Microsoft 365 Community SharePoint, 25 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: Using Microsoft Syntex Bulk Content Assembly to automatically generate documents

Description

In this 19-minute developer-focused demo, Leon Armston delivers an update/overview, use cases and roadmap on Microsoft Syntex and Content Assembly. Demo steps through populating a template and subsequently generating a document using Syntex and content in documents stored in SharePoint list. To create multiple documents – bulk content assembly, using same template, create a Power Automate flow and use a preview action to “Generate document using Microsoft Syntex (preview). Generate personalized documents in a workflow! This PnP Community demo is taken from the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call recorded on October 27, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Leon Armston (Intelogy) | @LeonArmston

Supporting materials
• Templates - SharePoint look book | aka.ms/sharepointlookbook
• Marketing site - Microsoft Syntex | aka.ms/Syntex
• Adoption - Getting started with Microsoft Syntex | aka.ms/Syntex/Start
• Roadmap – Microsoft Syntex Roadmap | aka.ms/SyntexRoadmap
• Samples - Microsoft Syntex Samples | https://github.com/pnp/syntex-samples
• Articles – Leon’s Syntex Series | bit.ly/LeonSyntexSeries
• Assessment Tool - Discover opportunities in Microsoft Syntex by using the Microsoft 365 Assessment tool | https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/contentunderstanding/adoption-assessment-tool

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/m365/community

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Content assembly using the power ultimate action to automatically generate lots of documents. A little about me. My name is Leon armston I'm, a Microsoft 365 Solutions consultant ad IntelliJ in London in the United Kingdom I recently was made an MVP which was yeah like such a nice uh award that and uh yeah I'm looking forward to yeah contributing more and yeah. That was a lovely recognition. uh You find details below on how you can connect with me: I blog quite a lot about syntax uh and tweets and Linkedin and uh GitHub.

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So today uh what I want to do is well I want to give an intro to Microsoft syntax, but I can't cover it in 15 minutes. I couldn't cover it. In an hour like there was so many Microsoft syntax announcements, so Microsoft syntax form, Malaysia airport, syntax, there's so many announcements at ignite uh last week it's becoming a really compelling product. uh Then what I'm focusing today on is Microsoft syntax uh content assembly, so document generation, creating documents I'll, give you a demo and then give you some steps to find out more.

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So what is Microsoft syntax, so the vision for Microsoft syntax is basically content. Ai. So using content to view your content, so your your documents, your images uh and trying to make sense out of them identify documents, uh identify the content, that's in the documents and then make that discoverable to your users. So your users are not uh say, searching everywhere to try and find a document or that's going to help them uh with your job. And there is some automation steps as well.

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So when it is discovered um yeah we can do subsequent actions, that'll be what I touch upon today.

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So just a brief slide, so it's putting people at the center. uh So this is a vision with with content, seamlessly integrated into collaboration. So most uh storage, so say if you store all your files in SharePoint, that's quite an expensive uh platform to store in comparison to I, don't know as your blob storage, so it's yeah as people are adding so I think there's some stat, like 1.3 billion files a day, are added to M365 um and that keeps on going every every day.

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If it's people's M365 tenants are getting um quite uh ball, so we want to turn that content from just a cost that yeah it's just sitting there. As is to an advantage to make people uh yeah make people get value uh from it. So what does syntax do? Microsoft's, syntax, a lot more uh vectors to it. Now initially it started by reading content, so you create a model to say pick out all the reports in a document Library.

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It would only trigger on a report, for example, but then it would uh so once it's been once the model has been triggered.

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You can then train the model to pick out subsequent Fields, so say the report title or the date of the report or the offer, and then those values are yeah tagged um with say that report name that the dates the the author, so then that that's metadata Fields attached to the document, so we can do search, Solutions or so filter by reports by an author, for example, and that model can be spread across all of your content in M365.

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So you can uh say, find the reports in your M365 tenant, so they might be over many different sites and then yeah. There is X reports uh now to syntax. So it's robust analytics security retention. So when a model is applied to a library, you can apply sensitivity, retention labels and now there is some extra parts of syntax. So at ignite um yeah about a week or so ago, um there was lots of new announcements.

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Now I'm not going to go through the all of these uh individually, but this this was the road map that was released. So it's not just about. uh So, if you see my mouse now, it's not just about uh yeah processing uh documents.

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Now there is content assembly generating documents as there's a whole new managed tier with backup, And archiving of SharePoint sites, and there is a developer story in terms of a data lake, so you can ingest uh the information from your M365 tenant and do reporting over X exchange, so Outlook uh SharePoint uh there's a whole lot of like things but yeah, that's a separate thing. There's e-signature, um but yes, I'm not going to go through them, I'm, going to focus on the next thing, so content assembly.

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So, as I mentioned, content assembly is document generation, so you may use Microsoft Word uh to generate documents, so you create a template and then you can populate it with say, address, address letters to a different person, so yeah, it's very useful for standard repetitive business documents uh such as generating contract statements of work service agreements, um so so to set one set. A Content assembly uh template you use an you, can use an existing uh document.

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So if you've already got a letter that that you'll often send out to people, you could create a template. A modern template from that uh and mock placeholders, where, like the name, is the first line of the address, for example, and Boot, and generate uh different uh letters. You can link the placeholders to a SharePoint list, so you maybe got a list of several people or you've got a third-party system.

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That's on a workflow or a power app, that's uh yeah, connecting to that SharePoint list to like populate the address Fields, uh for example, or we could have this manual field, so the user every time they create a document, they have to specify the name and type it all in. This is a concert assembly. uh This is how you would uh populate a document, so we can see on the right hand, side all the fields, and these are mapping to these green placeholders.

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Here you can create PDF and Word Documents, but now in preview there is a power automate action to generate documents using SharePoint syntax uh contents assembly.

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So we can see it in action here, so it looks yeah quite quite familiar uh if you're used to using say the SharePoint add item to SharePoint lists. For example, we select the site, address the document, Library name and um then which template we want to use, there's some exciting stuff coming on the roadmap for Content assembly, so image placeholders in documents. So perhaps you want to create a document that you need a different logo uh depending on what's been chosen, there's been in some improvements for placeholders and concerts assembly in tables.

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uh There's this uh roadmap entry has not been closed yet, but you can create PDF documents from uh templates now and there's a few more new things that came with uh content assembly in ignite, so the ability to from a SharePoint document Library merged uh to documents uh together. All is the ability to have placeholders so say: if a fee amounted, a contract is say over 50 000 pounds, for example, it.

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A uh the CEO, the audience added that yeah. We need approval from the CEO, for example, some of the use cases that I've used content assembly for uh so today, I want to talk about employee checklists, I've used it for creating contracts. So often you people will send out the same contract that, like replace the client, the um the date, for example, or the company um letters, has been a useful one, like sending 500 letters out to different people, statements, reports and invoices.

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So I now want to go to My, Demo I'll. Just briefly show you how we would do all this manually so how we would create an employee checklist manually so from within the SharePoint document Library. So we've not got to say open word or anything like that. We just do it on a SharePoint document Library. We select the modern template that we've created, so here's one I created uh just we've got the equipment permissioning checklist.

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We can see that this is quite a complicated form, there's lots of different uh tables and checklists. So what I'm doing is uh I'm creating this checklist for the engineer to go to site and they may have a clipboard um and they check off things and add comments about uh commissioning or checking the status of a piece of equipment. So this template is linked to a SharePoint list, so I'm going to select an existing SharePoint list entry that I created previously the good old Megan Bowen.

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So we can see that all these placeholders now have just changed uh to the values of of that SharePoint list.

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We can. We've got a manual field here, so the date of inspection, so I'm going to specify um I, don't know Halloween, so I can now create this document. I can specify a name PMP demo uh and I can choose whether it's going to be a PDF or a uh Word document. So I create the Word document, sorry uh PDF, and we can click into this, and we should be able to see that it's generated the document and it's got Megan Bowen as the Chief, Inspector and yeah filled out all these details.

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But for the engineer uh we want to, we want to generate all the jobs that that engineer's got to do for the whole day. So we don't want to do that uh one by one. We want to uh yeah, do uh bull generation so.

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We could have that this is the SharePoint list, which is the uh data repository for the book creation, so this could say link from a CRM system. That's uh um the CRM system talks to SharePoint and it adds the entries for the engineer today. uh We don't need this uh SharePoint list. As an as a interim measure. We could just go with say power automate.

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We could uh link straight to the syntax action here, so I'm just going to add the syntax action here. So just do a search for for syntax and if I talk, if I find my Microsoft syntax site and select the PMP demo sites um and then I select, my templates.

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It should Auto populate with all the fields that the placeholders uh of my template so I'm not going to yeah.

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Can I can fill these in, but I don't want to slow the process down, so um that is the power automate uh action uh in uh for SharePoint same-sex content assembly. So what we could do now is uh this is um a power ultimate flow. That's uh gets all of the items from the employee equipment, inspection checklist. So this list here and then uh we we're pre-populating all of those uh placeholders that we created that are in the model. So we can see the manufacturer, the equipment ID Etc.

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So if we now test this, we manually start this power ultimate flow.

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um This shouldn't take too long to create uh it's a couple of seconds per per document, so we can see that it's now yes successfully completed for free documents. So if we now go to the bulk um fold up, we can see that a few seconds ago, um yeah the equipment checklist for a lampshade, a bed a laptop has has been created and uh because it's a workflow, these documents could be emailed uh to the engineer uh they they could be sent to a printer, a web-enabled printer, for example.

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So you know all the engineer needs to do is uh yeah pick out what the printouts and then they can go to to sites. um What uh the equipment checklist also has is places for recommended actions, comments uh places for signatures. So what could happen like this is another part of syntax is what could happen? Is the engineer fills in their site?

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Visits for for the equipment puts all their notes in and then we can get a document library and then there could be a syntax model that then picks up and syntax can read a handwritten text, so uh it could yeah pick out all the handwritten details.

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The chat boxes, uh for example, and save someone having to type in all of those uh details and because the data's been extracted, it could perhaps talk back to the CRM or work management system with all the um you have the details of the equipment from the site visit so yeah. That's that's bulk uh content uh assembly, I'll.

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Back to my my slides and just finish so, I just want to give you a few more steps to find out more about syntax.

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um If you want to get going with Microsoft syntax, there is a free, Microsoft, 365., syntax assessment tool where it's really cool cool tool. It will assess all of your sites and libraries in your SharePoint environment and give you areas where yes, syntax could be of benefits, and there is some it will scan for finding say: libraries where there are um Word documents assigned to say the content type, because you create a content and you create a document from the content type and it comes with a template.

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So that might be a great example for where you could use content assembly. So you have a set document and then you can Auto generate the the values rather than yeah working on a document template for all my content, type uh SharePoint lookbook. If you want to get started with syntax, there is a syntax content, Center template, so you can have a play around with syntax with that and you don't need a license to do anything in that site.

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uh The contract management template also in the look box- that's a accelerator for syntax, so that shows you a scenario of you know: receiving contracts, processing contracts, generating contracts, a few more links to find out more about syntax and yeah I, always blog blog, quite a bit about syntax. uh If, but yes, that's, the end of my presentation today feel free to reach out if you've got any feedback or you know, need any assistance with content assembly or any syntax queries. But uh yeah. That's uh me uh done uh thanks. So much everyone.

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Awesome very, very cool stuff Leon really allows us to take that redundant work and automate it uh in a very efficient way, using the whole spectrum of the Microsoft and Power Platform. So thank you. Excellent work.