1. WPC019 - Building integrations with the Microsoft Bot Framework & Azure Functions
Giancarlo Lelli

2. Integration – Cloud’s Biggest Challenge
Although cloud evangelists are quick to point out the benefits of cloud computing technologies, enterprise leaders have identified integration as a major obstacle to successfully adopting and deploying Software as a Service (SaaS) and other web-based applications. While SaaS applications promise greater flexibility and lower costs, they also present new challenges to the enterprise. With the procurement of each new SaaS application, enterprise data becomes segregated into cloud silos, a problem exacerbated by the increasing number of vendors in the SaaS market and the ease of obtaining such services. –

3. Integration – Key points to consider
Security: remains a concern for cloud users and is complicated by the challenge of integration. A cloud integration solution must be capable of authenticating and authorizing access to resources, both in the cloud and on-premises.
Flexibility and Scalability: Cloud integration solutions must be able to support a variety of integration flows moving in both directions across the cloud and enterprise and scale up as the number of endpoints increases.
Management: Cloud integration solutions should include rich monitoring capabilities in order to provide the visibility and control over information flows and other performance attributes currently lacking in SaaS applications.
Open Platform: Cloud integration solutions should be open platforms that allow enterprises to easily migrate on or off and seamlessly integrate their applications and data. 
Management: For enterprise users, SaaS applications offer convenience and ease of use while shifting the burden of maintenance and upgrades to the provider. The trade-off, however, is that users have much less visibility and control over their SaaS applications, especially when it comes to integration. –

4. Microsoft Enterprise Integration Services
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016: Hybrid Connectivity, support for the latest Microsoft products, improvements in HA.
Microsoft Logic Apps: Logic Apps as an enterprise grade integration platform that brings core BizTalk server capabilities to the cloud.
Microsoft Flow: a brand new SaaS offering for automating workflows across the growing number of applications and SaaS services that business users rely on. –

5. But IMHO there is more… Azure Functions Azure Bot Service
An event-based serverless compute experience to accelerate your development. It can scale based on demand and you pay only for the resources you consume.
Intelligent, serverless bot service that scales on demand.
Serverless architectures refer to applications that significantly depend on third-party services (knows as Backend as a Service or "BaaS") or on custom code that's run in ephemeral containers (Function as a Service or "FaaS"). By using these ideas, and by moving much behavior to the front end, such architectures remove the need for the traditional 'always on' server system sitting behind an application. Depending on the circumstances, such systems can significantly reduce operational cost and complexity at a cost of vendor dependencies and (at the moment) immaturity of supporting services. - source. Fowler’s Blog –

6. And finally our SaaS – Dynamics 365
Microsoft combines Dynamics CRM and ERP solutions into one cloud-enabled product offering. The Dynamics 365 Apps are Sales, Field Service, Customer Service, Project Service Automation, Marketing, Financials, and Operations.
Announcement
dynamics-365-now-generally-available
SDK Download
Official Blog –

7. Setting the stage A simple customer support scenario–

8. We are going to build an integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
A users will talk to our bot asking for support (broken item).
He will upload his purchase receipt and explain what issues is he facing
And then we create a support ticket inside the CRM
We will use an Azure Function to help the bot verify some data
Demo outline
Bot Documentation: –

9. Demo Azure Functions, Azure Bot Service, Dynamics CRM & Tooling–

10. Final thoughts UX, Maintainability & Future development–

11. Final thoughts - UX Define the problem Understand your users
Identify your bot UX interactions
Design a bot UX conversational flow
Promote your bot and continuously iterate
Focus on user expectations
Support full human conversation –

12. Final thoughts - Maintainability
Platform as a Service (PaaS) abstracts away the underlying hardware and infrastructure so that application code can more easily be hosted, deployed, and managed with much less overhead than traditional hosting. Serverless architecture takes PaaS to the most extreme, by fully abstracting away the server in such a way that a single function of code can be hosted, deployed, run, and managed without even having to maintain a full application.
Final thoughts - Maintainability –

13. Contatti OverNet Education
Tel
@overnete
Contatti OverNet Education –

14. Thanks!  Giancarlo Lelli gcarlo.lelli@live.com
Microsoft MVP – Avanade Italy
aspitalia.com/autori/Giancarlo_Lelli.aspx
@itsonlyGianca
linkedin.com/in/giancarlolelli –