Ask the Experts: Document automation: From APIs to low-code with Adobe & Microsoft | CATEFP101

Ask the Experts: Document automation: From APIs to low-code with Adobe & Microsoft | CATEFP101

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[Music] [Music] hello everybody uh welcome to this uh ask the expert session uh i'm ben vandenberg principal platform evangelist for adobe and joining me i have a number of uh different experts where we're going to be talking about document automation uh from apis to low code automation using things like power platform and some of the great adobe connectors that are available within uh the microsoft 365 and power platform ecosystems so um what i'd like to do as part of this session is do a couple things first i'm going to introduce some of our experts i'm going to give you a brief just kind of tell you what it is that we are doing between adobe and microsoft through some of our low code connectors and then really all this time is about you being able to answer your questions uh during this because we have a huge wealth of knowledge on uh on this session and we want to make sure that we can get all your answers answered so there is a q a pod um in there so feel free to drop your questions into there and we will try to answer as many of the questions as we can in the time allotted um we'll also we'll try to answer live but also we might uh answer directly some of your questions uh through chat as well so for introductions here again i'm ben vande berg i'm on the adobe side of things i focus on uh some of our document cloud uh platform also some of our integrations into the microsoft ecosystem and uh how we create low code automation type of workflows for our customers um ray do you want to introduce yourself absolutely hi i'm raymond camden i am a developer evangelist evangelist on the team uh focused heavily on our apis our sdks also working with power automate quite a bit as well nikhil hi i'm nikhil kumar i'm a senior engineering manager in the adobe i manage the team of pdf services and responsible for building the apis for pdf services bringing in the ai capabilities in our apis as well as servicing those apis and ecosystem like power automate etcetera awesome and rakesh hi i'm rakesh i'm a product manager with the power automated team so i've been partnering very closely with adobe's acrobat sign team to launch certain new embedded capabilities that we announced yesterday awesome cool so um there's a couple of things that are what's available from uh from a development low code perspective as well as some of the announcements uh that rakesh mentioned that we could talk a little bit more about but just to kind of level set everybody on things part of our whole philosophy is how do we help empower people to create uh digital document workflows to help improve productivity and one of the ways that we're doing that is we're taking our tools and services that many people know like adobe acrobat acrobat sign and all those types of tools that you use to create documents and making those available as services that are available within the microsoft uh 365 and power platform ecosystem and these are different types of services uh throughout a document life cycle whether it's helping dynamically create documents based on the data that you have within your dataverse or sharepoint or other types of systems that you can connect uh through powerautomate capturing electronic signatures um being able to take many of those tools from acrobat like being able to create pdfs combine uh bringing those all together to be able to use those as services inside to automate uh be able to capture uh form information uh through adobe experience manager forms as well as being able to extract content out of pdf documents so you can reuse republish that content or bring that into your databurst and push that into things like natural language processing tools in there every single one of these services are available as connectors within microsoft power uh platform so you can leverage those within power automate and logic apps as well as if you are working to create uh code-based applications there's also a variety of different sdks there so we're working and along with that a lot of these different apis we're also making available through um pre-built add-ins into the microsoft ecosystem like add-ins to microsoft teams add-ins into uh sharepoint as well as going in the other direction as uh of now taking some of those microsoft technologies and integrate the grading them into adobe products so you can use them natively inside of there so um again ask your questions we can see your questions coming in and we're happy to answer any one of those as we are going along here um but i wanted to start off and um just talk about uh one of the questions that uh often comes in is that there's a lot of different documents that uh you want to capture information out of those those documents because those pdf documents have been maybe around for decades and you want to get that information out so um i want to start off maybe ray would you be able to uh answer are there ways that adobe has been uh making things available to be able to extract information out of pdfs uh absolutely and it just so happens we have an extract api uh and this will return an incredible amount of data above an incredible amount of information about your pdfs uh every single possible item on the pdf the text of that item the position the font the styling uh more than you can imagine being available inside of pdf this will dig everything out um it will return this in a json format so if you want to do post processing you can do that it will also extract things like images and tabular data as well and what's really interesting is that the tabular data comes out in the format that can be parsed so you can do more processing on tables that you may have within your pdfs that's that's like the super power tool uh we also have a simpler properties api which is more of a metadata uh call to get information about your pdf documents thank you for that um and there was a question that came in from one of our our visitors here that was asking about um are there tools that we have for being able to create documents um not just necessarily with acrobat but also some of our creative cloud applications like indesign to dynamically create things like contact sheets and things like that um so uh first off when it comes to things like creative cloud and document cloud they are different different applications um indesign we don't have connectors inside of power platform at this point in time um one of the things that we've been doing is we've been making available a number of different uh apis online like the photoshop api uh and uh we're looking at some other uh types of cloud-based services to leverage creative cloud applications um we haven't made those available within the microsoft uh 365 ecosystem but um it would be certainly interesting to see some of the ways you could do that however one of the ways that you could if you're looking to kind of create a contact sheet that would be something that you could use the document generation service uh as part of our pdf services to uh to generate a document based on a word template uh ray do you want to maybe talk a little bit about that yeah so the document generation api it lets you take a microsoft word file um and you would use it like you normally would you said styles headers and stuff like that uh but then you could add tokens to it uh that vr api will be replaced with your data so the simplest example is hello name uh and that name could be any data that you have within your system we could take that microsoft word file with that token we could take your data and we can output a dynamic pdf based on that it does a lot more than just simple token replacement uh you could have dynamic tables you can have dynamic uh dynamic images you can have conditional type statements where if you're creating an offer letter for example and some people get a starting bonus you could have that section dynamically showed up uh based on what you're offering this person so uh the document generation api is one of the most powerful ones it's also i think as a as a developer it's one of the easiest ones to use as well awesome um i wanted to touch on one of the questions which was actually centered around um one of the announcements that we have with adobe and microsoft uh yesterday that centered around embedding uh power automate inside of adobe acrobat sign so one of the things that was in that announcement is that we've been working really closely with rakesh's team to tie in things together here to allow you to be able to trigger flows within adobe acrobat's line within that interface without having to leave there you're running all your automated flows inside of um power automate seamlessly there so that gives a whole bunch of flexibility of not just having something that's electronic signature but you can also then route that for approvals within teams approvals you could connect it to all the different connectors within power automate rakesh do you want to maybe talk a little bit more about some of the things that we've been doing around uh our embed uh scenarios with power automate there absolutely i think yeah so ben as you mentioned the key the key value prop is that a seamless uh integrated experience for adobe users so as they're creating uh documents for signature and typically what we have seen is that there are workflows that are typically associated with a signature event right so so what the integration with power ornament enables adobe users would do is to really build those workflows in line without ever needing to leave adobe sign so that you get the full experience of power automate uh to build workflows uh to create workflows use uh hundreds of templates or a few dozens of templates that are very specific to sign um and then manage those workflows share with your co-workers and execute them on the go all of them in line so what we really what we really hope to do is that really remove any kind of friction that adobe users would have in automating their scenarios that are adjacent to document uh document signature events um so i'll post a link to the uh so this k we announced this capability yesterday and it's going as a limited preview starting end of next month so there's a sign up process i'll send i'll post the link in the chat if anybody's interested in signing up for that and the broader announcement as well so uh really looking forward to people trying to design your capability and over the next months we will expand the scope of who are who can proudly participate and will be broadly available in the coming months and now i think one of the things that i love about that is it's also just a testament to some of the things that adobe and microsoft are working together um to think about it not just in the context of how some adobe technology exists within the microsoft ecosystem but how we're kind of adopting some of the ways that people work uh so that regardless of whether where you're coming from um you're working within both ecosystems um so i wanted to touch on one of the questions uh nikhil there's a question from somebody who um asked if there's a for startups or developer programs is there a way for them to be able to get access and learn um and maybe get started using the document services apis without um you know having to go through a whole like contractual process is there a process that startups and developers can uh can go through yeah absolutely uh we have a trial program and we provide a a thousand transactions free in the trial program and anybody can sign up within five minutes in fact less than five minutes credential and get started with our sdks so we have a very extensive and a very seamless frictionless trial program and uh and uh anybody anybody with a basic coding skills in fact with the low code and no code platforms any citizen developer can come and start trying out our apis and i'll just go ahead and it's a 1000 transaction in six months so if you've ever signed up for something and got busy and your trial ending we give you a very large amount of time to uh to try it out now speaking of which ray um does this also have rest apis yes yeah so we have sdks for nodejava and net uh python specifically for the extract api uh for anything else outside of that uh there is a rest-based api we have documentation for that and if you're if you are familiar with postman we have a postman collection that you can download uh to kind of help uh get you started on working with those apis quicker um rakesh uh maybe you can clarify this because i think sometimes this is confusing for some people um uh when it comes to power automate power automated is awesome but there's also things like logic apps so for people who are looking to kind of implement some of these uh low code document automation tools when would they use logic apps versus power automate yeah so if you take a step back so power automate is the low code tool for automation for automation and which actually runs on top of logic apps so the real difference uh differentiation is when what's the uh context of the user so we believe that there are uh fewer developers than there are people other than what is required so that's why we believe the low code aspect would really help bridge the gap the this is the talent gap that we have that we see across industry so if you're a citizen developer who are working with local no code tools then power automate is the way to uh automate your scenarios but if you are a real professional developer who is what was very comfortable with azure who's come who's very familiar with uh the infrastructure as well as the past layer of azure uh who's very comfortable with app services containers and who are managing the entire thing into it then uh you you would use logic apps to kind of automate that so underlying is the same connector for example adobe sign and pdf services you all have the same connector that work across different uh both power platform as well as a logic app it's a function of where you are operating in if you are familiar with if you are mostly on the vs code uh github then you probably are likely to use more of logic apps whereas if you are more on low code and and purely using the local tools and other design and document cloud you're likely more likely to use the power automatic capabilities awesome thanks there um nikhil you may or may not know the answer this question but um especially like pdf metadata so things like author subject keywords the xmp metadata inside those pdfs do our services have an ability to be able to edit some of that metadata uh not right now uh right now we have a uh we have api to read the metadata from pdf that's an api that we have but editing is something which is uh which is not available right now it's there on the roadmap but yeah not there right now um all right uh and ray there was a question around um if you have a document and you want to break it down to each page and separate page with uh separate file names uh from a field that exists on each page um is that possible with uh with our services so i saw that question uh the second half just just splitting we we absolutely have an api on that so given a pdf input you can split that as you see fit uh your particular beginning of that question about splitting based on a form field i think inside the document i don't believe we can do that uh but if you want to reach out to me with more particulars on that i could try to help you out actually i think there was also an article we had on adobe tech blog that was actually talking about splitting based on extract data yeah it was just about you know i still want to know more about like exactly how he or she wants to split like what are they looking for if that makes sense that makes total sense and maybe with form field data that might be uh i'm not exactly sure how we would do that but if you're looking for just general information inside of the document so just like the textual information that is something that you could potentially use the extract service to get the information about the content tell you'd like that to so then you could go through and iterate and find these are the places where this specific uh thing is mentioned inside the text and then get the page name and then based on that use the split service to split that but um yeah we would probably need to understand a little bit more of the specific use case but there's probably at least some stuff that we can do to address some of your your needs there um all right the next question here is um any plans to support document extraction for content uh capture for syntax or viva topics pages um anybody have a good answer on that one i think my answer would be most of your viva topics pages are probably web-based uh pages and if that's the case um most of the services uh especially for extraction services those are for content that are based in pdf format so if you're extracting content from uh stuff within syntax or viva topics pages those are probably or a web content so you probably use a different uh tool to be able to do that and if those are pdfs then i think extract api will do a a fairly good job oh just that it will extract the content but then there has to be an additional code parsing that json and then kind of making a sense out of it one thing i would say is that our extract api extracts the content as well as the syntax and the structure around the content so i think it makes it easy to understand what exactly the content is so it is not just the content but as well as the intent of the document that is extracted in the uh response oh this is a fun one um is there an api that can uh take json structure and then combine it with a pdf template and then return it as a merged pdf in a browser to a user ray any thoughts on that well the documentation iteration api is very close to that uh if your input can be a work template instead uh so if if you want to take a word template and set that up the way you want and put it in the tokens and stuff then you could definitely merge it with json data coming from anywhere your database your flat files sharepoint etc so if you're okay with me changing that question to can i take a word document as a template and my json data and get a dynamic pdf out then the answer is absolutely yes uh i'll add to that one of the things that we also have that we haven't highlighted as much as we also have our pdf embed api which is a web-based uh client to be able to render a pdf on a web page and one of the things that you could potentially do is take that generated pdf that ray just described um and if you're doing like a power automate flow and you have it based on a um an http request um you could have the response be actually a page that has the pdf embed api embedded in it um to provide that back that pdf or if you didn't even want to use the pdf embed api and you just wanted to have that provide a response with the generated document you could do that using the uh http request trigger and response within power automate there um all right so the next question here is talking about um uh maybe licensing so um we have the adobe pdf services connector um we have acrobat sign um rakesh um if if i understand correctly the acrobat sign connector is a standard connector uh within power automate is that correct that's right yeah um and uh the adobe pdf services connector is a premium connector um although although i think uh one of the things that uh rakesh you're touching on is part of the partnership of what we're doing with acrobat sign and bringing power automate inside of there um that means that our acrobat sign users will be able to use some of their premium connectors within acrobat site is that correct that's absolutely right yeah so i think uh it's really uh taking away all kinds of friction or hurdles from the user from using premium capabilities when they are in the context of science so if you're building anything using the sign connector uh and if you want to connect your premium system like for example you could connect you could take a document and upload it to sharepoint which is again a standard you don't need a premium license for that but if you want to upload it to going to make a update to a dynamics 365 uh system and and based on some significant if you want to connect to uh a sales force or or a well you know or upload it in a dropbox all of these are premium connectors for premium connectivity capabilities you would be able to do that in the context of adobe sign that's awesome um now uh one of the things that um i was uh then curious about is um this is actually related to templates and ray maybe you can answer this one is uh you mentioned word-based templates but what about if you have like html is it possible to create templates that are based on html yeah uh so we have a you know file to pdf api and supports office docs and supports html as well and one of the features of the html page to pdf is the ability to have dynamic data in there so uh you would send the html to your api you would send your data and you would use a little bit of javascript um in your code to handle saying you know when that json data comes to me uh update the dom to uh to to change portions of it to match your data so um it's a bit more of a advanced use case versus just word document to pdf but it is supported um and so that almost sounds like you could have like a mini website that is essentially generating that document so you can have the javascript logic inside of there right yes yeah uh it's it's running in the environment of our api in terms of when it's converted uh so if you're that was good if you're a javascript person like me you know don't think full client-side javascript but you can do template type things like the document generation api awesome very cool there's another question that's talking about being able to populate information in documents uh from power apps now um uh the answer is actually there's a couple of different ways that you can uh do that and somewhat depends on it's whether it's like a document that you're maybe routing for signature you want to populate fields into there you want to generate as a document um so we have connectors uh that that if you are using say like a canvas based app um powerapp you can take any of the same connectors within power automate to be able to pass that information into the documents either generate the document or populate fields in a document using acrobat sign to route that for signature um those connectors already exist you can easily tie those into there in the model driven app world there's actually even more options that you have you have the um pre the connectors for power platform you can leverage which uh allows you to connect the dots just like as you you would with canvas apps um to either generate documents or send those for signature populate fields into there um or the other option is that there's also pre-existing connectors for microsoft dynamics 365 that you can use for acrobat sign to populate information through there through uh pre-existing add-ins both of those have pros and cons one's an easy package you can install and all the information about your agreements can then be stored within dataverse there um or if you want more flexibility from a workflow side than the connectors uh within uh power platform give you the the the great options uh within there um all right so uh i had another uh question and actually this is just gonna be a kind of uh a round robin especially when we talk about things like um document automation and especially how we're tying in with power platform um maybe you can give one thing that is like the thing that's exciting you the most about some of the things that we're doing together between adobe and microsoft and um rakesh maybe uh i'll uh start with you um and we'll uh and we'll we'll go go around the the table yeah i think we cover the main things uh and there's i think there's two things one is the embedded experience itself so that the user is always in context of their documents workflow and documents and signature uh workflows that they're creating so there's an inline experience and there's the seamless uh experience of using premium capabilities along with adobe acrobat sign right so that you don't need to go and purchase a premium power automated license to kind of avail the uh connectivity and the capabilities the combination of adobe and microsoft are providing so that's the to me that's the the thing that i'm most excited about uh nikhil yeah uh i think the most exciting thing is that we are kind of building automation which helps uh automate those repetitive and mundane things which earlier people used to do uh day in day out using products like acrobat now there are apis and automating them is so simple that anybody can kind of look at a cookie cutter template and then simply use it to automate this thing so it really helps i use these uh kind of automation day in day out for my uh various uh kind of uh work and uh we are really bringing down the barriers for people to use the automation and kind of automating their reparative works and ray i think what i'm really excited about um is using the automation aspects of power automate and mixing our pdf extract apis and then taking what we extract and doing natural language ai processing on it so you can imagine like we dump a bunch of pdfs into a sharepoint folder and power automate fires up runs our pdf extract api and we could tell you these pdfs they talk about blah blah blah they talk about foo they have pictures of blah blah blah that all can be done without writing code which is awesome i agree i think that is awesome so we we've come to time thank you everybody for coming to your at to the session um as a couple of quick kind of uh finishing up things if you want to learn more about some of these different things um that we're talking about um you can go over to our um partner showcase page where we have a number of different uh sessions and demos where you can uh get to know and understand more and also reach out to us if you have some more info want to learn more about some of that stuff along with that if um if you want to uh also uh kind of get started and figure out how to start creating some of your own flows you can go to the link here which is the adobe dot com slash go slash power automate and that has a number of resources to help you get started but don't forget to go to the uh provide your feedback on this session because we always love to hear your feedback and with that i'd like to thank everybody as part of our experts here to for taking their time to jump on here to answer any of the questions that are your questions and enjoy the rest of build thank you for coming

2022-05-31 18:47

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