Using Azure Functions and Cognitive Services Text API to enrich a Flow that fills Metadata for new items in a Modern SharePoint Team Site. That’s, in a nutshell, the solution I submitted to a recent online hackathon. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? The whole solution (and a public vote, if you’re interested!) is available here: https://devpost.com/software/resolving-managed-metadata-madness-in-sharepoint – this blog post will describe the solution and the reasoning behind it.

Preface

Some time ago my manager asked me to take a few weeks off, since I had accrued quite a lot of overtime during the hectic months working for Valo. I got bored quite quickly, so I was pretty happy to encounter an online hackathon organized by Devpost. I wasn’t aware of them beforehand, but they seemed to have hosted quite a few interesting hackathons before. Some of which quite interesting, I might add! This prompted me to also take part into a hackathon they were just hosting: “Work smarter, not harder with Office 365.”

I’m not a huge fan of hackathons, but the topic was too good to miss, so I submitted a solution I’d been thinking about implementing, but didn’t have a good enough reason to implement it for customers.

Description of the issue

So, which issue am I aiming to solve? Let’s see… 

• 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, you need to make sure, that your users find it 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) – or not use any collaboration solutions at all!

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