Ones to watch (#33)

News 

• William Dorrington 🤘 on LinkedIn: #canvasapp
• Mastering Timeless AI Strategy: A Deep Dive into Data Readiness and Industry Transformation with Chris, William, Andrew and Ana - Microsoft Business Applications Podcast by Mark Smith
• "What Microsoft employees say about Copilot behind closed doors" on LinkedIn by Jukka Niiranen
• Introducing Code View in Power Apps Studio (Public Preview) by Marcel Ferreira
• "UI Design Tips" on LinkedIn by Anna Black
• Power Platform Apps UX & UI | Groups | LinkedIn
• Flow Runs taking too much space in Dataverse? Let's clean this up! By Éric Sauvé
• Power Pages Lookup to Select - Dancing with CRM by  Oleksandr Olashyn
• "The Microsoft Partner is dead" on LinkedIn by Mark Smith

 BOOSTquest from last week highlights our favorite blog posts | LinkedIn

Listen to Lisa Crosbie and Nick Doelman on Resco Next 2024 | Resco posted on the topic | LinkedIn

Events

Power Platform Community Conference

Nordic Summit

Scottish Summit

Xs7Qi6xhVVizEk3TWSuw

Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of Power Platform BOOST!
Thank you for buying us a coffee: buymeacoffee.com

Podcast home page: https://powerplatformboost.com
Email: hello@powerplatformboost.com

Follow us!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/powerplatboost
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powerplatformboost/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/powerplatboost/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090444536122
Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@powerplatboost 

 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

[0:00] Can you adjust it a bit? Because if you see the ceiling, it's kind of crooked. It's. Is that better? You need to adjust it. Well, yeah. Okay. It's okay. No, because I have it on a tripod, so I can do whatever you want. Right. Because the only, I was getting a bit seasick because you were kind of on the, what's the, no, because I could see the ceiling. No, we don't want to see the ceiling. No, yeah. No, it's better now. It's all good. Okay. Hi, Nick. Are we over-recording? Yeah. Hi. Hi, Nick. How are you doing?

[0:36] Music.

[0:55] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast. Your timely source of Power Platform news and updates with your hosts, Nick Dolman and Ulrike Ackerbeck. I'm good, thank you. How are you? I'm good. Where are you? Where am I? Good question. I'm actually in Prague right now. I'm in three weeks into a four-week European tour. I've done three events. I have one more to go. And yeah just i think living the dream rock and roll lifestyle you know new towns seeing places.

[1:37] Yeah nice okay so what does prague have to offer what's the what's the coolest thing you've seen so far uh so far yesterday i went to the prague castle uh just you know wandering out that was built like hundreds and hundreds of years ago we don't have any old stuff like this in canada so So every time I see it, I'm like a kid. I'm like, wow. And I'm taking, I look at my camera roll on my phone. I have like probably a thousand pictures, you know, going into big old cathedrals that were built like 700 years ago and just seeing all like the stained glass and this and that and the sunlight going through. And then of course the old castles and, you know, and then there was also like doing changing of the guard, things were happening. The weather was amazing. And then just, you know, the views out over the city and traveling around in the city, walking the old city streets, the cobblestone streets in the narrow and.

[2:27] Like this is to me this is europe all sort of everything you could have imagined and then you know compared to you know me growing up in canada where yeah the cities are big and wide and noisy and i don't know they lack a soul so yeah it's good yeah yeah it's like i talked about when he was in you know when we were traveling the last time it's uh every european city kind of have their own identity uh so you can you know be dropped in any city in europe really and you You could kind of feel or see or know where you are based on, you know, the feeling and the identity of the city. So, yeah, I really get that. And, you know, so when are you moving here? Is this a trial? Is it that four week moving to Europe trial? And if it goes well, then you're coming to move here permanently. I also saw some chatter in one of the groups going, well, do you live here now?

[3:21] Yeah, we'll see. Maybe someday. Yeah. Yeah. A conversation for another day. Working on it. Yeah, yeah.

[3:30] Yeah, all right. Okay, that's so good. So the next event coming up is EPPC, right, for you? It is EPPC. Yeah. And unfortunately, I'm not able to go. We were supposed to go. We were supposed to do recap and record a podcast and have all sorts of fun. And I cannot go, unfortunately. So I'll have to stay here and cancel my session and our joint session. You're going to do that by yourself. Unfortunately, these things happen. It's out of my control. And I will make sure to be back next year. So, yeah, that's life sometimes. Family first and all that yeah absolutely and i'm sorry to hear that um and yeah it's unfortunate but don't worry i got our 10 tips and tricks i will do that by myself it'll be it'll be weird having without having you beside me to kind of play off and everything like that but uh we'll make it work and uh yeah and actually i think i took over your other slot now i'm not doing it about styling because i am not qualified or responsible though i take that level of responsibility responsibility. So I will be doing the session on the same one, the same session that I did in, I did it at Collab Days recently, and also did it at Dynamics Con, the Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Power Pages. So if you missed me in Denver, and you miss me in the Netherlands, you can catch me in Brussels on that particular session.

[4:59] Absolutely amazing. Fantastic. Thank you so much for picking up that session slot. And yeah, I'm sure they're going to have a great, you're going to have a great time yeah no problem i know you do the same for me so i may have to you may have to return the favor someday yeah more than happy to all right let's dive into this week's news and updates because there are a lot and this week we're kind of going in and just having a few things on our uh on our one notes um notes here uh thinking oh do we have enough content and then sitting down scrolling through all the socials i just now we have too many things there is always new stuff going on um.

[5:40] And just wanted to start off by shouting out to Will Durrington for one. Let's start with Will. Because I find my LinkedIn feed is now way, way better with his small news and updates that he kind of posts very regularly a couple of times a week. It seems like he's in a role where he's probably using AR or something because the text is a bit off sometimes. Sometimes there is an indent and it seems like it's kind of copy and copy paste, not throwing will under the bus or anything. We're all using AI these days, but the content's good. So, for instance, one of the things that he highlighted this last week was the new clean up your data. So now in Canvas App Design Studio, you're not on the data workspace. You now have a little brush button or icon you can click and it will remove data. data is not currently in using your app for you. And it's small things like that. So it's a description and a screenshot and a link to where you can see more. And that's what we need, right? That's what we're trying to do. So I love the content you're putting out. Well, just keep it going. It's really, really helpful.

[6:53] Also, he has a post about the new, create new table experience that's in preview. The covalent formula bar, Really, Will is one to follow, especially on LinkedIn. Yeah, for sure. And I saw Will and AJ Safar did a session at Dynamics Mines in Slovenia that I was just at two weeks ago. And...

[7:17] An amazing session. Those two. Just together. And again, Will showed some of that stuff with the new data, the data designer, and I tried it out myself. It's, yeah, it's definitely missing a few things still, but definitely way better than the let's create a single app, single table app. But yeah, Will, we all know Will's an amazing guy. So yeah, keep up this great content and just keep being an awesome person overall.

[7:43] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So you want to talk a bit about the the new table creation experience, because that is the ERD diagram experience for creating tables these days, right? It's a new preview feature for for Dataverse more than Power Apps.

[8:01] Yes, it's really cool. So before, so you need to enable, you need to go to the US preview environments for this currently. Hopefully, this will be rolled out to other environments real soon. But you know, when you go into the copilot and say, hey, you want to build an app, and it's all the one we've all tried it, and it's built that single table app, and we're kind of looking at like, okay, this is too simple. Let me just do it myself. self. This actually starts off saying, hey, but let's create some data first. Now you're beginning to talk my language because you know me. I'm all about me. Don't start creating an app. Start working on your data model first. Get that sorted out. Like you've heard me rant in actual project meetings and whatever about the data model. And it's something I'm going to keep preaching. But this is pretty cool because immediately it says, okay, start describing the tables that you want in your app. So it's like, yeah, I need a project table. I need a project task table. I need a your resources table. I need all of these things. And you describe that. And then it creates those tables and begins to draw the lines between the boxes like an ERD diagram. And you can continue, you can modify those relationships a little bit and begin to build out your data model. Now, is it perfect? No, because it's missing a few things. If there's certain field types and trying to link in existing tables is doesn't seem to do very well because I asked it to, Hey, can you link in the contact table? And it said, certainly, and built its own contact table.

[9:23] So things like that. So again, like all these, like this is the thing. These co-pilots are still version 0.9 or 0.8, and they're coming along. This is already the next evolution in things.

[9:36] Now, still with the data models, I'm still trying to get to a point where we can fully design. Like, it'd be great. Because this, to me, this is what we've talked about before.

[9:45] This is Copilot saving us all that tedious work of building all those tables and those fields and those forms and going through, click, click, click, creating all that stuff. It just takes a long time to kind of recreate that data model that we might have done on paper or on a whiteboard or using other tools, which, you know, and this is something I'm actually going to show off a little bit in my session on EPPC. See on the co-pilot what i'm doing is i'm using mermaid along with mural boards to create an erd diagram like we said we did that the other day in our project i kind of whipped up an erd diagram using those tools and it was just fantastic very quickly and during a team meeting we're able to visualize what those changes meant that we were because we needed to make some changes to our app It made me to change things around and it just made things so rapid and fast. This is what I think AI is great for, is beginning to get some of that tedious stuff out of the way. So I know we've kind of segued from the Dataverse data modeler to some of the other tools, but I think take a look at some of these other tools to enhance building your apps and power apps. And eventually I see the co-pilots built within Dataverse probably incorporating the exact same features. So we're beginning, we can see glimpses of the future and other tools. Hopefully that will show up within co-pilots within the Power Platform as well. So exciting times.

[11:10] Strap yourselves in. This is going to be amazing.

[11:14] Yeah. And for what I wanted to do is actually then start to give me advice, right? So you have that, if you just imagine this in the future, you have that ERD diagram type experience for building out your data model. And then imagine AI looking at this and working alongside you on this, prompting you to say, this looks good, but you have to consider the complexity of the security model that you have to build alongside this. What if we do this instead? I have an idea. What if we connect these two tables instead of this? Maybe it can give you some suggestion in terms of usability.

[11:55] I see what you're doing here, but if you want to publish this on a PowerPages site, the usability would be poor because of this relational database you created here. What if we did this instead? This is what I want AI to do for me. When I can get Copilot to that level, then it's actually adding to my existing knowledge. It's not just enabling me to do what I already know how to do faster, but it's actually enhancing the quality of the work that we do. Thinking ahead and also making sure that the data model that we create is not, and this is something I'm going to, this is a segue to another thing, but not future-proof, but future-ready. Yeah. Because it has to do with data quality and data health, data hygiene. Yeah.

[12:45] I've heard so many places recently that AI can only get you so far on existing data. A lot of it is because we have poor data quality and poor data hygiene in our data centers. Because for 10 years now, we've been herding data. We've been gathering everything and just stacking it in a box or cupboard somewhere, thinking one day we're going to put AI on top of this and it's going to be all sorted out. But your AI capabilities will only get you so far if your data model is not right. And that goes for customizations in Dynamics 365 and business applications as well. We've talked about this before.

[13:26] Now more than ever is the time to reduce the amount of customizations that you do as much as you can. The more out-of-the-box and standard data model and standard stuff you can do now, the more AI capabilities you'll unlock in the future. The more you customize, the bigger the chance are that you'll kind of paint yourself into a corner where AI can't reach you.

[13:53] And the segue is to the AI white paper that Andrew and Anna Welsh has created. They published that in January. We saw a session at ColorCloud where Anna and Andrew presented their white paper. And there's a podcast episode on Mark Smith's podcast, the Microsoft Business Applications podcast, where Will Durrington, Chris Huntingford, Anna, Andrew, and Mark talk about this white paper. And it's all about AI and data hygiene right they talk about the five pillars of AI the incremental and the differential work of AI and and they also shout out to our podcast I love that Anna just picked up something we we talked about in one of our future previous episodes about Fabric and how you can now have a Power Automate flow triggered by an event in Power BI and how that allows you to kind of be alerted when AI finds out about a pattern, sees a pattern in your data. Something is about to happen and can now start to alert you before incidents happen. And looking at data from that perspective, it's now imagine what you can do, right?

[15:19] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I, the more I dive into this, the more my mind kind of opens up to the possibilities that are out there really, because now it's, and I love the conversation that they're having in this podcast episode as well. It's more about, so it's kind of, because you look at AI now and how organizations are adopting it and see more and more, there's kind of two layers. So one is we want to just go for the low hanging fruit. We want to look at the simple data. And then on the other hand, you have those who wants to dive in and kind of make it very complex and just embrace everything. I think the magic is in between the two.

[16:01] And they also talk about health and medical professionals and how much AI, generative AI is helping them just by having knowledge of the language that the doctors speak and And being able to digest diagnosis and patient data and writing up what should be in your, what's it called, the medical records, right? The charts, yeah. And for the, yeah, so showing the doctors, this is what I wrote. Is it okay? And for the doctors to approve it, kind of shaving off hours of their workday. And imagine the impact that that can have on society when there's so little medical professionals are very stretched these days all over the world, shaving off a couple of hours of their workday is kind of significant.

[16:51] So, and then that is really entry level, right? It's just, it's digesting data and it's creating that post and it's so entry level, right? It's so easy and makes such a huge impact. And that's me 10 minutes ranting about co-pilots and AI. On a positive, on a positive, usually you're ranting against the machine, but now you're basically like, this is. I know. And this is me all every week, right? I'm just back and forth, back and forth on all of these things. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good. No, but you're absolutely right. I can't, I can't disagree with any of that, of course. And then going right back to where we started the data modeling about you asking advice, is this, you know, you know, is this data model good? What if, you know, good for a PowerPages site? Well, the thing is, I want to do some reporting on this. Should our data model change for that? What about security concerns I have with this data model? What about UX design issues I'm going to have with this data model?

[17:47] You know, I had a whole session at Dynamics Minds on data modeling. And these are the types of questions that, as a solution architect, we need to ask ourselves as we're building applications. Applications, having, again, a co-pilot kind of advising us going, hmm, if you're going to add this table, this also means you're going to have to add additional security roles and that kind of thing. Stuff that we don't sometimes discover until we're actually implementing the project or we're starting to do the design on our security roles and things like that. So again, the more proactive, if AI can help us be proactive in our design, all the better. So yeah, like I i said strap yourselves in folks we are in for a ride but again at the end of the day and this is my i'm not trying to i'm not trying to play devil's advocate here anything but yes co-pilot could be advising us on all of these things the security getting our data right getting our data model right um taking a lot of that tedious stuff out of the process and you do talk about the medical profession at the end of the day though we still need the doctors to look at that data that the ai AI is consolidated and brought down and make a judgment call. Human in the loop is so critical. Same for designing systems. Yes, AI can help us design a data model. I still need to know how data models work. Yes, Copilot can help generate some power effects. I still need to know how power effects, the syntax works, what it's going to do.

[19:15] Designing an app, UX design, we still need designers that know how people think and what the flow, what's going to make sense. So yes, co-pilot is going to help, but we still need to factor in the humans to make sure this is going to work. AI is a tool, not a solution. I have a slide on that in my presentation coming up at EPPC, the one on AI and co-pilots. It's about this whole topic, embracing co-pilots to help, but also being aware that this isn't the magic bullet that's going to turn into. Basically, we can just sit back and let it do all the work for us. Our work is going to is going to still be there but it's going to be slightly different yes we might get a lot more done but we still are going to need to use our brains more than anything because what we used to do by hand because we knew how now we're going to get machines to do it, we're going to need to make sure those machines are doing it correctly.

[20:07] So there's my rant. That's your rant. And another one that's also famous for rants is Yuka. And I just wanted to shout out, back and forth being positive and just kind of calling it for what it is. I saw one of Yuka's recent blog posts today, what Microsoft employees say about Copa behind closed doors. And that if that's not a clickbaity title, I don't know what is. Because, and he goes on to say, you know, how employees, and this is a public report that's come out that say these, it's not like you, because sharing inside information from Microsoft employees, but it comes across in the report that he's read. So, and the fatigue and the frustration around Microsoft only investing in putting co-pilots in everything and not investing enough in the product itself. Now, if you look at Canvas apps these days, it looks like it's kind of also a proof that Microsoft is investing in other areas as well. It's not just Copilot. If you look at the enhancements in terms of UI and UX and the new modern controls that are coming out, if you look at the code.

[21:21] Being what Scott and Marcel showed at Build, where you can copy and paste code in Canvas App Studio. Now, you're not able to edit the code in Studio Designer yet, but you will soon. And actually, now you can already copy someone's code and you can paste it. So I can grab Marcel has a blog post. We'll put a link to it in the show notes where he put some YAML in there and you can grab that YAML. You can paste it in your own Canvas app in a different geolocation, in a different environment, different tenant, and it works. And that is groundbreaking now we're getting somewhere the new prompt the file type that we talked about just the other week there are improvements here towards developers and this development platform is evolving a lot it's not just co-pilots um so and kind of just leveling out balancing out that conversation a bit and it's there it's there now i tried it last night it's really cool it opens up the yaml view um yeah and i would have loved i would love for it to open that up in vs code for the web very much like how we can edit power pages in vs code for the web.

[22:32] Um but already this is like you know the fact i can just click on any component this is on an app that i built two years ago and it's clicked on a component right click show code boom there's all the yaml and i'm like oh i can really go in and fine-tune things a little bit so yeah and or cut and paste or do all this other stuff that we do um and i'm not big like you know i don't i haven't done a lot of canvas apps up until recently so to me this is this is my happy place i guess you could say as a as a developer from way back um yeah and sharing i mean imagine what this will do for isvs and other you know you can now create a very cool component and you can share it in your app and someone can just copy it and paste it into their own app and boom it works so in terms of reusability and all of that and just having that in source code and you know it it unlocks so many many different dimensions in terms of developing Canada's apps. It's just mind blowing to this point. And also in terms of AX and AI, I just wanted to shout out to Anna Black as well. We shout out to Anna in a couple of recent episodes as well, because her work on LinkedIn, especially now with these document things that you can flip through.

[23:47] She posted something this week about Power Apps, apps, UI tips for Canvas apps, for instance, that is more of a do's and don'ts in terms of UI in general and not only for Canvas apps. And I love the small little posts like that. It's perfect. And then she also posted, I saw in one of the groups on LinkedIn, Power Platform Apps UX UI LinkedIn group. So if you're into this space at all, that's a group to follow. I'll put a link to the group in the show notes and make sure to follow Anna Black. Yeah, for sure. And Anna, she was on the 90-day mentoring challenge I was doing with Mark Smith as well. So shout out to that. I think I went day 89 and a half. I'm almost done. And Mark, I will do that testimonial video that you keep asking me about. So on that too. Cool. And then both of us, speaking of other little helpful tips and things like this, our good friend Eric Sauvé noticed that his Dataverse exploded overnight.

[24:50] Yeah, it's a short video. It's really worthwhile watching. This is me because I'm not a Dataverse developer at all or a Dynamics developer. So I learned a lot of new things by Eric's video just by watching what he did. So first of all, we've talked about the flow runs before. Yeah.

[25:09] So it's a new feature that logs all of your flow runs in a new flow runs table in Dataverse. So it will store all of that as rows. Now, in a huge existing environment like the one Eric is governing, that meant 12 gigabytes of data in Dataverse in a month. And he showed the graph. It went like that. Yeah. Yeah. So the video is about, you know, if Flores is taking up too much space in Dataverse, this is how to clean it up. So first he shows you how to go in and kind of edit. So it seems like the default is 28 days of retention. And he shows you how to get to the settings where you can set it to disable the feature altogether or maybe set it to 7 or 14 days instead. So it will kind of automatically delete the rows after that. And also how to go in to the organization settings table in Dataverse and set the time to live in seconds for flow runs. I didn't know about that. You can set that to zero, then it won't store anything. And also the bulk deletion, the bulk record deletion process. Now, this is probably something you know about that I've never seen, because I don't know anything about this, obviously.

[26:33] But it's a process. Can you tell the people about this? Because this is new to me, actually. And it's so old and so useful. How old is it? I don't know about it. If I don't know about it, then chances are that other people don't know about it. And I have a hunch that you've used this before. Oh, big time. Tell the people what it is. So how old is it? How old is it? Ask Dick. He'll know because he was there. so yeah yeah so because he's old hey hey.

[27:05] Just you wait. Wait till you become my age. Yeah, because then you'll be even older. I am timeless. Didn't think this through, did you? Yeah, of course. Fair enough. So bulk deletion, it is something that is back in the old CRM days. It came, I think, for version 3 or version 4. Anybody else can correct me if I'm wrong. But it's been in part of CRM forever, which the whole idea is just go in, have a whole bunch of records and run this process on a schedule to remove old records to keep your database down. So, of course, a lot of transaction records like tasks that have been completed or old cases that have been resolved or opportunities that were closed and those types of things. So that way you just go in, you set it up and it will bulk delete and really reduce your database size, essentially your dataverse size. It was even to the point where the bulk deletion was one of those things where you could set up the schedule in order for it to run. And Matt Wittemann, for those of you who don't know Matt, Matt used to be an MVP. He now works at Microsoft.

[28:20] He created what's called the Matt Wittemann technique. Technique whereas before of course now we can use power automate to run things on a schedule before power automate we couldn't run workflows on a schedule or if we did it was really awkward in the timing so what he did was a technique that if you wanted to run something on a schedule let's say every 30 days send out renewals out of your crm system he set it up that somehow with doing a workflow triggered on the bulk delete record and a custom table you would use the scheduler from the bulk delete when it deleted that of course that would trigger a workflow that could send your renewal and then part of your workflow would create a new record that you would delete again in 30 days or whatever time you had set up so anyways that's just a little side thing on the bulk delete scheduler but overall yes i know i went off in a thousand directions there but let's bring it home nick okay um the book delete is something you can go through and it will delete you set up on a schedule it will delete records or if you know you have a bunch of records you want to delete like these flow runs, you can set up that bulk delete. Now, it works great. You can run it on a schedule, however, it does take time. So sometimes the bulk delete could run for hours or days before all of these records are deleted.

[29:34] Of course. And it takes up a lot of processing, I would imagine. And Eric showed this in his video as well, that he has had this bulk operation thing going for one and a half days or something. And you can see the curve starting to kind of decline a bit, but it will take time for all of those 10 gigabytes of records to disappear from your Dataverse environment. So it does take time. But is this something, because now if you connect that to what Thomas wrote in his blog post the other week, where they're kind of looking to remove the old settings area, the old advanced stuff behind Dataverse. Because Eric went into the old experience to get to this. So is this now available in the new modern experience? If it's not available, the new modern experience.

[30:27] It should definitely be accessible from the new modern experience because I know as much as they talk about the modern experience going away, or sorry, the legacy experience going away, everything still should be accessible. So if I look at data management and bulk deletion now in the PPAC, the power platform and VIN center, and I click on bulk deletion,

[30:54] excuse me, travel cough, it still will navigate to the legacy experience. Experience so i don't see that going i don't see the feature itself going away but hopefully there will be um hopefully there'll be a new and like probably a more modern interface to it so yeah it is going to the old experience want to watch yeah for sure yeah it can't go away it's one of these things that are mission i think mission critical to dataverse so unless they want us to replace every all of these scheduled things with cough floats then maybe that's a way to transition us over to that yeah don't get on the right don't get on a soapbox breathe breathe breathe it'll be fine it'll be fine yeah i know all right okay so on to other things now i'll i'll cheer you up and you'll get to talk about power pages instead how about that so it says power pages look up in here tell me what is this this is um yeah this is our good friend Alexander.

[31:56] Who has moved to Ottawa, the town where I live in, and we haven't got together yet because I've been not home. But basically, he's written a component that you can actually call or using something called a jQuery library and calling it Select2, which basically is a.

[32:23] Is a way that you can actually do lookups in Power Pages by typing a few characters, and it will actually begin to fill in. So all of that stuff our clients have always been asking for in lookups. Oh, finally. And it's using a jQuery, so it's not even using a full-on PCF control or anything like that. So, of course, he's written a very good blog post. His blog post, again, people to follow, Alexander Alashin, Dancing with CRM. His stuff's amazing. He has a lot of screenshots, very easy to follow. So check that out, especially if you're working with PowerPages and lookups and you want your customers to have a better experience. Definitely check that out. It's pretty lightweight to add to your projects.

[33:02] And now if you're using a new modern portal with, or sorry, PowerPages website that is using Bootstrap 5, make sure to add jQuery yourself because it's not supposed to be loaded with jQuery to begin with. So I know that there is still a bit of legacy stuff there, and maybe it is already loaded. So make sure that you load your query before you start with this. But this is amazing. And like you said, always customer requirement always comes in. And once that Ajax kind of experience where you start typing and it just fills

[33:39] out the Dropbox for you. Very good job, Alexander. And also you have something in here that says the Microsoft partner is dead.

[33:48] What is this? Okay, this is one of these. Speaking of clickbait, uh one of the masters of kickbait people to follow um his you may have heard of him our good friend the nz nz365 guy mark smith uh wrote this linkedin post about this whole concept about the microsoft partners are dead they're doing um you know less outcomes based work kind of resource augmentation um yeah they stopped delivering results replace this activity like all sorts of stuff just to get people talking. And he started making the argument that a lot of end customers no longer need Microsoft partners. They're mature enough to build their own implementation teams.

[34:36] It's not that I don't disagree. I do know that there's a lot of big partners out there. They're just kind of looking for the next big deal. They just want to sell a bunch of software and services, boom, sign, dump resources in, make big money, walk away. Way um i i'm always a big believer in um a microsoft park partner being a true partner to an organization and helping them build and sort of lack of better word co-pilot uh someone in building their building and maintaining their business solution now i also you know it kind of ties in a little bit with steve mordew wrote about a while ago too about um projects no longer being sort of projects, but kind of an ongoing thing. And I've always, I've said this before, a good CRM project is never done. Yes, we can achieve a bunch of the initial requirements and achieve those objectives that a customer wants. But if we do it correctly, there's always something new. There's always a new business process that can be improved. There's always new aspects of business that are changing. And the great thing about the Power Platform is why I love it so much is we can adapt and we can adapt that with the business as it grows and as it changes, as new programs get added, as new products get added, new business ventures, we can continue to work with that. And my job working with customers over the years is to help them.

[35:53] The business application side navigating that saying oh you have this new thing like i worked with a you know organization that did wage subsidy they had to take on a whole new program that they were managing in excel and i brought this over into the power platform and we started managing that with a portal and power apps and made that more efficient and i almost kind of believe this kind of ties into you know a farming metaphor where or you know every year we're redoing the The crops were changing and it's a cycle, right? And continuing, it never ends. It keep on going and we keep producing. So circling back to this article that Mark sort of suggested, he's sort of suggesting that the idea of the traditional Microsoft partner coming in, doing an implementation project is dead and that's changing. I totally agree it's changing. Again, it's a clickbaity title. I kind of just linked in and tons of comments back and forth. So we'll put the link in the show notes. I think the conversation has died down. My LinkedIn notifications on that thread have decreased a little bit, but you still see a few people kind of popping in there with their opinions. And yeah, what do you think is, you know, I think business is changing. The world's changing. The projects are changing. And how we deliver projects and how we act as professionals, how we engage with customers as professionals is definitely changing. I know for myself being an independent, I see a different aspect and I do work with other partners. I do work with customers directly.

[37:19] And yeah, the world is definitely different than it was even five, 10 years ago. So that's sort of, you know, that's more of an ongoing conversation more than anything. Yeah, and I love that Mark is bringing this up. Yes, it's quick-baiting, but it's also encouraging others to think about the relationship that you have with your partner, or if you are a partner, the relationship you have with your customers. I've been fortunate enough to work with a modern at a modern Microsoft partner for 10 years where we always thought of it as a real partnership. And I may I know the business in Norway is kind of different to the U.S. especially. So this is kind of in the way that we've been working as long as I've been working in this industry. It's never been about kind of deploying that thing and then go moving away. way. We always wanted that continuous partnership because if it's something we know, it's that organizations change. When I started out with SharePoint back in the day, building intranets, the customer always wanted to tie the sites and the setup, the site collections to the organization structure. And we always said, no, no, no, no, no. If it's something we know, it's that your organization structure is going to change. And they went, no, no, no, it's no, no, no, this is solid. It's like, no, no, no, believe me, it's not.

[38:39] So this has been kind of our way of working for a while. And I'm so glad to see that this is brought up and actually pointed to and talked about because I think it's a dynamic that hasn't been talked about enough. And also to kind of wash up all of those old cowboy organizations that the cowboy partners that hit and run partner that you don't want. So yeah, good spark, good conversation, Mark. and well done. So it's good. We need to wrap up. We're on time and you had a thing with Daniel where you're supposed to make this episode a bit shorter so that Daniel can actually get through an episode. So Daniel Askewitz, if you're still here, then thank you. Well done. And maybe that will shut Nick up. I don't know.

[39:24] So with that, I think it's about to wrap. Nick, what do you think? Yeah, for sure. I did want to very quickly touch on, if I may, the boost quest. I did this past week about blogs. I put this together about tips on writing blogs and trying to get people to consider blogs. Some of the blogs, favorite blogs that we followed, we listed off a few people. Very interested to keep that conversation going on LinkedIn as well. If there's blogs that are your favorites around the Power Platform, definitely share that with us. If you started a brand new blog and you're working where you want a bit of self-promotion, let us know as well. We keep discovering new blog posts. Like, you know, we see people come up and if you're like, if you've written one blog six months ago and that's it, that's one thing. But if you are being consistent and you're running blogs about the Power Platform or Dynamics 365 or something, let us know. We're keen to add to our list of resources. So, yeah.

[40:19] Absolutely, definitely. And also keep up, keep doing what Will and Oana is doing. Share screenshots and small descriptions of stuff you discover. I must say, I discovered something in Power Pages the other day in terms of the Flex components that is now available. That was released in May, but it was new to me. I haven't seen that light up in my environment. I share a picture of that on LinkedIn and my followers, you know, through the roof just by that one post. So, I mean, it's just sharing. If it's new to you, then chances are it's new to someone else. Share it. And, well, collective knowledge is improved by it.

[40:57] So, yeah. And I think that's where we leave it for now. Next episode will be June 26th. And we are not going to do summer holidays, I think, this year either. So we'll keep you up to date on all the news and updates from the Power Platform throughout the summer. Don't you worry. Perfect. it all right right okay yeah have a awesome day and we'll see you when we see you bye everybody bye bye thank you for listening if you like this episode please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community and be sure to leave a rating and or a review on your favorite streaming service that makes it easier for others to find us follow us on social platforms and make sure you don't miss a single episode thank you for listening to the power platform

[41:45] Boost podcasts with your host, Lirika Akebek and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

[41:54] Music.