Power Platform Boost Podcast

News Bonanza (#30)

• Season 1 • Episode 30

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[0:00] I gray hair. What are you talking about? No, no. Yeah. I can't have gray hair. People will know how old I really am. I know. Right. Um, me too.

[0:14] Music.

[0:33] 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. Hello. Hello. We haven't really gotten the hang of this yet, the saying hi without the intro. One day we will get it. Right. How are you? Eventually. eventually one day so yeah i'm good how's your hair color doing so last week no this is crazy uh we're fading yeah we're fading so two weeks ago or yeah wednesday when this is released it's two weeks ago since we dyed our hair and we thought it was going to be permanent it was semi-permanent now the bleach underneath is permanent so what's going to happen is you're going to see 10 of the

[1:25] community people that dyed their hair are going to look like they have gray hair pretty soon, I bet. So do you have a strategy for what to do with yours?

[1:40] Gray hair? What are you talking about? No, no. I can't have gray hair. People will know how old I really am. I know, right? Me too. So I'm going to, I have to color it. I have to. So I kind of wish it was permanent now so that it wouldn't just look washed out and horrible. But yeah. So we'll see what kind of color it is going forward. Yeah. But can you believe? Yeah, we'll see. I I've. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was about to say, I'm still uncertain what the future holds, whether I just get it re-dyed blue again, or whether I just let it grow, whether I shave my head. It just depends. Every morning when I get up and I look in the mirror, I'm still like, okay, there's that. And I think before we started recording, I mentioned I had breakfast with my good friend, Matt, who says he will listen to the podcast someday, but he still hasn't. So maybe this will be the incentive. but he just saw me and he just started laughing his ass off he was just like as he does he's a uh he's he's got a very unique laugh so it was it was kind of funny when he saw my head uh the other day but you've gotten so many comments haven't you.

[3:01] I've never been compliment complimented on my hair well maybe it's been years because it's kind of like it is funny this isn't it turned white in the spring in the summer of 2013 13. Um, and just basically it was extremely stressful time. Like it was already beginning to go gray, but then it just over, it was almost within a matter of like three weeks, it went completely kind of my reddish Brown to white just due to the stress that I was kind of under the time. So yeah, but I've not had any kind of compliments on my hair, but of course, coming back from color cloud in the airport, there's different people who said, Hey, your hair looks great. Uh, the Air Canada agent, she was like, Oh, your hair looks fabulous and all all this other stuff. So yeah, it's interesting. Of course, my daughter loves it. Her friends love it. Her daughter, like, I guess I'm the cool dad now. So yeah, we'll see. It doesn't take more than hair color to be a cool dad, I guess, you know, and then, then you were kind of a great dad to begin with. 

[4:29] Well, let's dive into the world of Power Platform News and Updates, shall we? First item on our list. Yeah, because there is a... A beep done. A ton of stuff. A beep done of stuff. Yes. Okay. So first thing that we saw was the, again, Power Pages, of course, Copilot, and the ability to actually create an FAQ page. Of course, that is one of the most popular use cases for PowerPages. It's for FAQs. Of course, traditionally, using the customer service portal, we could tie back to the knowledge articles that were in Dataverse. This is a little bit different take on it. And of course, there is this other FAQ template, which is a data-driven approach as well with tables. This is a little bit more in terms of it does generate static text, but what it allows you to do is grab a document that you might already have set up. You might already have an FAQ document. It will grab that and then generate that page for you, the questions and the answers. So that could be a huge time saver and a very quick win on PowerPages to get something up and running for your customers or in your own organization to publish an FAQ page based on data that you already have very quickly.

[5:45] Doesn't necessarily have to be data-driven because you can just regenerate that page later on if things get updated. So, yeah, kudos to the PowerPages team. I know there's more stuff coming with them, but that was pretty cool. Yeah, very cool. And then how does that tie into, because we've had this kind of functionality in PowerPages, the customer service template, but always had that ability to connect it to a knowledge-based article base that is a part of the customer service, Dynamics 365 customer service suite.

[6:17] And so the cool thing that I always used to show my customers was when you created a new case, for instance, on your PowerPages site, you started typing into the title, it automatically grabbed suggestions for knowledge articles that could help you with it. It's the same kind of experience that you, If you go through and you create a support ticket, Microsoft these days will do kind of the same thing. And I guess that's AI under the hood. But that relies on the data-driven setup that you get. So this is kind of the other way around and doesn't apply to that at all, I guess. Yes.

[6:57] No, no, the case deflection capabilities. I don't see that here yet, but that could be something that could does come down the road. I don't know. I don't know the roadmap on that, but that is, that is something to like, it's always good to have to have to open a ticket. And if I, as, as I'm putting in the description, it can come back and tell me the answer. So I don't have to open a ticket. That's beneficial to me as a customer, but I don't believe that this is incorporated yet. Although that being said, though, because there's co-pilots that can read the data from your website, then you could maybe ask the chatbot, here, I want to open a case or something. So I think it's something that could be pieced together, but it's probably something that is, you know, it'd be a no-brainer for this to be coming down the road. Yeah, definitely. Wow, good. Good for PowerPages and good for FAQ sites. I saw something else that business approval templates overview is in preview. It's for Power Automate. Yeah, it's now in preview. It's kind of a template set up using Power Automate and Power Apps for most common approval scenarios that you have in finding your businesses. And there are already two, four, six, seven templates that are pretty fully baked that you can just start off with as a template. And I feel like this is something we come across in all projects and there's a very good involvement of that functionality.

[8:22] Yeah, is this part of the approval creator kit? Is this an extension of this or ties into that? Yeah, I think it is. And you have that new app and everything that you have, that new experience that you have to go through. This is approval process manager.

[8:37] You can set it up and yeah. I haven't worked with it at all. I just really, really enjoyed to see this and use that for upcoming projects. Yeah. Like, yeah, the approvals process has always been something part of Power Automate now for quite a while. But this, I saw the, I saw very, it was actually funny. My wife was working on a project where she was using, she started using the approval toolkit and she kind of showed me and it kind of blew me away of this was the regular Power Automate approvals, but on steroids. So I think this is just extending that even further because that is it's another very common scenario. Let's, you know, we need to approve something, approve purchase orders, approve vacation requests, approve, you know, quotes, all those types of things. So this is this is awesome that this is this is yet again extending the power of the power platform, what we can do with our building really cool business apps. Yes, definitely. And speaking of Power Automate, our friend David Wyatt pointed out quite a few new exciting things. Yeah, and this is one of those small little things. There was a LinkedIn blog post that he did, I think, last week, pointing out that copy and paste for containers. So that would be your scopes, for instance, or your Py2H. Now you can start copy pasting those.

[9:56] Also, you'll be able to open up and see two action properties at once, and also undo redo coming in May, May and June. So just three little smart, small improvements to Power Automate that you will absolutely love. And then of course, this is for the new designer experience in Power Automate. And so David Wyatt says, small comment on the bottom that maybe end of May is the day I finally switched to the new designer. Now, do you use the new designer or the old one?

[10:26] Uh, you know what I, at first I was trying to use the new designer and then I got a little frustrated with some of the rough edges that are still there. So I probably pop back to the, the, the, what'd you call classic, I guess, uh, for now. Um, but yeah, I do like, I like some of the features in the new designer, but more for my day to day. Um, I'm still popping back to the, the old one just because I just, my, my head sort of aligned to that, but it's like anything, right? Right. It's like, you know, the old form designer and model driven apps, the old solution explorer. Like eventually we move over and then we don't even think about the old one anymore. Yeah, I'll get there eventually. Maybe not May of this year, but we'll see. May next year, maybe. I'm notorious. I always force myself to start using the latest thing always. I don't know why. I just I just love new shiny things, I guess. But it's hard because it's slow. and I have a monstrosity of a flow that I built. So every day I have to battle with that new designer experience. There are some things that I enjoy, but I feel like I have more control, more visibility. I guess I like the canvas and that whole, I don't know, the ability to kind of zoom in and out. I like it, but yeah, I know a lot of people struggle with it.

[11:47] I love the idea of it, But I think I'm I sort of the speed of it is totally like just watching a spinner and me with my, you know, squirrel eyes like, oh, something else. And I'll go do something else. Like, hey, what was I working on? You know, that's power platform in general. Yeah. Right. Moving on. Do you want to look at talk about the the new diagram for that from Danny?

[12:15] Yeah, sure. Sure. Basically, Danny Cahill has done another diagram about, and this is, just check out Danny's website. He's got so many diagrams and things. We talked about the Power Pages one he's done. He's got a great one on model-driven apps. And then this one is about kind of discovering a company in industry. So I know like both you and I were more in our jobs are more in the hands of implementing, but we do get pulled into, I do like discovery sessions with companies. And then sometimes even in the sales process, we have to understand who we're pitching to that kind of thing, or, you know, trying to even go through some design thinking sessions to figure out a solution. And what he has is a great one pager of all the things that you should look and ask and research for companies. So again, Dani, keep these diagrams coming. They're lifesavers in terms of the work we do. Yeah, definitely. It's so good to see that visualization.

[13:12] It makes my mind kind of, it gives my mind a mental map to kind of hook things on afterwards as well. So I just love that he's so visual in the way that he puts this out there. So yes, keep it going.

[13:27] And I see that there's the next one here is something that this is a question that I've asked. It looks like Michael and Craig have maybe with Lindsay have answered that. It's the I've installed the CEO starter kit. Now what do I do? Yeah. So you want to talk about that? Yeah, sure. It's one. It's on the series that Michael and Craig has started. They do blog posts about Dataverse and CRM platform and admin to kind of dive into all of the aspects of the admin part of this platform and governance. And so, yeah, I've installed the COE starter kit. Now what? We've all been there, right? So this blog is about how they look into the analytics part and a lot into the different Power BI reports. reports and what that kind of gives you in terms of intelligence about your platform and how it's set up in the different environments.

[14:17] They also look into how to extend COE, how to kind of build your own apps and what to look for, and also good apps to use and how and why. And they also brought Lindsay Sheldon with them this time. And I love that when you kind of read through the blog posts, it says that Michael says, and Craig says, and Lindsay says, and the kind of small little quotes from each of them and it's so good it's so good knowledge it's um yeah no i just like it and um the format as well it's my like you said the squirrel brain is busy um so it kind of keeps you preoccupied throughout it's a very good read so good job guys and keep it up we'll keep shouting out um yeah all the nice bug posts that you make.

[15:01] And in terms of, you want to jump to the, I was thinking about the Aurel's post. Yeah. So probably a lot of people don't know who Aurel is yet. He's somebody we work with on the project we're working on now. And he's actually recently gone off to be independent, although he's still thankfully working on the project with us. I appreciate Aurel, everything he does. He is sort of our calming voice. And are, you know, a lot of great things. But he actually wrote a blog post on how to pre-populate the recipient field with selected records. So we're doing a lot of stuff using kind of custom pages within a model-driven apps, a lot of things with the command bar, that kind of thing. And he's taken a lot of that knowledge that he's picked up with some JavaScript, and also wrote in a blog of basically how to select a bunch of contacts and generate an e-mail from that. Now, that is something I know I've done years ago in CRM with very clunky JavaScript, but his solution looks pretty elegant. So, yeah, shout out to Errol and his blog. And I hope to see a lot more blog posts from him as it is his learning journey and that kind of thing. And it's just great to see new people kind of get into the community and start sharing a lot of content. So thank you for that post. Yeah, we are just someone who doesn't need encouragement to make a blog post.

[16:27] So, yeah, so Amy Holden, shout out. Jesus, she she's on fire. She has a blog post that's kind of created a lot of tension this week about Forrest's roll up. Yeah, I saw that. All of the calculation in Power Automate. Now, she's a I don't know what this is. Even Steve Mardu is kind of pro-code, low-code, come on, missus this is not low-code anymore but she says that it is so we'll see actually, so this is.

[16:57] What she did was figure out a way to force data versus roll-up column calculation using Power Automate. So when an opportunity is won, force the calculated field on the opportunity to upload with the accumulated amount, for instance, or you have another contact related to an account, you want to update the total number of contacts related to this account number and to kind of force that calculation to happen. And it's fun, it's creative and just shows yet another way to trigger a power army flow and how to work with it. And it's more, I think what she's trying to do is just open up our minds to what you can actually do and the triggers and how you can work with it for us to apply this to other things, not necessarily the use case that she's presenting. thing. Now, this blog post, she posted it on LinkedIn, and I didn't look to see how many, but the comments were so many comments. Among one, my good friend Thomas Sanzer says, hmm, this should be a plugin, no?

[18:05] And then she replies, well, it could be a plugin, but I wanted to do it the low-code way. And then, yeah, Steve Mardu goes, oh, low-code, small-code. I mean, you're kind of on the balance here. And then someone says, well, So if you want this to be instant, because PyroArm won't be instant or real-time, you should use a classic workflow instead with Dynamics CRM 2015 Calculate wrote-up field workflow activity. And it just goes on and on and on and on. And I just love the fact that you can make... So this is a very small niche thing that she found, and she posted a blog post on it. But what I learned from the commentary, the comments on LinkedIn was equally nice to see because I don't really, I'm not a Dynamics 365 consultant, really. I just came in from SharePoint to PowerPages and learned Dynamics from the inside kind of because I had to work with PowerPages. pages. So for me to kind of see someone picking this apart and going, well, if this is the case, and if that is the case, and it's such a good way to learn for me. Oh, so that won't be instant. Okay. If I wanted to do instant, then it's classic workflows, little thing. Okay. I didn't know that. And okay. If I want to do this, then that's a plugin.

[19:28] Yeah. Long way to say that great blog post Amy keep it up I don't care if it's low-code or pro-quit what you do is just awesome keep doing it and then I just love the people just latch on and come on yeah keep doing this it's so good it it's.

[19:46] It showed me like, as anything, there's always 10 different ways to do something. And then the other part too, is it's for the, the, the problem itself is rollup fields only recalculate once per hour. If they were constant, then it would bog the system down, but sometimes you want to force it. You want to force that rollup. So that was the initial problem. And you're, yeah, whether it's flow, power, automate, plug in a classic real-time workflow, there's like dozens of different ways you can force that to happen. And then I think probably eventually this is where the power affects column fields or eventually we'll get to the point where they could do all this automatically. So this in a year, this might be complete all moot. But you're right. It is a good way to crack open a problem. Very simple. Then have a discussion. And again, it comes down to it depends. So, yeah, it was real. I scanned through that. I'm like, holy crap. Like, this is just such a small thing. Yet everybody's kind of latching on. And, you know. Fun conversation. That's what we do. That's what we do because we don't have lies. We just dedicate all our time to these niche little nerdy things. Yes. And we love it. We absolutely love it. Exactly. Speaking of... Yes, so...

[21:01] We got to get our segues right. There you go. You go. No, I was looking at the HelloFusion development thing, because I saw that and I didn't have time to walk all the way through it. Would you like to enlighten me about what that was. Sure. So I had to watch this on double speed to get through it as well before this podcast, because it's like 43 minutes. But Mark Schweigert, who's part of Microsoft, who's a big proponent of, you know, ALM and things like that. He's been around for quite a while. He's done a lot of cool stuff. Big shout out to Mark. And basically he's going through like almost the whole process of using PAC CLI, using the pipelines, but both from a low code and pro code approach. So here's your low code things. And then here's your pro code things. Here's how it all merges together. Here's how to get into source control. Here's how to use, you know, VS code and all of these pieces and kind of puts it together in this whole story. Definitely check it out. And it is also, again, I think this is a very common theme that I'm beginning to see. And I think you're beginning to see as well as the lines between low code and pro code, pro code and low code are beginning to become more and more blurred and more fusion code. So I think I just want to make a statement. Let's just throw out pro code. Let's throw out low code. We're Fusion developers. We might kind of lean one more way or the other.

[22:26] But ultimately, that's how I think I'm just going to start calling myself. I am a Fusion developer. Let's just call it Fusion. I develop on the Power Platform. Let's just call Power Platform. It's a developer. It's a development platform. And we're all developers. Done.

[22:38] If I can configure my way to solve a thing or have to code my way to solve a thing, I don't care. And and to be fair the customer really doesn't care as much either and it's also how you look at it and i was in a customer meeting on monday sorry last monday and they asked me so this uh fancy new solution you're proposing how much what's the ratio between local and pro code and i just went well if you want me to put a number on it i'll give you a rough estimate but why do you ask that question and the question was really how much code will i have to manage once you're done? And I said, well, not a lot. That's my answer. Because this is along the way as well. As we figure out the depth of the requirements, that's when you get to that part. And I said, I can promise you one thing. We will configure our way to solve the problem or the requirement as far as we come. And once we hit that threshold where we can't, we'll switch to Procode. How's that? And he said, well, perfect. That's what I wanted to hear. So let's just... Yeah, who cares?

[23:44] Yeah, because things like, you know, they say, well, low code is power effects is low code. You still need the same skill set. You still need this. The same brain cells are working. If someone has to look at that six months from now, whether it's whether they're looking at JavaScript or C Sharp or power effects, you're going to need someone

[24:03] with skills to take a look at it and figure it out. And exactly the same. same if if someone asks me if you can have a power pages site up and running for a customer without knowing your html your css and your javascript i would say no don't do it because it doesn't work just as much as you need to know a little bit of php to have a wordpress site writing so just forget about it learn what you need to learn to to make that tool work for you and to do the thing you wanted to do and then that's that's where you stop kind of thing and and also this is actually a good segue into what i saw what i listened to um the other day and that was an um an episode on xrm toolcast with uh scott and daryl and anthony shiri shiri she she um he's a product manager at microsoft and they were talking about power platform pipelines for all.

[24:57] Sounds so grand power platform pipelines for all and that's kind of the it's the same thing that we ranted a bit about last episode that now any one maker can go in and choose to move their solution from one environment to another without setting up the power platform pipeline host without any admin knowing anything they can now instead of having to export and import the solution just click a button it creates a pipeline for them and they can run their solution over.

[25:27] We kind of trashed it a bit last time because and that's coming from an admin perspective i guess Yes, but from the user perspective, to show new makers that this is a healthy ALM way and to break that barrier into entry, to show them a good way of working with solutions, I kind of have to agree with them that, yes, this makes sense. And I know that admins love control and to know that this is done in the right way. But at the same time, this does not enable users to...

[26:00] New capabilities this is not the these users are able to create personal pipelines or pipelines raw they had the ability to export and import anyways so you're not giving them any other capabilities that it didn't have it coheres to the security model that's already in place and the only thing you're giving them is a more healthy way to do it and expose them to pipelines lines then make them aware that this is a thing and maybe you can actually have a broader sense of healthy alm going forward so i'm i'm completely swayed um and i'm now all for part blood fine for all uh and i think maybe admins have to take a hard look in the mirror and ask if they really need to have that level of control um it's not hurting their full 180 180 that's how easy it is 80 degrees in two weeks. Next two weeks, I'll read blog posts that trash it and I'll be all trashing it again. Just watch me. Yeah.

[27:00] Hmm. Cool. Yeah. So, but yeah, but part of this whole ALM thing, whatever. Now, this is, now we, if I look at the numbers for the most popular episodes, it's always around the release plans. Those seem to get the highest number. But, and as we say in those episodes, this isn't just a one and done type thing. They keep adding things as they go on. And having worked at Microsoft, I know that there is a cycle every few, I think, once a month or something. There's always the, you have to update and approve and make sure the copywriting and all the technical details are done. And then it gets to a publish state. So new things might crop up. Things might disappear. Something appeared two days ago, which is pretty exciting. It says, connect your environment to source control. What?

[27:50] And basically, business value teams of makers, developers, admins can collaborate seamlessly using the tools of their choice. Native Git integration and Azure DevOps democratize best practices, blah, blah, blah. Fusion teams. So basically, it just alludes to something that source control might be tied directly into our environments. Keep an eye on that. Yes, because it's it's a little brief little thing, but sometimes these little snippets can get our imaginations going and we're going to see what is this going to, you know, the fact that you can maybe potentially tie Git into some of the pipeline stuff we're already doing. Who knows? We'll see. So very exciting, exciting times. Yeah, absolutely. And can I then wish or hope that maybe I'll be able to automatically download and commit my artifacts to repo automatically when I run a pipeline without me having to set it up? Maybe. That would be awesome.

[28:55] Potentially. We'll have to see, like everything, right? We have to see what the release planner says and what reality is. So sometimes those aren't exactly in alignment. Yeah.

[29:06] This is, again, it's just showing the commitment to the Microsoft, the Power Platform team, to ALM. That ALM story, like I've mentioned this before, over the past five years has gone from a bunch of us in the community monkeying around with PowerShell to built-in tools and other apps being created to the pipelines being integrated directly. And just, like, ALM is just going to be so, it's just going to be a no-brainer on projects going forward. Yeah, of course. Of course, all these tools are there. Of course, you're going to do it. And it's just going to save so much time and effort in terms of making sure you have your dev tests and your backups and your source control and who did what and when and everything.

[29:45] Just like any other software project that's been running for 20 years. And speaking about saving time, did you see from Jojo the dataverse to the ERD diagram thing? Because that will save so many people so much time. And probably this has been around for a while. But what Joe did was he went into Dataverse and then he, so he has a table set up, a table set up in Dataverse. This is data model in Dataverse, right? And then he uses the entity relation diagram creator from in XROM toolbox to create that ERD diagram. He then adds that into draw IO or opens that in draw IO. and then he kind of imports that into Power BI and creates this amazing ERD diagram.

[30:33] I mean, come on. That's so awesome. I just love, I love ERDs. I don't know what it is. It's kind of the same thing with Danny diagrams. It's just so lovely to just see so abstract things written out in so visual ways. It just calms me down. So great work, Joe. Thank you. No, and I've, yes.

[30:57] Yeah, because I've always said, too, like you've heard me on projects, like we need to get the data model done right first. Yeah. And then. Sorry. Just, yeah, go. Yeah, you could press it. But yeah. So this week, you're all pro data model, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Next week, I'll diss it. But, you know. No, but this is what I. Because we have this in our current product as well. Because the data model keeps changing. And the ERD diagram never updated. So if it was so easy to just, you know, four steps down and you can have that thing updated, I could do that every afternoon if that meant that that thing will be updated. Right. So this is just yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, please. Yes. Good.

[31:40] Okay, cool. All right. You also came across Dionne's thing about improved email attachment. I know, and this is so cool. And it's, so Diane says... Go over a little bit. Are you a time cop now? I said, we might just go over a minute or two. Yeah, you're a time cop now, aren't you? I'm not time cop. I'm time warden. Yeah, I know. So this is very cool because Diane, she discovered something. And this is an experienced consultant that uses a tool every day will come across these improvements. That's kind of not communicated. there's no announcement is suddenly you just discover that email attachment experience in Dynamics 365 customer service has suddenly been very much improved to the point where you can see preview images and you can drag and drop attachments and it just I just immediately I contacted three of our customers going you know the thing that you want to custom thing you want to build because you want to use this, you know, have better experience for your customer workers. Well, guess what? You don't have to build that thing anymore because it's coming. Look at this. And so I just, I just love that. So thank you, Diane, for pointing it out and to showing us all so we can share it with our customers.

[32:59] And it's all happy day. Ding. Perfect. Yes.

[33:04] Cool. And, and, and I did a I did a quick video over the weekend as well, or I walked through the converting the standard data model to the enhanced data model, wrote a bit of a blog, what does this all mean kind of recapping all of that. So I know for those of you who work in power pages, I know this has been a big ask. Since the enhanced data model went GA, it's like, Oh, how do we convert our sites? Do we just flip the little button? Or how do we make this happen? And the tool was finally released a couple weeks ago, still in preview, check out my video and my talk about that. And if you're working with power pages, You'll probably find that hopefully interesting and informative. Yeah, definitely. And then you also found something from Louise that is in here. I literally found this 10 minutes before we started recording and I thought, you know, this is, this might turn into a big conversation. But I did want to point it out. Louise is a, as people know, Louise Freeze, she's a, she does a lot of great content. She's an amazing speaker. She's an all around good person.

[34:08] And she just basically kind of came out and said, I'm tired of all this AI stuff, which I think some of us are a little AI fatigued. But she made a really good point about a lot of the content we're seeing, we can tell it's been touched by AI. It's been polished. It's gone through and it's been changed a little bit. And it's kind of removed a bit of that human creativity and a little bit of that creative touch. I know we do this too when we post the socials. We kind of use those and buffer the little, hey, rewrite this in AI. I know I've done that. Like, here's my little blurb. Let's rewrite this in AI. And yeah, it kind of does clean it up and does things like that. But you're right. Sometimes I think she's right. It takes a little bit of that human stuff out of it. So check out the link. We're going to put it in the show notes. There's a ton of comments on there. Some a little bit controversial, a little bit debatable. But overall, I think it's a sentiment that I think is going to be a bigger conversation going forward in terms of using AI. In terms of what we do every day, of course, yes, co-pilots are great. They can help us write code. They can help us be more efficient. But in terms of content creation on like LinkedIn or some of these other socials or that kind of thing, you know, AI is meant to be a helper, but people are kind of, it's a little bit too much.

[35:29] I just, like I said, I haven't really fully digested it yet. Maybe we'll talk more about it in future episodes, but it is something, it is worth, I think it's worth having that conversation with AI. In general about what are we really losing as using AI in our content. Yeah, yeah. And to be fully transparent, I haven't used that AI touch for our descriptions and our socials in a while because I found exactly this. It turned our episodes into something that was, rah, rah, come check out this epic to changing your life, do, do, do, do, do. And I was thinking, I'm Norwegian for first, So I'm not comfortable with that at all. And then I thought, maybe that's what people want to see. Maybe that'll draw people in. And then I thought, you know what? It's not worth it. I want it to be us and I want it to be our voice. And we don't use AI to collect any of the data that we, all the things that we tell you guys, it's things that we discovered ourselves through the different channels that we watch each week. We don't use AI for anything for this podcast, actually, just to be fully transparent about that. And I get what Louise is saying. I can read through, you go to look at a schedule or an agenda for a conference and you'll see what's AI and what's not. And I gravitate towards the authentic thing, I must say.

[36:53] You can tell. Yeah, you can. And also, I think people are afraid that AI would take their jobs away. I look at it on the flip side now, that if anyone can use AI to create text and content, then the people that are very skilled and do their craft and art well, the really good typewriters and the people that actually know how to do this right, they will earn even more going forward. Because suddenly you'll create a demand for handwritten, personal, people-made content instead of the AI stuff because that's a commodity that we can all do for free. And if you really want to resonate with people and connect, then you need the real deal. And then that will suddenly become a commodity. That will be the thing that you want to pay for going forward. So let's see where this is going, but it's definitely so good to see Luis's voice in this. And it yeah i i should go in and read all the comments just also see what how people react to such a um a tense topic let's put it like that yeah wow so uh.

[38:06] So, yeah, that is sort of our news and updates. And I know we're all a little bit over time, but just a very quick shout out. Both you and I have been on other podcasts over the last month or so. Yeah. So, and we forgot to do shout outs. So you were on the Xtreme Toolcast a few weeks ago. I've been on the Xtreme Toolcast as well, a little bit before that. So you talked a lot about Power Pages and stuff with Scott and Daryl. Very interesting episode. Thank you. As always with these guys. And I was on the air and in the cloud. Yeah. That was very, I love that. I love that when you get to talk about the history and kind of connect us to the age of the platform, kind of the solidness of the platform. I just love that you do that because you do that every time you get a chance to. And it just adds always to my knowledge of this being an enterprise 30-year-old platform that people look at it as a really low-code kind of thing in a corner. No no this is a battle-tested thing that we've had around we've used for heavy lifting for 30 years don't look at it as a fragile thing uh and i just love the fact you point that out and also yeah um thank you for all the nice words.

[39:27] Of course. Yeah. Thank you for that. And then of course, and then the other thing both you and I were involved with, of course, our friend Victor Dantes has put on this zero to hero for power pages and AI mentorship. He's had like, this is Victor. He just seems to be able to assemble.

[39:44] He just makes the call and people just come running. And of course, like us too. It's like, oh, Victor's doing something. We got to help him out. so he does the zero to hero for power pages uh basically everybody the people he's just, amassed a whole bunch of really cool people as cheryl netley uh franco um just and then you yeah you you did a session this week which was amazing um i did one a couple weeks ago on power automate and power pages so check out that we have the link in the show notes he's reposting these videos after so if you need to get ramped up on power pages um this is another great resource and i just someone sent me a link to the zero to hero uh thing that we did because two years ago we did exactly the same thing and you were both on it and that was before i became an mvp so it was kind of the same it was april ish two years ago and i was sitting there saying how i'm not an mvp and i don't have small children i don't have time for it and it's not gonna happen and And la la la, so inexperienced and so nervous and talking so slowly. I was, oh, it was embarrassing to watch, but also just knowing what happened after that and kind of what, you know, it's just, it's so much fun. Part of the adventure and love being part of Victor's stuff. And yeah, it's very fun to see. Yes.

[41:06] Yes. So I'm, I'm collaborating with Victor on a few things. announcements are coming up, which will be interesting. Put it this way. I actually have to order a flight suit off of Amazon. So we'll talk more about that later. Oh, now I'm carrying. This is. Maybe I'll let you in on the secret after. I didn't know that we had secrets in the first place. What else don't I know?

[41:33] Oh, no, there's no secrets between you and I.

[41:38] Anyways you're speaking at a couple of conferences coming up.

[41:44] Yes dynamics con dynamics mind collab days and with you at eppc and also i'm at resco as well resco is the other thing that i think we will announce this week what's going on uh i got something cooking there which i think they're about ready to let public but i will let them do that and then yeah EPPC you and I we're doing our top 10 power pages tips and tricks and also there are two day tickets left and boost for 10% discount if you're going and you haven't got your ticket yet yeah and, Yes. Cool. All right. And yeah, I think we've kind of blown by our regular time, but we're not our longest, but that's okay. Yes. We've had a lot of things to go through today, though. And it's, yeah, I think it's worth it, right?

[42:36] Absolutely. Yeah. Last Boostcast was about the preparing session submissions. And that was so perfect timing because I had someone ask me, you know, I want to prepare a session for Nordic Summit because that is due this week, the end for a call for speakers. Do you have any tips or tricks on what the people that are looking at this are looking for? And I went, oh, very curious that you would ask that, sir. Let me just send you a TTP. So that was perfect timing. So if you're looking to submit sessions to any conferences then check out the latest Boost Quest as well.

[43:09] Yeah, like the The, no, I was just about to say, yeah, for the Nordic Summit, I think by the time this is published, the deadline for Nordic has passed. But I mean, there's new events and new conferences, new user groups coming up all the time. Plenty of opportunities for you to create and submit. If you've thought about it, you know, like check out the Boost Quest, but also like don't hesitate to reach out to people in the community or even the event organizers. People are there to help you. They're looking for content. Um, we're as an event organizer, we're always looking for new speakers. Um, you know, we just, we like the classic sessions, uh, you know, Daryl and his, uh, plugin base class. Like, yes, that's a classic, but let's add some new content as well. With how to get started with part pages. Yes, we've seen it, but come on, we need that too.

[44:01] Yeah. And then, yeah, hit us with something new. Hit us with a customer case, a problem you solved, something you couldn't work around. Show us the dirty the fails the anything just show us something we haven't seen before something you are excited about something you're passionate about that's all we need or or even if you see even if we've seen it before even if it's like a power automate 101 session if we like to hear a new voice about the same thing as well you have different experiences everybody's unique so don't look at a session like oh everybody's going to do a session on co-pilot well that's true but we don't know you're no one's going to do your session on co-pilots so go for it exactly right, perfect and with that we have to wrap up our next episode will be in two weeks may 15th if i don't recall and that is also the day that i have my next portal lunch so if you're norwegian you speak norwegian and you want to learn about the latest in power pages world then join us for portal lunch on May 15th. And yeah, I guess we'll see you then.

[45:09] All right. Bye, everybody. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a rating 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 Boost podcast with your hosts, Luric Akebek and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

[45:43] Music.


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