Microsoft Finland - Software Developing Companies monthly community series.
Tervetuloa jälleen mukaan Microsoftin webinaarisarjaan teknologiayrityksille! Microsoft Finlandin järjestämä Software Development monthly Community series on webinaarisarja, joka tarjoaa ohjelmistotaloille ajankohtaista tietoa, konkreettisia esimerkkejä ja strategisia näkemyksiä siitä, miten yhteistyö Microsoftin kanssa voi vauhdittaa kasvua ja avata uusia liiketoimintamahdollisuuksia. Sarja on suunnattu kaikenkokoisille ja eri kehitysvaiheissa oleville teknologiayrityksille - startupeista globaaleihin toimijoihin. Jokaisessa jaksossa pureudutaan käytännönläheisesti siihen, miten ohjelmistoyritykset voivat hyödyntää Microsoftin ekosysteemiä, teknologioita ja kumppanuusohjelmia omassa liiketoiminnassaan. Huom. Microsoft Software Developing Companies monthly community webinars -webinaarisarja järjestetään Cloud Champion -sivustolla, josta webinaarit ovat kätevästi saatavilla tallenteina pari tuntia live-lähetyksen jälkeen. Muistathan rekisteröityä Cloud Champion -alustalle ensimmäisellä kerralla, jonka jälkeen pääset aina sisältöön sekä tallenteisiin käsiksi. Pääset rekisteröitymään, "Register now"-kohdasta. Täytä tietosi ja valitse Distributor kohtaan - Other, mikäli et tiedä Microsoft-tukkurianne. Webinaarit: 5.9.2025 klo 09:00-09:30 - Teknologiayritysten ja Microsoftin prioriteetit syksylle 2025. Tervetuloa jälleen mukaan Microsoftin webinaarisarjaan teknologiayrityksille! Jatkamme sarjassa kuukausittain pureutumista siihen, miten yhteistyö Microsoftin kanssa voi vauhdittaa kasvua ja avata uusia mahdollisuuksia eri vaiheissa oleville ohjelmistotaloille – olipa yritys sitten start-up, scale-up tai globaalia toimintaa harjoittava. Jokaisessa jaksossa jaamme konkreettisia esimerkkejä, näkemyksiä ja strategioita, jotka tukevat teknologia-alan yritysten liiketoiminnan kehitystä ja innovaatioita. Elokuun lopun jaksossa keskitymme syksyn 2025 prioriteetteihin ja uusiin mahdollisuuksiin, jotka tukevat ohjelmistoyritysten oman toiminnan suunnittelua, kehittämistä ja kasvun vauhdittamista. Käymme läpi, mitkä ovat Microsoftin strategiset painopisteet tulevalle tilikaudelle – ja ennen kaikkea, miten ohjelmistotalot voivat hyödyntää niitä omassa liiketoiminnassaan. Tavoitteena on tarjota kuulijoille selkeä ymmärrys siitä, miten oma tuote, palvelu tai markkinastrategia voidaan linjata ekosysteemin kehityksen kanssa, ja miten Microsoft voi tukea tätä matkaa konkreettisin keinoin. Puhujat: Mikko Marttinen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Eetu Roponen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Katso nauhoitus täältä: Teknologiayritysten ja Microsoftin prioriteetit syksylle 2025. – Finland Cloud Champion 3.10. klo 09:00-09:30 - Autonomiset ratkaisut ohjelmistotaloille – Azure AI Foundry ja agenttiteknologioiden uudet mahdollisuudet Agenttiteknologiat mullistavat tapaa, jolla ohjelmistotalot voivat rakentaa älykkäitä ja skaalautuvia ratkaisuja. Tässä webinaarissa tutustumme siihen, miten Azure AI Foundry tarjoaa kehittäjille ja tuoteomistajille työkalut autonomisten agenttien rakentamiseen – mahdollistaen monimutkaisten prosessien automatisoinnin ja uudenlaisen asiakasarvon tuottamisen. Kuulet mm. Miten agenttiteknologiat muuttavat ohjelmistokehitystä ja liiketoimintaa. Miten Azure AI Foundry tukee agenttien suunnittelua, kehitystä ja käyttöönottoa. Miten ohjelmistotalot voivat hyödyntää agentteja kilpailuetuna. Puhujat: Juha Karvonen, Sr Partner Tech Strategist Mikko Marttinen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Eetu Roponen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Katso nauhoite täältä: Microsoft Finland – Software Developing Companies Monthly Community Series – Autonomiset ratkaisut ohjelmistotaloille – Azure AI Foundry ja agenttiteknologioiden uudet mahdollisuudet – Finland Cloud Champion 31.10. klo 09:00-09:30 - Kasvua ja näkyvyyttä ohjelmistotaloille – hyödynnä ISV Success ja Azure Marketplace rewards -ohjelmia Tässä webinaarissa pureudumme ohjelmistotaloille suunnattuihin Microsoftin keskeisiin kiihdytinohjelmiin, jotka tukevat kasvua, skaalautuvuutta ja kansainvälistä näkyvyyttä. Käymme läpi, miten ISV Success -ohjelma tarjoaa teknistä ja kaupallista tukea ohjelmistoyrityksille eri kehitysvaiheissa, ja miten Azure Marketplace toimii tehokkaana myyntikanavana uusien asiakkaiden tavoittamiseen. Lisäksi esittelemme Marketplace Rewards -edut, jotka tukevat markkinointia, yhteismyyntiä ja asiakashankintaa Microsoftin ekosysteemissä. Webinaari tarjoaa: Konkreettisia esimerkkejä ohjelmien hyödyistä Käytännön vinkkejä ohjelmiin liittymiseen ja hyödyntämiseen Näkemyksiä siitä, miten ohjelmistotalot voivat linjata strategiansa Microsoftin tarjoamiin mahdollisuuksiin Puhujat: Mikko Marttinen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Eetu Roponen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Nauhoite: Microsoft Finland – Software Developing Companies Monthly Community Series – Kasvua ja näkyvyyttä ohjelmistotaloille – hyödynnä ISV Success ja Azure Marketplace rewards -ohjelmia – Finland Cloud Champion 28.11. klo 09:00-09:30 - Pilvipalvelut omilla ehdoilla – mitä Microsoftin Sovereign Cloud tarkoittaa ohjelmistotaloille? Yhä useampi ohjelmistotalo kohtaa vaatimuksia datan sijainnista, sääntelyn noudattamisesta ja operatiivisesta kontrollista – erityisesti julkisella sektorilla ja säädellyillä toimialoilla. Tässä webinaarissa pureudumme siihen, miten Microsoftin uusi Sovereign Cloud -tarjonta vastaa näihin tarpeisiin ja mitä mahdollisuuksia se avaa suomalaisille ohjelmistoyrityksille. Keskustelemme muun muassa: Miten Sovereign Public ja Private Cloud eroavat ja mitä ne mahdollistavat? Miten datan hallinta, salaus ja operatiivinen suvereniteetti toteutuvat eurooppalaisessa kontekstissa? Mitä tämä tarkoittaa ohjelmistoyrityksille, jotka rakentavat ratkaisuja julkiselle sektorille tai säädellyille toimialoille? Puhujat: Juha Karppinen, National Security Officer, Microsoft Mikko Marttinen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Eetu Roponen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Katso nauhoite: Microsoft Finland – Software Developing Companies Monthly Community Series – Pilvipalvelut omilla ehdoilla – mitä Microsoftin Sovereign Cloud tarkoittaa ohjelmistotaloille? – Finland Cloud Champion 12.12. klo 09:00-09:30 - Mitä Suomen Azure-regioona tarkoittaa ohjelmistotaloille? Microsoftin uusi datakeskusalue Suomeen tuo pilvipalvelut lähemmäksi suomalaisia ohjelmistotaloja – olipa kyseessä startup, scaleup tai globaali toimija. Webinaarissa pureudumme siihen, mitä mahdollisuuksia uusi Azure-regioona avaa datan sijainnin, suorituskyvyn, sääntelyn ja asiakasvaatimusten näkökulmasta. Keskustelemme muun muassa: Miten datan paikallinen sijainti tukee asiakasvaatimuksia ja sääntelyä? Mitä hyötyä ohjelmistotaloille on pienemmästä latenssista ja paremmasta suorituskyvystä? Miten Azure-regioona tukee yhteismyyntiä ja skaalautumista Suomessa? Miten valmistautua teknisesti ja kaupallisesti uuden regioonan avaamiseen? Puhujat: Fama Doumbouya, Sales Director, Cloud Infra and Security, Microsoft Mikko Marttinen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Eetu Roponen, Sr Partner Development Manager, Microsoft Katso nauhoite: Microsoft Finland – Software Developing Companies Monthly Community Series – Mitä Suomen Azure-regioona tarkoittaa ohjelmistotaloille? – Finland Cloud ChampionNow Generally Available: Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution
Co authored by: vjirovsky Azure Native Integrations enable you to easily provision, manage, and tightly integrate Independent Software Vendors (ISV) SaaS with a unified billing on Azure. By leveraging the power of Azure, Pure Storage Cloud Service offers you the same trusted Pure Storage capabilities in the cloud, without the complexity of refactoring or rearchitecting your VMware environments. You can easily discover and sign up for this via the Azure Marketplace. Azure Native Integrations enable you to easily provision, manage, and tightly integrate Independent Software Vendors (ISV) SaaS with a unified billing on Azure. By leveraging the power of Azure, Pure Storage Cloud Service offers you the same trusted Pure Storage capabilities in the cloud, without the complexity of refactoring or rearchitecting your VMware environments. You can easily discover and sign up for this via the Azure Marketplace. “We’re excited to announce Microsoft’s strengthened partnership with Pure Storage through the Azure Native Integrations program. With the service now generally available, customers can seamlessly deploy enterprise-grade block storage on Pure directly from the Azure portal. This seamless integration with Azure VMware Solution enables elastic capacity, flexible performance, and instant resizing – all while unlocking the full power of Azure’s cloud and AI capabilities.” - Scott Hunter, Vice President Product Management, Microsoft Developer Division Key Benefits of Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud on AVS Enterprise customers migrating VMware workloads to the cloud have long faced challenges with storage scalability, cost inefficiencies, and operational overhead. With this GA release, Pure Storage removes those barriers and delivers: Decoupled Scalability & Flexibility: across Compute and Storage solutions, so you pay only for what you need. Seamless Native Azure Experience: Provision Pure Storage Cloud resources via the client of your choice - Azure portal, CLI, PowerShell or SDK. Multi-Region support: Enjoy the support for your Pure Storage resource across East US, East US 2, West US 2, Central US and Australia East regions, with many more coming in shortly! Cost Efficiency: Achieve up to 40% Total Cost of Operations (TCO) savings through best-in-class data reduction and compression solutions. Streamlined VMware Migration: Simplify the transition of VMware workloads from on-premises or hybrid and multi-cloud environments onto Azure with consistent storage performance, nearly zero downtime, and minimal business disruption. Easy management: Perform all daily operations on AVS from a single VMware vSphere client directly via built-in plugin for Pure Storage Cloud Robust performance and reliability for mission-critical workloads with enterprise-grade Data protection and Data resilience support, with solutions such as Pure Snapshots and Hybrid Disaster Recovery in the pipeline. Fig 1: Pure Storage benefits of decoupled storage scalability. Why Pure Storage? Gartner report from Sept 2025 states that by 2029, consumption-based storage as a service (STaaS) will replace 50% of on-premises enterprise storage and data services infrastructure capital expenditure (capex), an increase from 15% in early 2025. Pure Storage® is a pivotal storage player among the Enterprise customers in revolutionizing the storage, management and resiliency while ensuring flexibility. From AI to archive, Pure Storage delivers a seamless cloud migration experience with one unified Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) platform across on-premises, private and public cloud, and hybrid environments. Pure has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Storage Platforms, with highest rating in Execution & Vision. An enterprise-favorite, some key customers for Pure Storage include ServiceNow, NASA, Comcast and many more! Fig 2: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, Sep 2025, Gartner Inc. Get Started with Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud Getting started is simple and fully integrated into the Azure experience. You can now start your journey quick and easy, and you pay only for the storage you use. For a detailed step-by-step visual guide, check out this YouTube playlist. Search and Provisioning the Pure Storage Cloud Resource Look for “Pure Storage Cloud” in the Azure portal or Azure Marketplace and sign up to subscribe. Select the service and create a new Pure Storage resource. Follow the instructions in the QuickStart to easily spin up your Pure Storage resource. Fig 3: Searching for Azure Native Pure Storage via Azure portal Create Storage Pools Using your Vnet and a delegated subnet to PureStorage.Block/storagePools, use the Overview blade navigation or the Action tile in the bottom to create and configure your storage pools. Fig 4: Newly created Pure Storage resource Overview in Azure portal Fig 5: Create Storage pool blade in Azure portal Connect to an Azure VMware Solution (AVS) resource Once created, you can use the Connect button up top to link your storage pool to AVS. In a few minutes, your storage pool is coupled with your VMware resource and ready to use! Fig 6: Connect AVS button establishes connection between storage pool and AVS resource Also, it automatically installs the Pure Storage Cloud plugin into your VMware resource, so you can manage everything, including the storage, from a single place, vSphere Client. Fig 7: Creation of a Datastore within the vSphere Client – this maps to a Storage container on your Pure Storage Cloud resource We’re excited for you to try out our solution! If you have suggestions or questions, contact us at azurenative@purestorage.com Resources Sign up for the service via Azure marketplace here. For a detailed visual guide on the step-by-step process to create a Pure Storage resource on Azure, check out this YouTube playlist. To learn more about the service, FAQ, and how to create your resource, check out the Microsoft docs as well as the Pure docs. Learn about how to create datastores and volumes and manage your Pure Storage here. Check out Azure Storage's blog and Pure’s press release for more excitement around the Pure-Microsoft partnership.
Introducing Dell PowerScale for Azure: Now in Public Preview
We’re excited to announce the public preview of Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure – a fully managed, enterprise-grade file storage solution natively integrated into Azure. This offering brings Dell’s proven scale-out Network-attached storage (NAS) technology directly into Azure, delivering the performance and scalability enterprises expect with the simplicity of Azure-native management. Supporting up to 8.4PB in a single namespace, Dell PowerScale offers the scalability needed for demanding modern workloads. With multi-protocol support (NFS, SMB, S3), it ensures seamless access across diverse applications while maintaining the trusted Dell PowerScale user experience. This Dell-managed solution handles monitoring, maintenance, and updates, enabling organizations to streamline operations, optimize storage, and focus on business priorities with confidence in their data’s security and accessibility. This natively integrated solution uses purpose-built virtual machine infrastructure provisioned by Microsoft in the standard Azure hyper scaler environment. This special VM leverages cache to flash persistent memory technology using NVDIMM-N specifications suitable for the fast linked journaling transactions. These purpose-built VMs enable higher performance throughput and max capacity scale. Capabilities of Dell PowerScale for Azure Multi-protocol access – Global permission structure shared across users and protocols. Seamless scalability – Easily adjust to changing workloads with scale-out capacity. Operational consistency – Same experience as PowerScale on-premises. Smooth data mobility – Transfer data across environments without disruption. Advanced data protection – Safeguard critical information with comprehensive backup and recovery solutions. Snapshots – Fast data backup and recovery. Native replication – Asynchronous replication for data migration or disaster recovery. Why Dell PowerScale for Azure? Dell PowerScale is purpose-built for modern data-intensive workloads that require high performance and scalability — such as AI/ML pipelines, media & entertainment, EDA (electronic design automation), backup & recovery, and enterprise content management. Key Benefits of the Integration: Dell-Managed Service: Enjoy a streamlined storage experience, with Dell handling deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades — freeing your IT teams to focus on higher-value initiatives. Scalable & Elastic: As business requirements grow, PowerScale dynamically scales capacity and performance by adding nodes on demand, without any downtime. Enterprise-Grade Durability: Data is distributed across multiple nodes within the cluster, ensuring high durability and fault tolerance. Advanced Protection: Uses erasure coding for space-efficient protection and features like SyncIQ for asynchronous replication across sites — keeping your data available even during outages. Secure Private Access: PowerScale integrates into your Azure Virtual Network (VNet) through Vnet Injection, ensuring secure, high-performance data access. Azure-Native Experience: Provision, manage, and monitor PowerScale from within the Azure portal. It supports full integration with Azure Resource Manager (ARM), upcoming support for CLI/Powershell/Terraform, and supports native billing. How to Use the Integration: Mount shared volumes to Azure VMs or Kubernetes running in the same VNet. Run analytics or AI workloads that need parallel access to high-throughput file storage. Support backup, disaster recovery, and archival workflows across sites. Store and manage media assets or research data in regulated industries. Getting Started with Dell PowerScale for Azure Getting started with Dell PowerScale is simple: Navigate to Azure Portal Go to https://portal.azure.com and search for Dell PowerScale in the Marketplace. The offer is named Dell PowerScale for Azure - Dell managed (Public Preview). Contact Dell for a private offer and request a Dell Reference Number. Deploy the Storage Resource Follow guided steps here to configure your resource or cluster Connect Your Workloads Use standard NFS or SMB to mount volumes from Azure VMs or AKS. More Resources You can subscribe to the service through the Azure Marketplace online store or through the Azure portal. Search for it by name: Dell PowerScale for Azure - Dell managed (Public Preview) To learn more about the service, check out Microsoft docs as well as Dell docsAPAC Fabric Engineering Connection call
Are you a Microsoft partners that is interested in data and analytics? Be sure to join us for the next Fabric Engineering Connection calls! 🎉 The APAC call is Thursday, October 23, from 1-2 am UTC/Wednesday, October 2, from 5-6 pm PT. Tamer Farag and Trilok Rajesh will be presenting on Modernizing Legacy Analytics & BI Platforms.What’s New? Unveiling the Latest Features of the Azure Native Dynatrace Service
Introducing Multi-Subscription Monitoring for Dynatrace on Azure We’re excited to announce the general availability of Multi-Subscription Monitoring (MSM) for the Azure Native Dynatrace Service (ANDS). This powerful new capability allows customers to monitor multiple Azure subscriptions through a single Dynatrace resource—significantly simplifying the setup of observability for multiple Azure subscriptions at scale. Organizations often operate across dozens—or even hundreds—of Azure subscriptions. Until now, when setting up observability with the Azure Native Dynatrace Service, customers had to create one Dynatrace resource per Azure subscription, leading to higher operational overhead and some redundant configurations. With Multi-Subscription Monitoring, customers can now consolidate monitoring of up to 20 Azure subscriptions into a single Dynatrace resource, streamlining their operations and reducing complexity. 🧩 How It Works The feature is available directly in the Azure portal: Navigate to your Dynatrace resource. Go to Environment Configuration > Monitored Subscriptions. Click Add Subscriptions. Select the subscriptions you want to monitor—Dynatrace will automatically detect those where your managed identity has the required permissions. Click Add. Once added, the subscriptions will appear with an “Active” status, and diagnostic settings will be applied automatically based on your tag rules. ⚠️ Note: You can link up to 20 subscriptions per Dynatrace resource. If you reach the 20 subscriptions linked to one Dynatrace resource, you have to create a new Dynatrace resource in the next Azure subscription you want to link. To use MSM, the managed identity associated with your Dynatrace resource must have Owner permissions on the target subscriptions. 📘 Learn More Check out the article here for step-by-step guidance and stay tuned for updates on the Azure Tech Community blog. We look forward to your feedback! Announcing Enhanced Customization for Dynatrace OneAgent Installation on Azure VMs We’re excited to introduce a powerful new capability in the Azure Native Dynatrace Service: The installation of Dynatrace OneAgent on Virtual Machines (VMs) now supports additional parameters. This enhancement adds flexibility and control to your observability workflows—directly from the Azure portal. Previously, customers installing Dynatrace OneAgent via the Azure portal needed to manually configure important options. This included enabling system logs, choosing infrastructure-only monitoring, or setting proxy configurations. These settings were only available through CLI-based setups or post-installation. This manual configuration created friction for certain use cases, including the following: Security-conscious teams wanting to pre-configure log ingestion, proxy settings and custom installation paths. SREs managing multiple subscriptions desiring to predefine host groups and network zones for better organization and routing. With this update, we’re providing advanced configuration and automation. What’s New: Full Parameter Control at Install Time You can now configure the following parameters during agent installation via the Azure portal or CLI: Parameter Description Monitoring Mode Enable full-stack or infra-only monitoring Host Group Assign host to a logical group Network Zone Route traffic through a specific network zone Proxy Define address of proxy server Custom Host Name Custom host name for agent Enable Log Monitoring Enable/disable log monitoring Enable Auto Update Auto-update agent version Access to System Logs Enable/disable system log collection Enable Automatic Ingestion Enable/disable auto-ingestion Extensions ingest port Set custom ingest port StatsD Port Set custom StatsD port These parameters are optional, giving you the freedom to tailor the installation to your environment’s needs. 🔍 Learn More To explore the full list of parameters and their usage, check out the official Dynatrace documentation: Customize OneAgent installation on Linux — Dynatrace Docs We look forward to your feedback!Americas & EMEA Fabric Engineering Connection call
Are you a Microsoft partners that is interested in data and analytics? Be sure to join us for the next Fabric Engineering Connection calls! 🎉 The Americas & EMEA call will take place Wednesday, October 22, from 8-9 am PT and will feature presentations from Teddy Bercovitz and Gerd Saurer on Fabric Extend Workload Developer Kit, followed by a presentation on Data Protection Capabilities from Yael Biss.Partner experience using Microsoft ECIF Funding for Federal sector?
Looking for some general feedback from ISV, SI, MSP community... We're a mid-sized ISV with some enterprise services capability focused on deployments, cloud migration of both our own and some Microsoft security workloads. We've never used ECIF, but have a few targets where it would be valuable. I'm getting great support from Microsoft program team to onboard to the program and expect to have us activated shortly. Scope-wise, we have a handful of targets and would probably be pleased to execute with them in upcoming year. Question - what are your experiences with ECIF for Fed? What's the "operational lift" to manage a program and capture this benefit? Has this worked well for you? Has it been cumbersome? Any particular areas we should especially focus attention to ensure smooth execution? Any general guidance appreciated.Using Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI to extract structured data from documents
Addressing the challenges of efficient document processing, explore a novel solution to extract structured data from documents using Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI. Context In today’s data-driven landscape, efficient document processing is crucial for most organizations worldwide. Accurate document analysis is essential to provide much needed streamlining of business workflows to enhance productivity. In this article, we’ll explore the key challenges that solution providers face with extracting relevant, structured data from documents. We'll also showcase a novel solution to solve these challenges using Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI. Key challenges of effective document data extraction ISVs and Digital Natives building document data extraction solutions often grapple with the complexities of finding a reliable mechanism to parse their customer’s documents. The key challenges include: Variability in document layout. Documents, such as contracts or invoices, often contain similar data. However, they vary in both layout, structure, and language, including domain jargon. Content in unstructured formats. It is common for pieces of useful information to be stored in unstructured formats, such as handwritten letters or emails. Diversity in file formats. Solutions need to be able to handle a variety of formats that customers provide to them. This includes images, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, emails, and HTML pages. With many Azure AI services to build solutions with, it can be difficult for teams to identify the best approach to resolve these challenges. Benefits of using Azure AI Document Intelligence with Azure OpenAI As solution providers for document data extraction capabilities, the following approach enables these benefits over other approaches: No requirement to train a custom model. Combining these Azure AI services allows you to extract structured data without the need to train a custom model for the various document formats and layouts that your solution may receive. Instead, you tailor natural language prompts to your specific needs. Define your own schema. The capabilities of GPT models enables you to extract data that matches or closely matches a schema that you define. This is a major benefit over alternative approach, particularly when each document’s domain jargon differs. This makes it easier to extract structured data accurately for your downstream processes post-extraction. Out-of-the-box support for multiple file types. This approach supports a variety of document types, including PDFs, Office file types, HTML, and images. This flexibility allows you to extract structure data from a variety of sources without the need for custom logic in your application for each file type. Let’s explore how to extract structured data from documents with both Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI in more detail. Understanding layout analysis to Markdown with Azure AI Document Intelligence Updated in March 2024, the pre-built layout model in Azure AI Document Intelligence gained new capabilities to extract content and structure from Office file types (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) and HTML, alongside the existing PDF and image capabilities. This introduced the capability for document processing solutions to take any document, such as a contract or invoice, with any layout or file format, and convert it into a structured Markdown output. This has the significant benefit of maintaining the content’s hierarchy when extracted. This is important when we consider the capabilities of the Azure OpenAI GPT models. GPT models are pre-trained on vast amounts of natural language data, which helps them to understand structures and semantic patterns. The simplicity of Markdown’s markup allows GPT models to interpret structures such as headings, lists, and tables, as well as formatting such as links, emphasis (italic/bold), and code blocks. When you combine these capabilities for data extraction with efficient prompting, you can easily and accurately extract relevant data as structured JSON. Combining Azure AI Document Intelligence layout analysis with GPT prompting for data extraction The following diagram illustrates this novel approach, introducing the new Markdown capabilities of Azure AI Document Intelligence’s pre-built layout model with completion requests to Azure OpenAI to extract the data. This approach is achieved in the following way: A customer uploads their files to analyze for data extraction. This could be of any supported file type, including PDF, image, or Word document. The application makes a request to the Azure AI Document Intelligence’s analyze API using the pre-built layout model with the output content format flag set to Markdown. The document data is provided in the request either as a base64 source or a URI. If you are processing many, large documents, it is recommended to use a URI to reduce the memory utilization which will prevent unexpected behavior in your application. You can achieve this approach by uploading your documents to an Azure Blob Storage container and providing a SAS URI to the document. With the Markdown result as context, prompt the Azure OpenAI completions API with specific instruction to extract the structured data you require in a JSON format. With a now structured data response, you can store this data however you require for the needs of your application. For a full code sample demonstrating this capability, check out the using Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo to extract structured data from documents sample on GitHub. Along with the code, this sample includes the necessary infrastructure-as-code Bicep templates to deploy the Azure resources for testing. Conclusion Adopting Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI to extract structured data from documents simplifies the challenges of document processing today. This well-rounded solution offers significant benefits over alternatives, removing the requirement to train custom models and improving overall accuracy of data extraction in most use cases. Consider the following recommendations to maximize the benefits of this approach: Experiment with prompting for data extraction. The provided code sample provides a well-rounded starting point for structure data extraction. Consider experimenting with the prompt and JSON schemas to incorporate domain specific language to capture the nuances in your documents to improve accuracy further. Optimize the document processing workflow. As you scale out this approach to production, consider the host resource requirements for your application to process a large quantity of documents. Optimize this approach by maximizing CPU and memory usage by offloading the loading of documents to Azure AI Document Intelligence using URIs. By adopting this approach, solution providers can streamline their document processing workflows, enhancing productivity for themselves and their customers. Read more on document processing with Azure AI Thank you for taking the time to read this article. We are sharing our insights for ISVs and Startups that enable document processing in their AI-powered solutions, based on real-world challenges we encounter. We invite you to continue your learning through our additional insights in this series. Optimizing Data Extraction Accuracy with Custom Models in Azure AI Document Intelligence Discover how to enhance data extraction accuracy with Azure AI Document Intelligence by tailoring models to your unique document structures. Using Structured Outputs in Azure OpenAI’s GPT-4o for consistent document data processing Discover how to leverage GPT-4o’s Structured Outputs to ensure reliable, schema-compliant document data processing. Evaluating the quality of AI document data extraction with small and large language models Discover our evaluation of the effectiveness of AI models in quality document data extraction using small and large language models (SLMs and LLMs). Further Reading Using Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo to extract structured data from documents | GitHub Explore the solution discussed in this article with this sample using .NET. Azure AI Document Intelligence add new preview features including US 1040 tax forms, 1003 URLA mortgage forms and updates to custom models | Tech Community Read more about the release of the new capabilities of Azure AI Document Intelligence discussed in this article. What's new in Document Intelligence (formerly Form Recognizer) | Microsoft Learn Keep up-to-date with the latest changes to the Azure AI Document Intelligence service. Prompt engineering techniques with Azure OpenAI | Microsoft Learn Discover how to improve your prompting techniques with Azure OpenAI to maximize the accuracy of your document data extraction. Using Azure OpenAI GPT-4 Vision to extract structured JSON data from PDF documents | GitHub Explore another novel approach to document data extraction utilizing only Azure OpenAI's GPT-4 Vision model.
