Microsoft Flow guides: improve SharePoint modern pages approvals with Azure Content Moderation

SharePoint modern pages support approvals with preconfigured Microsoft Flow. What if we want to partially automate and improve this process with some smart services, which will automatically reject approval if a page contains not appropriate content. Or add a piece of information to an approver to pay special attention to a particular page? This is a nice place for Azure cognitive services to come into the play! 

For your convenience, the whole flow in png format is available by this link

Azure Content Moderator

Azure provides a lot of different cognitive services and one of them is Content Moderator:

The Azure Content Moderator API is a cognitive service that checks text, image, and video content for material that is potentially offensive, risky, or otherwise undesirable.

Sounds interesting! To be more precise, currently Content Moderator has below core features:

  • Detects profanity in over 100 languages. It includes profane words based on a built-in list. You have an option to provide your own inclusion or exclusion lists with your specific terms. 
  • Text classification. It detects a potential presence of language that may be considered sexually explicit or adult or offensive in certain situations. Text receives classification from 0 to 1. The higher the score, the higher the model is predicting that the category may be applicable (text is offensive or adult etc.)
  • Detects Personally Identifiable Information (PII) - any presence of emails, SSN, emails, phones, addresses in text. This is sensitive information and sometimes it's not desirable to have it available publicly.
  • Image and video moderation detects adult or racy content, face detection, and some other features

That's just basics. The content moderator is able to do a lot more cool things. More...

Microsoft Flow beginners guides: how to detect that a page is a SharePoint news page

Modern SharePoint pages support built-in approval flows. While it's a cool feature, probably you don't need approval for all pages, but for news posts only. The question is how to detect that a page is a news post page? 

It turned out that it's not difficult at all! Every modern site page has a field called Promoted State. It holds information if a page was promoted as news or not. For regular site pages, the value of this field will be empty, for news post pages it will be equal to 1 (if a page is not yet published) or 2. The trick is to check the state of this field and make a final decision. More...