Enterprise apps using Microsoft Power Platform

These are the slides of the session I presented at Global Power Platform Bootcamp at Microsoft, Bangalore. While it was a demo heavy session on RPA, the slides give an insight to the rise of the powerapps in the enterprise.

Enterprise apps using Microsoft Power Platform from Ramana Iyer

Common reports used for O365 Tenants

Here are the list of common generated reports that are typically used in organisations –

a)       Site Collection Details –

S.No	Site Collection Name	URL	Size in GB	Rootweb template	Primary Owner	Secondary Owner	Business Unit	Subsite count	Rootweb list / library count	Site level workflow present (Y/N)

b)      Site level details

S.No	Site Name	URL	Primary Owner	Secondary Owner	List / library count	Workflows present (Y/N)	Forms present (Y/N)

c)       List details

S.No	List Name	List Type	Custom Forms(Y/N)	Contains Workflow (Y/N)	Workflow Name	Item Count

d)      WF details

S.No	WF Name	Site URL	List Name	Business Owner	Technical Owner	Solution Name	Complexity

e)      Form Details

S.No	Form Name	Site URL	List Name	Business Owner	Technical Owner	Solution Name	Complexity

f)        Solution Details

S.No	Solution Name	Site URL	Business Owner	Technical Owner	Solution In use? (Y/N)	Business Unit	Description	Dependencies

g)       Flow / Power automate & Power Apps

While the above tables talk about classic forms & workflows, you would want to have details captured on Flow & PowerApps on the tenants.
Here is a link to a blog post which talks about getting details on the PowerApps & Flow –

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/admin-app-report/

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powerapps-enterprise-deployment-whitepaper/

Content type hub best practices for Office 365 SharePoint Online

WHAT IS CONTENT TYPE HUB

The content type hub is a special site collection that allows for the sharing of site columns and content types across the tenant.

This site collection is hidden and is accessible at https://<tenantURL>/sites/ContentTypeHub

For more information, please visit https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Publish-a-content-type-from-a-content-publishing-hub-58081155-118D-4E7A-9CC5-D43B5DBB7D02  

CONTENT TYPE HUB BEST PRACTICES

• Have a proper naming convention for the content type published through the content type hub to ensure that business users do not create another content type with similar name in sites / site collections. 

• Use the Content type hub only in cases where the content type would be reused on a lot of sites / entire organization. 

• Only add fields to the content type that are required for search / refining or navigation or workflow. Do not add fields just because data is present. 

• Make the fields in the content type unambiguous so that people can populate them consistently without training. There should not be a necessity to explain to use what the field stands for. 

• Start small with a few content types first and then expand.

• Try to ensure that the amount of content types in the content type hub does not exceed 20. 

• Once the content types are published in the hub, it can take anywhere between 1 to 48 hours to show up in the subscribing site collections, so the activity needs to be planned accordingly. 

• If the content type in the hub need to undergo structural updates, then ensure that no orphaned columns are present and proper clean up activity takes place to prevent issues.

Slides from my session at SPS Bangalore 2019 - Make $$$ with photography and Azure Cognitive Services

Over the past few years, thanks to the travel I get to make because of my work, I have developed an avid interest in photography. This led to me taking thousands of photos which were lying unused in my HDD until I came across the concept of stock photography.

The photographs are now submitted to stock agencies like Adobe Stock, ShutterStock, Alamy etc. 
My profile on Shutterstock can be viewed at https://www.shutterstock.com/g/Skanda+Ramana?language=en 

The process to submit these photos is a lot of work but thanks to Azure Cognitive Services, the workflow for the same has been become very easy with a lot of the manual work now automated. 

I have used Azure cognitive services and a .Net console application to achieve this, also some 3rd party libraries to read and write into exif metadata in jpg files. So if you have a bunch of photos stored in a folder, then the app.config of the console application can be configured to read the files from that folder. 

The app would then create a small version of the image and send to cognitive services which would analyse the image and send back Title & keywords which the console app would use to update the main image in the folder.

Once this is done, the image can be uploaded through a ftp program to stock photo sites which make use of the title and keywords to see to potential buyers. 

There are also some other minor bells and whistles in the console app to help with keywording and caption, more to set some default values. 

This was a unique case where my profession and my hobby met at cross roads and helped create something. 

This is very useful for a lot of people who have thousands of photographs rusting in HDD which can be used to make passive income.

Slides from the session are available below - 

SPS Bangalore 2019 - Make $$$ with photography and Azure Cognitive Services from Ramana Iyer

Introduction - Hello World!!!

Hello there,

Welcome to Ramana's blog.

This would be a place where I would gather and present my thoughts mainly on the work that I do which for the past 15 years has been on SharePoint & .Net.

I'm a Senior Technical Architect at Cognizant (CTS) and my profile on LinkedIn can be viewed at https://www.linkedin.com/in/skandaramana/

I started off my career with SP 2003 and MCMS 2002 for an intranet portal.
Since then I have been fortunate enough to work on SP 2001, SP 2007, SP 2010, SP 2013 and o365 +Azure. In between all of this I also got to dabble a bit with pure .Net, Oracle and SQL DB but have always found my back to the world of SharePoint.

The purpose of the blog is primarily to serve as a sort of notebook with my findings & thoughts which hopefully others out there might also find useful. Over the years I have come across interesting problems to solve and I found myself going back to the solution again and again for later reference and found the process to be painful as I did not have a central repository like a blog maintained.

I started blogging last month (Dec 2019) on C# Corner at https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/members/skanda-ramana but felt it would be preferable to have my own blog and hence this was setup.

I had always dreamt of having a blog of my own with a personal domain but for whatever reason did not bother to do anything about it, until now.

Now that the first step has been taken, it is going to be interesting to see where this rabbit hole leads to.

See you around.
-Ramana