Magic Matrix category final article

Posted on 25/01/2025 by SnitchOps

SO as you know that yesterday we created a functionality that tracks the documents that has to be provided by students for onboarding. But now to streamline the onboarding process, we introduced four dedicated faculty sites:
🏛 Gryffindor
🏛 Hufflepuff
🏛 Ravenclaw
🏛 Slytherin

Each site acts as a collaborative space for students and teachers, where they can upload, share, and manage documents efficiently.

To fully automate the onboarding workflow, we use an Azure Function App that:
✅ Invites students to their respective faculty site after completing a survey.
✅ Provides a checklist for required documents (e.g., photos, transcripts).
✅ Automatically verifies documents and tracks missing files.
✅ Sends SMS notifications to students if required documents are missing.

The Business Logic Flow

The onboarding process is fully automated using Azure Durable Functions and SharePoint.

Step 1: Student Completes the Wayfinder Portal Survey

Once a student submits their faculty preference and personal details, a HTTP request is sent to an Azure Function with their data.
Based on the selected faculty, the function determines the corresponding SharePoint site.

Step 2: Azure Function Invites the Student

An HTTP-triggered Azure Function is responsible for processing the onboarding request.

Step 3: Orchestrator Function Handles Onboarding Workflow

The orchestrator function manages the entire student onboarding process.

The orchestrator first invites the student to their faculty site.
Then, it creates a checklist for tracking required documents.

Step 4: Student Invitation to SharePoint

The invitation activity sends an email invite with a faculty-specific SharePoint link.

Uses FacultySitesDictionary to find the correct SharePoint site:

· Sends an invitation email with the SharePoint link.

Step 5: Checklist is Created for Document Upload

Each student receives a checklist for tracking the required onboarding documents.

📌 Add Student Checklist

Step 6: Automated Document Validation

An Azure Function runs on a schedule to validate student document submissions.

📌 Timer-Triggered Function

📲 This ensures students complete their onboarding without manual intervention.

Faculty Administrators’ Perspective

✅ No manual student onboarding – Everything happens automatically.
✅ Real-time checklist tracking – Admins see which students have missing documents.
✅ Less communication overhead – Automated SMS reminders handle follow-ups.

Summary of Key Features

Feature	Technology
Student invitation	Azure Function (HTTP Trigger)
Faculty-specific SharePoint sites	SharePoint Online
Checklist tracking	SharePoint Lists
Document verification	Azure Durable Function
Scheduled validation	Timer-Triggered Function
SMS notifications	LinkMobility API

🚀 Conclusion

This fully automated system significantly improves faculty onboarding by:
✅ Eliminating manual work for administrators.
✅ Ensuring real-time checklist tracking for students.
✅ Automatically notifying students about missing documents.

This scalable architecture using Azure Functions, SharePoint, and Durable Functions ensures smooth student onboarding with minimal effort.

Stay tuned for our next post, where we dive deeper into SharePoint automation! 🚀

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Almost)

Posted on 24/01/2025 by Groundhog Day

Imagine you have created an Canvas App to avoid Burnout among your colleagues. You could tell your coworkers to download another app to their phones and complete tasks there to be able to provide a result based on their entries that will suggest future actions to manage their stress and workload. Wouldn’t this add more work to your already tired and stressed colleagues? Why don´t meet them where they work.

Some manage all of their workload directly from teams: their communication, SharePoint files, calendar and more. This would be a good case to add your app to Teams for those users that avoid using a browser or desktop apps as much as possible.

Others love SharePoint and work directly from the browser, they love it some much they haven´t even synced their folders to their PC. Again, why not meet them where they are instead of having to download an app? How can you as a developer make it easy for your users to access an app that is out of the scope of their work? Make it easy.

In case your users as using the app on SharePoint, maybe you would only want that some users have access to it. In that case, it´s possible to create a button that only a specific group can see. Then it is possible to target audiences so only specific users can see it.

It is important to “prioritize accessibility, privacy, and an exceptional user experience”, so make sure your app will work on all platforms. It is not only necessary to make it responsive in mobile, table or web; it is also important to make sure it will be accessible on SharePoint and Teams.

When the app is shared in Teams, privacy is easier to manage if shared in a Team or even a Private channel. Extra filtering can be added directly in the app to ensure privacy.

In conclusion, accessibility, privacy, and an exceptional user experience is achievable with a Canvas App thanks to the connectivity made available by Microsoft. A good rule of thumb would be to make these three criteria a critical consideration when developing apps.

Finally our hands got dirty with Sharepoint deep dive!

Posted on 24/01/2025 by SnitchOps

“SharePoint: The Room of Requirement for files—sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s full of things you didn’t ask for”

So our Oleksii the Oracle, following his dream to follow the footsteps of one of our honorable judges and become the “World Champion of SharePoint” (We admire your work, @mikaell ).

went to expore, learn and share.

In our Wayfinder academy, we collect a lot of data, we manage it. And everyone knows how difficult it is not to forget to provide to faculty administration some important stuff or remember where it is, etc. To fix this problem for students of Hogwarts we are using a sharepoint which acts as a back office for faculty administrators and our academy workers.

For this purpose, we have a checklist that controls the completeness of the provision of documents by students required by faculty administrators.

Also we have a docset that stores data from students. Files from students are uploaded to corresponding folders from out of the box integration with Dataverse and SharePoint.

CheckList processing handled by a timer triggered Azure durable function that crawls all the students from checklist and searches for the missing documents in the library. If app found any missed documents it updates checklists, so faculty administrators could see which documents are missing and act accordingly (exclude student, joking!)

Azure function is written with .Net and hosted in the Azure. Variables for azure function are also stored in the Azure Function App.

On the next step we are going to send sms notifications thanks to our integrations posted yesterday about utilizing a LinkMobility API (LinkMobility & Logiquill Love story | Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge Submissions)

Also we would like to setup an Azure devops project for repository and CI/CD of our Azure Functions. Stay tuned, more is coming!! Woo hooooo! This is so much fun!!!!

Microsoft Magic

Posted on 24/01/2025 by Itera Power Potters

We have used a lot of different Microsoft products when developing our solution.

With this blog post we aim at getting points in the category “Magic Matric”, because that’s what it feels like to use Microsoft products and services.