Power Platform Boost Podcast

Embark (#40)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 40

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Events

Low Code | No Code Microsoft Power Platform Conference 2024 | The Tech Platform

Online, free event, made by AI?

 

Power Platform Community Conference 

Top Gun Power Pages workshop

Las Vegas, Sept 18-20 2024

 

European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Stockholm, Sweden from September 24 -27, 2024




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[0:00] Sounds familiar? Certainly. It's chat TTP. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not even being edited. No. So we have a theory because we tried to find who in the community was behind this. We couldn't really find anybody. So we think this isn't the Power Platform Boost conspiracy podcast or anything. Well, not yet. Maybe we should be, but we're thinking that this is AI finally becoming self-aware, co-pilot becoming self-aware, and now beginning to put on virtual conferences on its own without any kind of human involvement.

[0:47] Music.

[1:07] 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. How are you? I'm doing all right. We're recording today. We're in the same country, but we're in different spots. So it works. Same time zone. That helps. Yes yeah so we get to record in the morning you usually record in the morning but usually it's afternoon for me uh but this is morning so um yeah i'm pumped up on coffee ready to go don't have anything i have maybe two things on the list because last week well the reason you were here was that we were in a humongous project um together and worked day and night uh for a whole week had a day off yesterday that was good yeah yeah uh what did you do to charge your batteries yesterday did you do anything uh i slept yeah no i slept i slept in of course i i went to the gym in the afternoon like here i thanks thanks to our good friend Arill who's given me some guest passes at the the local fresh fit so this time on this trip But for the most part, I was able to keep up on my training schedule.

[2:29] Yay! This last week, I missed a couple days just because we were up late trying to run deployments. And then I'm super early trying to have meetings to discuss fixing deployments, screwing around with connection references. So doing all the fun stuff that you kind of run into on a go live just to make sure everything goes smooth. So my training was a little bumpy. So I did that yesterday. It was good. And if you see us on my Instagram, I'm benching pain-free. So, woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Oh, that's good. I'm so happy. You picked me up two times this week. So, you seem to be in very good shape. I hope so. We'll see. We'll see. It's a, it'll be a game day decision. If I go to Canadian nationals at this point, based on how I'm feeling when I get back, but we'll keep progressing, keep going forward. Yeah. Your trainer is going to be so proud of you. I know he's very happy when you, you keep to your schedule when you're traveling. And I was, I was so happy because yesterday it's been kind of a, you know, the weather's been so-and-so this week. And then yesterday we had blue skies and lots of sun. So I was able to just come home and stretch out and have an hour in the sun. Oh, I needed that.

[3:43] Yeah, went for the run, had fun with the kids and just, yeah, rewind and recharge and not work. And then this morning it was just right in there and diving in and keep going. So unfortunately we did not publish a boost quest this previous week just because there was really actually no time.

[4:06] But the episodes are coming out as they should because this is a priority for sure we have a huge list and it's mostly your things so this is going to be one of those where Nick brings you all the news and updates from last week and Ulrike comments and make fun jokes ding!

[4:26] Yeah, go. You want to talk about the first thing? Well, the first one is actually something we found simultaneously, I believe. Oh, this is that one. And I was so proud one morning that I had, yes, I found this great blog post. And I looked at you and you were just looking at me with that little smirk that you have on your face going, yeah, she's going to go into the show notes with that link. And what's she going to see? That I beat her to it by minutes or something. And of course I did. So i boldly put what are put both our names on this one yeah so this one is by alina grishenko and i think she's in australia uh and she has a lot of great content around power pages and it was interesting because uh this is using bing address which i've worked a little bit with bing address uh api as well on some projects over time so this is really cool that at first First, I was a little bit, which he said, like, first, I'm genuinely surprised I couldn't find a PowerPages article on this topic. And I'm kind of like, I've written a couple of blog posts. But to be fair, once I kind of read through, I realized that it was more about auto-suggesting, filling in things. And like, oh, yeah, absolutely. There's still content out there. So thank you, Alina, for writing this, basically how to use Bing Maps. Now, of course, Bing Maps is being deprecated, but I'm sure all of this could be applied. And she mentions it into the blog as well about using Azure Maps.

[5:54] So kind of, but the idea there is to kind of add power pages where you can begin to fill in the, basically, yeah, fill in the address based on, or do an address search based on the Bing Maps API. So it really cool and really helps people filling in forms accurately when they need to fill in like things like address. where I've seen data migrations before where the cities are spelled differently and the postal codes are different formats. So yeah, great post on that. I think, what did you get out of this post? No, exactly what you said. And in the beginning as well, calling out that there's really not a lot of content about this and also the insecurity that she kind of opens up with. Because I really relate to that because when you're kind of looking for something and you can't find information about it on the internet you're kind of wondering is it me or is it the internet because usually you find work but of course diving into a field and i find this with the juniors on my team especially they don't really know what to search for and so when you're beginning and is it the search words that that i'm not using the right words for this or is it that i don't understand the results that I'm getting, or is it me? Cause I don't know about you, but I tend to go there first. Yeah, it's probably me.

[7:14] And yeah. And I think the kind of the way that she lays it out, it was very logical and easy to follow. So yeah, very good. And also there was something called, called Google maps that also have an open API.

[7:27] Well, we don't have to do Microsoft stuff all the time. I'm surprised that anyone actually uses Bing. I didn't. Bing Maps? There's a reason why it's deprecated. Maybe.

[7:41] For users worldwide. And that's the reason you can't really find anything on it. Maybe. Dull.

[7:49] Okay, moving on. Moving on. line so a couple really really quick ones um first off it's uh john does flow of course john who's one of the hosts of the sprint zero podcast um i think i think i've got my podcasts and posts sorted out um but he just had a very quick post and it's funny it was one of these things i had to laugh because we've all run into this i'm sure where we restore an environment and all of a sudden We dive in and like, why isn't this working? And then you realize, ah, shoot, admin mode. And it was just John calling that out. Basically, it's like, yeah, John, I think we've all been there. And it's good to have a post because you'll do that search and then you'll see, oh, right, right, admin mode. Okay. Yeah. And also, yeah, when you copy and restore environments, also all your Power Automate flows kind of break. And especially custom connectors, they will break. And also we discovered this week that when you turn on admin mode, it may take up to, what was it? Was it one hour or was it a whole day before our automation started firing correctly? Yeah, 24-hour cache or something like that. So that was a bit of a surprise. Yeah, that's something to be aware of. Yeah, I know that it needs to warm up in the morning, but that was, yeah, laser loading, sure. Okay. Yeah. And, yeah.

[9:13] And something we've been waiting for the next, no, sorry, I'm, I'm getting ahead of myself. You wanted to talk about the open with the. Yeah, this is just, this is just another little quick one. This is by Timmy Wahyu Raharo. And again, I apologize. Like we always do. We apologize if we mispronounce something, but this is a great little post about, you know, building model driven apps, which I've been working with a bit using like the quick creates using custom pages. And he shows a process to open a lookup in a side pane, which is really good because it kind of keeps you within context of your model-driven app. A little bit of JavaScript, a little bit of, you know, that you'd have to inject there. But overall, it's pretty straightforward. Nice little demo. This could be something that I could potentially, you know, put in my back pocket as a solution if someone asks for this down the road. So, yeah, awesome work, Temi. I love that. I love these little, hey, you could do this kind of posts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've had Temi's content on the podcast before. He does a lot of these smaller things. And also, I just wanted to point out the evolution through the different interface modes. Remember, CRM back in the day used to be pop-up windows.

[10:26] Hell, beep. It was a mess. You had a million windows open. And then they kind of turned into the modal views. and suddenly it was a modal pop-ups everywhere. And then you had the navigation phase where you navigated back and forth until you were kind of dizzy. And now it's all right side panel, right side panel for everything. It's kind of funny how it kind of just transitions from the one to the other. So yeah, but it's good to have the ability to control that a bit for sure. Yeah. And so then the next one is the one that I got excited about. I think, I don't know if you're excited about it, but it's something we've been waiting for and asking for. And they just finally did it because it's like, this should be a quick win. And I think they did.

[11:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah. The add component to Power Pages. Yes. Is that the one you're talking about? Yeah, okay. That is the one. Yeah, because this is one of those, we were excited about it, and then they removed it, and then they introduced it, and we were excited about it, and then back and forth. But yeah, finally, you're able to add the custom code components to Power Pages.

[11:38] And that's... In the designer.

[12:11] From the designer. From the designer. The web template as components part has worked up until this point. And also now they introduced, they can use Power Fx for it as well. It's coming, I think, in October or later. And then now, finally, we're also able to add it through the designer. So yeah, great work team. And I'm glad to see that finally come through.

[12:35] And now on to something that we have finally, fully wrapped our heads around this week.

[12:45] Connections and connection references in Power Platform. And flow ownership. And flow ownership and how that works with an upgrade and an update in terms of downstream production pushing. Thank you, Benedict, for helping out because that was a shout out to Benedict Berman this week. Going out of his way to make sure that we did this the right way um i am sure there blog posts and videos in the making for both of us around this topic because then you actually added also um you also started content for some for for a few sessions about this as well because this is really something that we can't find information about, Well, yeah, it's because it is convoluted. It's sort of like, okay, why are you going to an environment? Why are there's like two bazillion new connection references? Why are there's all these connections? Why are they named the same? Why can't I share them? Why can't I take ownership of them?

[13:43] How can I clean all of this up? What's the best practice here? Surely what Microsoft is recommending isn't the best practice and it is sort of, it's a bit messed up to be honest. I think it's just the evolution of the platform as well and how things are. And obviously we need these components to make a good healthy ALM, but just getting there is a bit of a struggle. And it's very easily the easy path is is very easy but it causes a whole bunch of problems where following the correct path.

[14:16] Yeah, there's a lot of hoops you need to jump through, but it just makes everything better in the end, especially with deployments and using pipelines and running in the dependencies and just all this. So, yeah, this is something we've learned. And in the meantime, I also found some documentation, you know, about recommendations for reassigning orphan cloud flows from Microsoft Learn. But also interesting, there's a new XRM toolbox, which I haven't dialed completely in yet. But just out of just telling you, I ran it on our production environment this morning and I found connection references that still have my name attached to it using this tool. Wow. This is something to definitely, if you're dealing with this, there are tools and things to help you out. And let's all work as a community to make this process better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just wanted to, so that we are not just talking around it. I am very Norwegian. I need to get into the purge, as we say. It doesn't translate well into English, but that's what we're going to do. So just to give people a bit of an understanding of what we're actually talking about. Connections hold the credentials and what you need in terms of connecting to a service. That could be Dataverse, Dataverse Legacy, SharePoint, EnterID, Outlook, etc. Some connections use service principles to connect. Some use just API keys. Some use username and password. It's very different from...

[15:44] Connection to connection. These are specific to environments. You need to set up your connection for dev in dev, for prod in prod, for test in test, and they don't move. And they cannot be shared with other users. So the logged in user account that create the connection will be the owner of that connection forever. You can share it with a service principal and an app user, but no other users. Now, of course, just a couple of years ago, they introduced connection connection references being entities that you can put in a solution that can connect to a flow and can move with the solution from environment to environment. And it's kind of just the link really between the connection and the flow. Now those are also linked to your user and that is the default experience. When you go in, create a flow, create a connection or an action, that's going to create a connection reference in that solution automatically tied to your user. Even if And I've experienced this a lot this week. You go in with the intention of creating a service principle, it creates a connection to your user first, hence the mess.

[16:50] So by default, by doing everything right and knowing what to do, it still creates a mess and you still have to clean it up. And that's already touching on two big things. One, you cannot share these connections across. And two, you need to know what you're doing and know to clean up after yourself because the default is creating a mess. And also, you know, the ownership of flows, right, they will automatically be the owner, the user that pushed that flow to production or the downstream environment the first time. Even though you take ownership of that flow in dev and we push it through, it still says that first user on that PowerArmy flow in the destination environment. Stuff like that. And also the trick that Benedict showed us with, of course, you move that solution downstream to your production environment. It's a managed solution. You go in and you try to edit that flow to change those connection references, going to make it create an unmanaged layer. And we now know how to set production up in a way that doesn't create an unmanaged layer, but at the same time, allow us to reconnect these connection references to the production connectors underneath.

[18:00] It's not intuitive and it's very easy to do it the wrong way. And so if you're struggling with this, know two things. One, we struggle with this. And two, it's by design hard to get right. So don't feel discouraged and reach out and we'll try to help as best we can because we got help from someone to solve this. This week and of course we want to help you guys figure this out so reach out and and we'll try to help as best as we can and also we're going to make blog posts and videos about this absolutely yeah and sessions as well it was this way it was a good learning experience and how it all ties into.

[18:37] Power platform pipelines as well because that was something i dove into a lot this week as well we are using power platform pipelines um and so yeah i'd used

[18:48] them before but it was sort of like Like we needed to divide and conquer some of these things. So I have done ALM in the past. And yeah, it was good. Good learning as always is. And we get, like I said, more content coming. Okay.

[19:05] That was a lot. A couple other little points I did see. I'm going to just jump quickly because that was a heavy topic. Let's go into a funner topic for a second. Not that these aren't all fun topics. But I saw this post by Karl-Johan Spick. He's a Microsoft MVP.

[19:30] And he has this blog post where he describes how he wrote this app that checks to see if the coffee pot is full or how full the coffee pot is. This is mission critical stuff, folks. This is business value. You um because there's you know obviously we knew we're working on a big go live it's sort of like okay we need to go get coffee we have coffee machines but if there was a coffee pot we wanted to know is there coffee in it or not before we go get it um what's cool about this he explains how he does it how he factors in ai ai but he has a couple other follow-up posts on this in terms of tying it into adaptive cards also looking at potential triggering issues that he ran into so So again, I love this because this is an example of a fun project where you get to learn and you get to try out some of these things and kind of build your repertoire of knowledge around the Power Platform and what at all it can do. So great post, Carl Johan. Keep these coming and hopefully, may your coffee pot ever be full.

[20:39] Yeah yeah that's fun and also i picked up something from craig david this week the power apps performance optimization the ultimate guide and i love absolutely love posts like this 27 items do this don't do this if you do this then this will happen with short and very concise precise explanations of why and how to do it right oh and it to me this is just yeah this is going to be bookmarked and bookmarked and going to be up on my screen uh just just to have that as a checking reference because this is hard and oh yeah the amount of if you don't know what you're doing power apps chances are it's going to be not performing that well it's easy to do it the wrong way. Let's put it like that. And also some practices that used to be good practices that are no longer. For instance, putting things on app on start, for instance. We used to do that all the time. We used to put everything in app on start. Well, guess what happened? It was slow to start. And then now we know not to do that anymore. So things are changing and it's a good resource to have to keep up on app to date and everything.

[21:53] Yeah, I love these little kind of checklists and things like that, these kind of posts. It's just so very handy and also redirect other folks to it as well.

[22:01] Yeah, and not so small. I'm impressed, 27 do's and don'ts. Yeah, he's been around for a while to compile that list. Yeah.

[22:12] And talking with lists and good things, I saw a post by Amy Holden. Of course, we've shouted out Amy a few times and about how so good her blog posts are. And again, Amy, always like, because you explain it, you have the screenshots, you point out things. It's just, I really enjoy these. And again, you went through on this post is retrieve member data from customer insights. I'm not all up on customer insights, but even her process, even if you don't use customer insights, sites this was a really good post about how to query dataverse and get in an array of guids because manipulating a lot of data is something we have to do in all sorts of model-driven apps so again um excellent posts and again telling us how to go through each step of the way now amy says she's anything but code i know there's a bit of code going on here she even would use the chunk it um you know the the chunk function and things like that so yeah amy like i think you're lying to us i think you're you're more of a coder than you'll admit to so um but that's also something that i appreciate about amy she never lies she tells it like it is and that's kind of one of the things that is you know also a common thread in her blog post she'll tell it like it is i really appreciate that so yeah.

[23:39] I think it comes back to what you're saying all the time, that Power Fx, is it code? Is it not code? You know, what's code? I think that's kind of what she's getting into. Code. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And something that is also code, speaking of Power Fx, working with polymorphic lookups in Power Apps, as type and is type function explained by the byte duta.

[24:07] It's just something that I quickly scrolled through. It's one of those things that he probably have the requirements worked on something for a project and came across this with polymorphic lookups. Now, for those who doesn't know what that is, it is a lookup where you can have more than one table in the lookup. So, for instance, customer can be both account and contact. You can have owner, it can be team or business unit or owner. Or sorry, or contact, or user. Not contact, but user. And regarding, of course, being, it could be all the activity ones. And you could make your own. Now, you have to make your own through either code or there's an extra toolbox. I wrote a blog on this a couple years ago, and I've never really had the opportunity to really implement it. And I think, and not a lot of people do, because I think we are missing some of the tooling, the low-code tooling around to do it. But it is, it can solve some specific use cases. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this blog post is really about using Power Fx formulas to set and read what type of table you're dealing with in that lookup. So yeah, good blog post.

[25:29] And just a nice reminder that was really why I brought it up just a nice reminder to tell people that these polymorphic lookups I'm sure a lot of people that grew up in Power Platform are not aware of polymorphic lookups so then we got to say that and I got to say polymorphic 10 times.

[25:48] Yeah alright so you had something here from our friend Neil Parkhurst about the 365 Context Center and speech synthesis? Well, this is just me being the voice UI, not nerd, because I really don't know a lot about it, but I just find it fascinating, right? So this is actually something, a very small blog post about the three steps you have to go through in order to make a co-pilot studio say certain phrases. And also, you can have it adapt to a different dialect or, you know,

[26:29] kind of adjust the voice a bit. So what it does is it uploads audio to a hosting site that makes that audio file available on the Internet. He creates an SSML being speech synthesis markup language code to play that audio file. And then he sets the Co-Pilot Studio up to play that audio for the right cues as well. So it's a really short and very to-the-point blog post, which I like. That kind of just touches on one small little solution to one small little thing that you can do. So if this is your field of line of work or something you're interested in, then check it out for sure.

[27:13] Nice. So something else I literally just I saw published this morning and it ties into a lot of what I was doing when I was kind of in the 90 day mentoring challenge with Mark Smith and some of the communities that were created after the fact as a fallout of that. So again, if you're thinking about signing up for the 90-Day Mentoring Challenge, it's great content, but also the communities that kind of spin up from that are really cool. And there's a community building out there about freelancing. And a lot of people going through that, they're thinking about freelancing, they're thinking about going out on their own. Obviously, different countries and different regions have different rules around taxation and if it's full-time contract or employee contracts and all these types of things. But there's also some fundamentals about going off on your own. Now, I've been freelancing kind of on and off since 2006. Of course, I've grown a company. I've managed a company. I took that company into a large consulting firm. I got back out of that. I am now an employee of one and really like to kind of stick mostly to that structure. And that's how I do it. And I like to say, I don't want to toot my own horn, but I think I've been pretty successful because I've been able to pay my bills and travel the world and do different projects and do different things. So I love, you know, the freelancing kind of working lifestyle.

[28:37] So Mark has started a series of articles. He's posted the first one today about getting started with freelancing. He has a whole bunch of other articles. And now I know sometimes people new might say, well, I'm going to write these 10 blog articles and then they never do. I know for sure Mark has got them already rewritten already. He just is scheduling his public, because this is what Mark does, you know, clicks and everything. He's got this whole thing down. But that being said. He did it for him. There's great content there and there's great content coming.

[29:08] He gave me a shout out, which I was kind of surprised with. So that also means I'm probably going to get pinged for some extra work, which is all. Can't complain about that. So, yeah, if you're interested in freelancing, definitely check that out. I know a few years ago I have a series of YouTubes I did. I think they're still kind of relevant. It was happening right before the pandemic. But it is something that I keep thinking in the back of my head that I want to write new content around as well. Because I think it is a very rewarding career path, but it's not for everybody and it's not easy sometimes. But it is a consideration. Yeah, very much so.

[29:48] Well, good. We have another little thing that we wanted to touch on. We saw a new conference pop up, a low-code, no-code dedicated conference, a virtual one called Microsoft Power Platform Conference 2024. And it was kind of surprising to us that they could use that name because we know that other conferences have had to change their names because you aren't

[30:12] really allowed to use Microsoft Power Platform Conference that way. And we started to look into it. And it's, I don't know about you, but I'm going to read the introduction paragraph here. And anyone that this sounds familiar to, please raise a hand. Embark on a transformative journey into the realm of innovation at the highly anticipated Low-Code, No-Code Platform Conference 2024. Join us for our groundbreaking experience where cutting-edge technology Technology converges with creativity, empowering you to revolutionize software development like never before. Sounds familiar? Certainly.

[31:05] It's chat TTP. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not even being edited. No. So we have a theory because we tried to find who in the community was behind this. We couldn't really find anybody so we think this is and we're not we're not you know this isn't the power platform boost conspiracy podcast or anything well not yet maybe maybe we will maybe we should be but we're thinking that this is ai finally becoming self-aware co-pilot becoming self-aware and now beginning to put on virtual conferences on its own without um without any kind of human involvement. Or if there are someone out there that knows who's behind this, because you look at even on the description page, the introduction, they have an agenda. With keynote session, no speaker names. I go into the contact page on that website and it's a contact form. You can't see who's behind it. We open up the Facebook page that is associated with this webpage. There's nothing, no names, nothing. Just links to YouTube videos for other people. So we're curious who's behind it.

[32:23] If you know, please shout out and let us know who's behind it. Um because we're curious that's that's what it is and ultimately we and we'd like to promote our friends in the community with their events and everything like that so that that's we want to know we want to we want to help you promote this but right now it looks like co-pilot's doing all the work so maybe co-pilot good job buddy good job yeah good job buddy we love you yeah yeah sarah right so but on to real life um events.

[32:56] Also um we wanted to mention just quickly because we're a bit short on time already but uh power platform community conference in vegas is coming up uh european fabric community conference september 24th till 27th is coming up that's in sweden nordic summit in oslo september 27th to 28th irish power platform summit on october 3rd scottish summit october 18th and nick has stopped his recording whoop whoop yeah because we have scottish summit uh october 18th october 18th till 19th um we have something called directions emea i don't know what that is do you want to yeah so that's the um it's the direction european um directions conference it's really more focused on business central but also bringing in more power platform uh content there that's in vienna uh november 6th to 8th um so yeah that'll be that's another one that's kind of on the calendar as well.

[34:01] Nice. And then Mastering Model-Driven Power Apps Power Conference in Prague with Nick and Angeliki. Yeah. And that's December, right? First week of December, 56. Yeah, we're doing a workshop on model-driven apps. So yeah, that's another one to check out. Yeah, lots of stuff happening. Yes, lots of stuff happening. Can't wait to see all of you there. So, and our next episode, you put that in here already, is September 18th. And until then, take care, have fun, and we'll catch you then. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a rating 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.

[35:06] Music.


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