Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers (session at SharePoint Saturday Nashville 5/5/2018) by Antti K. Koskela

Citizen developer tools are not just for citizen developers!
Level: 200 ||Track: Developer (The rest of my slides will have less text, I promise!)
So, the citizen developers have all the cool tools, and those that actually code for a living are left
with legacy stuff? Not so fast!The same tools that Microsoft is targeting for citizen developers
make development easier, faster and cheaper for everyone!
This session combines tools such as Flow, Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Functions with
some actual simple development work to provide highly customized, Machine Learning
powered analysis workflow for the newly baked ModernTeam Sites in SharePoint Online.This
demo-heavy session will look at real business scenarios, and how we can solve them using
citizen developer tools and some code (Because we’re developers after all, right?)
After this session you'll know how to create rich and customized business automation processes
that use the latest tools offered to us by Microsoft.
@koskila | https://www.koskila.net

Citizen developer tools are not
just for citizen developers!
Antti K. Koskela | SPS Nashville 5/5/2018

Who’s speaking?
• Antti K. Koskela, Escalation Engineer for
Valo Solutions
• A dev since 2004 (started with PHP)
• Bending and twisting SharePoint into
different shapes since MOSS.
• Background in Fintech + accounting
• From Finland, lived in USA in 2017, moved
to Montreal in 2018.

Session: Structure
• 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 ServicesText Analytics 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 …
• A developer?
• … or a technical (non-developer) person?
• … or something else?
• Used Microsoft Flow before?
• Worked with Azure before?
• … or even 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…)
• While a developer still waits for
Visual Studio to start, a Citizen
Developer has already hacked
together an integration between 13
different systems using Flow.

Citizen Developers == a mortal threat?
• “End of Software Development”
• “Citizen Developers are appearing at the workplaces”
• Tietoviikko (The KnowledgeWeekly), 2018
• “Software DevelopersWill BecomeObsolete”
• Brain Food, 2016
• “Software engineers will be obsolete by 2060”
• Dan Auerbach, 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 DevelopmentWithout Programmers”, James Martin, 1982

• Death of programming and obsoleteness of programmers (by
automation, citizen developers, higher level languages, AI) has been
proposed at least from the 80s!
• Excel is the biggest software development environment (and the
most dangerous one) anyway.

• “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 & Azure App 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 Microsoft Cognitive 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
• Using Azure 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
• 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
• Text API used to analyze text for Key Phrases

How?
• A Flow attached to Document
Library will call the Azure
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
SharePoint Online

Case 1: Considerations
• The whole stack is super cheap!
• SharePoint Online 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 (for storage)
• Flow free for personal, basic use

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-box SharePoint 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:
1. Get the Azure Function URL
2. Hook it into a SharePoint list
3. Add an item to the list
4. 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 & Resources

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.
• Text Analysis 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/

SharePoint & Office 365 Users
Group
NashvilleSUG.com

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

Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers (session at SharePoint Saturday Nashville 5/5/2018) by Antti K. Koskela

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