, automate, powerapps and also in azure logic apps. So all these 153 connectors are live today.

C

If you want to use them or of course, if you want to build them um so on the slide here I do in our github, we do have a wiki called top connector ask that we keep track of from customers and forums if you're interested in building one of those. But of course, you're welcome to build whatever you'd like and you're also welcome to add additional functionality to a connector, maybe that you've used.

C

But you wish that there was another action or trigger um you're more than welcome to do that as well, and collaborate with folks in the community in terms of new connector submissions recently, so troy has submitted numerous connectors within the past two weeks and we also got a new independent publisher.

D

C

Harold has built the sos inventory connector. So really um we're really happy to have harold uh in the community as well thanks everyone.

A

Excellent, thank you natalie. It's really great to see all that troy you're rocking it out. So thank you for those contributions.

A

Next up is script samples. This is one of the newer and most popular repositories and programs that we've got 158 scenarios and 242 scripts using graph cli for m365 powershell spo management, shell and more. So this is a fantastic wide spectrum of opportunity to be able to not only consume information and data. That's going to help you in your day-to-day work, but also how you can contribute, because there's so many opportunities, so don't hesitate to check them out.

A

We absolutely want to ensure that everyone is has an opportunity and of course we have a dedicated badge for that. So it's a very, very cool opportunity and program. You can see more at aka.ms forward, slash script, samples and moving on to microsoft, team samples with bob german.

E

All right, so um it's it's time for a confession. I have to make a confession. I misspoke a couple weeks ago and told everyone that marcus muller's really cool example with movie watching and voting for movies together that it was using the fluid framework because he and I had just discussed the fluid framework, but actually that first version cool as it is, didn't have the fluid framework.

E

So today, I'm here to announce that take two, this time really with the fluid framework, so that you can see the votes update in real time if you're not familiar with fluid framework. This is the api that makes the loop components work and you can write your own. So you want to learn how check out marcus's blog article and sample and thanks again, to marcus and to everyone in the community love to see more team samples. um There's contribution guidelines right there and back to you, david.

A

Awesome thanks bob that is really really cool. I'm a big fan of the fluid framework, so uh super cool to see that uh instant collaboration. Thank you marcus. ah So we've got power platform samples. uh Now these are samples that are again covering the spectrum of power platform. We've got two new samples. uh In fact, one is directly from a sharing. Is caring graduate just from yesterday matt. Thank you so much a keyword, tagger app. We've also got mike mendez, who has provided a sharepoint site creation, but this is the first pva sample.

A

That's been added, so thank you for setting that up, michael, that's, fantastic and then updates for the accessibility, color checker app from louisa free. So really appreciate all these samples and updates you are all rocking it. Some of those are still pending pr's and we will get them processed in just the next little bit. So thank you so so much for from the uh for the community. For all these amazing contributions, all right. What time is it picture time?

A

Let's share our cameras. If you would like to show your fantastic faces on twitter and the social networks- and I will move this over- we'll select a scene- all right go ahead and turn that camera on and we will start recording here in just a minute.

A

All right, since we see that compound still room for some more all right, still see some cameras. Turning on whoa we're still still filling in there we go got some more all right. All right. Let's give it a wave, everybody do the seb all right. We gotta bobble head back and forth all right, fantastic, excellent, all right! Well, let's move into our rockstar demo presenters of the day uh we're going to kick it off with ankit on document automation with syntax content assembly so feel free to take over the screen share.

F

Thank you so much david, um I'm just sharing my screen.

A

Perfect looks great.

F

Great so before I jump into content assembly, I just want to recap a little bit about what sharepoint syntax is so at sharepoint syntax. Our goal is to help you organize your content into insights, into knowledge that you can use to transform your business processes, and how do we do that? We do that by really simplifying machine learning and advanced ai and helping you leverage human expertise that you already know to build low code, no code, ai models and then deploy them to extract those insights really easily.

F

Now, as part of sharepoint syntax, we we try to get into the entirety of content life cycle, so we have content understanding where we help you build low code, no code models to extract insights from your forms. From your documents uh help you assign sensitivity labels. We also have functionality around metadata search which helps you search for documents easily in sharepoint libraries.

F

But now we have also added content assembly. What this contains a content assembly. It is really about helping. You generate content from all the insights that you have extracted now. Imagine there is an insurance claim that comes to a user. The you can actually extract information like the claim id the claim amount and then send it for reviewer approval.

F

Once the review happens, you can use the same information that you have extracted to actually generate a an insurance claim letter for your client, informing them whether the claim is accepted or rejected, and all that can be done using syntax, the different components of syntax to understand, to discover and then to generate these uh discontent moving on to the demo.

F

Okay. So for the demo, imagine that you are a recruiter who is responsible, for you know creating all the consulting and service agreements for different vendors that you actually hire in your organization. Now the way that you have that you would do that today is to possibly create a you know. You have a sample contract already. You would actually open it in word.

F

uh You have the details coming to you in either emails or some other format, and you you will manually, enter those details in the contract to generate the contract, uh the agreement or the consulting agreement or the service agreement, and then you will actually get it reviewed and send it out to the customers now. This is both error prone in terms that you know, there's manual intervention involved and we actually want to simplify this process for you and make it easy for you to generate this repeatable content, the consulting and service agreements again and again.

F

So what we have done is help you create templates from any existing document that you already have. So if you are a sharepoint, syntax licensed user, you can go to any document library. You will start seeing a new option called create modern template. You hit on this option and then we let you upload any files from any word document from your existing uh from your onedrive or from your device. So I'll just select this contract because you know it's a sample contract, so let me select it and use it to build the template.

F

So it takes a little bit time to load in this once it's loaded, you can start by identifying what is the dynamic content really in this contract that will change from one contract to other, like not everything in the contract. In terms of the con, the conditions the clauses may change, but there are certain things which will change from one contract to other. You can identify that and start creating placeholders protect. In this case, you can simply select the text that you want to create a placeholder for give it a name.

F

And we allow you to associate it with three types of data sources. One is you want the user to add it uh enter it manually and you can support these six data types for manual addition.

F

You can also use a sharepoint library or a list as a data source, and we also allow you to associate it with your with the already set up management data in your organization.

F

So for now I'll just set it up uh start by selecting it as a list.

F

We show you all the lists that you have access to here. There's a list called contractor details which the organization has set up in case. You know all the new contractors that we want to work with their details are present here.

F

You say next title contains the name you can hit save once you are done. You can hit add to add this placeholder. Now you can create as many placeholders as you want for this document. There is no limit as such. Whatever dynamic text you feel needs replacement. You can do that I'll, just create one more, because I want to demo another functionality and associate it with the same sharepoint list notice how we have pre-selected the list for you, it's highly likely that you will actually be working with the same list.

F

Select the address, hit, save and add. Now, once you are done, you can actually go ahead. Rename this, as you know, let me just rename it service agreement, template.

F

Go ahead, publish the template, create as many placeholders as you want. You can go ahead, publish the template once the template is published, it is now available in the new menu in the document library.

F

So if you go go to the new menu, you will start seeing a new template here called the service agreement, template which any syntax licensed user can now come back and use to generate the document to generate the document. You simply need to click. This template.

F

Notice how we show you all the information in terms of hey. There are two placeholders that you need to fill in. There are. The here are the two placeholders that you have to fill in I'll start by renaming it and saying hey, you know what I want to create a service agreement for somebody called bob.

F

You'll see that the list values are auto populated here. If you want anything here, you can add it or you can also invoke the list directly from create from this uh button.

F

So let me select bob, let's say: okay and notice how the address has been autofilled, because we were able to identify a unique record in the sharepoint list and hence we auto filled the placeholder. So this is a functionality which we provide out of the box without you having to go through the hustle or filling in all the placeholders.

F

Once you have done, you're filling all the placeholders and you are ready to publish, but you are ready to create the document simply hit create and at the time of creating. We allow you to rename the document if you want, but we also allow you to create the document in two formats, either the word or the pdf format. So I want to document in a pdf format. Let me create a pdf and say create.

F

Once done, you'll see that the document is available. The pdf document is available in the library and notice that we have changed the placeholder values in the document.

F

So this is how you can actually convert any uh any of your existing documents into a template that you want and use it again and again to generate repeatable content.

F

Now you know this is not the end of it. We are actually working on a lot of lot more functionalities, which are going to come really really soon out, and some of those functionalities include. You know, templatizing entire tables, templatizing images.

F

We also want to ensure that the values that you fill in as feed in those placeholders uh you can directly tag them as meta of the document so that you don't have to write any other model or you know to extract those values again and something that we're really excited about is also uh we are. We are actually releasing uh very soon a preview action in power automate in sharepoint connect and power, automate uh to help automate the entire document generation process. Where you don't actually have.

F

You can directly generate a document when a list item is added, modified or deleted. uh You can tie it with a content, assembly, template and then generate the document automatically. So that's it. Thank you.

A

Awesome anki, thank you so so much, that's very! Very cool stuff really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today. All right, we're doing great on time. So plenty of time left for ian and chris ian building an app for microsoft. Teams, which creates conversational tabs and conversations based on external events feel free to take on over the screen share.

G

Good morning, folks afternoon evening, wherever you are in the world, uh thank you very much for having me my name is owen. Yes, this is quite a mouthful of a title, so apologies for that.

G

Yes, I wanted to showcase a scenario in microsoft teams, development that we've been working on that while it's possible today. It's not something, that's like immediately obvious from the documentation and samples that exist, but before I run into an example, let me quickly summarize some key building blocks that we're using so conversational tabs is something that exists in teams for a while and allows you to create a conversation around a sub entity or tab inside of a microsoft teams.

G

Application in your channel. So in the left hand, side here, you'll see an image where you can have a conversation about the content on the in the tab. Essentially- and this is done using the team's javascript sdk and it's it's a simple way to add a collaboration to your app it. But one kind of issue is it's kind of like a file and forget where, like the isv or the app, might create the conversation.

G

But then the conversation happens without the isv being aware of it or even like getting much to a say inside of it, but one of the key things it does allow you to do is it allows you to pass in a conversation id, and this is used to help um reopen a conversation in the future.

G

If somebody comes back to the entity and some entity in the future- and you want to talk about the conversation again- oh sorry, one thing I've got to mention this conversation actually takes place inside of the channel and so any any in that channel's posts. You can see this conversation also, and so it allows for like a uh communication to be specific to a cell entity but available to the entire group, and this sorry, this conversation idea, we're storing, is useful in our pc that we'll see in a second.

G

The other thing I want to talk about is bots and teams, and if you're aware of any sort of team's apps, I'm sure you're, aware of bots and they're very useful for creating and responding to conversations and activity, handlers, sending texts, cards and images, emojis, etc.

G

But again it kind of focused on responding to events rather than creating them, and that's perfectly fine. It's very useful for a lot of scenarios, but one thing we wanted to handle and apps for concept was actually creating conversations without having a part being invoked directly.

G

So bots and teams are built in the bot framework and you can create conversations directly using the connected client. You are the server behind the bot as a social situation, bottom framework, and so our proof concept.

G

We wanted to create a proof of concept that allows you to have a conversation about an event that happened externally and you can have context about that inside the tab.

G

So an example of this that might be implemented is like an army channel support where you've got a support channel and each support inquiry ends up in a specific channel and teams.

G

You can open up that inquiry have a chat about the inquiry and in the left-hand side you can have uh more context provided- or maybe you do this- with job applications where each application, uh each candidate's application can be visible as a conversation, and you can view the cv in the left-hand side and talk about talk with your managers and recruiters in the chat in the right-hand side or even instant management, and where you have a new conversation for each incident, and you can view details and graphs about the incident in the main tab.

G

But I recommend using teams as an instant manager so from the building block studies discussing earlier, and you can get the service url that we need to create a new conversation from the bot install activity. You can create a conversation using a backline. You can send a conversation id to a tab that is created from that conversation that you just created backlined and to be used in the conversational tabs. And then you can open a conversation on the side panel. So these all things are separate kind of ideas.

G

I suppose, but you can build them to get into a great example inside microsoft teams, so let me kind of quickly showcase this, and hopefully this all works out. So this is a sample teams. Channel I've got going and you can see, we've got a few different channels, we've got a general channel, and that includes information about uh our sales tickets.

G

We've got finance challenges of financing and again I t team that contains information about mit tickets, and so you can see here, we've got a few inquiries to create I've created this morning, just to showcase this sample, but before I jump into that, let me quickly kind of create a new um ticket and you can imagine this. This is kind of like a stand-in for an external service, so in the real world this might be a it help desk or some other instance, but here we're kind of like, instead of creating a whole new service.

G

This is our external service in inverted quotes. So let's say mike is going to create a new question he's going to say: I have lost my charger on my laptop.

G

Can you help, and so this is coming from an external server somewhere and it's going to end up in our channel and you'll, see here now? On the bottom side, we've created a brand new conversation using the bot framework to provide to inquiry. We can open this detail directly. This will bring us into our tab.

G

Where you can see information about the the inquiry you can open up. The conversation left hand side where you can see more information about it, and I can reply and I tag someone and say: hey adele. Do you mind shipping like a charger.

G

And this happens inside teams and if I go back to the posts directly, you can see that I can't my message that has showed up already it's very useful. You can also go via the actual tab directly and in the tab itself. We've got a list of all the tickets that are currently available and you can open up a different ticket and view information about it and reply to conversation directly and this one hasn't been responded yet. So let me get lyn on this.

G

G

G

I wanted to very, and so one thing about conversation tabs is that you can only create them inside of a channel, so a conversation tab cannot be created in a group chat or a personal chat, a one-on-one chat, but what you can do is have a personal app that references conversational tabs directly. So in this scenario, we've got a conversational tab where our support technician is able to see all of the uh instance from every department that they are a member of- and we use this to do this.

G

We use microsoft graph, so we're querying microsoft graph to get the users teams and the channels they're a member of, and we then use that information to filter out the support patterns that exist to show that user, just like here, the tickets that are available to you. So this is very useful if you need to have a technician across multiple teams. That's working with these things, and so somebody can open up the technician can open up a specific inquiry open up. The conversation have a chat.

G

And reply directly and that conversation will end up back in the team's channel where this post was originally posted.

G

So you can see that ended up here here. So that's very useful for me and kind of single place of working for the itm, so we'll run through the code in a second, but just as a quick summary again of what just happened. It's a simple workflow proof of concept.

G

So on the left, you can see that support request comes in for a customer that ends up hitting an external endpoint and or the external endpoint controller, where we create a new conversation for the request and that conversation id is stored with the along with a request in a database inside your team's client, then you can view the conversation in a channel.

G

You can open up the sub entity or the specific request in a in the tab view by deep linking to it and in the tab view a query is a database for the request, details and the conversation id so that can be opened up in the tab sidebar.

G

This code is available today on the microsoft team sample repository, but before that I'm going to run through quickly and the stuff that the little pieces that kind of may be of most of interest to how this all works.

G

To do this, I'm going to actually use a thing called coder, which is it's available in the um repository that is shared and it's very useful way of kind of jumping through the code simply so when we first still installed the boss. This is using the on team members added async method.

G

We store information like the service url.

G

This is used so that we know how to send a send a create conversation request to the bot in the future, and we started the language team's team id and, as you said later on, when we have to create a new conversation, we say: what's the team id okay, here's the service url for that for that team, I'm going to skip a few things just to make sure I'm not going over on time, but essentially we use we're storing everything at the moment in our sample using an in-memory database, but in a production environment.

G

This would obviously be that you need to have a more reliable data store.

G

Let's skip that.

G

All right so, when we creating a new support department or something similar, we authorize to make sure the user who is trying to create this um department is a member of the team that they are creating the department in. So we do a quick authorization make a quick call to microsoft, graph to ensure that the user is a member of our team.

G

Yeah, no listen! Sorry.

G

So when a user creates a new inquiry here, we hit the external controller endpoint, and in here we pass. We can navigate down through the code, but essentially we we create a new sub entity. This new inquiry so eventually uh gets information about the support department. Here that support department includes information like the service url that we stored initially, when the bot is first created. Our first installed apologies, including the team's channel, the edit attempt entity. We get the bot id from our settings and then we've created an adaptive card.

G

That includes all the information, including the customer's inquiry, details. This conversation and our parameters are then sent and we try and create the conversation directly and when a conversation, if that conversation is created correctly, we update our state a database store with the customer and queries and the conversation id.

G

um Yeah and so.

G

On code, culture.

G

Sorry, I've kind of talked a bit too jump to go on a few few points here.

G

G

In the front end in our tab directly, we make a call, so if you need to actually load an inquiry or a sub entity into a tab, we make a call to our back end where we query the support depart this the inquiry based on its sub ntid.

G

As part of this query, we get a conversation, id returned and that ends up calling this open conversation function. This is calling the microsoft teams sdk and it's passing in the conversation id that has been returned from the api, and this is how we actually can show the same conversation multiple times and there's a few things along in this setup. That is also important to have where you need to have callback handlers for when somebody closes the conversation tab directly using the x button and that actually opens conversation tab.

G

So you can have it all entirely in one big flow from start to finish, where you can create an external conversation, as I create a certain inquiry that leads to a conversation be created, that leads to a inquiry being visible. The conversation created inside of a tab where you can reply and you can have a lot of communication inside microsoft, teamster.

G

Thank you very much if you've, any questions feel free to join the chat. I'll, take a look at him and thank you david for your time.

A

Awesome awesome stuff in and bonus points for the uh code tour, a lot of fans here for that uh there's some questions in the uh chat, so just in the interest of time I'll, let you kind of cover those uh there in the chat, but thank you for the fantastic demo today, all right that takes us to our last demo. What is that something I hear in the background is that right here? Oh some galloping chris kent list, formatting warrior horses chris, take it away.

D

All right, everybody I'm chris and we're talking about some stuff. So let's do that all right boom all right. We're headed over to our classic warrior horses site all right. Well, we'll just ignore those! It's fun! Okay, we'll hide up with that face. So sorry, david all right. So let's talk about what the horses are up to, so the horses are always trying to uh look into new things and to work on stuff, and so we're going to take a look at r d.

D

They've got a new r d site where they're doing their research and development and here's where they're going to gather up all the different ideas for how things are working they're going to gather up. uh You know different initiatives, so they can kind of view what's happening. They can comment, they could work together on them, and that sounds like a great idea and they hand it to someone who that's not their job. They have another job, but you know it seemed fine at first because they were very excited about it right.

D

So what they said was just email me, your new research initiative that sounds good and then they create a little page for it uh then link it back and then they can check it out, and that seems okay at first right, but things have picked up, but now we're talking two to three a week and we're looking at more of these and it's gotten a little crazy we're trying to manage all that, and so now we're going to talk about what could we do to make that better right?

D

So it's a common scenario right, something starts small gets a little bigger, but you still don't have funding or budget to do anything much beyond the out of the box right. So let's see so in this case right, our lovely uh manager of the r d and m site. uh What they're doing is when they receive an email, they're putting things in a list, because you know they thought a few things through. So they've got a list here.

D

They put them in this list and that's cool and they have the details. You know the key details: they're having them email them right and they're, hoping that maybe they'll make this a form that they can later have. You know individuals fill out and so on, and once they, you know, put these items in here and they create a page right. They've got this template here, so they create a page research initiative and then they fill out some stuff.

D

For instance, here is page they're just linked, and so they've created a page for that research initiative right, oh, this is lovely, so excited about this all right. So that's, okay, right, but they've got to copy this information over. It doesn't look great right. They've got to do this combo manually and, as things ramp up right, there's a lot of chance that they can make mistakes. Things aren't quite right. Things are certainly not standard as they work through this. For instance, they decide to add a new category.

D

They've got to go back through all the other research initiatives at it. You can see it's a bit of an issue right, so traditionally you might solve this right. If you're coming from a development background, you might do this as uh spfx right, for instance, you might create a single page. You put spfx webpart on it and maybe you've got a query string that points to you know a list item and then you're displaying that list item.

D

However, you want and that works pretty well, there are some big limitations drawbacks with that right for one, uh this person doesn't have any funding right, so they don't have time to spin up development. Even if it's the easiest, spf x web part in the world right, there's deployment, there's other things. I've got to go through approvals, it's a big hassle just to get that going sometimes right, it could be the right call, but what if uh they also want to take advantage of individual pages? So they want page comments right.

D

They want to be able to let the authors they want the key information, but they want to, let them add any other web parts they want and so on. So a single page template with just using query strings, isn't a great model for that either right. So what can we do? Well, in this case, we want to. We want to look at how we can make this information look better now, one of the things you might do- and this is a fine thing- sometimes you've- got a small amount. Information- is to use page properties right.

D

So, if you've seen this web part, you can add additional columns uh to your page uh site pages library and you can show them here right. I can show the title and that's cool and you can add a whole bunch of these, and that would be a standardized way to do it and you could have the metadata instead on the list. You can have it on the page and that's one way, but you don't really get a lot of control over that and this is a formatting demo.

D

So you know that's not the solution all right, so let's get rid of that. So what if we wanted to go a little further right? We want to make this a little better. So we've gone back to our initiative site all right, and the first thing I want to solve is navigation all right. So we've got this. We got this so we have this navigational view which is cool. It just gives us buttons so that we can click on those links. So we go back to the home page.

D

Let's just integrate that briefly, all right, so we can come in here and whatever these things you can do here. We don't care about that anymore. Instead, we're going to add the list and we'll pick our initiatives list, and then we edit that this is where you can see. We have the list and we can pick our view, and so in this case we're gonna pick navigation, uh but we're gonna hide all these uh extra junk. We don't want right here, I'll move, you guys over here all right and let's apply that and that's cool.

D

So now, we've got this little thing here and uh because I've got weird section issues, that's a it's a list! One part issue: I'm just going to turn off the section background shading. So it looks good right. So now we've got this navigation, that's going to be dynamic.

D

Whenever we create an item in that list right and click this and it's going to go to whatever site we pointed at so we're solving some things with formatting all right, but let's go a little further. So if we go back to our list, uh which was let's go to resources initiatives, we have this idea of like what what if we want to display this a little better.

D

We have this idea of a stacked view, so this is just some of those details right now, they're all stacked on top of each other, which doesn't look great, but it's a little more of the the way we want to display. This right, it'll be great if we display that on the page. So if we go to a page say we're on our course clause page all right, we're just going to remove this whole thing or where's that button- I don't know, let's just add a new one. There we go.

D

We add our list here and then we go to initiatives and we're going to grab our view right. We're going to say that stacked view just as before and we're going to you know we'll hide these things just to make it prettier and wow wow and down here we apply.

D

Well, that's not great right. We still have multiple items here and their infinite wisdom. The dynamic filtering is only for listed libraries instead of being pulled from query strings and some other stuff we might be able to do uh so. How do we do that right? We could create an individual view for every item and then we would be very, very sad that we were having to do that and maintain that, and that would just it's not it's not a good play. Don't do that, okay, but what about this thing? What is this folder thing?

D

Well, let's check that out. This is where we're really looking at work. This is the folder pattern, and so, if we come back here, uh the idea here is, if we go back, let's go to our all items view it's a little easier. If we go to our list settings we're going to take advantage of folders you're familiar with folders in document libraries where they're on by default, but you can do them in list as well.

D

So if we go to our advanced settings- and we just come down here- and we say- make new folder command available, we're going to say yes and we're going to hit ok and now we go back and the idea here is well not on navigation. Let's go back to our all items. We could create folders right. So let's create a folder and we're going to call this one initiative for one and there's a reason for that name.

D

I'll show you so I'm going to just create that and it is, I created a folder and I can literally just grab this guy and stick at the folder right. So now I've got this in a folder there's horse claws and we could go back. We've got another folder and so on, but on our page here now we can actually type a folder right initiative.

D

Two three four was that what was one? Maybe let's try that yeah supply there. We go look at that so now we can actually use a folder to create a dynamic filter for us right. So now we're pulling back exactly the item. We want here right and we can. We can go a little crazy and get rid of this name right. We can just say you know details or something right, and that looks pretty good right now. We're pulling this in all right, so this works pretty well right.

D

So now we're just pulling from a single folder um and that's great and we're getting a little further right, but that's still a hassle right. The idea that I've got to create a folder I can save there. I've still got to create the page, then I've got create a the web part and I've got to point it to the folder. I mean again, I've got a little more dynamic here, but why don't we take this a little further right, so why don't we make a way to have this folder stuff be automatic.

D

So, let's look at that, so we're going to go to integrate we're going to power, automate we're going to create a flow, and I'm just going to hit show more. So I can get the the template I want, which I just want when a new item is added all right. This is the idea that, whatever a new item is added to this list, I want to run my flow all right. So we'll continue here and we get a nice little starter. It's pointed at our list, wow wow and that's exciting. Now.

D

The first thing we need to check, though, is we've got to check our trigger condition so right now we we can create folders and everything else, but we don't want to run this when you create a folder, because then we've created a folder for a folder. The whole idea is we're going to run this flow to create a folder for the list item and move the list item into that folder.

D

So, in order to do that, we go up here and we go to settings and we've got this lovely trigger conditions here and I'm just going to add one here and I'm just going to copy and paste and all we're going to do is add equals and we're just saying if it's a folder, don't run it right, so pretty straightforward. So we're only running this flow when it's not a folder. So it's just a standard list item so hit okay.

D

So now what we want to do is we first want to create um a variable right, so we're going to say edit variable there. It is and we're going to call this guy, folder name all right and we're just going to generate. We just want standardized folder names. It makes things a lot easier to work with, so we're going to make this string and we're going to use a little formula here, I'm going to do an expression, and in this case I want to concat all right.

D

You guys got to watch me type, an expression here. This is going to work out dash right and then we want to put just like we did before. We want to format that id right. So we're going to say format number here and the way the format number works is we're going to take an item and then we're going to say padded, basically with zeros, so we're going to put five zeros in there we're going to pad it now.

D

We need our dynamic item here, so go to dynamic content and we're just going to scroll down till we find id boom. There we go now. We've got a little formula, that's going to build and if we can see a little better, basically we're going to format, we're going to say, initiative dash, and then you know up to five zeros with our id in there and that just kind of gives us a standardized folder name which is exciting.

D

I do recommend changing these titles, but I'm not going to in terms of speed here, but let's keep going so now. We want to create a folder right. So let's do that. So we're going to do that uh using this. So we're going to say folder and we got a create new folder.

D

Then we pick our site right there and then we're going to pick our list, of course, which is that same list. Oh you can do it there we go initiatives and then our folder path. Well, that's our folder name! There we go so we're creating a nice folder there, and then we want to move our item to the folder. Now, that's a little less straightforward, of course, and in that case we're going to use a sharepoint http call airport http and there it is now.

D

This is an hp call, but it is not a premium connector because it goes to sharepoint, so yay, all right, I'm going to click this then we're going to go our dnm and we're going to say this method is actually a post and then let's copy some stuff, because I don't want to type all that out here. So let's grab this and let's paste that sucker in there. Oh I'm going to zoom this at all.

D

There we go make a little easier okay, and so the idea is here: I'm going to get by server relative url. I've got it to my list initiatives instead of item id right. I actually need to replace that with dynamic. So let's do that blah blah blah blah and our dynamic content. We don't want, we want id, but we don't want the one from the create new folder. We want it from when the new item is created that id and then we want to move it to our folder name here.

D

So, let's back over that insert our dynamic content, which was just the folder name and then once again we need the item id right. There we go and let's grab that id boom. So now we go now we're going to be moving the item into the folder so now create a folder and we're going to move the item into the folder, and that is very, very exciting.

D

Okay, so let's see if that works, we're just going to do a quick test on that one after we save, of course, now we'll test, I'm going to say manually, so we don't have to wait the you know five minutes there we go and now we just go over to our list and let's just create a new item, all right, we'll just call it uh super research. I don't know wow wow, wow, wow, wow, perfect right, all right, we'll give it a category just for funsies, right and uh duration is six weeks.

D

I will pick a start date. None of these are required, but I just feel like going out and it's a good time all right and we'll save that right. So now we've got a new entry here and if we check our flow, we cross our fingers, we hope boston, prayers and all that and there we go it has run. And so now, if we go back, we should see maybe I'll just refresh to be certain. ah We have initiative for and if we click that up, we have.

D

Our super research was automatically moved in there and that's very cool, and so then what we can do here is we can actually turn off like if we don't like this folder view, all right. If you haven't seen this before, you can go to edit current view.

D

um You come down here to folders and even though they are folders and everything's in folders, you can show them without folders, so it will flatten everything. So it looks just like a standard list and nobody even needs to know. You've got those ugly folder names back there, but now you've created those as flow. So now you've got a way to point to each individual item on a page. So let's go a little bit further.

E

D

Hey, I still got a couple minutes, so that's exciting. So if we go back to our flow right, let's go further right. So we have this idea that we want it on a page. We know that. So let's do that. Let's put it on a page. So in order to do that, we need to take our template. First, let's go to our template and let's edit, this template, so we're going to edit our page template and let's set it up as an actual template. We want to use let's get rid of whatever that was right.

D

So we're saying a basic page is going to have a list, it's going to be the initiatives list and we know we wanted to point to. You know initiatives and we want to go to the stacked view and we want the folder we're just going to put in here initiative.

D

What was that 0 4 all right there we go. Let's apply that see if that worked, okay, yep and then we get rid of these guys just so we have there we go so here is our exciting template right, and what we want to do here uh is we're just going to leave this, as is for a minute. Well, actually, let's go to the before. I forget okay, so we saved our page templates now, we've got a template and we know that it's at our research.aspx in our templates folder.

D

So if we go back to our flow now and all I did by the way in case you weren't familiar, is I just created a page and there's an option? Instead of save as draft to save this template, that's the only thing I did there. It's not strictly required, but I find it is easier to do that. So, let's go add a new step, and in this case now we need to create a copy of that template.

D

So this is going to be another one of those posts so http there we go http press to sharepoint and, of course, we're going to pick our site there. You are that's exciting and this is another post because we're doing something here and let's go ahead and again grab our url we're going to replace. So I don't finger it boom. Okay.

D

So what we're doing is we're getting the file by server relative url templates research aspx, because that is the name of our page right and then we're going to copy it to our site pages and in this case we're going to use that folder name once again here, all right, so we're going to say boom folder name. So there we go so now, we've just uh gone through and we've created a copy. So I'm going to rename that just for lose my mind.

D

Copy of temple- okay, there we go so that's cool now created a copy of the template and in order to work with that now we need to get details about that right. So now we actually have to get metadata about that. So, let's see get file metadata and in this case we're going to pick the uh what is the rnd side: perfect, okay and our file. I did our file path, which one did I pick not file.

D

This looks different.

D

Let's see did I have the right step here. Let me add one more step here. I want to try that one more time, because this part's fun. Okay, let's make sure I pick the right metadata one. I think I did, but I'm gonna double check before we try and run this thing all right. So we want to get the uh file metadata easy pack, that's the one! We want perfect, okay, so get rid of that get out of here. You guys don't need you boom all right.

D

Okay, so that's why I look different all right, so now we need to pick our site correctly. So in this case, what we're doing is we're going to the page we just created and we're just doing this. So we get the nice id from it right. So we're going to say our file path in this case we're just going to type.

D

It is site pages right, slash and then our dynamic content is the folder name, all right, I'm going to type dot aspx there we go there we're going to get our page metadata and then we've got to check it out. Since we're going to edit the page right so now we're going to do another http action, I love those good times all right and so in this case we're going to pick our site one more time and our method is going to be post again and once again, let's copy this guy from over here.

D

Our api endpoint boom is just our page item id right here, we're gonna backspace over that, so we can insert it and it's going to go dynamic content and we got file metadata using path. We have that item id boom. We're going to check out that page. That's all there is to checking it out and now we're going to update the page now this one's a little crazy. So, let's see what we can do here now.

D

This is an http post once again and we'll get it set up and then I'll show you what we're going to do here. So once again pick our site pick the site there. It is, and our method is once again post because we're doing stuff and the url is this save page as draft endpoint right here and let's once again before, we forget, let's take up the dynamic piece insert that item id okay. So now we want to save pages draft, but in order to do that, we need the actual content of that page.

D

All right. So good news. I got a trick for you, we're going to hit f12 in our browser or bring up our dev tools, whatever you've got that configured for right and we're going to switch to the network tab I'm in edge, but this works in chrome and firefox and all those things I'm going to just go to network I'm going to record the traffic. I'm just only interested in these fetch requests. For now, let's edit the page right just so, I can hit save page as template.

D

Let's see, then we can set up the page one more time and try or actually turn it off yeah. You actually do need to record it. Okay, so save page template. You see, we have the save pages draft call right here this payload right here and we didn't really change it. We said view source, so we can leave it this way.

D

Sometimes you'll have to come here and expand it if it's really big, depending on how much stuff you put on your page literally copy this, I'm just going to copy that head back to your flow and in the body. That's your body, so paste that all right and now what we're going to do is we're just going to go through and find a couple things right. So we have this idea of our title. Was research initiative right? That's what we set it up, how about?

D

Instead of that, we backspace and we say, where's our dynamic content, dynamic content. In this case we want the title right. So let's get the title from when a new item is linked, so we're going to name our page right, there is title and then what we want to come down to is we want to find here is initiative004 make sure. That's the right one, the folder folder panel, here's the folder path right here.

D

So we want to change our folder path, so we can dynamically insert that as well and we'll get rid of that guy insert our folder name and then I think, there's one other spot. We have to put it as well and that would be selected folder key, which is right here, yeah here with that: okay, I'm sure I'm doing that yep select, folder t versus 2f boom backspace over that guy and then once again, folder okay.

D

So now what we're really doing here is we're taking the whole page contents right and we're taking the properties that we configured and we're just dynamically swapping in a couple things that we just did and then we're going to save that page as draft all right and then the last thing we need to do is we need to publish that page that we just did so one more http action and we should be done.

D

D

Let's see, we have one more sharepoint number four awesome now: let's drag our site one more time the and it is again a post and our uri is published in this case, so very similar I'll. Take our page item id back out.

D

Time and then we're going to grab item id okay. Now, assuming I typed all that, let's see what happens, shall we? Oh all right, sorry, one last step and that last step is to update the actual item right. So we need to update the item so update item.

D

In this case we want to grab that site one more time. Remember what I said one more time earlier and I lied to you that was nice to me all right. So we go to our initiatives and our id is that original id from way back up top so glide your fingers across. Thank you all right.

D

There we go and we'll just take the title because all required fields for some reason that we mapped in and uh we love that so much all right title, and in this case we just want to update that page url right. So we just created that dynamically.

D

So we know that the pages and site pages actually we're going to put it on our site site, slash rdm slash what was it site pages: slash, folder, name, dot, espx right! So that's what we're doing now! We could take this further. We could add permissions. You know individual permissions to the pages and all that stuff and send emails like your page is ready and we can do all that kind of stuff. If we wanted, we could bring that form stuff in through microsoft forms.

D

In fact, we've got a less than five minute demo on the on the youtube channel. That'll show you how to take microsoft, forms and put those in the sharepoint list, so you could have all this kind of wrapped up together. So let's save and again cross those fingers. Okay! So now we're going to test it once again manually test it all right and now.

C

D

See come on now we're going to create a new item.

D

Now we're going to call this uh hope. The researching hope did it work there. We go some categories just for fun, boots and style methodology, great and duration. We're going to say is 78 years and the start date is uh we'll say uh tomorrow today it's today we're great and we don't need to know that and our budget is going to be uh 78 million yeah. It's a lot hope costs quite a bit. Okay.

D

So now we're going to run that and let's, uh let's see what happens with our flow here, are we going to fail? Are we going to do it? Let's see so, we've gone through we've. Aha florence successfully! Well, that's exciting! Let's see so if we come back here and we have hope we can see that we've got a link right here to the page right and click that it actually takes us to our page research initiative. uh We forgot to update the title, but we can do that as well.

D

But the idea is, we just created a page. We dynamically, you know, set it up. We've got our navigation set up off of view. Formatting we've got an individual format here we don't have to have a view for each individual item. People then can control this page. They can add whatever web parts they want. We still have standardized display and because you've got all the power formatting. You can make this look. However, you want, you can go really elaborate depending on the number of columns you have. You can integrate those power.

D

Apps we've done that as well. It's pretty cool pattern um and you can see if we go back home. We already have our new initiatives here and our navigation and things to sort of show up, and we could order this, maybe by recent initiatives and just limit that to five or ten and so on.

D

So now the person that was struggling to do you know two or three of these a week is just set all this up and it's automated and they're good to go and then get back to the regular job, yay all right and just to wrap up here. Here's a couple of resources for you, so please check out our full documentation.

D

We've got lots and lots of samples on on this and more uh we've got samples on how to use the flow and other pieces as well, but there's also some tools available too, and that's about it. For me, thanks awesome, chris.

A

Yep everybody's excited right, even the horses, so very, very cool. Thank you. Everyone for attending today, let's wrap up here. Let me share the screen and we will wrap this puppy up today. Okay, excellent, well, thank you again for our three fantastic superstars of the day, anka, eon and chris for presenting those amazing demos. Today the recording will be available in 24 hours in the microsoft 365 community youtube channel. If you try to download it through the chat, you will not be able to so make sure you subscribe.

A

Aka.Msforwardslash m365 videos follow us on twitter, at microsoft365dev and or at m365pnp. Our next general dev call will be two weeks from today august 4th at 7 am and our next viva connections and sharepoint framework call will be next week july. 28Th, you can see all the calls at aka.ms4 m365, slash calls. Thank you. Everyone for attending the fantastic conversation and support in the chat have a wonderful rest of your week and a fantastic weekend.