Generate Documents using Microsoft Syntex in SharePoint using Power Automate

Today I had a look into how to generate documents from lists items using Microsoft Syntex with Power Automate. In this post all the steps.

Setup Microsoft Syntex billing

Before you can get started with Syntex, the billing will have to be setup.

Microsoft Syntex requires you to use an Azure Pay As You Go subscription. This is probably one of the main factors that will hold people back from using this great solution. But once your administrator has put this in place you are ready to go.

As a global administrator, you will have to go to the Admin Center and then in Setup find the Files and content section. Then click on the Use content AI with Microsoft Syntex.

All you need to do is setup billing.

All you will need to supply is the subscription, a resource group ( you will need to create this within your Azure Portal) and supply the region that you want to run Syntex in.

Then you will have to wait a while, before Syntex is fully setup.

If anything goes wrong then you might bump into this issue:

The Something went wrong. Please try again later. message is very little help.

If you do get the above message then simply hit the save button again and you will find that the red error will turn into a green success message. So there might simply be some issues with the setup process timing out.

Setup Microsoft Syntex

Now that the billing has been sorted out, we’re going to go back to the Admin Center Setup to configure Microsoft Syntex. Note that not all these options need to be configured to get to my end goal of running my flow to generate a document. However, I didn’t want to skip the Syntex options in this post either.

By clicking on the Manage Microsoft Syntex. We can now configure the following options

• Content center
• Prebuilt document processing
• Unstructured document processing
• Optical character recognition
• Image tagging
• Content assembly

Create a Content Center

I’m going to start with the creation of the Content Center

Nothing exciting here. It is just creating another SharePoint site ;like you would do in the SharePoint Admin Center.

Once your site is created the site should look like this:

Configure Prebuilt document processing

The next part of our Syntex journey is to configure prebuilt document processing.

Syntex currently supports the following prebuild document models:

• Contracts
• Invoices
• Receipts

In my case I only want these processing models to appear with a demo site that I have created. But if you want these mdoels to appear in many site you might want to use the csv import option that is available.

In a similar way you can also make the following available for selected SharePoint sites.

• Unstructured document processing
• Optical Character recognition
• Image Tagging
• Content Assembly

Configure a SharePoint Site for prebuilt processing templates

Within the Classify and extract option in your document library, you can create the models on the library.

The first time you create a model, you will ned to activate document classification

Now depending on the configuration that you went through earlier, you will see some or model option.

In this case I’m going to create invoice processing

Simply click on next and then supply the Model name and description

Then click on create, which will get you to a file upload page

Now you can add a few invoice examples. It will be important to get a decent set of examples, to make sure that you get the model trained/tested with the right data.

Now depending on the quality of your invoices uploaded, you will get a good or a bad result.

Each element found on your invoices will need to be confirmed.

Create a Document Library and a SharePoint list

That is enough for now about enabling Syntex. I’m going back to my aim of creating a flow to generate a document from the creation of a list item.

Once I configured Syntex I’ve been given an additional option. Create Modern Template.

The Create modern template option will get me to select my template document. I’m going to pick th Invoice template that I prepared before.

Using the Edit New menu in my Document Library I will be adding a new document template.

As shown above we can have text fields, but it is also possible to create data fields, or number fields or a few other types of fields.

And as you go through the fields you can specify the type of the fields.

Once you have completed the fields, make sure that you publish the template. If you decide to save the template and want to publish the template later, then please use the Edit new menu, where you can find the draft templates back.

Configuring flows to create documents

I’ve started by creating a SharePoint list and I will be using this list to generate invoices and every time I create a new item in the list.

I want a document to be generated using Power Automate. Just to make sure that my Invoice template has been published I check the New menu in my library.

Creating a flow to use a modern template

Now the easy part. I’ve got my site, document library and list. All I now need to do to generate a document is to create a two step flow.

And my document is created as soon as I create an item in my list.