Create Viva Connections extensions using SPFx with Windows and WSL
When it comes to building web applications which heavily rely on platforms like Node.js, a Linux environment is often the best choice. Thanks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, we don't have to choose anymore or go through the hassle of setting up a virtual machine. We can run a Linux environment right inside our Windows installation. In this post, we'll focus on the experience in setting up WSL properly to build Viva Connections extensions (or any other extension based on SPFx, the SharePoint Framework) so that we can get the best of both worlds: the Windows experience, but the Linux performances when it comes to build and run our project.Build a Viva Connections card to display stock prices - Part 1: the backend
Recently, a customer engaged with my team because they have started to adopt Viva Connections in their company. They are happy about the experience, but they miss one piece of information that they consider important: the stock price of the company. It is quite a common use case, but Viva Connections doesn't provide this feature as built in. So, I decided: "Why not take advantage of this engagement and build something that can be useful to every customer who is adopting Viva Connections?". In this series of posts, we're going to build a Viva Connections card to display the price of any stock on the market, powered by a set of Azure services like Azure Functions and Azure Cache for Redis. This post will be focused on the backend, while in the next one we're going to build the actual card.Bringing Open AI into an Outlook add-in: moving to Azure Open AI
In the previous post we have learned how to use AI to help users write better business mails. We developed an add-in for Outlook that, using the AI models and the APIs provided by Open AI, can generate a business mail starting from one or two sentences and, using the Office SDK, to include it into the body of the mail. For this sample project, we have directly leveraged the APIs provided by Open AI. We created an account on their website and we obtained an API key required to manage the authentication. But what if you're an enterprise customer and you're already using Azure to host many of your applications and services? It would be great if there was a way to use the powerful models of Open AI, but leveraging at the same time the security, privacy and billing provided by Azure. Well, actually, this way exists and it's the Azure Open AI service, which is part of the Cognitive Services family. Thanks to a partnership between Open AI and Microsoft, the same exact models that you can use with the Open AI APIs are available on Azure. The way they work is very similar, but the main difference is that the whole hosting infrastructure will be provided by Azure, with all its benefits around scaling and security. In this post we're going to replace the Open AI API implementation we did the last time with a new one based on Azure Open AI.Build a Viva Connections card to display stock prices - Part 3: deployment and security
Welcome to the final post in the series about building a Viva Connections card to display stock prices! After building the backend in the first post and the card in the second post, now it's time to deploy our solution and to take a deeper look at the security of our API.
