Resolving Managed Metadata Madness in SharePoint

Flow that's used in this demo

Video demo:

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 Azure Functions and Cognitive Services Text API to enrich a Flow that fills Metadata for new items in a Modern SharePoint Team Site. PERFECT!

Using Modern Team 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 :)

What it does

Automates metadata tagging for SharePoint Online.

A Flow attached to Document Library will call the Azure Function that’ll do the heavy lifting
An Azure Function will run, extract text, analyze it using Azure Cognitive Services, and then write the info back to SharePoint Online
Finally, notifies admin of the execution and the creator of the file.

How I built it

Using Visual Studio 2017, but you could do everything in VSCode, too.

Challenges I ran into

Extracting text from a PDF sometimes returned a lot of headers / metadata and was scrambled - had to work around that.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Sanitizing the text from a PDF is not straightforward, but I think it works decently. Also, this was based on a topics extraction tool I made for a PoC a while back, and Microsoft has completely changed the API since then, so learning the new API was rewarding.

Also, it's fun to see how well the Azure Function + Flow + SPO -integration works!