Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function

23rd of April, 2018 / / No Comments

The requirement that I will be addressing in this blog is how to Promote and Demote site pages to news articles in Modern SharePoint sites. This approach allows us to promote any site page to News, add approval steps and demote news articles to site pages if the news need to be updated. The news also shows in the modern news web part when the site page is promoted.
Solution Approach:
To start with, create a site page.… [Keep reading] “Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function”

Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 – Creating the Internet of YOUR Things

21st of April, 2018 / / No Comments

Today is the 6th Global Azure Bootcamp and I presented at the Sydney Microsoft Office on the Creating the Internet of YOUR Things.
In my session I gave an overview on where IoT is going and some of the amazing things we can look forward to (maybe). I then covered a number of IoT devices that you can buy now that can enrich your life.
I then moved on to building IoT devices and leveraging Azure, the focus of my presentation.… [Keep reading] “Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 – Creating the Internet of YOUR Things”

AWS DeepLens – Part 1 – Getting the DeepLens Online

27th of February, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Look what I got my hands on!

Today I will be taking you through the initial setup of the yet to be released AWS DeepLens. DeepLens is rumoured to be released globally in April 2018.

What is the AWS DeepLens?

Announced at AWS Re-Invent 2017, DeepLens is a marriage of:

  • HD Camera
  • Intel based computer with an on-board GPU
  • Ubuntu OS
  • AWS Greengrass
  • AWS IOT
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS SageMaker

This marriage of technologies is designed to assist developers achieve Deep-Learning inference at the edge device.… [Keep reading] “AWS DeepLens – Part 1 – Getting the DeepLens Online”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 4)

23rd of January, 2018 / / No Comments

Welcome back to the final blog post in this series! In parts 1, 2 and 3, we set up an Amazon Lex bot to converse with users, receive and validate verification input, and perform a password reset. While we’ve successfully tested this functionality in the AWS console, we want to provide our users with the ability to call and talk with the bot over the phone. In this blog post, we’ll wire up Amazon Connect with our bot to provide this capability.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 4)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)

9th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to follow along in parts 1 and 2 where we set up our Lex chatbot to take and validate input. In this blog, we’ll interface with our Active Directory environment to perform the password reset function. To do this, we need to create a Lambda function that will be used as the logic to fulfil the user’s intent. The Lambda function will be packaged with the python LDAP library to modify the AD password attribute for the user.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)

20th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

Welcome back! Hopefully you had the chance to follow along in part 1 where we started creating our Lex chatbot. In part 2, we attempt to make the conversation more human-like and begin integrating data validation on our slots to ensure we’re getting the correct input.

Creating the Lambda initialisation and validation function

As data validation requires compute, we’ll need to start by creating an AWS Lambda function. Head over to the AWS console, then navigate to the AWS Lambda page.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 1)

18th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

“What! Is this guy for real? Does he really think he can replace the front line of IT with pre-canned conversations?” I must admit, it’s a bold statement. The IT Service Desk has been around for years and has been the foot in the door for most of us in the IT industry. It’s the face of IT operations and plays an important role in ensuring an organisation’s staff can perform to the best of their abilities.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 1)”

Psychodynamics: Are We Smarter Than The Device?

29th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

PhonePeople

How did you know about this blog post?

It’s likely that you were notified by your smartphone or device, the notification itself as a part of trundle that you’re figuratively swiping left in-between email reminders about upcoming events and direct messages from your favourite social media. Or you were trawling your usual network feeds for updates to catch your attention.
Now if you were to time the window in which you check your smart device again for notifications, new messages or general updates, I’d bet that this window would be within a minute or just outside of it, and would require no prompting whatsoever… much like, say, breathing?… [Keep reading] “Psychodynamics: Are We Smarter Than The Device?”

A quick start guide for Deploying and Configuring Node-RED as an Azure WebApp

7th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

I’ve been experimenting and messing around with IoT devices for well over 10 years. Back then it wasn’t called IoT, and it was very much a build it and write it yourself approach.
Fast forward to 2017 and you can buy a microprocessor for a couple of dollars that includes WiFi. Environmental sensors are available for another couple of dollars and we can start to publish environmental telemetry without having to build circuitry and develop code.… [Keep reading] “A quick start guide for Deploying and Configuring Node-RED as an Azure WebApp”