Introducing Azure Data Factory Community Templates
Today, we’re excited to announce that Community Templates are now available, giving our community members an opportunity to contribute to our existing template gallery. Templates are predefined Azure Data Factory pipelines that allow you to get started quickly with Data Factory. Templates are especially useful when you're new to Azure Data Factory or Azure Synapse pipelines and want to get started quickly, reducing development time for building data integration projects, and improving developer productivity. A wide variety of best practices are also infused in templates that cater to different scenarios that you can build on top of. And if you have Git enabled, templates help create shareable pipelines for better collaboration within the same factory.
Deploy Logic App Standard with Application Routing Feature Based on Terraform and Azure Pipeline
Due to Terraform's cross-cloud compatibility, automation, and efficient execution, among many other advantages, more and more customers use it to deploy integration solutions based on Azure Logic App standard. However, despite the extensive contributions from the community and individual contributors providing Terraform templates and supporting VNET integration solutions for Logic App standards, there are still very few terraform templates covering the "Application routing" and "Configuration routing" settings: This article shared a mature plan to deploy logic app standard then set the mentioned routing features automatically. It's based on Terraform template and Azure DevOps Pipeline. Code Reference: https://github.com/serenaliqing/LAStandardTerraformDeployment/tree/main/Terraform-Deployment-Demo About Terraform Template: Please kindly find the the template in directory Terraform/LAStandard.tf, it includes the terraform definitions for logic app standard, the backend storage account, application insights, virtual network and VNET integration settings. About VNET Routing Configuration Because there is no terraform examples available for VNET routing, we add VNET Settings by invoking "Patch" request to ARM RESTful API endpoint for interacting with logic app standard site: https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/<Your subscription id>/resourceGroups/$(deployRG)/providers/Microsoft.Web/sites/$(deployLA)?api-version=2022-03-01 We figured out the required request body in network trace as the following format: { "properties": { "vnetContentShareEnabled": false, "vnetImagePullEnabled": true, "vnetRouteAllEnabled": false, "vnetBackupRestoreEnabled": false } } Please find the YAML file in TerraformPipeline/logicappstandard-terraform.yml. Within the Yaml file , the "AzureCLI@2" task is used to send the request by Azure CLI command. task to send the patch request. Special Tips: To use the terraform task during Azure pipeline run, it's required to install terraform extension (which you can find in the following link): https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.custom-terraform-tasks Terraform tasks: Reference: Deploy Logic App Standard with Terraform and Azure DevOps pipelines https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs/resources/app_service https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/devops/pipelines
Designing and running a Generative AI Platform based on Azure AI Gateway
Are you in a platform team who has been tasked with building an AI Platform to serve the needs of your internal consumers? What does that mean? It’s a daunting challenge to be set, and even harder if you’re operating in a highly regulated environment. As enterprises scale out usage of Generative AI past a few initial use-cases they will face into a new set of challenges - scaling, onboarding, security and compliance to name a few. In this article we outline a set of common requirements and provide a reference implementation for an AI Platform.📢 Announcing Public Preview: Organizational Templates in Azure Logic Apps
We’re excited to announce the Public Preview of Organizational Templates in Azure Logic Apps— empowering teams to author, share, and reuse automation patterns across their organization. With this release, we’re also rolling out a brand-new UI experience to easily create templates directly from your workflows—no manual packaging required! What Are Logic Apps Templates Templates in Azure Logic Apps help teams accelerate workflow creation by providing prebuilt, reusable automation patterns. They package one or more workflows—along with their connections, parameters, and documentation—into easy-to-deploy blueprints. There are two main types: Workflow Templates – Reusable single-workflow blueprints. Accelerators – Bundled solutions made up of multiple related workflows. These templates have been available in the Logic Apps through the Templates gallery, and many Microsoft-authored templates are already published for common design and integration patterns. Watch the walkthrough of Templates: Templates Experience in Logic Apps What's NEW! Organizational Templates: Standardize, Share, and Scale Organizational Templates enable teams to publish Logic Apps templates scoped to their own environment—allowing you to standardize integration patterns, share best practices, and reuse solutions across your organization without making them public. This feature is especially useful for enterprises looking to promote consistency while still retaining flexibility. Whether you're embedding internal APIs, handling domain-specific logic, or enforcing architectural patterns, organizational templates help you scale with control. You can now: Create templates using a simple UI experience Scope templates to your organization so they’re only visible within your Azure tenant/subscription Publish in test or production mode, enabling safe experimentation and gated rollout Use internal systems and APIs directly in templates without needing to externalize them Download template packages and optionally contribute them to the public GitHub repo With lifecycle management built in, you can mature templates from test to prod, giving teams the structure they need while retaining agility. Access Control and Visibility Across Subscriptions Templates are a first-class Azure resource, which means they: Integrate with Azure RBAC - you can manage access permissions just like any other Azure resource Respect subscription and role scopes - developers only see templates they have permission to access in the selected subscriptions This gives you enterprise-grade control over who can author, view, and deploy templates—giving you full control on how you want to organize the templates and ensuring that the right teams get access to the right automation patterns. Getting Started Before creating a template, make sure the workflow is already deployed. Additionally, ensure that any values meant to be provided by the user are properly parameterized, rather than hardcoded. Create a new Template resource Start by creating a new Logic Apps Template resource in the Azure portal. Go to Manage > Manage Workflows Use this section to add the workflows you want to include in the template. You can add either Standard or Consumption Logic Apps. For each workflow provide the required details. Review connectors Connection information is automatically pulled from the workflows. You can view the connectors, but no action is needed at this stage. Provide parameter details For each parameter, fill in the required metadata such as Display Name and Description to help users understand what values to provide. Review template details On the Profile page, you'll see how your template will appear in the Gallery—including its Title (Display name), Connectors, Tags, and other metadata. When you Save, validation runs automatically at this step. If there are any errors (e.g., unparameterized values or unsupported actions), they must be fixed before publishing. Save progress anytime You can save your template at any point—even in an incomplete state or with validation errors. Publish to Testing/Production When you are ready to test, you can publish to Testing. Once testing is complete, you can change the template’s status from Testing to Production. This will update its availability and visibility in the Templates Gallery. Walkthrough/Feedback We believe that templates are the foundation of repeatable, scalable automation. With organizational templates and intuitive authoring, we’re making it easier than ever to bring consistency and velocity to your Logic Apps development. Start building, start sharing—within your team or with the world. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions. Here is a demo video that shows detailed walkthrough of this feature.🎙️ Announcement: Logic Apps connectors in Azure AI Search for Integrated Vectorization
We’re excited to announce that Azure Logic Apps connectors are now supported within AI Search as data sources for ingestion into Azure AI Search vector stores. This unlocks the ability to ingest unstructured documents from a variety of systems—including SharePoint, Amazon S3, Dropbox and many more —into your vector index using a low-code experience. This new capability is powered by Logic Apps templates, which orchestrate the entire ingestion pipeline—from extracting documents to embedding generation and indexing—so you can build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications with ease. Grounding AI with RAG: Why Document Ingestion Matters Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a cornerstone technique for building grounded and trustworthy AI systems. Instead of generating answers from the model’s pretraining alone, RAG applications fetch relevant information from external knowledge bases—giving LLMs access to accurate and up-to-date enterprise data. To power RAG, enterprises need a scalable way to ingest and index documents into a vector store. Whether you're working with policy documents, legal contracts, support tickets, or financial reports, getting this content into a searchable, semantic format is step one. Simplified Ingestion with Integrated Vectorization Azure AI Search’s Integrated Vectorization capability automates the process of turning raw content into semantically indexed vectors: Chunking: Documents are split into meaningful text segments Embedding: Each chunk is transformed into a vector using an embedding model like text-embedding-3-small or a custom model Indexing: Vectors and associated metadata are written into a searchable vector store Projection: Metadata is preserved to enable filtering, ranking, and hybrid queries This eliminates the need to build or maintain custom pipelines, making it significantly easier to adopt RAG in production environments. Ingest from Anywhere: Logic Apps + AI Search With today’s release, we’re extending ingestion to a variety of new data sources by integrating Logic Apps connectors directly with AI Search. This allows you to retrieve unstructured content from enterprise systems and seamlessly ingest it into the vector store. Here’s how the ingestion process works with Logic Apps: Connect to Source Systems Using prebuilt connectors, Logic Apps can fetch content from various data sources including Sharepoint document libraries, messages from Service Bur or Azure Queues, files from OneDrive or SFTP Server and more. You can trigger ingestion on demand or at schedule. Parse and Chunk Documents Next, Logic Apps uses built-in AI-powered document parsing actions to extract raw text. This is followed by the “Chunk Document” action, which: Tokenizes the document based on language model-friendly units Splits the content into semantically coherent chunks This ensures optimal chunk size for downstream embedding and retrieval. Note – Currently we default to a chunk size of 5000 in the workflows created for document ingestion. We’ll be updating the default chunk size to a smaller number in our next release. Meanwhile, you can update it in the workflow if you need a smaller chunk size. Generate Embeddings with Azure OpenAI The chunked text is then passed to the Azure OpenAI connector, where the text-embedding-3-small or another configured embedding model is used to generate high-dimensional vector representations. These vectors capture the semantic meaning of the content and are key to enabling accurate retrieval in RAG applications. Write to Azure AI Search Finally, the embeddings, along with any relevant metadata (e.g., document title, tags, timestamps), are written into the AI Search index. The index schema is created for you ——and can include fields for filtering, sorting, and semantic ranking. Logic Apps Templates: Fast Start, Flexible Design To help you get started, we’ve created Logic Apps templates specifically for RAG ingestion. These templates: Include all the steps mentioned above Are customizable if you want to update the default configuration Whether you’re ingesting thousands of PDFs from SharePoint or syncing files from Amazon S3 bucket, these templates provide a production-grade foundation for building your pipeline. Getting Started Here is step by step detailed documentation to get started using Integrated Vectorization with Logic Apps data sources 👉 Get started with Logic Apps data sources for AI Search ingestion 👉 Learn more about Integrated Vectorization in Azure AI Search We'd Love Your Feedback We're just getting started. Tell us: What other data sources would you like to ingest? What enhancements would make ingestion easier for your use case? Are there specific industry templates or formats we should support? 👉 Reply to this post or share your ideas through our feedback form We’re building this with you—so your feedback helps shape the future of AI-powered automation and RAG.Automating Logic Apps connections to Dynamics 365 using Bicep
I recently worked with a customer to show the ease of integration between Logic Apps and the Dataverse as part of Dynamics 365 (D365). The flows of integrations we looked at included: Inbound: D365 updates pushed in near real-time into a Logic Apps HTTP trigger. Outbound: A Logic App sending HTTP requests to retrieve data from D365. The focus of this short post will be on the outbound use case, showing how to use the Microsoft Dataverse connector with Bicep automation. A simple use case The app shown here couldn't be much simpler: it's a Timer recurrence which uses the List Rows action to retrieve data from D365, here's an snip from an execution: Impressed? 🤣 Getting this setup clicking-through the Azure Portal is fairly simple. The connector example uses a Service Principal to authenticate the Logic App to D365 (OAuth being an alternative), so several parameters are needed: Additionally you'll be required to configure an Environment parameter for D365, which is a URL for the target environment, e.g. https://meaingful-url-for-your-org.crm.dynamics.com. Configuring the Service Principal may be the most troublesome part and is outside of the scope of this Bicep automation, and would be considered a separate task per-environment. This page may help you complete the required identity creation. So... what about the Bicep? You can see the Bicep files in the GitHub repository here. We have to deploy 2 resources: resource laworkflow 'Microsoft.Logic/workflows@2019-05-01' = { } ... resource commondataserviceApiConnection 'Microsoft.Web/connections@2016-06-01' = { } ... The first Microsoft.Logic/workflows resource deploys the app configuration, and the second Microsoft.Web/connections resource deploys the Dataverse connection used by the app. The relationship between resources after deployment will be: The Bicep for such a simple example took some trial and error to get right and the documentation is far from clear, something I will try to get improved. In hindsight it seems straight forward, these snippets outline where I struggled. A snip from the connections resource: resource commondataserviceApiConnection 'Microsoft.Web/connections@2016-06-01' = { name: 'commondataservice' ... properties: { displayName: 'la-to-d365-commondataservice' api: { id: '/subscriptions/${subscription().subscriptionId}/providers/Microsoft.Web/locations/${location}/managedApis/commondataservice' ... The property at path properties.api.id is all important here. Now looking at the workflows resource: resource laworkflow 'Microsoft.Logic/workflows@2019-05-01' = { name: logicAppName ... parameters: { '$connections': { value: { commondataservice: { connectionName: 'commondataservice' connectionId: resourceId('Microsoft.Web/connections', 'commondataservice') id: commondataserviceApiConnection.properties.api.id } } } ... Here we see the important parameters for the connection configuration, creating the relationship between the resources: connectionName: reference the name of the connection as specified in the resource. connectionId: uses the Bicep resourceId function to obtain the deployed Azure resource ID. id: references the properties.api.id value specified earlier. So fairly simple, but understanding what value is required where isn't straight forward and that's where documentation improvement is needed. Secret Management An extra area I looked at was improved secret management in Bicep. Values required for the Service Principal must be handled securely, so how do you achieve this? The approach I took was to use the az.getSecret Bicep function within the .bicepparm file, allowing for a secret to be read from an Azure KeyVault at deployment time. This has the advantage of separating the main template file from the parameters it uses. The KeyVault used is pre-provisioned which stores the Service Principal secrets and not deployed as part of this Bicep code. using './logicapps.bicep' ... param commondataserviceEnvironment = getSecret( readEnvironmentVariable('AZURE_KV_SUBSCRIPTION_ID'), readEnvironmentVariable('AZURE_KV_RESOURCE_GROUP'), readEnvironmentVariable('AZURE_KV_NAME'), 'commondataserviceClientSecret') This example obtains the commondataserviceClientSecret parameter value from Key Vault at the given Subscription, Resource Group, Key Vault name, and secret name. You must grant Azure Resource Manager access to the Key Vault, enabled by the setting shown below: The Subscription ID, Resource Group name, and Key Vault name are read from environment variables using the readEnvironmentVariable function, showing another possibility for configuration alongside individual .bicepparm file per-environment. In Summary While this was a very simple Logic Apps use case, I hope it ties together the areas of connector automation, configuration, and security, helping you accelerate the time to a working solution. Happy integrating!Word Online no OfficeTemplate library - does anyone have this yet ?
Hi Everyone, In January we ran the Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary officetemplatelibrary powershell command. Like many tenants it took over 48 hours to work, but in the end when I open Word, click new, click Tenant name, I can see the docx files in the SharePoint library specified in the powershell command. Great our users of Word Desktop can see the templates and use them. So can our Excel and PowerPoint users. BUT Word Online users can't see the OfficeTemplate library when they open a new document from https://www.office.com/launch/word They can see all the publicly visible templates but not our OfficeTemplate library as a folder. NOTE PowerPoint online users DO see the OfficeTemplates library as a folder when they start a new presentation from https://www.office.com/launch/powerpoint QUESTION Does anyone have the OfficeTemplate library folder in Word or Excel online yet ? Just like exists in for PowerPoint online after you've run the Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary officetemplatelibrary powershell command.
