Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 3 May 2022

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From YouTube: Introducing new Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool with SharePoint Syntex Module

Description

In this 18-minute developer focused demo – Bert Jansen and James Eccles introduce us to a brand new open-source assessment platform, for which additional modules can be built by Microsoft and Community. The tool uses CLI to run assessments tenant wide or on selected site collections. Step through the tool download, usage and interpretation of Power BI report results. Replaces Modernization scanner. Effectively analyzes content stored in SharePoint and generates recommendations. In the case of Systex, the module identifies where Syntex could deliver highest impact. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on May 3, 2022.

Demo Presenters
• Bert Jansen (Microsoft) | @O365Bert
• James Eccles (Microsoft) | @jimdeccles

Supporting materials
• Tool - Microsoft 365 Assessment tool | aka.ms/microsoft365assessmenttool
• Repo - Microsoft 365 Assessment tool | github.com/pnp/pnpassessment

Learn more
• 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/m365pnp

A

Welcome everyone. My name is bertie hansen, I'm a senior service engineer in the one driving sharepoint customer engineering organization and in my day-to-day job my main role is actually helping. Isvs and customers get the most out of their sharepoint developer experience and with me today I have james who's also from customer engineering, but I, like james, introduced himself james, take it away.

B

Hi everyone, uh my name, is james eckles, I'm a customer experience pm on the customer engineering team with uh with burt. My focus is all around sharepoint syntax, helping customers adopt syntax, understand, best practices and how we can use that to improve the product.

A

Thank you james. So, let's move to our tool, the microsoft 365 assessment tool, which is a brand new tool that we released last week during the aim conference and this tool is an open source tool that you can use to run an assessment on your tenant for a particular adoption scenario or deprecation scenario.

A

So uh adoption is, for example, the the case that we have today sharepoint syntax, I'm using. I want to use syntax or I'm already using syntax, and I don't know where uh syntax will add value to my tenant, because there's so much content, there's like hundreds of thousands of site collections, millions of files, where does it bring? Why does it make sense to use syntax?

A

So the assessment will help there and james will dive into the details on what it actually means: the syntax output report and so on, and I will more focus on the technical parts of the tool, because this microsoft, 365 assessment tool is not just for syntax, is a platformer framework that will use for all forward growing adoption or deprecation scenarios, a search. It will also replace the monetization scanner so for the folks have used the monetization scanner.

A

That tool was kind of a little bit a homegrown small tool that has been getting more and more features without having the proper rewrite and a proper kind of backing, and with this tool we we hope to have uh where you actually have changed, that to the better to get started. You can download the tool from the akitomas micro65 assessment tool link and in the demo we will show you a bit more on how to do that and then what that means to run the tool.

A

uh I also want to point out that, uh compared to the memorization scanner, there's a ton of improvements in this particular tool. So for the folks I've used transition scanner- it worked great, but as soon as your tenant goes really really large like. If you would want to scan like 200 000 site collections, it was kind of sometimes hard to do and with this tool that you'll see there's much more reliability and control for you as a person operating the tool.

A

The tool itself is also open source, um meaning uh you can just look for what we built and you can actually build your own module.

A

So if you have a need in your enterprise to uh have some kind of a framework that can iterate across content and and kind of check certain things, this can be like a nice baseline for you to start writing your own solution, some technical details about the tool itself when we run the demo you'll see that the tool is exe, microsoft, 65-assessment.exe, which is our command line interface and the same exe, is also used as the actual tool.

A

So the build of the logic, decor assessment operations all happen in a web server, asp.net orchestral web server and the command line interface talks to the web server using grpc as a protocol. So today we have just a command interface in the future. We most likely will have another ui layer to make it a bit more easier, uh although the command line interface is already really great um for the technical folks. All of this. This is based on dotnet six.

A

um It's like a single exe or a single package for windows or mac os uh from mac os and linux next to the business one, and all of that is authentic. um When developing this, it kind of really blew me away. How easy it is this with linux. You just built one solution, you tested windows and you can just recompile it for macros and linux and with very very few kind of changes. You have like a single package that works. The package itself contains all dependencies.

A

You just dispute one file to linux host and it just works. It's great a bit more about the tool itself in the command line, command line interface. Sorry, uh you have a number of key actions that you can do. You can uh and we'll see them in a demo, but you can list the running available. uh Assessments start a new one status, pause, restart assessments generate a report and so on um all of these assessments.

A

All of these kind of actions sorry leads to a call to the server which uses a sql lite database as backing so compared to the previous monetization scanner, which kept things in memory or just put them directly in the csv file on disk. This one uses sql lite database, which enabled a ton of improvements and reliability enhancements.

A

A certain point. Your assessment is done, and you want to generate a report and then we'll actually export data from the sqlite database into csv and into power bi, so that then you have both the data and csv and the power bi report all right.

A

Let's do a quick demo, um so I'm going to shift to my other desktop here I am and let's see we have a folder. I've already downloaded the assessment tool.

A

um You see it over here, micro35 dash assessment and let's just start that one you can either start it like this just hit enter, which you'll do in a demo or you can do something like with the arguments next to the exe engines. Just run it like that.

A

But this demo, I'm gonna, just run the tool like this and you get like a version check. The tool starts. So let's first check if there's already assessments done on this location. So if I type list it will check, is our assessment server running and if not, it will start the assessment server. So it will start the web server and then it will talk to the web server over grpc and ask like hey give me all the assessments that you are aware of.

A

In this case it is returning four assessments which I ran in the past, so you see all of them are finished now. In our case, we want to start a new assessment, so starting assessment is done using a command line which I'm going to copy and paste, and before I run it, I want to explain a bit more, so you see the start. So we start a new assessment.

A

The mode is syntax. um This is the current mode. In future you will see more modes, more operations, either adoption or deprecation being added authentication mode. You can do application permissions.

A

You can also do interactive and device permissions, so device authentication, interactive and device are more meant for, like I have access to a particular site collection, or do I want to just assess my own site collections? Then those were great. If you want to assess your full tenant, you would use application permissions.

A

You can scope the assessment to a single to your full tenant, so which is the case here, I'm scanning my complete tenancy, but you can also scope an assessment via specifying a set of site collection, urls, either on command line or via a file. Then we have the application id. This is an azure id application that you created with in documentation. You can find the exact permissions required for each mode, so syntax requires certain permissions.

A

The future ones might require different ones and then, finally, the location to a certificate that we'll use for the app only authentication, it's recommended to create your own application.

A

If you don't specify application we'll default to the pnp management, shell application, so the one that user bmp powershell if you're using that one, that might be an easy way to also then run an assessment and finally, there's a syntax full argument which in case the syntax assessment, enables it to search to get additional data.

A

If I hit enter it starts to check authentication and then it will enumerate the site collections to assess. So we have 383 site collections and it starts running now. At this point I can close the window and kind of leave it running, but and come back later because it runs in background on the web server, but I can just type, for example. Now, let's do a list, and you see that okay, we are running 18 site collections, then five percent.

A

This is like a static view. I can also like a dynamic real-time status view which is status. Now you see this one just moving along, so you see the counter growing and the number of cycles being processed rising.

A

A key thing that we added here is we try so with the old demonstration scanner. Folks, sometimes did it new, is it stuck? Is it still running? Is it being throttled? Yes, no. It was really hard to tell here. You'll get two numbers. The first number here will tell you like: hey, I'm throttled. I have a 49, I'm throttled, the other one is a network exception. If there's a socket exception, something flakey network happens, you will notified as well until we try. So it's really robust.

A

But if you see like a large number of your tries, you know that you might are pushing too harsh that you might want to run it with less parallel operations, for example right moving on. So one thing that a common request from the previous assessment of anonymization scanner was like: hey it takes too long. Can I restart it? Can I stop it, and now you can just type pause, minus id.

A

You paste the assessment id and now the assessment will be paused and once it's paused, you can just shut down your processes. Close your machine. uh Do whatever you want it's it's there, it's an awaiting status.

A

So this is all done. If you do now list, you see it's being passed and now they can just start it again.

A

And it will start running so this also will survive like a crash or like a machine reboot. If it's just shut down, you can just pick it up and restart, which is really handy if you have like a huge large set of side collections to scan final thing to show and then I'll move to james is the report generation.

A

So I can do a report minus minus id. Then I need to pick one which is already finished. So let's take this one all right and hit enter and then it's creating a report and it will open up the report in power bi. So that's new for this assessment compared to the previous one. The preschool had excel based reports. Now we chose for power bi, because that gives way more options to visualize data.

A

It's more flexible. You can easily adjust it for your needs and also as an admin. When you run an assessment, you get a report and you can just share it using your power bi service in your organization, so you can share it with different teams in the organization that need to, for example, work on the application or that need this adoption data.

A

Now here's the assessment report for syntax- and I think I'm going to stop from here and james. I think you want to take it over and talk a bit more about what this all means.

B

Thanks burke now before I jump into the uh the report itself, I just want to do a quick uh overview of what we're talking about when we're talking about sharepoint syntax, because um some of you may not have had the opportunity to uh to play around with this before so. Syntax is really about using ai technology um to get the most out of the content we have within sharepoint, and in order to do that, we're really using ai to take the knowledge our subject matter.

B

Experts have and use that to drive insights now, there's a broad and expanding feature set within syntax and within the next couple of minutes, I'm not going to be able to talk about all of it, but the um the most important thing with regards to the assessment tool is the content intelligence section on this slide.

B

So within this pillar of syntax, we have various ai model technologies, which can analyze content, analyze files that are stored in sharepoint and then uh generate metadata from those so automatically populating our columns within sharepoint. Now, why is that interesting now, metadata on its own isn't particularly useful. um Even for those of us who've worked with sharepoint for a long time. We might love metadata, but it's got to have a purpose.

B

Here's just a few examples of how metadata can drive experiences across sharepoint online and the broader m365 ecosystem.

B

Now that could be across search around discovery of content in compliance scenarios, such as with microsoft, purview, building retention, rules, um driving e-discovery cases and so on, process, automation in power automate or even in things like viva topics, so using metadata and the taxonomy service to see the topic center and the knowledge base.

B

So really what the syntax assessment is driving at is giving you places where syntax can help with the metadata story. How can we make that more reliable, more robust and more scalable in your organization?

B

So this is an example based on my demo environment, just showing you the type of reports that we have within the assessment tool. This home page gives you a brief overview of the different report. Pages and I'll. Show you a couple of examples to give you a sense of the type of data we're collecting and the recommendations that we're going to make.

B

So, starting here on identifying the libraries with custom columns within the syntax assessment, we're looking across all of the libraries on the sites that you put in scope as bert said, that could be a constrained list of sites or it could be all of the sites within your tenant and we're pulling back particular attributes of those libraries.

B

Well, it's not possible for us to say exactly where the business processes might exist, that syntax could uh uh could benefit for, and what we can do is find out indicators of libraries that we we know from our experience with customers could benefit from syntax. So, for example, libraries that have a large amount of columns, so libraries that are very wide from experience that I'm sure we've all had the more columns that exist for a document library, the less likely end users are to be diligent in populating those manually.

B

So the recommendations on this particular part of the report are about identifying those libraries which are the widest within your environment and then considering whether one or more syntax models might be appropriate to automatically populate that metadata.

B

For you, you can see, on the right hand, side visualizations to show which libraries are using custom metadata versus not how many libraries of different widths we have and, on the left hand, side the detailed information around specific libraries that we can then go and investigate with the content owner to understand their business process and whether or not syntax might be of use.

B

Another example we find to be beneficial in syntax. Rollouts is the size and structure of document libraries, so we bucket different libraries into small, medium and large containers as part of the assessment, large libraries being any library with more than a thousand documents in them, and the uh the recommendation here is for those libraries which are particularly large. They can be really overwhelming for a user to navigate and browse through or even if, they're, using search.

B

If we don't give them the means to provide a very structured ability to filter sort and discover content, it's gonna be very hard to find the information they need. So by identifying the largest libraries we have here. These might be good opportunities to deploy syntax models to applying content types generating metadata. Really driving some of those discovery behaviors.

B

Additionally, we show how many folders there are in the library. So while a library could be large um and have no folders in it, it'd be very difficult to navigate for a user. um Some might have more structure and for that more um more traditional directory tree um behavior. Now those might be a less less suitable candidate for syntax.

B

So really, this is all about identifying where those top candidates are to begin. The conversation with uh content owners within the business to work out where syntax may be a good fit that I will hand back to facebook.

C

Excellent. Thank you jameson burke, on that one really really really cool stuff and and awesome to see this automation in place and and paul was already saying in the chat that I'm totally going to check out the source code of that assessment, tooling, which is open source so which is really really cool.