Power Platform Boost Podcast

Angels Sing (#35)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 35

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[0:00] All our Google Homes go, good morning. The weather today is going to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, before they even get coffee going. It's the first thing. Can I go to the beach or not? And they hear sunshine and warm, and all of a sudden, boom. All your cars are humming away to the beach. Like, hmm. They don't hum. They don't hum. That's the thing. OK.

[0:24] Music.

[0:43] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your timely source of Power Platform news and updates with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk. Hello. Hello. Hey. It's so... Hey. It's summertime.

[1:03] Five minutes summertime. This episode will be like five minutes because nothing happens in summer, right? I know. It's sunny out and I'm Norwegian, so I'm going to run in a minute. Oh, no. I'm on summer holiday. This is my summer vacation. And you have kind of a strange thing going on. And I'm Norwegian, right? So we have four weeks off every summer because in those four weeks, there might be one day of summer and we don't want to miss it. So we take four weeks and we just all sit inside and wait. And then when that day comes, we just run outside and we enjoy that hike out on that day. And then we go back in and we mope and we sulk. So everybody's running to the beach. The sun gets up. They're mad dash. Ah, it's so crowded. And then now you work with a Norwegian customer project and they go, you're not allowed to work in July. And I love the look on your face when you went, I'm not allowed to, isn't it? You're being forced to have a Norwegian summer holiday. And you don't do it yourself. It's so much fun.

[2:10] Yeah, because this is so... This is how North American projects go live. It's sort of like, oh, yeah, we're going live at the end of the summer. So cancel all your vacations and work through it and we'll make it up later. They never do. But that's typical. And then there it's like, OK, we're going live at the end of the summer, but we're taking July off. Everybody have a good summer. Get recharged to get ready for early August. They're like, OK.

[2:37] Yeah, we go live three weeks into August. because we go live and everyone has four weeks of vacation where we get to turn our phones off and just be at the beach. I think that's, and you know what, to be honest, that is the better way because I think we've been going, working hard on these projects plus other things that just sort of, yeah, you need to unhinge, unwind and just do other fun stuff like, you know, go to the beach, you know, when it's sunny or I would say go to the gym as long as you don't hurt yourself, but that's a whole other conversation. You know, so bonus track. Yeah, exactly. Cool. But even though when you're sitting on the beach or waiting for the sun to poke through, I know I'm on my phone, I'm checking LinkedIn, seeing things and there's still stuff happening in the Power Platform. There's new stuff in the community. It's like I think a lot of people like, oh, if we're not working as hard, we can write new videos or new blogs and post stuff on LinkedIn, write new tools. So there's still a ton of stuff to talk about today. So.

[3:42] Yes, definitely. Ready to dive into it? Do you want to kick off with one of yours or do we just go top to bottom? Because I think it's a kind of a good flow in here for some reason. Yeah, let's go top to bottom. Sure. So the first one is yours. Yes.

[3:55] The first one is mine. It's from one of my favorite, favorite coders of all time. No coder, Amy Holden is first up with how to call a Power Automate flow from a button in model-driven apps.

[4:08] And this is a very clever thing. And I love how Amy does this. She kind of opens the thing and just rips all the little pieces apart. And then she puts them together in a weird way that no one ever thought about. And then she creates magic. So this is a way for you to trigger something, trigger a model from your ribbon in your model driven app, triggers a model that gives you some kind of feedback about what's happened. And so the flow triggers when you click the button and the custom page that is the modal loads. That's when the Power Automate triggers.

[4:47] And you're able to catch the response if it's a failure, if it's a success, and give the user a good user interface based on the response from the Power Automate flow. So if that is something that you are in need of. And she also lists three different ways of doing this with the HTTP request or can't remember what the second one is, or God forbid, you use when I do what I do and use the legacy of fire, the legacy trigger for Power Automate. I think it's called CDN or something. Yeah, but they actually it's there now in the new one, apparently, which I didn't add that to the notes. But anyways, but. Okay, good. Anyways, keep going. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, because that's been the only way to trigger a Power Automate from Mulder as far as I've been concerned. You know, you have the flow on top and then you click the...

[5:40] Um, but it's legacy or it's been legacy up until this point. So it's amazing to see how Amy was able to kind of hack and use a custom page to trigger a flow. Uh, and also with like, we had an episode a couple of months back with a little help from my friends. So she uses one of, uh, Diana Birkelbach's blog posts and kind of works with that as a starting point and develops it to make it her own. And it also speaks to the fact that if you read a blog post and you use that for something and it's slightly different, write your own blog post about it because your perspective and your use case will trigger something in someone's mind that the previous blog post didn't. I love that she kind of builds on what Diana did and makes it her own. And also, yes, Amy, I agree with you. Don't hide buttons. If you want to not allow users to click a button, don't hide it, but disable it and give them a good feedback to why you're not able to click this button.

[6:44] It's one of ours. Yeah, Amy and I agree on a lot of these UX things. So that's just something I had to mention. So, great work from both of these gals, both Amy Holden and Diana Birkbeck, for sure. So, great work, girls. Amazing, amazing folks in our community, both of them. Absolutely. Friends of ours. And that made you make a, what is it? Happy dance? Happy co-dance. Happy co-dance. Yes. So this is Pauline Cold.

[7:16] She's a new MVP. She just got awarded, I think, last month or the month before. Congratulations, Pauline. She was in the same group of the 90-Day Mentoring Challenge that I did with Mark Smith as well. And we met her at ColorCloud as well. Um, and so she, it's funny, she put something about, you know, the, uh, just sort of, she says, anytime you get a piece of JavaScript code working, um, do you kind of do like a happy code dance kind of thing? And I know having worked a lot in JavaScript and model driven apps lately, um, I totally agree. If I get a piece of code working that I've been banging my head against the wall and then all of a sudden it works, it's just sort of like, like, you know, I don't dance much, but I do that for.

[7:59] So anyways she's of course she started to put together um uh basically a library of the stuff that she's learning and again this is what it's all about you learn something share it because chances are people like even if it's documented even if someone already posted a blog or did a video someone still has probably missed it or they didn't understand it or it's from a different perspective so you're providing your perspective so pauline's put together a beginning to put together a JavaScript library for real-time marketing. And I just have it up here and I'm just looking at some of the things that she has already there, like selecting checkboxes, showing hiding fields, showing hiding multiple fields, like activating, deactivating buttons. There's a whole bunch of stuff here. We'll have the link in the show notes. So again, JavaScript is not dead in definitely model-driven apps and marketing forums and customer insights and everything like that um there's a lot you can do with it like yes we have business rules for certain things but at the end of the day if you're building model driven apps and you're going into it like i'm learning now i'm doing a lot of model driven app stuff and i absolutely love it um but i'm still using javascript on a daily basis so definitely check that out and speaking of model driven apps and buttons our good buddy thomas who is our very loyal listener Right, Thomas did a blog post about hiding, showing buttons.

[9:28] Yeah, absolutely. I was supposed to have that up there with Diana and Amy's posts, but nonetheless, Thomas wrote a blog post about the new capabilities of how you now can edit the ribbon buttons without the ribbon workbench. So maybe then Scott has more free time coming up I don't know um because it seems to be that Microsoft is attempting to replace the ribbon workbench which they kind of been embedded into their own documentation I heard I I watched um I listened to a blog a post sorry my mind is mush a podcast episode I think that was the sprint zero podcast episode with Scott where he actually talks about how they're now working together to try and figure out how to transition from the Ribbon Workbench that we've had for a while into something embedded in the designer studio. Yeah, it's a prime example of how, I mean, Microsoft designed the Ribbon, like going back a thousand years ago, doing the menu in CRM was pretty, it was actually pretty straightforward. It was an isv.config and And it was a pretty simple XML, but then they incorporated the ribbon, if you remember, from Office 2010 or something.

[10:45] And then it was this whole XML mishmash. And at the time, you basically had to use Notepad to add or remove buttons and things from Dynamics CRM. And then so Scott comes along, builds this tool. And I think Microsoft had always planned to build a user interface. But then Scott came along, built the ribbon workbench, originally in Silverlight, I believe.

[11:07] He can correct me if I'm wrong. He's good at that. And then redid it again, I think using HTML5 or something like that. But anyways, very powerful tool.

[11:21] Everybody who's worked in model-driven Power Apps or Dynamics 365 is aware of it, but the new command editor, you can do a lot. And the nice thing about the command editor is it loads, it's directly within your existing tool set and things like that, but it can't do everything yet as Thomas kind of outlined in his blog. I had to go through and I did some documentation for the project we're working on now for the folks that will be maintaining it of how to hide or edit buttons that you know basically go through security, command bar, ribbon workbench is kind of your almost your last resort nothing against ribbon workbench but.

[11:58] It is sort of, you know, eventually we, you know, in the fullness of time, we want Microsoft to be able to support that, especially the new command bar tooling going forward. So, yeah, great, great post. And, yeah, be interested to hear sort of what people's, when we'll get to a point where we can edit buttons completely and then wait for the next. And I'm sure Scott's got a thousand other ideas of building amazing tools and he always comes up with something creative. Of so now we work some Microsoft I mean surely they can figure it out yeah amazing good and I thank you Thomas for bringing it to our attention and we keep we'll keep track of new features and updates to the to that editor for sure keep pressing those buttons oh yeah and I saw also I think that was on the LinkedIn post that Robin commented something along the lines of you know,

[12:55] when do we get the custom button action for triggering a Power Automate file? And then his response was, well, you could always do. And then he kind of went through the same approach as Amy and Diana did with the custom page. So that seems that custom page trigger a modal thing seems to be the solutions for a lot of these things. So if you're in need of something custom, then maybe you should look into that and what you can do with it. I'm living and breathing.

[13:23] I was about to say, yeah, I'm living and breathing custom pages right now and just doing all sorts of amazing things. So that's not really a big flashing update. But if you're trying to work your way through model-driven apps and you're running into these roadblocks, make sure you, that's another thing. You need to know JavaScript. You need to know custom pages. So maybe I should do a blog post on stuff you need to know for model-driven apps or a session or something like that. So top 10 things you need. I would read it. Yeah. And you obviously also need to know Power Fx. That's now everywhere. And YAML. YAML. You put a link in here to YAML Essentials for the Power Platform.

[14:04] And I watched it. I learned a ton. So much fun. Yeah, this was by April Dunham, of course, Scott's boss, actually. Speaking of the advocates, our favorite advocates, and of course, Daniel as well. We can't forget about Daniel. We don't pick favorites, do we? Do we? We don't pick favorites. It depends on the day. It depends on who's buying me beer at the time. Anyway never mind April wins this week we've already talked about Scott now we have to put down something Daniel at the end so that we make sure that Daniel always listens to the end but now we're going to talk about April's stuff so she did this amazing blog post on YAML and why is so YAML is.

[14:52] Yet another markup language originally but they changed the change the name and she talks a little bit about that no i'm not going to spoil it so you'll have to watch the video but you know yaml is another format um i've used it before in different things but what's cool about yaml is why it's why is yaml so important is because in canvas apps when we want to view code of our components those are all going to be in yaml now so, again yaml is pretty straightforward you just got to understand it's spacing as opposed to like like either JSON or XML or whatever, but it is something that a power platform advance maker needs to know about or developer. So if you've never heard of YAML or you don't know, check out April's video. She will get you ramped up ASAP.

[15:38] Yeah, definitely. Amazing. And also something we noticed this week, and this is also something that was brought to our attention on LinkedIn. So, and, you know, we kind of had a bit of a discussion before we started recording

[15:51] if this is something we wanted to talk about. And it is because, so, Wilmer Alkivar, is that right? Alkivar? Yeah, Alkivar, yeah. linkedin so happy to see my latest pcf power pages file uploader has been added to the pcf gallery thank you so much guido uh yeah yeah yeah rah rah this could easily be me right and then suddenly one of the comments is a bit it's a bit direct maybe is is i want to call out this is not the best way to go about this in terms of security and you know any kind of pinpoints three things that me as not non-developer doesn't really understand in terms of security right so there's There's a few security issues with this. And yes, the comments might be a bit direct and kind of feels a bit harsh maybe. But I have to say, for me, maybe it's just because I'm Norwegian, this just occurred to me that I like this.

[16:45] I love the fact that we as a community have the trust to be able to call each other out when something is not good enough or something could be better. And that we trust and we understand that this comes from a place of love and wanting things to be the best they could be. So the point of bringing this up and talking about it is really more to the point where if you experience some hard criticism, some candid feedback.

[17:21] Then try your best to see that forward what it actually is. it is a compliment more than anything that we expect or the bar is so high. We expect everyone to know everything about security and UX and user feedback and to be, you know, but not everyone knows this. And especially when you have citizen developers and no coders coming into this space, making tools and creating code and solutions and apps, we need to work together to make this the best it can be. And so I just wanted to give a big shout out to both Wilmer and.

[17:59] And to, I wrote his name, Jan Hayek, for allowing us to see their communication and for both for Wilmer to be as responsive as he is and his comments to the comments. And also he you see that he's making changes along the way as the comments come in and he's updating his documentation and it's readme file and it's an open GitHub repository where you can contribute to his to the PCF component and I just wanted to highlight that communication.

[18:34] That openness and that humility that it comes with. So thank you guys for showing us that this works and I'm really proud to see that because we do see a lot unfortunately we do see a lot of i want to call it like very disruptive comments sometimes like it maybe it was it was it was criticism there well not criticism but it was exposing he called out you know hey this isn't the best in terms of approach to security but it was direct he went to the points there was no name calling no um uh no No question on the ability to create the tools or things like that. And it was a discussion. It was kind of maybe a little cringy, like, oh, shoot, they're kind of, you know, but it wasn't an argument. It was, there was facts back and forth. And I think that's okay. Of course, we do see the comments on someone's appearance or just sort of making these other, I don't know, social media is a bit of a trash can sometimes or a dumpster fire.

[19:40] But we also shouldn't be afraid to call this out because truly this is something that's needed. A PowerPages file uploader is a pain in the butt for a lot of folks working on PowerPages project. I hear at least once a week from somebody, here's a solution. Does it have security issues? Yes. But at least by identifying awareness is the first thing. All of these things can be addressed somehow.

[20:07] Probably there's different ways that could be approached. So like everything, it's got to start somewhere. And then as a community, let's all work together. So yeah, it's good. It's kind of like discussing, like, I hate discussing politics with people because people get very close-minded. Both these guys expressed a growth mindset of, let's kind of move ahead and let's make this better because this is something we need. Yeah.

[20:31] Absolutely. And that could easily be me, right? I could pull things from different blog posts together and make a PCF component and publish it and not think about all the different security liabilities. Because, you know, he says, I could grab that thing that you send back, that token, and I can actually delete all the contents in your blog storage because Postman or another, you know, API service doesn't really care about your course settings on your PowerPages site. Because if I have that token, I can do whatever I want. And stuff like that, I have no idea about stuff like that. And I depend on my developer colleagues and developers in the community to see something like that and call that out and make me a better developer as well. Because this is a community of knowledge, right? We're only as good as we allow each other to tell each other and pass that knowledge on. So, yeah. Great job, guys. And please keep it up. Keep building. And Wilbur, yeah, keep building these tools. Keep sharing. Don't be discouraged. Just send it to Yon first next time. Exactly. Fair programming. Come on, Fusion team. Whoop, whoop. Cool.

[21:44] Another cool thing.

[21:47] Dataverse, API, API Planner. I saw the link and I thought, this is cool. I got to check it out. It took me about searching about three environments before I finally found it. One that worked.

[22:01] I didn't find it. I finally found it on a US preview tenant because I was under the impression that it was supposed to be everywhere, right? So I'm like, okay. So I fired up the Dataverse. First, if I went to my first environment, didn't see the Dataverse accelerator. Okay. I need to install it because it was an older environment. Wouldn't install for some reason. And I'm like, ugh. And I'm probably like a lot of you. I have two tenants and about a bazillion environments everywhere. And along those, I don't know if you know, I don't think I ranted here on this podcast, but I actually, during a training session, I showed how to create a Power Automate flow that would send the weather to me on a daily email. It literally took me a month before I finally found the environment that I set that up on. I was finally able to stop that. You finally found it? Because you've been ranting to me about that weather app so many times. Where is it? Where is it? Because it comes from, it comes from a power apps email address and I can't locate the environment. Like, where's this coming from? Like every day I get, and not only like, it's okay if I get the weather every day, cause it's, it's helpful, but it's in fricking Fahrenheit and wasn't even how I'd want to format. I can't even change it. So finally I found it and shut it down. Like that was kind of a, an angel singing moment. That's it.

[23:24] I finally found the flow. And you're going to miss it now. So I know what's going to happen next week. You're going to go, oh, I miss it. Oh, maybe I just make it. Yeah, I forgot to take my coat with me. And I make it in Celsius. And then you're going to make a blog post about it. And then you're going to make a video about it. And there you go. Off you go. And then that's your vacation week done. And how am I supposed to know when to go to the beach if I'm not getting my weather email every day? You know that all Norwegians have this, right? Yeah. All our Google homes go, good morning. The weather today is going to be blah, blah, blah, before they even get coffee going. It's the first thing. Can I go to the beach or not? And they hear like sunshine and warm and all of a sudden, boom. All your electric cars are humming away to the beach like, hmm. They don't hum. They don't hum. That's the point. Okay. Moving on. Okay. Where were we? Oh, yeah. Did you finally find it? Yes. Did you finally find it? I finally found it. How is it?

[24:27] It's cool. So you could basically, so all that lead up. So yeah, you could test like the Dataverse web API, all the different functions that are there, and you can do like OData requests. So all the stuff you could, you've used Postman or some of those other tools before, but now you can do it within, like we said earlier, within the Power Platform tools, you know, directly and everything. So, like I said, I literally only found it this morning after searching a whole whack of different environments. So I've only begun to play with it a little bit. But as if we're doing development, I could definitely see this being a huge benefit to being able to test some APIs and calls and stuff or even do some troubleshooting. So yeah, it should be showing up in other environments. So it's the same app you go into create low-code plugins, which we've talked about before. You'll see a new thing on the side called API Playground or something, Um, and to use that with, um, you know, something like Dataverse REST Builder and a few other tools, it kind of, there's a bit of a crossover there, but overall it's, uh, yet another tool to make us power platform superheroes.

[25:34] So. Yeah. Good work, Microsoft. You can see this evolve, right? So both the Dataverse Accelerator and this app, um, having that, um, developer space that allows us to do other or more things. And actually, this is a good segue down to the PowerPages DevTools extension. That is just, can we just jump down and do that first? Sure.

[26:00] Speaking about angel singing.

[26:05] Again. Yeah. And I have not seen this, but walking through the notes, I opened this up. And I immediately shared it with my whole PowerPages team because this is, this is freaking amazing. And I stumbled upon that. Like this would have been something when I used to work in docs, I would have been fully aware of. And then I would have, you know, probably posted a blog or a video as soon as I knew, because this is like so cool. But of course I don't work in docs anymore. So I was looking up something else and I saw this thing about PowerPages DevTools extension. What is that? that and i clicked on it and i'm like okay and this is by this point we'd already had our notes kind of sorted for the podcast i'm like okay this is going in for sure so um probably will be more to report on this as we play with it a little bit more but this is the type of thing that considering the project we're working on now and trying to debug liquid because liquid's hard to debug and all these other stuff this is i have i have high hopes so i hope this is not one of these things we flip on next week. I hope it's all it says it's going to be. So we'll have the link in the show notes.

[27:18] Yeah, and because the last week before we went on holiday, we really struggled with the caching in PowerPages. There was problems kind of all over the place in the platform, and especially on PowerPages site. I had two people on my team working for a full day without realizing their code worked all along. It's just the PowerPages site didn't refresh. And so, Christina, now we are going to be able to see If it's our code or if it's the liquid, that's wrong, right? So this is a tool for us, girl. Yeah. Bye-bye.

[27:54] Yeah. So shout out to Christina on my team.

[27:58] It's okay. Let's circle back because we have Dynamics. Oh, this is, yeah. Is this marketing fluff or what? Dynamics 365 Cloud Tech Center. You know what? I saw it. I'm like, okay, this is cool. But then I'm like, wait a minute. Is this just customer service? Is this digital contact center? Is this just omni-channel with a new sticker on it? And so what I do is I called a few friends and basically it is kind of a new thing that you can add to CRM. You can integrate this with Salesforce, but it might replace other things. So the link is there. It was a pretty big deal when it went GA July 1st. It is a standalone product from my understanding, but it just goes to show there, as much as we are power platform focused, we got to remember a lot of this stuff came from Dynamics CRM and Dynamics 365. And there's a whole other world of dynamic stuff happening with what they call the first party apps. And so the idea is for those of you who are very much focused on the power platform and kind of, you know, what is Dynamics 365 and what does it mean? Of course, Dynamics 365 is.

[29:13] Is a whole bunch of different applications, both for ERP and CRM and customer service apps. And you can begin to mix and match with the idea being you're not going to build all these industry solutions. You actually have something already ready to go to manage your sales, to manage your contact center, your service center. Of course, marketing as well. It's now called customer journeys and something, something.

[29:41] We could rant all day. Customer insights? Yeah, that one. Yeah. So anyway, so now there's another Dynamics app, I guess you could say that you can get licensing for. And the idea here, really, it's a contact center. So if you actually have people that are taking in calls, or you have customers out there, and I mean, we all have to do that. That we have to contact, you know, our banks or other service providers or, you know, connect electricity or something like this. The more avenues and options to contact these companies, that's less hassled for you. Like I know I've been contacting one on my trip, I was contacting airlines because a lot of things are in motion. And of course, being able to use like the chat and things like that was much more convenient than waiting on the phone, waiting on hold. And they were able to manage a lot of that stuff too. A lot of it's AI driven.

[30:35] So these are important things. It's just unfortunate. It's kind of confusing of what they sometimes are and what they used to be, or are they something brand new? So there is that. From my understanding, this is co-pilot being able to act as a customer service agent and responding to voice and to all the different omni-channel kind of thinking that wherever you approach the customer service, then chatbot would be able to, or AI would be able to respond in a proper way and work together with. And this is also a story we've heard for a while, together with the customer service employee as an agent, being able to kind of be first response and also answer in a tone of voice that the customer service people would and etc. The licensing is pretty steep. It's $110 per user per month. Yeah, but this is in line with a lot of these other tools as well on a subscription basis.

[31:53] Yeah, but it's steep in my book anyways. But yeah, you wouldn't check it out. If you're in this space,

[32:00] then you have to know about it. So that's why we're talking about it, because if you're in this space at all, check it out. If it's not for you, then that's OK. But you have to know that this is out there. Yeah. It's enterprise level stuff. Yeah. Oh, definitely. And yeah, the premium one is $195.

[32:21] So yeah, this is just the regular version. Okay, moving on. Cool. Other cool Angel thing, Angel Sings moment. Is this your name? Your name? Or is this an official name? Power Rolls? Power... That is the, well, it is a community tool. It is, yeah, it's, yeah, it's written, developed by our friend, Ivan, Ivan Fico. I don't know if you, do you know Ivan?

[32:55] I'm not ivan yeah yeah ivan's cool ivan's really cool guy um and this thing is where has this this goes in the category where has this tool been all my life doing dynamic crm for like the last 20 years and immediately when i saw this uh i shared that with on the project we're working on the person that's responsible for setting up all the security and because we hear it on every every Every stand-up meeting about, you know, fighting with security roles and business units and the whole bit. Shout out to Pid and again, Angel Singh.

[33:34] Yeah, hopefully this tool helps about, it's going to help me out in my project. So with this, let's check this out. So have you ever, and like I've had this before where someone calls me up and said like, okay, we're trying this thing that you created or we're testing it. It doesn't work for me. And then you try it on your own machine. Well, it works fine on my machine. Why does it work fine on your machine? Because you have system administrator rights. That person doesn't. So then you realize, okay, we need to add, you know, okay, I need to give you permission to this table. Okay, try it now. Does it work? No. Oh, you got a little bit further. Okay. But try it. Okay. You go back in and there are tools. Like, I think another thing, and it might've been Ivan that wrote this too, or somebody, but someone added something to the level up tools where you can impersonate other users, which is cool. Impersonate mode.

[34:20] Personate mode is awesome because you can go in as that user and you could see the roadblocks are running into and then you can begin to fix it. What this tool does, it basically, you go in and let's say you go through the process. I want to create a new record. I want to associate it to these records. I want to run this process. I want to do these 10 things. You go in as a system administrator. You turn on this tool. You hit record. You go through all the steps. And it goes and lists all the tables and the rights that you need. And then when you're done, you hit stop. And it says, do you want to add these security permissions to an existing role? Or do you want to create a brand new role? And in what business unit you want to do to it?

[35:05] Amazing. So cool. Impossible. How much AI is in there? It's Ivan AI. Like this, I mean. That's mind blowing. I think he's just probably monitoring the traffic and from there seeing what tables are being hit. And it's just brilliant. It's just, Ivan, I mean, the next time I see you, buddy, your beers are on me for this one just because it's just so cool. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. Amazing job. Right. Okay. More, more, more, more. We're running out of time, Nick. We need to hustle, hustle, hustle. So, Power Platform Creator Kit. Yeah, so...

[35:51] An AI library. Yeah. So this is something Yuka, our good friend Yuka posted, and this is something there's no documentation for yet, but this is one of the things he discovered is that he was looking at the creator kit. And if those of you haven't looked at the creator kit, it's got a lot of cool stuff in there. That's probably a whole episode in itself, but he discovered that there was all these other AI features in there. So it's kind of interesting if you keep your eyes open, if you're going through the tools, Sometimes you discover things that are new to the platform or might have been documented yet, although technically they're supposed to be documented before they're released or turned on. But we'll put that post in the show notes as well. So you could check out if there's things in that AI library, the creator kit that you could potentially hopefully use down the road when it is when there is proper documentation. So again, this is a case of being the detective, keeping your eyes open, discovering things like how he discovered the PowerPages dev tools, kind of randomly stumbled upon it. And I think the difference was that he installed it through the Windows Store.

[36:58] I think that was a difference instead of the PPAC or something along those lines. Same package, just not just the core, just with everything else. So that's how he got to it. um and also he uh on the post on linkedin where he shares that he also shares a in one of his comments a link to a blog post about i see dead features and it made me giggle and it's so it is typical yuka where he kind of mentioned dead features that they're not removing that doesn't work so he's gone in and for instance tried from a solution to add a new component and he clicks report um which you're welcome to try and it kind of lands somewhere in a dead end and makes fun of microsoft for it and also you know it kind of tells a friend about it which responds you know did you seriously try to create a report wizard report uh because that's something that we did back in 2005 i think i have actually made a few of those in my day um and that was after i talked to you because and this reminded me of so this is why i put this in here because i remember acdc a few years ago you told me about a secret way to get power to get reports without part my licenses and had to do with sql or something not even so i put this in here.

[38:23] So you can make fun of this and you go, well, it's nothing to make fun of. It's amazing. Tell the people, what is it? Why is it made fun of and why is it amazing?

[38:35] Let's all put this whole package together. So a couple of things. This all ties into a few weeks ago, we talked about bulk delete. This is something that you didn't know existed. It came back from the CRM side. So for this past week's BoostQuest, I put together a bunch of these features that exist in Dataverse and the Power Platform that people have either forgotten or maybe they're, as Yuka calls them, dead features. And, you know, we talked about bulk delete, currency field. People don't know a lot about that. You can actually have currency exchange rates and stuff like that. You know, the charts, which you're right, they're very low, low tech, but they are there and a few others. There's another one was SSRS Reports, SQL Server Reporting Services.

[39:25] Let's go back a thousand years. CRM version one used something called Crystal Reports. And for some of you might remember, but Crystal Reports was a third party reporting package that you could write reports on any data source. So kind of a word perfect version to Microsoft Word, something that existed before. something else kind of took over. But then Microsoft realizing that, you know, they had their own reporting tool, SQL server reporting services was a reporting tool built on SQL server. So that's what they incorporated into dynamic CRM.

[40:02] That still exists today. So yes, the report wizard is pretty crappy. You can create a very crappy table report to generate a few things. I never used it much just because it was so weak. But to create more advanced reports, you could download a version of Visual Studio reporting services to your local machine. You could get an add-in. You could tap this back into CRM or, of course, now Dataverse, and you could write reports using Fetch XML. And as much as people say the Visual Studio Editor is old and outdated to build reports, it strangely looks a lot like developing Canvas apps, to be honest. Property window on one side, elements on another side. You drag them onto the Canvas, you can set up tables and all this other stuff. So to tell me that's out of date, it's sort of like, yeah, add a little lipstick to that pig and you got a canvas app editor right there. So, um, and as much as people kind of make fun of it, if I look at my blog stats, one of my top, I've wrote three versions of this blog post over time, but it's basically how to set up. Because Microsoft documentation around that was not great and still isn't. But how to set up your workstation to write SSRS reports. It's probably one of my most visited blog posts over all the years I've been writing blog posts.

[41:32] And I still every so often get comments and I'm surprised. I probably should test it to see, make sure it really, really works still. Still. Um, but I do know that there's people that are still writing SSS, our reports. It does not require extra licensing. Um, yes, it's not as powerful as power BI, but you can incorporate it. You can actually build it in. So you could run the report directly from your form within your model driven app. You could run it against a bunch of records. So it's all integrated. It filters security is, um, um.

[42:03] Security is adhered to. I think you have to do something special in terms of the table naming. But anyways, it's there. It's something that, yes, it might be a little older. It might be a little clunky, but it's one of these old pieces of farm machinery that just works and works decently. So if you need something to generate reports, don't completely throw SSRS out the window. And interesting enough, but also reminded me about this. We have the link there. Temi Hirarho, I hope I got the pronunciation right. Temi, if I don't, I apologize as we all do in our naming things. But he wrote something about downloading SSR reports using a custom API as a way to actually call and retrieve these reports as well. So we put the link in there. So it is something that's still being used. And there were some comments about the fact that this is still a viable solution in the Power Platform for generating, getting information out of your system into a document or onto a piece of paper. So definitely check that out.

[43:11] And if you want to use Power BI, use Power BI. I don't care. But if you want to use SSRS, there's that available to you as well. If you want to take a notepad and write what's on your screen, do that. So it's whatever works. Yeah. But of course, Microsoft won't tell you about this because then they won't get licensing money for Power BI. So it's not something Microsoft talks about or promotes themselves. And it's probably they can't deprecate it because it's such a big install base and it'd be harder for them to get rid of it than to deprecate it. So anyways. So yeah, check out. Maybe you guys might after all. Maybe.

[43:54] But yeah, if there is something, I was going to say on that boost quest, if there is something that we missed, if there's an old feature that we've forgotten about that's still useful, let us know. There's a few other comments on that post as well. Good discussion. So let's keep that up.

[44:11] Yep. And we're out of time. Really, really out of time. But you have time for one small shout out. To Richard. Yeah. Yeah, so, but a week and a half ago, I went on a food tour in Ottawa and Erika, I am sorry I went without you. And I know. Oh, that's a thing. I know, I know. You only have to make it up to me. I will. You only eat food. Yes, I will do that. Vegas maybe. Yeah, for sure. And we get our tattoos fixed and a whole bunch of other things. So yeah.

[44:48] Anyways. So sorry, Richard, he, he, we just got chat. He was the guide for a food tour. He's, he's fairly, he's just came to Canada a few years ago from Lebanon, but he's, he loves food. He was joking. He says like, I love food. And he kind of held his belly and was laughing. He said he does this for fun. So he goes, he's a food guide tour. He takes people around part of the company and visits different restaurants and food places in Ottawa, downtown in the market. So if you've ever been to Ottawa, you probably know the market area.

[45:19] And he basically, we just got chatting and he said, oh, yeah, his day job is he's a Power BI developer. Speaking of Power BI. And he says, oh, I do. I teach how to I teach people how to use Power BI. I have a bunch of Power BI courses. And I checked out. He gave me his card. I checked out his website. So, if you're interested in learning Power BI, check out his website. It's GrowWM. It's Grow With Me. And I know he's developing some other training as well. So, yeah, shout out to Richard about Power BI. And hopefully, we can send a bit of business your way. So, yeah. Oh, fantastic.

[45:56] Good job, Richard. And speaking about business, we will be back next week already. Because we have gotten our hands on the release notes from the way of two release. So next week we will record, pre-record and keep it really, really, really secret so that the day that the release notes are released, you guys will get it freshly baked out of our podcast studio directly to your ears. And then of course, we'll just continue with our regular episodes. You'll get a bonus episode this time. Bonus episode. Cool this is going to be the angels uh side or what is it called the angel things.

[46:48] One, two, three. That made me have a shattered glass. In their cars. Anyways. And we're not responsible for any damage. Don't even try. Yeah. And I'm looking especially at you, Daniel. Don't try. And thank you for listening this far. Yes. You did good this time as well. High five, Daniel. All right, so that's it for now, 46 minutes. Oh, we're never going to get this under 30. Sorry. Okay. All right. We talk to you next week. See you next week. See you. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a

[47:46] 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 host, Luric Akebek and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

[48:07] Music.


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