Color Cloud Recap

We had an amazing time at the Color Cloud Conference last week. What an event! We are practically jumping up and down with excitement; this event is all the things a community event is all about! :D Well done to the organizers!

As we try to recap a fantastic week, we talk about the Color Challenge on Wednesday, where we colored our hair for charity. Nick had a Power Pages workshop on Thursday, and Ulrikke helped out. The speaker dinner was a bit out of the ordinary, and one we will remember for a long while. Friday was conference day, and we learned a lot about the future of Power Platform and AI, strategy, and how it will affect our jobs. 

Speaker dinner Drag Cabaret

Pulverfass Cabaret: Powder Keg Cabaret (pulverfasscabaret.de)

 Our day at ColorCloud Hamburg 2024

• Keynote by Ryan Cunningham
• Rachel Irabor - "Unlocking CRM Potential with Power Platform Magic"
• Panel with Andrew Welch, Ana Inés Urrutia de Souza, Ana Welch, Chris Huntingford, Nick Doelman, and William Dorrington moderated by AJ Zafar - "AI Unboxed: Everything You Wanted to Know"
• "Ask Me Anything" by Ryan Cunningham
• Project Sophia
• "I want to become your companion — A different 👀 at Copilot" with Chris Huntingford and Carsten Groth
• "Crafting your future-ready enterprise AI strategy" by Ana Welch and Andrew Welch
   Whitepaper: White Paper: “Crafting Your Future-Ready Enterprise AI Strategy”
• "Architectural and technological considerations when implementing a Dual-Write integration" by Yannik Reekmans
• "XrmToolBox - the single most powerful tool in your arsenal for the Power Platform" by Matt Beard

Shout Outs

Mark Rademarker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcemarc/

Tino Rabe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tino-rabe-powerpages/

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Chapters

• 0:19 Introduction to Power Platform Boost Podcast
• 1:15 Advanced PowerPages Workshop Experience
• 2:30 Highlights from the Conference Sessions
• 7:28 Insights from Ryan Cunningham's Ask Me Anything
• 11:42 Lessons Learned from Dynamics F&O Dual Write Project
• 14:19 Showcasing Innovative Project Developments
• 16:39 Evolving Story of PowerPages ALM
• 17:56 Embracing Community Collaboration and Learning
• 19:17 Closing Remarks and Invitation to Next Episode

Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:19] Welcome, everyone, to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your weekly source of news and updates from the world of the Power Platform and the Microsoft community, with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk.
Hey! Hey, everybody! Hey! We're live from the Color Cloud.
And where do I look? I look here, right? Okay. You guys are here.
Yeah. And so this was supposed to be bright purple, not quite bright, but purple nonetheless, not as bright as some.
Yeah, I got, I'm blueberry now, apparently.
Yeah, well, it is what it is. It was all good fun. We raised over 10,000 euros for charity.

[1:03] That's like 16,000 Canadian. So it's great.
I think I messed up my mic. Sorry, people. I made a big noise.
Kind of used it by now, I guess. Yes.

[1:12] Okay. So we've been here, we went here yesterday and you had the workshop.
Yes. How did it go? It went really well. We had nine participants.
It was an advanced PowerPages workshop. We went way beyond the regular PowerPages of the day content and kind of dove into creating web templates, a portal web API, and sort of those advanced things that once you know a little bit about PowerPages, what's next?
And that was good. It was a great questions.
I mean, I was really impressed with the questions people were coming up with.
It was fantastic. It was a great day. and and you helped me out i really appreciate it was like you know this is the call a friend kind of thing and as people know me my design skills are like i said i'm a citizen designer, and uh i thought you know as opposed to me just talking a little bit about this let me get a pull in the big guns and like it came in big and she just did a fantastic presentation on styling design theming for power pages and just rounded out my whole day uh so i really appreciate it And thank you so much for bringing me in because I was here anyways.
It was a pleasure to join you. And the group was very good vibe.
So we interacted people from all over the world. So much fun.
So really workshops people. That's how you actually get to learn full day.
Just immerse yourself in one topic and you get to meet the presenter and actually connect with the community.
It's a great way to connect. So, yeah, definitely.

[2:31] Do that if you need to. And then now we're here today. Today was the sessions.
We still, we're about mid-afternoon right now. There's still, I think, another session or two happening yet.
And the closing keynote as well, which is, this is Chris Huntingford, our friend, who is going to be doing that.
I wonder if he's going to dress up this time.
Because he usually dresses up as a T-Rex.
Yeah. And then usually Rebecca is the unicorn and they have the thing going. We'll see. We'll see.
We'll talk a bit more because it was one of those sessions that I went to from him and Karsten.
But that was a little bit later on. The day started off, well, actually, it was last night, the speaker dinner. We should talk about that a little bit.
Which part do you want to talk about? I would say, let's just say that out of all the speaker dinners I've been to and all the events, this is definitely in the top five.

[3:23] Yeah, definitely. We will remember. Hard to be topped.
Yeah so there was a drag cabaret in the kind of red light district of hamburg so i'll let your imagination run with that and let's leave it at that but amazing good food good service and very good very very entertaining yeah we'll put a link to that actually in the show notes because they really wanted us to share if we liked it and we like this we'll share it with you so you can enjoy that when when you come to hamburg yes maybe yeah maybe so okay and then today today we had breakfast we had an amazing keynote with Brian Cunningham came here to do a keynote for us told us a bit about the platform and co-pilots and AI and the future holds what we can expect and one of the key things that I pulled away from it was he talked about co-pilots as agents and working with a team of co-pilots hmm.

[4:16] What did you take away from it? No, again, like, I mean, we've seen that, like, I like Ryan because he's genuine.
And just for those who don't know, he's the VP of the Power Apps and Power Pages, the apps part of Power Platform.
So he showed us, again, some of the demos that we've seen, but he's spent on it and how he takes it makes it very real, very practical, very hands-on.
And as he talked about one of the clients, the U.S. Geological Survey, and how what they're using co-pilots for and building apps and start throwing a lot of numbers.
They have like thousands of apps and what they're doing and just the whole digital transformation, taking their binder, their paper, like P.E.S.
What do you think they're using?
Of course, everybody said, well, Excel, like not even. They were using paper.

[4:59] So it was really, really cool story. Absolutely. And then we dove into the sessions. Yes.
So first I went to Rachel, and I'm really not sure how to pronounce her name, Rachel Erebor.
She has a podcast as well. You've probably seen that where she interviews people.
And she did a session with introduction to Power Platform and CRM, what it is actually and how it fits with the rest. It's kind of an introductionary session.
And I love that you can start the morning off with an introduction.
What does CRM mean? What's the history behind it?
What is BizApps? What the different BizApps are for? for a very good session. Very well done, Rachel.
Right. And I actually was part of a panel talking about AI with Andrew Welch, Anna Welch, Chris Huntingford, Will Dorrington, and Anna.

[5:49] Ines? Yes. Yeah. So it was really interesting. Hosted, AJ Safar was the moderator.
Wow, AJ is the moderator. Yeah, yeah. So imagine, and then a lot of, it was, we covered a lot of ground, very quickly it was a little chaotic as you can tell with that group yeah but it was a lot of fun a lot of interesting conversations about ai is it going to take our job if you're no totally not it's going to change our jobs for sure um and then other other aspects of it is like for education like you know if you have kids what would you would you what you'd be telling them right now and so i got to say my piece about going to trades so it's a little bit different but but overall it It was really interesting about how AI will change your lives.
It'd be interesting to look at this, that conversation a year from now to see where we're at with AI and co-pilots and everything like that.
Definitely. So will any of these sessions will be recorded?
I don't think so. No, we haven't seen any recording equipment here.
So this also builds upon that you had to be there kind of thing.
So if you are feeling like you're missing out, then you are.
You need to go to these kinds of community events. And this, for me, 250 people here, right? Attendees and the speakers.
This wins over any big conference for me any day of the year.
So this is where you need to be if you want to connect with the community.

[7:09] And so we were supposed to go to other... I have my notes here.
I'm just going to check where I am.
So we kind of got pulled away a bit. So we missed a session today because we were pulled away to save the day in a customer meeting.

[7:23] So we kind of missed the session. But then I went to Ryan Cunningham's Ask Me Anything session.
Okay. So you're stalking Ryan all day. Yes, I have been. Hey, Ryan.

[7:33] Just joking. No, and it was very interesting to see what kind of, I was purely there to see what kind of questions they would ask.
Because that's also a big part of the connecting to your peers.
What is in the heads of the other people working with this platform.
And it was a lot of interesting questions, a lot of hard questions.
I must say, I'm impressed by how well Ryan answers those hard questions.
That's really his skill. And then I got to ask a question about Project Sophia.
Because even in the keynote, when he's talking about AI and business applications and where we're going, Project Sophia is not mentioned.

[8:10] And so his answer was, as well there's a reason why project's still in the name it's still in its infancy it's very early days and they don't even really know where it fits in the platform yet oh wow so it's kind of just feeling its way trying to finding out what it's going to be when it grows up and also they really want feedback so that goes back to you guys if you have feedback if you dive into project sofia and you try it out you have feedback make sure to give that back to microsoft because they're They're really eager to see what this can be going forward.
And the fun part was a lot of questions were asked. And then I asked something about Project Sophia.
And the whole crowd went, yes. The whole race.
Yeah. And there were multiple other people that had questions about Sophia as well.
So not only me, because I thought I was the only one. But I actually just remember that that's something that came out a few months ago.
So that was really cool. So I went to see our friend Chris Huntingford and Carson Grove. You've been stalking Chris Huntingford all day. Absolutely.
Oh, yeah. I have a man crush on Chris. Love you, bro.

[9:07] Um, so, but they did, they had like a whole science experiment going, they're talking about co-pilots, the differences between Microsoft 365 co-pilot and building your own co-pilot and co-pilot studio and using purview, um, in terms of the security around that, of what data is being pulled in to these co-pilots and grounding and things.
And they actually had little science experiments going.
They had a little vase and they put in this egg and chemicals.
And it kind of, you know, this is, of course, all your prompting that's going in.
And then all the crap that might come out based on your data and your prompting.
And then what if you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that?
And then, boom, at the end, pulled out a little tiny dinosaur.
Of course, this is Chris, right?
Yeah. And I saw someone drinking crazy things from chemical bottles. Yeah.
I'm not sure I would have been drinking any of that. But yeah, so that was a really fun session and great work, guys. Really appreciate it.

[10:00] And then I went to Anna and Andrew's session about AI and kind of looking under the hood.
It was a really nice session. They had their daughter here. She's adorable.
She's two years old. She's kind of stealing the show. I'm sorry.
We spent so much time together walking around saying bye-bye to everyone in the crowd.
And when we clapped, she thought that we were clapping for her.
Of course. Right. Yes. That was a lot of fun.
No, but the session was very good because they started out with this huge, complicated AI model. What do you do? What can you connect it to?
How do you push your data through to Azure AI search and how does this actually work?
And Andrew was saying again and again, it's data hygiene. Make sure that you know you push your data through.
PureView again came up as the default platform to push your data through.
And also, make sure that you understand what you actually mean from AI.
And Anna was making the point that this is expensive from an economic perspective, but also in terms of the environmental impact.
So make sure you use AI for the right things, the things that you actually need it to do and not just push it on everything.
And what was good about it was kind of towards the end, they wrapped it up and they kind of went full circle showing the same complex image.

[11:16] From Power Platform perspective. They kind of just flipped all the icons.
And then you could actually see how that translates into our platform and the capabilities that we have now with these new tools.
And that was so great to see, because that was kind of the translation.

[11:30] The bridge between the gap that I've seen, kind of, ah, that aha moment where the puzzle parts just fall into place.

[11:39] And Andrew, of course, being Andrew Welch, he has a huge white paper that you can download.
We'll put links to that in the show notes, because yeah and he they really know what they're going so if that's your thing then go check that out yeah so that that appeared to be it like because uh we were trying to make sure we were going to different sessions so i kind of stuck my head and i saw you were there i said okay i'm gonna need to go and then i went to our friend yannick reitman he did a session on dynamics fno dual right which is completely a mystery to me but he had a small small small group and he was going through a project that he did with that kind of lessons learned what to look out for Or I learned I never want to be involved in a Dynamics dual write project, like an F&O. But still, it was good.
It's good. This is the great thing about these community events as well.
You can go and check out these things that you know absolutely nothing about.

[12:29] At least get a bit of a taste of what the technology is, what it's all about, what to look out for.
And then if it comes a time that either someone asks you a question, at least you know, hey, check with Yannick's session, check his content.
Content or for yourself too it's sort of like okay yes i now i know another friend i can call on these particular things or i've learned a little bit more to kind of expand my knowledge as well so initially there are resources right because at the end of sessions usually they will share resources documentation other things that you should look into yes need to learn more it's a good way to kind of expand to get all those little strings that you can pull when you need to right so that's what we're all about that's what this podcast is about so just giving you those breadcrumbs and those small threads that you can pull when you're in the right direction yes so that you know all about it okay right and so i went to matt beard session on extrem toolbox.

[13:20] And we talked about this as well.
I plugged one of the XRM Toolcast podcast episodes that they made talking about all the things that they didn't know about XRM Toolbox and people that create it.
Still, there are things in there that they don't know. And Matt was sharing kind of his top tools that he uses and stuff that he learned last week.
They're still learning about their own tool. It's 359 different tools. Wow. Wow.

[14:20] Wanted to show me stuff but they've been built so another uh one of my uh one of the folks that attended my session in um nordic summit because i did a workshop there uh mark rademacher mark great to see you today yep shut up um he showed me some of the stuff that they were working on in their project and pulling in this all this technology and i'm inspired like i said because i said i want to see the projects that you build from these courses and he showed me what they're building and it blew me away of all the stuff he's generating pdfs and using react controls and you know pcf controls in the in the um in the project he was doing and it was just a short little demo but it was really cool and i love that so if you do see me around if you have something cool show me i'm excited and then um and this also happened after your we'll talk about your session next but after your session to uh our friend tino we met tino rabbi who does a power pages weekly newsletter he showed us some cool stuff too so keep your eye open for that I know Tino we're putting you on the spot a little bit but I.

[15:19] What you're working on really now is cool, and we can't wait to share that.
And we'll share that on the podcast when it's ready to go.
Yeah, and contribute as well. Because what Tino showed us and what Matt showed us about the Xtreme Toolbox as well, this is all open source.
Anyone can contribute. And this is what the community makes for the community.

[15:36] It's bridging the gap between what Microsoft does and what we need.
And I love the fact that we can come together here and you can just pull someone away.
You can see one of the experts, the superstars that you kind of starstruck by.
You can pull them aside. you can show them something you get that feedback you make that connection i feel like i'm repeating myself i'm sorry i'm just so excited about this i love being here yeah i know and that but in so then we went went to your session oh no sir no i love how you present i know you know i've said this many times before your biggest fan the way you move the way you interact with the crowd where you move your hands you're showing stuff and everything like i was trying to take some pictures and you kept moving around from side to side which is good it's dynamic and how you reach out to the crowd, you engage people like who's done this, and who's what your feedback and this, who's tried this, those types of things.
So it was a great session on PowerPages ALM, which we know is a constant evolving story on a week to week.
So every time I go, like, I think there's a second time I've seen this session, there was already new stuff, because stuff has evolved since the last time I've

[16:38] seen you present it, which is a few months ago.
I know, every week, there's something new. And I love the fact that they're interacting and asking questions, we have to think and I don't know the answers always.
And you're always there to help me. So I'll just always point to Nick.

[16:50] Just, you know, anything about this, Nick?

[16:52] Usually you do. So we're kind of helping each other and staying up to date, even on parapages, things that we should know most about.
Right. Cause there's a few questions that they asked you and I'm like.

[17:03] Hmm, we need to try this and we get back to the lab quickly.
Also, you know, after the sessions, when the attendees come up and ask questions, it makes you think and you also get a sense of what they're struggling with.
And like you said, I also encourage anyone that struggles with something that's new and coming out, keep the feedback to Microsoft.
Use the little feedback icon because they do read it. It does matter.
Use the thumbs up and the thumbs down, the co-pilots as well.
Like, let's get that better. Let's get everything better.
And then, but yeah, like I find even presenting, I learn things or doing a workshop, I learn things from the questions.
So don't be afraid to ask questions, approach like the other MVPs, approach any of the other experts and approach people from Microsoft.
Like just like ask the questions and it just helps everybody.
All the, it just helps the community, uh, rising waters, float all boats or

[17:52] something on the shoulders of giants. Yeah. So, so yeah.
Right. Right, and that was our day. So what's next? What's next?
I think there's going to be, I think their sessions are going to be wrapping up.
And a little shout out to Tricia. I said I would join your session in recording this now.

[18:10] We'll link it up. Yes, we will. But then there's the closing keynote.
And then tonight is the after party.
We're going to, I have my dancing tokens.
So I don't dance unless I have maybe a drink or two.
How many Red Bulls have you had? I've had about three or four Red Bulls.
So yeah. Now, anyways, long story short, we're going to have fun later on with the whole community.
And we'll see you the next, well, our next episode is coming. We already said that.
Yeah, no, but so we release an episode on Wednesday and then there's another two weeks and then you'll get a new update from all the news and updates from the Firespire.
Yep. All right. Catch you later, guys. Bye. Have a good weekend. Bye-bye.

[18:54] Thanks for listening. And if you liked this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community.
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Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts Ulrika

[19:16] Akerbeck and Nick Dolman.
And see you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news.

[19:23] Music.