Power Platform Boost Podcast

Segues and shoutouts (#31)

• Season 1 • Episode 31

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[0:00] Hey, have you ever had a customer call you up in a panic, said, we have just deleted a whole bunch of data. How do we get it back? But it's not just restoring the whole environment. We only deleted this little bit of data. How do we get that back? Has that ever happened to you? No. Usually it's me calling one of the Dynamics seniors on the team going, I deleted this thing because I was drinking wine and exporting and importing. I didn't think, and then it's gone. What do I do? And they say, relax, have another glass, darling. I'll fix it for you. And they kind of get it back. And I have no idea what they do. Okay, fair enough. So I've had that customer's call. Like, oh, shoot. You've been on the other end. I've been on the other end. Yeah, it comes in like, oh, I've been drinking wine and I did this and this.

[0:53] Music.

[1:12] 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 Dolman and Lydica Akebeck. I won. Hi, everyone. Welcome to... No, I don't have to say that anymore. We're going to have to do this over. Hi, Nick. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. I don't really want to be here for once because I just... I was outside on my veranda and I was getting my tan on because today in Norway, it's summer. Who knew that that could happen in the middle of May? But it's 24 degrees. The sun is just, ah, it's so awesome. And it's all quiet. And it's Sunday for once because we're recording this early. And the birds are singing. And it's just this real raffling in the trees. And it's just so beautiful. I just love it. So when we're done, and I hope we're fast today, so I'll just run out and I'll just bake in the sun somewhere. How are you? That sounds, I'm good. It's rainy here.

[2:29] So, yeah, no, this is what we do. We always talk about the weather and it's funny because now with using some of the show notes stuff, it always comes out discussion about the weather. It's like the first chapter. Yeah. We're Canadian and Norwegian. What can you do? That's it. It's important in our lives. And I think it makes us appreciate the.

[2:50] Good weather more it's i feel it in my whole body there's um i have so much energy and i just soak up all the sun rays oh i just love it so and i know in my heart i can never live somewhere without seasons we've talked about this before yeah absolutely so yeah and the reason we are doing this on a sunday morning is because normally we record on a monday morning and then that way it's like you know it's a nice break from work and whatnot to do the the recording um but actually Actually, I'm traveling to Colorado this week to Denver, going to DynamicsCon, and my flight tomorrow is early tomorrow morning during the time we normally record. So that's why we're recording now on a Sunday, of course, but everybody hears us on a Wednesday, so it really doesn't matter. No, to us it's important, but not to the people, because we'll get this out in time. So what are you doing in Denver? What's going on? In Denver, it is DynamicsCon. It's a conference. They started a couple of years ago, I think in the pandemic, a lot of the people that used to work for Dynamics Communities started up sort of a virtual something, like virtual conference, and then they decided to start doing live conferences. So I've been on their virtual conference a couple of times, and now this is the first time I'm actually going to their live conference. So I'm pretty excited about seeing that. Quite a few people in our community will be there speaking on various topics. Of course, I'm doing an intro to Power Pages. I'm not sure I'm not sure if you ever heard of it before.

[4:17] I think I know your introduction to PowerPages by heart. Yeah, it's like I kind of know your styling PowerPages by heart, even though I'm not good at it. But that's why I keep going back. Maybe I should revisit it then if it's not sticking. If you don't get anything out of it, then maybe, you know, maybe it's just you. Maybe it's just a lost cause. But maybe I should mix mine up then because it's obviously nowhere. Maybe I should just do the homework. Yeah, maybe. Not just watch that. But that goes for a lot of things, I think. You know, you go to conferences, you see all these amazing sessions, and you think you learn so much, and then you go back, and then what do you actually do with it? But I think it goes back to things we've talked about before. It's more the threads you know, you know the threads to pull if you need them. So if you ever needed to style power pages, you know where to go. Absolutely. And it's funny, that's a nice little, I know I'm going to jump around a little bit. That's a little segue into one of the, I know a nice one too, about the, um, you put, uh, the link you put in here about how do you keep up in the power platform?

[5:21] Oh yeah. And it's got both of our initials attached to it. And this was by a post by Yuka, um, from Finland. Of course, everybody knows who Yuka is. It's like, you know, it does a lot of cool stuff on, you know, like all about power platform, but licensing. Saying but he wrote a very interesting article about how to really keep up in the reality about that and what um you put this statement here everybody is faking it is collective knowledge and i mean it just sort of hit home because i get this question a lot how do you get started and how do you know so much it's like i don't know hardly anything like i know certain things but even like we looked at this week i did a video on something that you showed me in power pages and i've been been working in PowerPages for years.

[6:06] So it just goes to show it's like we have this collective community knowledge and you can't, you can't know everything.

[6:14] Yeah, no, back in the day, you could when the platform was small, there were only a handful of us, you know, doing stuff, then I felt like I had the kind of the grasp on everything. But I think these days, you just, you need to find your, your niche, your thing, your little, you know, the tea, right? So you need to know a little bit about everything. And then you have to have that, that solid, that column that you really know a lot of things about. And even then, we piggyback on each other's content all the time.

[6:40] I think it's also a good segue into a couple of other things I want to talk about. So a podcast episode with Mark Smith, with Franco Musso. And thank you, Franco, for the very nice shout out. It really, really means a lot to me. I met Franco years and years ago. He's not an MVP, but he really knows his PowerPages stuff, especially styling. So you'll remember Franco did the Spotify clone back in the day. Megan Walker was his mentor when he spoke at Scottish Summit back in the day. That's when we kind of connected the first time we went to dinner and we've been working together on projects in Norway. Such an amazing guy. And he talks to Mark Smith about how you need to find your niche thing because he's an independent and most of his works comes from LinkedIn. And it's because he says, I've never heard anyone approach me and ask, Franco, do you There are no any dynamics in general lists, right? It's always, customers are always looking for that specialist.

[7:44] So if you go independent or if you're looking kind of to get that specific, find your thing, find the things that you get excited about and dive in. And don't be afraid to ask because we're all here to help. And it's back to what Yuka is writing. It's that collective knowledge. That is where the power of this community is. And you and I, we do this every single day where I bring someone in and you run with something or the other way around. So, yeah. Yeah. And let's never stop doing that because that's where this power comes from. Absolutely. And I think I've said before, too, you don't always it's cool that, oh, I want to get into Power BI or I want to get into this. I always find that it's a little bit opposite. You don't always get to pick. Sometimes it chooses you in terms of the projects you take on or the things like the same with me. Power Pages was not a choice for me. Well, it was. Everything's a choice in the end. but really it was it was something that i kind of fell into this is something that was needed on a project that i needed to become i had needed in that t-shape i needed to go down that that hole and learn this uh fairly rapidly and luckily at the time the company i was working for supported that so that's how i you know became that expert and then of course it's all about sharing all of the stuff you learn along the way and again i've always said i write my blogs or do my videos more for my future self.

[9:11] And of course, now that I'm back and being an independent, it's the same thing. Like the stuff I've done the last few times is really more for my own kind of knowledge. And I have a whole bunch of content coming around Okta integration because that was something I had never touched before until this project we're working on now. And now it's like, no, I don't know everything, but I've learned a lot that I hope really helps accelerate someone else down the road that's trying to figure this out.

[9:38] Oh, yeah, definitely. And this goes, and I know we, so in this particular project, we had a, you brought up something that really no one thought about. So how to onboard existing customers. You have a huge existing customer base. We need to bring them in. It's going to be a migration project to bring all of those contacts into Dataverse. How do you onboard them in a new PowerPages site without all of them having to go through that registration process again? And it's such it's a thing that we come across in in many projects sometimes we'll start from scratch but you brought into that conversation a blog post that you made a couple of years ago we asked someone in the product team for a specific detail and you kind of figured it out by um re-engineering it from the from the back to the front kind of thing uh and we tried it out together and it worked. And it is collective, it is together that we make this work. Absolutely. And also wanted to, yeah, sorry. So that, yeah, great, great thing that you have those, I loved when we can get those resources up, we're gonna of course shout it out to everyone, because this is something that many people will come across in the project.

[10:50] And it goes to show like, this is the great thing about the community. Even me as an independent, I'm not, you know, of course I'm working on the project with you, but working on other projects or doing other trainings, we're not, even if we're in a company of one like I am, we're not working in silos or community. You work together, extremely collaborative. Like I posted, I post questions on like on a Slack group we have or WhatsApp or whatever. And immediately people are answering or giving pointers or things like that. So it's all, it's, you know, many. And the thing is, sometimes we're even competitors in the whole space. But, you know, it's the, I say the expression I like is rising tides lifts all boats. So if we're all helping each other out, we're all going to benefit from it. Yeah. And also it comes with a humility to acknowledge that we don't have to know everything. That's something I struggle with personally, to have a question posed and I'm the expert in the room and maybe I don't know. Of course, I have you, so I always have someone to ask a very good question. I know someone that probably can answer this. And usually in sessions as well, the same thing goes. People come at me afterwards and maybe I don't have the answers to the question. But if we pretend that we know the answers to everything and we don't dare to go out there and say, I don't know this...

[12:10] Then we will never get that knowledge sharing because then that opens up a space for other people to contribute. So it's finding that balance where you know your things, but also being honest about things that you don't know, because that may seem like a kind of a defeat for you, but it opens up that space for others to come in with their knowledge. And that goes for us. We are both in an expert, PowerPages expert architect position at this customer. And even we say, we don't know the answer to this, but we'll work it out because we know we can. And that kind of brings me also to another segue, actually. See, this is the segue podcast episode. One of the guys that I have on my team, he made a blog post about how to mitigate that power pages move through.

[13:04] Power pages move through to the different downstream environments with pipelines. So Power Platform Pipeline has been around for a while. I've spoken about ALM with Power Pages using Power Platform Pipelines on conferences this whole year. But there is a gap where you can use environment variables in Power Automate flows, but you can't use them in Power Pages directly. So if you have authentication set up, for instance, usually you want to have different endpoints, for instance, to Okta or Azure AD B2C for the different downstream environments. If you're not careful when you set this up the first time and you have clean environments, it will work because you can now move Power Pages with managed solutions through to downstream environments. Then you can set up authentication and it will create an unmanaged layer. Next time you push your managed solutions through, it won't touch that unmanaged layer. Stig.

[13:57] On my team, he has added customers where it's not perfect. They came into environments, they're already set up. There's so many things, there's so many layers. They can't rely on that managed solution and the layering this way. So they have to figure out a way to dynamically set the return URL to the authentication every time they push that through downstream environments. So he's been diving into the new data model, the virtual tables, how to get that site component thing, how to get that ID of that specific site setting that you need to set and how to do that with extending Power Platform Pipelines with Power Automate. I think it's a very good bug, because it will open up your mind to what possibilities are out there for extending Power Platform Pipelines and also using site components and the new data model for Power Pages with Power Automate. So there's so many good snippets of knowledge that I'll kind of point you that you can use for other things. So he's got a blog post that goes through a myriad of things. I just wanted to shout out to Stig Ark. He's doing such a good job. It's his first blog post because I'm, of course, encouraging all my people on my team to blog and make videos and share their knowledge. I'm so excited to see Stig do this. So look out for Stig Ark, people, because I know that there's much more coming. Yeah, very brilliant mind. I love talking to him sometimes and just bouncing ideas and things. And it's really cool to see. And like, yeah, it's amazing. Mm-hmm.

[15:26] Photographer, designer, web developer. I mean, come on, it's a total package, isn't it? Oh yeah. Awesome. Yeah. It's funny. I don't know if you ever, like I've been on a walk with him when we were doing some training, we walked from the hotel to where we're doing the training and he is constantly stopping, taking pictures of just random like alleyways and walls and artwork he sees. It's just, it's sort of like, oh, it's just interesting to see someone else through someone else's eyes, that kind of thing. Right. So yeah.

[15:51] It's almost like walking with a child that sees everything for the first time.

[15:54] Oh, look at this. It's so exciting. That's what a creative mind will do. Right. So, and that's a photographer mindset you see things for the fresh eyes and you want to capture it for the world yeah no i um yeah definitely want to look at one cool and so so yeah you have another because i could segue some more if you want oh go keep segueing it's all working out we're covering our stuff so yeah because this is kind of neat because we talk about someone new coming into the community that we're encouraging now i was uh on a podcast the type situation the other day with someone who is very instrumental to my career and it his name is nick and it's he does power pages and he's in canada but it's not you it's of course nicholas hayduke engineered code um 10 year anniversary um there's a bug post that he made he and his team so uh i can't remember I remember we said that, I think it was Juergen, who commented on one of our posts that, you know, we should let the team know. Because they think that there's a team behind our podcast. There isn't. But I think it was Danny. Yeah, Danny. Well, with Nick, it's actually a team. He does have people helping him. Yeah, no.

[17:18] Yeah, go. No, it's cool. You recorded. So he interviewed a couple of people from the community uh i'm so honored that nick wanted to talk to me uh of course yeah of course no not of course not for me um and he talked to you and a couple of other people and the videos are coming out uh through may i think they're gonna release them on different dates mine is coming out on my birthday 24th of may so that's very cool And also, I flipped it around when I talked to Nick because he's been interviewing all these great people. And I said, did anyone interview you? And he says, no. So I want to hear what your answers to these questions are. So I flipped it around and we recorded another episode. When I interview Nick, we get to hear his insights into all the different things that he's asking. So that was really cool. I'm excited for your guests to see that as well because he has some great insights. He's been with this product for a long, long time.

[18:20] No, and it's a great, interesting story. So of course, it's 10 years of his company, Engineered Code. So if you're learning Power Pages or need tidbits, definitely subscribe to his YouTube channel. It is like Nick's stuff on there, plus his blog and everything. And yeah, it just keeps coming. And he keeps posting these memes and stuff like that out as well around Power Pages, which are just funny little tidbits you see on social media. So, and Nick's a really good guy. I've known him for quite a few years. We have a very interesting story, how we met, which he doesn't admit to, he doesn't acknowledge, but we'll, that's a story for another day.

[18:56] But yeah, it's a, it's really cool. Congratulations, Nick, and congratulations to the Engineered Code for 10 years and many, many more. You're doing what I like about what Nick does, the same thing that we talked about before. Or they have a lot of great tribal knowledge, but they're very eager to share and expand out and share that through different things. He does a call every month, a Power Pages call. He does that with, I think, MSCRM World.

[19:23] Plus, he does the blogs and the videos, the whole bit. Plus, and then, yeah, these interviews are very interesting. So I saw the MindFive, my final version, which I think is going to be out maybe this week or next week, or I think maybe the week before yours. But yeah, look for those.

[19:41] Yeah and also we saw um a question this question pops up all over the place so many times and it kind of baffles me that people are still asking so i want to get started with power pages where do i start and i'm like dude just google how to get started with power pages or just go to engineer code because the tip if you combine the tips the power pages tips that nick does and the power pages community calls that he does you've covered everything and then you have You have RPIT's 30-day challenge with end-to-end PowerPages. And then you add Victor Danta's Zero to Hero three years in a row on top of that. Dude, come on. If you can get through all that, then you know everything there is to know about PowerPages. There's so much content out there. I kind of feel like it's just people. Yeah.

[20:31] When we started, there was literally nothing, nothing, not a single thing. We had to rely on each other's, our own blog posts and kind of just, yeah, asking on email, sending emails to you, asking you questions. And nowadays, it's so much. Tino's newsletter. Come on, people. It's just, don't be so lazy. Google it. Try to see what's what. And speaking of Tino, sorry. No, keep going.

[21:01] I think this is going to be a Rick is a rant segue podcast episode. Yeah. Oh yeah. You'll get to say, or you'll get to speak. I'll go for a coffee. You keep going.

[21:11] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just do that. It's okay. Um, no. So another segue, Tino's newsletter, right? So he has a power pages newsletter come out, comes out every week with all the new stuff, the resources and blog posts and everything you can imagine related to power pages. It's such a good resource. source and tino was awarded mvp yes last week uh may 1st yep yeah yeah that's awesome yeah congratulations totally well deserved yes absolutely we nominated him and we've kind of been did we talk about this last time no we didn't no we didn't we meant we meant to but we didn't, i didn't i don't think we had the time because we recorded before we knew so just wanted to say from the bottom of our hearts Tino you deserve it so much and I'm so happy to see you get that award that you deserve so keep up the good work and shout out to you even one more time, and we got to meet Tino yes yes we did.

[22:16] So it's, it was just, it was even doubly cool. Like I said, like, I think we talked about it in our color cloud episode, the stuff that he's, the stuff that he's cooking up and working on. Um, like it's amazing what, what he's coming up with. So yeah. Big, uh, big shout outs to a lot of people, great people on this episode. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big shout out segue episode.

[22:38] Right. So do you want to dive into the list of the things to talk about? Cause we were kind of all over the place today. No, we were segwaying. It's all good. But if we go back to the list, now we have to, you know, there is news and updates as well.

[22:55] Some of the stuff I looked at, there is something about the new plugins and embracing virtual networks. I won't dive too deep into that. I saw this. No, can you please just tell me what, explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old. Can you, can you explain, because I don't understand what this is. So this is a good way for the people that don't understand. Man, explain it to me, please. Okay. So the way I understand it and the way I'm reading about it too, is like with the virtual, like basically with virtual networks. So right now, if I want to, if I build a power app for a company and we roll it out, tactically, someone could sign in from anywhere in the world and access that power app with their credentials. No problem. But, you know, obviously there's some security concerns of where is that data being passed around and that kind of thing. So this way, this talks about setting up a virtual private or virtual network, meaning I'll still need, before I can run my power app, I'll need to connect to my virtual network to my organization. Is this VPN? Yeah. Kind of VPN, but sort of kind of taking it more sort of built and baked into the whole process. Okay.

[24:14] That's my understanding anyway. And then this also now allows plugins to be configured that they will run within those virtual networks as well. So it just basically tightens up the whole security process. And of course, customers are always a bit nervous going, well, if someone can access this data on the other side of the world, than who's you know there's you know sniffing network lines and tracking data and all this now if it's all within a virtual network of course it still travels with those lines but it's all encrypted and there's much more secure and it can't there's less chance of it the data sort of being kind of put out there opening up ways for malicious actors to get in that kind of thing um so okay basically just a man tightening up the fences and the security and the guardrails around that okay i guess it makes sense if you have very sensitive data you're in a very sensitive industry or this you know the the ministry of defense of the u.s government or something like that but you know vpns is for me that's um on-prem sharepoint that's way back way machine so um true true it is but there's still like even with with azure and stuff like that you can have like like dedicated network lines into Azure Data Center so you can still run your cloud.

[25:33] But it's only, you can only act, like you're controlled access into your cloud, basically, through certain doorways. Makes sense. So if you want your thing very, very, very secure, then there's another thing that you can kind of close the thing and make, yeah, good. Right. And if you, you know, And if you want to get things you upskilled on security with networking and co-pilot, then you found something about the co-pilot ninja security certification.

[26:08] Look at that segue. Co-pilot ninja certification was suddenly one day on LinkedIn. It was everywhere. So many people posted in the community. oh i'm a co-pilot ninja certified and i had to look into it and what it was and of course i don't as usual i i pick this up and i go oh oh i need to do this and then i put it in the show notes and then i don't have time so maybe nick you seem to you go through all the the challenges and all the certification all the applied skill things so maybe this is for you um you can become I'm going to become a Coppola Ninja. Ninja? Ninja. Ninja? Yeah, I don't know. I'm on day 180 of the 90-day challenge that Mark Smith put out.

[26:54] But you're doing the 90-day challenge. I think, you know, you signed up. You finished it, didn't you? Almost done.

[27:03] So the real reason why I, because that's one thing, you see all of these things pop up. It's not a Microsoft certified certification. It's something else. It's someone else's partner or something that has the certifications. It's not an official Microsoft one.

[27:18] But the link that we put in the show notes, it is absolutely jam-packed with all the strands that you need to become very, very skilled at co-pilot security. I can't imagine a resource this extensive. So this post that we'll post, go through that and you'll find everything you need to know about co-pilots and security and throughout the platform. So it's a very good technical skilling curriculum from beginner to intermediate to advanced. There's a checklist that you can go through how to get started, how to become proficient, how to grow into an expert. And there's of course links to learning paths and tests you can take so it starts off with take this test if you pass 80 or more then you can um kind of what was it called request the certification so absolutely if that's what you need then put that on your linkedin profile and that's a good certification to have cool hey have you ever had a customer call you up in a panic said, we have just deleted a whole bunch of data. How do we get it back? But it's not just restoring the whole environment. We only deleted this little bit of data. How do we get that back? Has that ever happened to you?

[28:40] No, usually it's me calling one of the Dynamics seniors on the team going, I deleted this thing because I was drinking wine and exporting and importing and didn't think, and then it's gone. What do I do? And they say, relax, have another glass, darling. I'll fix it for you. And they kind of get it back. And I have no idea what they do. Okay, fair enough. So I've had that customer's call like, oh, shoot, I've been on the other end.

[29:10] Yeah, it comes in like, oh, I've been drinking wine and I did this and this. It's like, you know, no, no, no. So usually it's, I find it's actually one of these things that happen. This is a user design thing where you do it. Someone will have a subgrid with child records in a model-driven app, and then they'll want to delete a few of the child records, and they'll highlight them. But then they'll hit the delete button on the top form, which deletes the whole record plus all the child records.

[29:39] And then depending on the association, it's gone. And this has happened more than once. And it's usually by the power user that's at the client. Of course, they have full system and mid privileges, meaning they have access to the delete button, which for everybody else we remove access to. Right. So this has happened a couple of times. And, you know, so sometimes it's a case I don't once I had to restore another environment and extract the data and reimport it to say that the other time it was me being lucky that I when I did the association configuration, I didn't do the delete. I didn't do cascade all. I just removed link. So I was able to recreate the header record and relink those child records. Still extra work. And then, of course, go in and, you know, the command bar and get rid of the delete button, even for administrators, just to be on the safe side. But all that being said, where this was leading to is there was an announcement this week that there's a new feature that's coming out to be able to restore deleted Dataverse records.

[30:47] So, that means if you delete, it goes into a recycle bin for, you can set the number of days. I think the default is 28 or something like that. And then if it's deleted that way, if someone goes in that panic, it's like if it's within 28 days, you'll be able to go in and restore those records, including the associated child records that might have got deleted as well. Oh, that's fantastic. So then that applies to Power Pages as well, because that's records, right? So if you delete your website or you delete that big list that you've been working on because you were in the basic form metadata, for instance, and you kind of hit delete on the wrong thing, then you can actually get it back.

[31:32] Very exciting. It's interesting because it reminded me, and this is the old man Nick segment back in my day. In CRM 3 and 4, the way it worked, this is our on-prem systems. When you deleted something in CRM, it wouldn't actually delete the record in SQL in the back end. It would flip a bit. And then there was a job that ran every night that would actually go through all the records that were marked for deletion would delete them. So i've had it i remember i remember customers like oh shoot we accidentally deleted data like when did you delete it well this morning okay no problem i was able to go back to the sql server find those records and flip you know flip that bit of course completely unsupported to write to sql directly can't do that in the cloud now but sort of remind when i saw that i kind of like oh yeah and it was it kind of goes back to that a little bit so anyways we'll have that in the show notes check out that's a preview feature right now but uh that might save you a lot of time and uh agony in the future yeah absolutely and then so when you're um someone calls in your cons call center and then you can have a case going and you can help your internal or IT people restore it, and then Copilot can automatically create a knowledge article from it. And like Diane Taylor is showing us in her latest blog post.

[32:59] Yeah. So trying to not so skillfully segue over to one of Diane Taylor's latest blog posts, which is Dynamics 365 Knowledge Articles. This is a preview feature today as well that allows Copilot to generate a knowledge article in Dynamics 365 customer service based on case resolvent. Now, you've had the ability to do this for a while yourself, but you can tick a box and enable this, and you have a button in the command bar, and you have this proposed new knowledge to be added to the case resolution form. So, very good article, Diane. Thank you so much for bringing that to our attention. It's going to be very helpful going forward. Yeah, Dionne does amazing videos and stuff. It's just interesting. And a lot of times she has her dog in her videos and stuff as well. I don't know if you see that. You should bring Hudson. We should have that. And I should bring Senja. We could all do that. Yeah, the pets episode. Yeah, I'm not sure how that would work out.

[34:06] Cool Alright What else we got going on here So for instance the rendy story It's kind of on the same line It's kind of our Tracking and going back Do you want to tell the people what it is.

[34:21] Yeah, very timely that this came up because we were discussing with our project as well, because we do use Power Automate quite a bit and how we're going to monitor all of this. I think we've been I've been in projects where, yeah, we set up the Power Automate. It works great until it doesn't. But then no one knows it quit working until they realize, hmm, things aren't, you know, messages aren't being sent out or renewals aren't being sent out. It hasn't happened in a few weeks and no one noticed because there was no alert or message or things like that and how to monitor it. Now, I know the Center of Excellence has a lot of tools in there to help monitor your flows in this, but this is provides, this again is another thing in preview of how you can manage that cloud flow history within a Dataverse table. So there's a table that's being added called flow runs, which you can put in a Dataverse table. Of course, that means you can put it in a model driven app and this sort of helps an administrator kind of monitor that. And of course, once it gets into those, you know, that table, then you can, you know, if something fails, well, then you can send, you know, alerts or things like that, or even build a dashboard or help monitor and see what's going on with your Power Automate.

[35:28] So I know that there's still a few gaps, so it's still preview. And they acknowledge, it's interesting how they acknowledged about in that article when they're going GA and they said, we're not going to go to GA until we've addressed these gaps. So it was kind of a message of, I found that very interesting because Microsoft is usually a sort of like, yeah, we're waiting on, you know, yes, it will be, it's in preview now, meaning it's not necessarily supported. I know a lot of customers won't touch preview features. They always want it to be GA and I appreciate that.

[35:59] Um, but this was a case of, they were saying when it will be like, not so much the date of when it'll be GA, but the parameters of which they would make this GA. And I love that. I hope Microsoft continues to do that because that gives people a better understanding. Like, you know, you know, you hear the complaints like, oh, why isn't this a GA yet? This has been in preview and things like that. Well, there's certain thresholds and certain things to make it supportable that Microsoft wants to reach. So I do, I think that was pretty cool. So yeah, definitely check that out in terms of if that's an issue that you're running into monitoring your cloud flows and see what's going on there.

[36:34] Yeah, so then you can kind of intercept yourself. So you have a flow and that fails and that goes into flow run. So you can have a power automate that triggers. So when a new flow run with a certain status is created, then you can have a power automate kick that off and then it'll create another run flow run. And that will, yeah, and you'll have that going. Do you think that will then tell you, like it usually does for me when I create an infinite loop that, sorry, you've created an infinite loop. You have to make sure that this doesn't trigger itself and creates a complete mess. Yeah, I'm not sure. I think this is more of what's happened as opposed to what is happening. Like it's different from the checker that's within Power Automate. But yeah, definitely. Again, a lot of these things like we scan, we read, but we don't have time to try these out either. And sometimes we can't because it says it's coming, but it might not be available on our tenants yet. So things to keep an eye on. We're all learning together, right? This is part of the community. Like, hey, everybody check this out, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And then we kind of just play with the mind and think what could it be. And then, yeah, people just have to try it out. Something that Namasi Navratam also did with PowerPages Speak Recognition. This is also someone who's tried something out. So much of a fun experiment.

[37:59] Yeah. And he shared it with everybody. And yeah, he's a, the, he's part, he's from Kings County, which I know is a, is a, is a customer actually of, of Microsoft and PowerPages. So, and he did like speech recognition within PowerPages. That is so neat. And I read through his article, how he did it. Like, yes, it is a pro code approach and, but using some of those other APIs that are available within browsers. And so you can imagine you build a, you know, build a forum and a PowerPages site. Um, and if you, especially if you do it on a mobile app and you need to fill it in, you're out in the field and you're not all good with the thumbs and well.

[38:33] Now you can just, the way he's done it, you just hit a button and you can talk and it will speak into that particular form field and fill that in. So amazing, amazing idea. Really, really cool to see that kind of information. And that's something that again, it's going to stick in my head down the road or the customer's like, Oh, we want to build a mobile app and we want to do voice recognition. Like, aha, there's a blog post. They talk about that. Yeah, definitely. And it's so much fun to see people just trying things out. And this is maybe a far-fetched use case, but I am absolutely 100% sure that speech, if you're looking for a thing to dive into, like we talked about earlier, speech.

[39:11] Speech and AI. Go. goal yes and you'll probably yeah never run out of work to do in the future because that's where we're going um so yeah definitely something to check out um yeah and i think that kind of concludes the list uh we um are over time none of us kept uh nigh on the on the time i think um, last boost quest was about the balance between low code and pro code you're kind of looking for some input have you gotten any comments on the franco responded to this um and yeah it was this sort of it's interesting about you know configuration the fact that you know like this this could probably hope be a whole other episode um so it's it's really like i thought it would kind of create a bit of controversy but i think everybody's sort of we're going to that like we talked about in our last episode everybody's a developer and to me it's like yeah there was a one time where we were you know, doing punch cards, and then we move to machine code and then scripting languages. To me, natural language is the next thing. So one last little segue into this was the fact of there is a co-pilot features are now into Power Fx.

[40:25] Meaning you can write power effects kind of using that natural language, but it's, and those tools have existed, but now it's more embedded while you're building like Canvas apps and things like that. So there's another article we have here. We didn't really, I noticed we were going through like, Ooh, we missed that one. So that ties into this next evolution of where we are going as developers. The thing is, I think Franco made the point, we still need to understand the code. We still need that skill set to put through instructions on something. I know if I were to give somebody directions to my house, for example, I still need to be very conscious and sequenced. Like turn here, go down this street, look out for this, travel five minutes, turn left. I'm doing that in natural language, but I still need that skill set to make sure I'm doing things in a linear order. I am, you know, presenting things. Okay, but watch out for this roundabout because it's very dangerous. Or, you know, you know, and we've talked about this, you know, walking through this neighborhood, be aware of your surroundings kind of thing. Right. So those types of natural language things, we still need that developer skill set, but we're just our tools are evolving or different. So that was kind of the conversation where that boost quest is going a little bit now.

[41:43] But again, this could probably continue on for a while. So if you see that post, check it out. If you have some comments on there, if you don't, if you totally disagree with me, like, no, no, we still need pro coders and co-pilot sucks. Or no, no, no, no, no. Like now everybody would like get rid of configuration. We'll just tell what we want and it will just produce it for us. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, yeah. Hit us with all your opinions. That's what we want, want the discussion going. So you're going to DynamicsCon next week and then DynamicsMinds.

[42:16] Yes. Then CollabDays. Yes. Then Resco next.

[42:21] Yes. And Resco. We want to share with the people about Resco. Yes, we can announce it now. It's on LinkedIn. So it's funny, we talked about this podcast. We were inspired by Lisa Crosby and Megan Walker and the Up podcast. Podcast um and of course we're doing our podcast and then so what we're doing at resco me and lisa are doing a live um podcast episode uh it's not a podcast it's not boost podcast it's you know a kind of a one-time uh thing and we're talking about a very favorite topic for all of us we're talking about community and how community can accelerate your career because that's the whole Resco.net theme is, uh, you know, uh, accelerating productivity. Um, of course they have a lot of great tools, um, with their mobility and the mobility space are very well known. They have a lot of cool stuff, but we're talking about how the community can help accelerate a career. Um, because I, I would be honest, my career is nowhere where it will, it would not be where it is right now, of course, with the community, um, and what I've learned and how I interact. And even like we were talking about earlier as an independent, I kind of rely on the community to sometimes help me along and get over humps and problems. So that's really what the theme of that discussion is going to be about. I'm really interested to sort of hear Lisa's thoughts on that as well, because she's heavily involved in the community. She does a lot of stuff. And I think her career, her YouTube channel has exploded over the last few years.

[43:48] So yeah, keep an eye out for that. That will be, you know, like I said, I'm not exactly sure how it's going to be, probably going to be broadcast over LinkedIn, I'm guessing, but we'll be more details there. Yeah. And then we'll put links in the show notes when that's live and when we're together. We'll share the boost with the BoostGit accounts. Yeah. And speaking of joint sessions, European Power Platform Conference after that. Yeah. You and I have a joint session, 10 top tips about Power Pages. I don't know if there's still tickets available. We do have a boost discount code for 10% off two-day tickets. and then you're going to Vegas. Yep. That came out this week too. Speaking of collaborating. So this, this would be different, like going like Victor Dantes and Franco Moose. So talk, speaking of Franco and Victor, we spoke about them earlier. The three of us are doing a Power Pages workshop, kind of on a Top Gun style.

[44:48] This is, strap yourselves in folks. This is going to be a ride. Sign up now. Cause I have a, I have a feeling this could sell out. Just if I was... To learn development in PowerPages, it'd be like, okay, am I going to go to another boring workshop or am I going to go to these three clouds to see what they're going to do? The dynamic between the three of you, it's total package. You kind of just, yeah, you go full circle. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, that's so awesome. There's nothing you can learn about PowerPages that you won't learn from you three. So you kind of cover everything. And it's, oh, that's going to be so much fun. So bummed out. I'm going to miss it. But I'll hear all about it, I guess. Yes. And I'll see you at Nordic Summit and at Scottish Summit in October, because we'll have a live podcast recording of this podcast together at Scottish Summit. That was announced. I'm not sure it's announced. We know. So keep it to yourselves. Oh, yeah. This is a sneak peek for our listeners directly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't tell anyone. All right. So next episode will be May 29th. And that we will probably record together. Yes. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Right. I love talking to you today.

[46:10] And it's fun as always to record this with you. And you want to get out into the Norwegian sunshine, like they say. Summer in Norway, best day of the year, right? I know. Best day of the year. You'll have to just enjoy it while it's here. And then I'm going to have rain tomorrow, probably. No. I'm going to have a whole week, actually, of sun and summer. I'm so excited. Yeah. And I'm sorry that you have rain, but you usually have better summers. I mean, anyways, and more summer days. So it kind of evens out. You got to take the sugar with the shit. That's what we say, right? Yeah. Safe travels tomorrow. Thank you. And I'll catch you later in the week. Absolutely. Right. Right. Talk later. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening. And if you like this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. Make sure to leave a rating and review your favorite streaming service and makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode. Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts, Ulrika Akerbeck and Nick Dolman. And see you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news.

[47:21] Music.


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