Citizen Developer Tools (session at SharePoint Saturday Houston 4/28/2018) by Antti Koskela

Citizen developer tools are not
just for citizen developers!
Antti K. Koskela | SharePoint Saturday Houston 4/28/2018
@koskila | https://www.koskila.net

Welcome to the 9th Annual SharePoint Saturday

Who’s speaking?
• Antti K. Koskela, Escalation Engineer for
Valo Solutions
• A developer since 2004.
• Bending and twisting SharePoint into
different shapes since MOSS.
• From Finland, lived in USA in 2017, moved
to Montreal in 2018.
• Background in Fintech + accounting
• Blogging at https://www.koskila.net and
https://www.valointranet.com !

Session
• The session will include a quick overview and a few demos of
the capabilities of:
• Microsoft Flow
• SharePoint (both Modern and Classic!)
• Microsoft Azure Cognitive ServicesTextAnalytics API
• Azure Functions
• There’s going to be code 

Session: Structure
• A quick look into the bigger picture! (1/4)
• What’s a citizen developer?
• What does all this mean for a developer?
• And: Are we all going to be unemployed in a couple of years?
• A word or two about the tools (1/4)
• Demos (1/2)

Are you / Have you /Were you…
• A developer?
• Used Microsoft Flow before?
• At other Microsoft Flow sessions today?
• Created an Azure Function?

Enter the Citizen Developers!

What’s a “Citizen Developer”?
An end-user, who creates applications, usually without
programming anything themselves.
• “A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for
consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned
by corporate IT -- can build departmental, enterprise and even public applications
using shared services, 4GL-style development platforms and cloud computing
services.”
• Gartner, 2009

An Epic Showdown
Devs vs Citizen Devs – who’s going to persevere?

The typical Developer…
• Expensive
• Slow, obsolete from inception?
• Creates more bugs than
features
• Constrained by IT/vendor
(vendor-lock!)
• Doesn’t understand business

…vs the Citizen Developer!
• Understands business
• Agile, can react to changes in
business immediately
• No code – no bugs?
• Limited only by their
imagination (and tools…)

Citizen Developers == a mortal threat?
• “End of Software Development”
• “Citizen Developers are appearing at the workplaces”
• Tietoviikko (The Knowledge Weekly), 2018
• “Software Developers Will Become Obsolete”
• Brain Food, 2016
• “Software engineers will be obsolete by 2060”
• DanAuerbach, 2015
• “A new technology [5th GL] in software development [gives us] the ability
to automate fully the development process from design to installation. - -
Programming is better done by a machine than a human.“
• In “Can fifth-generation software replace fallible programmers?”, Philips, R, Computerworld, v 18, n 29, 1D/27-30, 16 July 1984
• “4th Generation Languages make programmers largely unneeded”
• In “Applications Development Without Programmers”, James Martin, 1982

Citizen Developers == a mortal threat?
• “Low-code tools won’t be putting developers out of a job; on the
contrary, they have the potential to help developers do better work.”
• -Mike Fitzmaurize,Vice President ofWorkflowTechnology for Nintex, 2017
• Citizen Developer tools are not useful just for Citizen Developers
• Tools like Flow make the lives of “actual” developers easier, too!
• And when the tools won’t do the trick anymore, a developer will get to (have
to) export them to “real” development tools and fix them.

Citizen Developer tools for
“actual developers”

OurToolpack
• Microsoft Flow
• Built on top of Logic Apps
• Simple integration tool for “any white collar”
• Azure Logic Apps
• More hardcore integration tool – a code view available
• Flows can be exported to be “full-fledged” logic apps
• Azure Functions & AzureApp Service WebJobs
• Code-first integration services (and much more!)
• Azure Functions are serverless – and easy to attach to Flow/Logic Apps!
• Webjobs are a more classic solution – console apps you can run in an App Service
• … and SharePoint 
Great resource: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-compare-logic-apps-ms-flow-
webjobs

Advantages of Flow
• Easy-to-use, fairly well-tested integrations available out-of-
the-box
• Run history is saved – you can always go back in time and
rerun something that didn’t work. Great for debugging and
iterating!
• Easy to extend
• Custom connectors
• HTTP requests to send and receive data from almost any source

Azure Functions considerations
• Consumption plan is practically free for small usage
• 1 million executions and 400 000 GB-s time/transfer are FREE
• After that €0.000014/GB-s & €0.169 per million executions
• Maximum runtime of 10 minutes!
• Scalability’s great (even though it still loses to AWS Lambda Functions)
• Running a function in an App Service
• It isn’t serverless
• Max runtime unspecified – but long!
• Azure Function can be durable (stateful)
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable-functions-
overview

Microsoft Cognitive Services -Text Analytics
API
• Detect sentiment, key phrases, and language from your text
• Powered by MicrosoftCognitive Services, machine learning and AI
algorithms in the cloud.
• “Key phrases” works well for term extraction
Learn more: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/
Also noteworthy: MachineTranslation in SharePoint, and BingTranslator (used in Facebook), are powered by Cognitive
Services

SharePoint: Modern
• Finally, SharePoint that looks (kind of) good out-of-the-box
• It’s even responsive 
• “Back to basics”
• Only does what SharePoint does well
• Excellent file storage (used byTeams & Groups), decent web interface, and a mobile app
• Uses other services for everything it’s bad at:
• Calendars from Exchange, tasks from Planner, IM and discussions viaTeams orYammer
• Webhooks + SPFx = decent extensibility

SharePoint: Classic
• Classic SharePoint is not dead either!
• If something works with Modern, it’ll usually work with Classic, too
• Just requires some sweat, tears and clever workarounds
• Publishing infrastructure makes things a bit complicated:
• Bad/no support for fields like “Page Layout” or “Publishing Page Content”

How does this relate to real-life
business problems?
Case studies and demos

Our demos today
1. Fancy: Using Machine Learning to achieve otherwise
difficult goals
2. Practical: Content mirroring in classic SharePoint
3. Hacky: Playing around with push notifications and Flow-
as-an-API

Case 1: “The Fancy”
Automatic MetadataTagging Using Azure Cognitive Services

The Problem
• The amount of data is surging (~90% of the data in the world has
been created in the last 2 years)
• To ensure that data in organizations is useful, it needs to be found
easily
• A great “Enterprise-y” solution has been metadata tagging!
• However, users generally hate doing that manually
• Automatic solutions are either cumbersome to maintain, expensive to
develop, or both
• Many required metadata fields will cause users to migrate to shadow
IT solutions (like DropBox)

The Solution
• Using ModernTeam Sites in SharePoint for document storage
enables collaboration
• SharePoint Search is decent, but thorough metadata tagging makes
it a lot more useful
• UsingAzure Cognitive Services we can fill the metadata fields
automatically – without any user interaction at all!
• Content will be found and users will be happy 

Our StackToday (1/2)
• Modern SharePointTeam Sites
• Document Library used as a Data Source
• The only End-User Facing GUI
• Microsoft Flow
• Launches via webhook, calls an Azure Function, finally sends a notification
• Azure Function
• Contains the actual program logic
• Azure Cognitive Services
• TextAPI used to analyze text for Key Phrases

Our StackToday (2/2)
• The whole stack is super cheap!
• SharePointOnline included in most licenses anyway, standalone
$5/user/mo (including 1Tb of OneDrive!)
• Cognitive Services free (for a small monthly quota – commercial
plans starting from ~$70/mo)
• Azure Functions billed per usage, my monthly cost for my demos has
been $0.02
• Flow free for personal, basic use

How?
• A Flow attached to Document
Library will call theAzure
Function that’ll do the heavy
lifting
• A simple HTTP request to Azure
Function – could create a
custom connector, too!
• Finally, notifies admin of the
execution and the creator of the
file.

How?
• An Azure Function will
run, extract text,
analyze it using Azure
Cognitive Services,
and then write the
info back to
SharePointOnline

Case 1: Resources
• Case description: https://www.koskila.net/2018/03/20/resolving-
managed-metadata-madness-good-enough-to-win-a-hackathon/
• Video: https://youtu.be/G0kESOlBBjk?t=109
• Code: https://github.com/koskila/KeyphraseExtraction

Case 2: “The Practical”
Mirroring content between Classic SharePoint sites

The Problem
• A lot of organizations will live with Classic SharePoint for years – it’s
not dead, and we’ll need to enhance and maintain those sites.
• Often there’s a need to replicate or mirror content between sites, but
out-of-the-boxSharePoint offers little to help automate this..
• Most of the intranets seem to use publishing infrastructure – and
that complicates the solution even more!

The Solution
• Classic SharePoint publishing sites
• Flow for orchestration and copying everything we can from site A to
site B
• Using an Azure function to “patch the holes”
• Page Layout is broken by default
• Publishing Page Content is not copied

Our StackToday
• Microsoft Flow
• For orchestration
• An Azure function
• Fixes the layout, copies the fields that can’t be copied with Flow
• 2 Classic SharePoint Site( Collection)s
• As the GUI & CMS

Case 2: Issues
• Flow’s support for dynamic values needs to be better
• Still a lot of custom development required
• Configuration overhead (hooking the Flows to lists)

Case 2: Resources
• Code: https://github.com/koskila/CitizenDeveloperToolsDemos
• Video: https://youtu.be/fe_NiTjmL58

Case 3: “The Hacky”
The easy but geeky way to subscribe to any push notifications

The Problem
• You want to subscribe to push notifications from a workload, that
doesn’t support them.
• You often have the option to just send a notification email – but
there’s so much email already!
• On top of that, notification emails look like SPAM -> you won’t necessarily
receive them!
• You just want to notify yourself, so using a Push Notification Hub
would be the overkill of the lifetime

The Solution
• You can use Microsoft Flow to create a simple “API” to push
notifications to your phone
• By creating a HTTP POST RequestTrigger, you can define the schema of the
payload, and use the properties for a push notification
• It’s hacky – but a really simple way to just notify yourself, and get rid
of the email notifications 

Our StackToday
• SharePoint
• Classic or Modern, doesn’t matter – anything that supports webhooks
• Chrome SP Editor
• A tool to add the webhook, you won’t need PowerShell!
• Azure function
• Receives the payload from the webhook, modifies the notification and sends
it to the ”API”
• Microsoft Flow
• Basically, a personal ”notification API”

Case 3, Demo 1:
• Get theAzure FunctionURL
• Hook it into a SharePoint list
• Add an item to the list
• Check out the notification 

Case 3: Resources
• Code: https://github.com/koskila/CitizenDeveloperToolsDemos
• Video: https://youtu.be/DaX6V_fFqy8

Further Considerations

Flow Custom Connectors
• Don’t want to configure multiple HTTP –requests with difficult
parameters after one another?You can automate some of that with
custom connectors!
• Custom Connectors can be shared between teams, so if you have a
great API you want to publish to your colleagues, it’s fairly easy to
share
• They also look fancy, and (arguably) make your flows more readable!

Flow Custom Connectors

Conclusions & Final words

Conclusions
• Citizen Development is not a threat, it’s an ongoing process and an
opportunity for developers – embrace it!
• Flow = great for orchestration (with caution, even for complex,
customized workloads)
• Azure Functions = code-first integrations and so much more!
• Demos:
• 1: Filling ML-powered taxonomy automatically for documents uploaded to
SharePoint = not a problem!
• 2: Content mirroring, even between classic publishing sites = not a problem!
• 3: Getting push notifications (instead of emails) = easy

Caveats
• The stack’s evolving – no telling how long this will be valid or required
• You could replace text extraction with Azure OCR – but last time I
tried, the custom library worked better.
• TextAnalysis is interesting – sometimes it works better, sometimes
it’s not that accurate!
• For shorter documents, it often doesn’t work well

What’s next?
• Microsoft Flow is getting more Managed Metadata capabilities
• Maybe we won’t need the OfficeDev PnP / CSOM library to write to the
document library soon?
• (Currently, can’t add new items via PowerApps / Flow:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/PowerApps-Flow/Set-values-for-Managed-
Metadata-aka-Taxonomy-columns-in/td-p/129888)
• Azure Functions can now be ran in user context
• With Flow this is quite finicky!Couldn’t get it to work here – passing cookies
between HTTP actions is forbidden.
• See: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Flow-Discussion/Passing-Cookies-
Between-HTTP-Actions/td-p/69761/page/2
• See if you can figure it out?: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/web-
parts/guidance/connect-to-api-secured-with-aad

Resources & Further reading
• Documentation:
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/campaigns/developer-guide/
• Slides available:
• Somewhere under https://www.slideshare.net/AnttiKoskela/
• Code available:
• https://github.com/koskila/KeyphraseExtraction
• https://github.com/koskila/CitizenDeveloperToolsDemos
• Descriptions of the cases:
• Case 1: https://www.koskila.net/2018/03/20/resolving-managed-metadata-
madness-good-enough-to-win-a-hackathon/

Feedback, Ideas,
Questions?
Let’s connect!
• antti@valointranet.com
• @koskila
• www.koskila.net
• https://github.com/koskila
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/
koskila/

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