Author Archives: Pass me a sock

Data Enrichment Capabilities in OwlExpress

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OwlExpress is delighted to partner with two excellent Muggle based services, to provide additional value to our solution:

  • Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF): Muggles are particularly ingenious with their homes, having all manner of different addresses, which can make it challenging to dispatch an Owl to the correct location. The benefits of using the PAF file* is that our solution can always validate and check that we have the correct address – including details such as house name, street, postcode, town / city and more. Our solution can frequently validate against PAF, to ensure your Owl never misses a delivery and can cope with the latest crazy concoctions that Muggles put in place for their homes.
  • MSN Weather Connector: Muggles claim to be able to accurately predict the weather, and their claim in this area cannot be disputed. A potentially bad weather event could cause severe difficulties for your Owl deliveries, including potential harm or loss of life. Our solution can proactively check against current weather forecasts and, if there is a high risk of potential bad weather, ensure that the Owl delivery is postponed to a later date. What’s more, we can bring in Artificial Intelligence capabilities to automate the evaluation and decision process here, using a clean and effective system prompt.

Rest assured, House Elves Limited follows stringent Obliviate processes when dealing with Muggle personnel from these companies, so you can be assured that we are fully compliant with the International Statute of Secrecy

*Data sample used for this exercise, strictly for testing and evaluation purposes.

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  • Dataminer

Let’s trust Artificial Intelligence with our whole body – an experience

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why a flow fails successfully

Prerequisites: When using the response value of the action “Create a text with GPT using a prompt” human approval is required to move on with the flow

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/use-a-custom-prompt-in-flow#incorporate-human-review

But let us start from the beginning. What do we want to achieve?

Based on the location of a student, we would like the AI to decide if it’s safe to send out one of our precious, well-cared Owls.

We don’t want to send her out to the terrible snowstorms of Oslo but for sure let them have an enjoyable flight to Paris.

Because we trust the AI with our heart, head, and full body, we obviously just want to proceed with the result.

But: Power Automate just blocks our innovative spirit.

With the usage of the beloved “Create text with GPT using a prompt” action a content approval needs to be added.

Our flow besides that looks quite cheap and straightforward:

It gets triggered once a database row for Student gets added or modified for the city (location)           

We initialize the Location as a new variable and hand it over to a custom prompt we previously created

Based on the answer, we update the preferred contact method of the student:

  • Owl
  • E-Mail
  • SMS

Of course, we only send the owl to nice destinations. In bad weather conditions, we prefer to proceed via Email or SMS.

So. Based on Power Automate, we have to add an approval action that requires human interaction to approve the response from the AI.

How can we skip this? And be fully commited to the Age of Artificial Intelligence?

Step 1: We of course add a “Start and wait for an approval of text” action as desired by Power Automate

We hand over the text response from the AI prompt and send it to Professor McGonagall – a real, mature human being – for approval.

But with a tweak.

Step 2: Adding an Action timeout of 1 second to the Approval action:

As mentioned – we don’t want to wait for human approval. We just want to proceed with the flow. Therefore we set the Action timeout to 1 second, which equals “PT1S”.

Reference to ISO 8601: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Durations

This will cause the action to time out before Minerva is able to approve or decline it.
Even with all the witchcraft in the world and the elder wand.

Step 3: Creation of a parallel branch after the Approval action

The action will timeout anyway, still we require a happy path for receiving an answer (which is actually just empty in our case) and a path to handle the timeout.

Step 4: Timeout condition

The approval will time out in any case. Therefore a time-out-related action is required.
In our scenario, a condition is whether we can send an owl or not.

Therefore, we set the “Run after” setting to “Has timed out” and proceed with the update of the Student data accordingly to the mighty AI.

Please don’t get confused. The Flow will timeout. That means the flow will fail but still proceed with the update:

The flow times out but still proceeds to update the record as we have planned initially:

Segmentation in a Power BI Dashboard: Helping Hogwarts Teachers Find Students

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Teachers and administrators at wizarding schools across the globe often have to spend a great deal of time investigating and evaluating potential students to invite to their school. The end result if a bad decision is made can be catastrophic, as He Who Must Not Be Named has demonstrated. In addition, having to co-ordinate the activity of many hundreds of owl’s across a country can be problematic, without detailed knowledge about the potential locations where letters need to be sent out to.

Thanks to our innovative and scalable dashboard solution as part of OwlExpress, it becomes even easier then ever for wizarding school staff to not only see where prospective students are based, but also to easily segment and group together wizards with the type of characteristics that will make for a truly phenomenal wizard. This helps save an immense out of time for staff, as well as supporting ingestion of data from a variety of data sources – such as Microsoft Dataverse, SharePoint document sites and Azure Data Lake locations:

Altogether, House Elves Limited’s solution provides another great reason to consider adopting OwlExpress for your school, to help streamline your operations and more efficiently plan for the onboarding of the very best wizarding students!

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  • Dash it Out

OldSkool but still Cool

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In the modern world of Power Automate, there is still a place for business rules

Our solution needs to only display a house and a school if the student is active, though there are more technical solutions, Javascript, we went old school.

A simple business rule checks the status of the record and hides or shows the House and School fields as appropriate. Simple! Clear! Low-code!

Showing the condition, checking status of the Application
Showing the House field
Activating the Business Rule
Business Rule in action

Need Some PCF Help? Resco to the rescue!

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MVP’s are generally not very well thought of, but one advantage is the amazing connections we have with different people and companies in the community, such as the sponsor Resco. We are delighted to let all other teams know that we’ve received an Owl letter from Resco, announcing that they do have capacity today and tomorrow to support with any PCF control development needs you may have, and are also very excited to hear what feedback you have as well. Please feel free to reach out to Mats on our team for further details. We also have some PCF experts on our team as well, so we’re happy to help any other teams as well.

OwlExpress365: Improving your WOX 

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Overview

The wizarding world is safe once again. He Who Must Not be Named has finally been defeated, and the taint of dark wizardry is gone once again. But the threat remains. How can the wizarding world nurture the next generation of wizarding talent, to prevent the next dark wizard from appearing again, while also offering a top-notch onboarding experience for students of all backgrounds – wizard or muggle born alike? An improved Wizarding Onboarding eXperience (WOX) is essential to ensure wizarding schools keeps attracting the world’s finest wizards and witches.  

Introducing OwlExpress365, an innovative new digital solution from House Elves Limited, designed to assist wizarding schools across the globe to identify, nurture and onboard new students. Infusing the latest innovations from a low-code and artificial intelligence standpoint, our end-to-end solution is designed to benefit everyone involved as part of onboarding new wizards to your wizarding school – from initial identification, through to invitation and collating all required information to ensure students are ready and enthused to start at your school. Deliver an exceptional experience to your teachers, students and parents, whilst ensuring necessary compliance against dark magic regulations and documentation requirements for each new student. Contact our friendly House Elf developers today to find out more! 

Key Features

Mystical Student Segmentation with Microsoft Fabric: 

  • The Sorting Hat 2.0: Utilize Microsoft Fabric to tap into enchanted external data sources, segmenting students based on magical abilities, and unique traits with the accuracy of the Sorting Hat.
  • The Pensieve Hub: Import segmented student data into Dataverse via Fabric, creating a central Pensieve for all student information, allowing for easy access and management. 
  • Effortless Administration: Enable Hogwarts administrators to manage student records with the flick of a wand, keeping everything magically up-to-date. 

Automated Enchanted Communication: 

  • Enchanted Communication: Deliver personalized and spellbinding communication strategies that captivate each student’s heart and mind, utlising the Owl network and more modern, more scalable technical solutions such as LinkMobility’s SMS solution and Oneflow to gather contracts from potential students parents. 
  • Owl tracker: Utilising Signal R to track the location of your owl messages in real-time, available for students and administrators in a visual map. 

Student Portal – OwlExpress App: 

  • Secret Passcode Entry: Each student receives a unique magical passcode to log into the OwlExpress app, guaranteeing secure access as if opening a secret door. 
  • Magical Onboarding Portal (MOP): Crafted as an Azure Static Web App, the portal offers a smooth, scalable, and secure user experience, akin to walking through Diagon Alley. 
  • Ask Hermoine: Potential students and parents will always ask questions, and who better to answer them than our Professor Hermonie Weasley, providing her knowledge by a Copilot enabled chatbot via the web portal 
  • Profile Enchantment: Students can complete and update their profiles within the portal, adding personal touches to their Hogwarts story. 

Technology Stack

  • Microsoft Fabric: For advanced, magical data segmentation and spellbinding analytics. 
  • Dataverse: For robust, arcane data management and storage. 
  • Microsoft Power Apps: Using Model-Driven Apps as the base application that embed Custom Pages and Power BI for dynamic data interaction and great usability for the users. 
  • Power Apps Component Framework: Using PCF to embed Power BI in Power Apps with custom actions and bi-directional direct integration into Dataverse 
  • Azure Static Web Apps: For hosting the OwlExpress app, ensuring scalability and security. 
  • ISV Components: Resco PCFs component to enhance Power Apps usability, LINK Mobility for sending out SMS, Oneflow to send out and get signature on Parent Permissions.
  • Communication Channels: Integration with enchanted SMS and email services for areas beyond the reach of owls. 
High Level Design of the OwlExpress365 solution
Entity Relationship Diagram

Key Personas 

Teachers: The lifeblood of any wizarding school, they will have a huge say not only in helping to identify the next generation of wizards, but also in ensuring that their students are well catered for and enthused about their upcoming lessons. Using our solution, teachers can benefit as follows: 

  • Login and review key data relating to prospective students, including their characteristics and magical incident history 
  • Segment and group prospective student data together for further analysis 
  • Leverage AI infused analytics that can identify potentially problematic wizards. 

Admins: Identifying prospective students is one thing, but ensure that all required compliance processes are completed, and to ensure this is done in a streamlined way. Our solution can benefit school admins as follows: 

  • Prepare and submit parental consent documentation and other important compliance documents 
  • Handle any student queries not answered sufficiently by “Ask Hermoine”
  • Streamline the communication process using wizards preferred channels, including traditional and digital sources. 

Parents: Sending your child off to wizarding school for the first time can be scary, even more so for muggle parents. Our solution helps to keep parents informed at every stage of the process, as well as offering the following benefits: 

  • Auto-creation of all required consent and informational documents, that can be reviewed and signed accordingly. 
  • Answer any common questions using our “Ask Hermoine”. 
  • Understand the reasons why the parents’ child has been selected or accepted/rejected into the school. 

Students: Joining a wizarding school is an exciting time for any young wizard, but there is a lot of information to take in. Using our solutions, students will benefit from: 

  • Constant communication throughout the process, using their preferred channel. Students will know exactly what they need to do, and when, to ensure a successful onboarding to the school. 
  • Additional nurturing activities will be triggered automatically, in particular for very promising students
  • All the knowledge from our “Ask Hermoine” chatbot, to answer any common questions. 

Conclusion:

OwlExpress365 is poised to revolutionize the way your wizarding school manages its student life cycle, blending the timeless charm of the wizarding world with the cutting-edge efficiency of Microsoft technology. Whether through an owl, an enchanted SMS, or a mystic email, students will always stay connected and engaged, ensuring their journey at your school is as magical and thrilling as it is memorable. 

Brought to you by Team Pass me a sock, your mythical, magical partner to enable your wizardry students.

About our Team: Our team’s name is a sightly cheeky nod to the second book, where Dobby is freed by Lucius Malfoy by a strategically planted sock by Harry. We are a passionate group of MVPs from across Europe, who are excited to be attending their very first ACDC!