Power Platform Boost Podcast

AI Rabbit Hole (#44)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 44

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[0:00] But that doesn't matter. Project Sophia was launched last year. It's had a bit of a journey. What? You're laughing at me now? Well, of course. Yeah. Of course.

[0:10] Music.

[0:30] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your timely source of Power Platform news and updates with your hosts, Nick Dahlman and Ulrike Ackerbeck. We're just about to launch this week's episode, and then something happened, something came up, and we just had to kind of interject our own podcast.

[0:54] Interrupt her own little message in here so yeah uh mary myers who we all know in the community she's she's an mvp she's based out of the u.s she posted something on linkedin, about our good friend nikita polikov now for those of you who don't know nikita polikov works for the powercat team although if you've been involved in any of the community events if you're in vegas or even some of the other microsoft events i'm sure you've met nikita or nikita.

[1:20] He does a lot of stuff with Power Pages. Um, always willing to help out, always good at engaging with the MVPs, um, and all around great guy. Now, what happened a few weeks ago, unfortunately, Nikita was in a car accident with his family and Nikita and his, and his girls are all right, but his wife was, uh, injured. And, um, what Mary suggested, what they do in the South is someone needs help. So Nikita, of course, being the guy he is, he, you know, big champ, the taking, you know, kind of taking control, helping out his wife, helping out his kids. Uh obviously just trying to take care of the family now of course it's a you know a lot to take in especially if someone's hurt or sick to take care of them so what mary suggested what they do in the south and what we do here in canada as well be quite honest how do you help out your friends and neighbors you bring them food now we can't just all go bring a casserole or a pie down in nikita's house but what there is a mary has done is there's a she's kind of given the information We'll put it in the show notes as well of how you could use Uber Eats to help out Nikita.

[2:26] Basically, take one of those chores off his plate, and that's in terms of preparing

[2:30] food for the family. If you do it through Uber Eats, we can all help out. That way, that will probably take a big burden off. If you're outside of the U.S., I just tried to do this with the Uber Eats app. I couldn't do it without giving him a Canadian one that only worked in Canada. The other alternative is go to Amazon. If you log into amazon.com, even if you have an Amazon account in your own country, I think you can log on to the U.S. Version and send them a gift card that way. That's another way to kind of help him out and, you know, basically help them, you know, get through this rough patch because that's what we do as a community, right? Yeah, we pull through and help each other out. And yeah, it can happen to anyone. Car accidents, unfortunately, happen out of nowhere. So it's important to show some love and some care and just show that you care and can contribute that way. So let's pull together for Nikita. All right, Nikita, best wishes to you. Hope you and your wife gets a better back-to-the-road recovery and hope you and the family are recovering. And I hope this small little gesture of us helping out helps, helps out, make catch you there. Hope to see you get better soon. All right. So back to the regular, regular episode.

[3:45] Yep. All right. Hello.

[3:50] I beat you to it. How are you? I'm doing good. Thanks. How about you? I'm good. Very good. I'm ready to record another podcast episode. But for some reason, it feels like forever since we recorded one. Can't really figure out why. Maybe it's because so many things have happened since last time I talked to you. Oh, maybe. To me, it feels like it was just last week. I was surprised that we had another recording thing to do today. So it's all. Everybody perceives time differently. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, and also had a really busy couple of weeks. I mean, between Scottish Summit and MVP Summit and working throughout the weekend with the project. Yeah, so it's kind of, I think that's why we get so many, so many things have happened since we last recorded. Yeah, and well, and talk about so many things. Of course, there's like a bazillion new things happening in the world of the Power Platform as well.

[4:44] Yeah. And before we get started, let me just check. Did you, did you say a piece of feedback that we got? I can't remember the name of the person that got us. You're very concrete. I love that. So people just wanted to say that first, before we move on, we got feedback, really great feedback saying, I wish you didn't alternate between, you know, the, when we do the, you know, either side thing, they wanted side by side and just have that static instead. Yes, great. We will try that, and we'll see how you like it. And then also, someone wanted Nick to edit pictures of the things that we talk about and kind of have them switch in and out of the picture. And what do you say, Nick? You're going to give the people what they want? Nope. That is not happening. Come on. Come on. It's so easy. I'm going to try, because I know that in Riverside that we use for recording, you could also add those kinds of things pretty easily, but just uploading an image and add it. And I don't think you can swoosh it back and forth, but we can add some pictures of stuff. So we'll see. Let's try it. I'm not saying it's not doable. It's just sometimes with everything else that we got going on, you know, to get the editing and everything and published. And then, you know, I send it to you and then you come back and say, well, can we add this back in or can we take this out? Yeah, you remove stuff. Then, you know, it's not happening. So let's try it one episode to see how much work it is, okay?

[6:13] Please? Fair enough. Sure. Yes. Okay, perfect. We'll see if there's any good bits that we want to add in here. And I'll help you, of course, making the visuals for it. Okay, perfect. Yeah, sounds good. Okay, perfect.

[6:28] Okay. All right. So let's dive into the first piece of content. Now, for once, not for once, sorry. So this time around, you've added most of the things to talk about here. But and for once, it's actually kind of three or four major things that we kind of bulked all together. But there's a lot of resources and a lot of things to talk about. But at the very top, we have something that's a bit of a small announcement and it has your name on it. So do you want to get off?

[6:57] Yeah well actually this was a this was a blog post by enogic which of course they're they're friends um who uh who post a lot of really good content i like their stuff because it's just a lot of little quick tips and things of stuff you could incorporate in your day-to-day projects and this one was about a client requirement to um basically hide and show the buttons on like in a model driven app and it's based on the kind of permissions but it's using power effects so it's basically uh we know that we we can do this you can hide a button based on security roles or if you have access to thing but this is kind of going a little bit more granular and they kind of go through and they show how they do that with the um the command uh the command editor and using power effects so you know customize the command bar using the command designer using power effects showing based on a formula using power effects so it's a quick little interesting tip. So if you're building model driven apps, which I believe a lot of our audience is, check out that little link and that might just actually save you a few clicks or make your solution a little bit more elegant.

[8:05] Right, because now we're talking about editing the command bar, the ribbon right at the top, whereas back in the day, you used to have to use the ribbon workbench. And then you had an extra toolbox. No, sorry, that's from extra toolbox. And then now you have the UI to do it in the product, but it still doesn't cover everything. So this is kind of trying to mitigate still that little gap.

[8:29] The things that are left. And actually, I think this is something that Matt Snecker and Sarah Lagerquist talked about in their talk at Scottersummit where they showed what you can actually, because model-driven apps.

[8:43] Has kind of gotten the bad reputation of being very boring and you can't really change the UI much or the user experience, but actually they had to talk about the things that you could do to enhance that user experience. Whereas if it's using icons and emojis for that matter, what you can do with.

[9:02] I'm having reference panels and the panel on the side, and also the things you could do with PowerFX and the ribbon editor thing. So this is really good. And also we have another resource from Megan Walker talking about some of the hidden and forgotten features of model-driven apps, where she goes through and she talks about how you can change the icon and the description. You have that settings page when you're in the model driven app designer where you can also turn on and off features for your app where you know she talks about how you can enable and disable co-pilot um how that can help you write emails for instance also you can turn on or off the breached text editor things like that you can actually do in a model driven app so i think we're seeing and you talked about this i think that's kind of three or four episodes ago early in the summer, how there's so many hidden things that dynamics developers know about model-driven apps that people that are born in Power Platform doesn't realize about model-driven apps. I just love seeing these resources pop up more and more about how much of a great and advanced tool model-driven apps actually are.

[10:21] Yeah, model-driven apps are the true low-code, high-impact tool. Um i know like people will who are new to the power platform immediately dive into canvas apps and i know that's based on a variety of reasons and yet canvas apps have their places yes you can talk to different data sources i find canvas apps are very good for single tasks you need a very specific ui but for enterprise applications whether you're dealing with a lot of data and you're dealing with a lot of transactional stuff and you need to get these apps up and running very quickly model driven apps is definitely the way to go it is the it is the original power app coming from the crm world it uh yeah and it it's yeah does it look boring yeah lists and forms but there's so much more to it and what's really cool is you're seeing the new co-pilot investments uh in building model driven apps um like for instance we talked about last last time, about the the new the the model the data model designer the co-pilot one and how you can generate and model-driven apps directly from that. And actually, we'll talk a little bit about events later, but presenting at Ignite, Angeliki and I are doing a workshop on model-driven apps,

[11:28] and we're showing all the new co-pilot features we're using to build a model-driven app. So if you're going to Ignite, come check out our workshop because we're going to be showing off a lot of these new features to what maybe some consider old technology.

[11:42] Wow. So is that a session or a workshop? It is a 75 minute lab. So very much hands on. And in 75 minutes, we're going to have you build a model driven app. But in how we can do this in 75 minutes is because we're having co-pilot help us along the way. So, that's very cool. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And the session at Ignite, that's really, that's pretty good. That's one of the bucket item lists for any MEP, I think. So, congratulations on that. Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, it'd be cool. I'll be hanging out with Satya. You know, we'll be talking AI platform. It'd be cool. Definitely. Okay, so I have so many segues in my head right now. I just have to choose one because you've talked about all the things that we're going to talk about for the rest of the episode. So if you could just go back to what you just said and the things that you said as an index for the rest of the list.

[12:34] That's amazing. Okay, so let me just finish off with, so going back to the least exciting thing on the thing, create, edit, and configure forms using the model-driven form designer. Because it talked about AI and co-pilot and model-driven apps. Let's just finish off that story first. What is the new capabilities that you see coming for model-driven apps in terms of AI? So, of course, we've already a couple of things. We've already seen the ability to do your data model and get the co-pilot to describe that. Now, it still is lacking a few key features. But the next thing, too, is and this is something I haven't quite dove too deeply into yet. But when you're designing your forms and views, typically you have to move the fields around. You have to decide, okay, what fields do I need? These experiences now have co-pilot built in. It can give you suggestions of what fields you want to have on your views and your forms. So this is now just continuing on that process. And of course, a lot of this stuff is building into the new plan designer, which of course they announced at PPCC.

[13:38] I've gotten to play with it a little bit. I'm very careful what I'm allowed to say and not say about it. But so far, I'm really, I'm super excited of where it's going. And it's, it, honestly, it is going to change on how we design and build applications in the Power Platform. So whether again, we've said this before, whether you like it or not, you need to get on board with this, with these tools and get yourself your head wrapped around it, because this is where things are going. And, But all that skills, that foundational skills you have, so, so important because you need to know what the co-pilot is doing to understand where it's going and what it's doing and guide it as it's beginning to build these things or actually as you work together to build these things out. So, you know, it's making the right decisions or the advice that it's giving you is kind of fits what you're what's in your head. And again, there's always a little caveat that at the very bottom of these things that say AI generated content may not be correct. Please verify or whatever it says.

[14:34] You know so anyways exciting times yeah absolutely i yeah it's uh it's blowing me away and i still have that because you know that you know me i just one day i love it and next time i absolutely can't stand to hear another blah um but you know yeah i um i do really recognize that these things also leave a lot of the the the workload right so you don't want to be sitting there creating tables and creating the columns. That's something you don't want to spend your time on. If this can help with that, then I'm all for it. So the experience you're talking about, that's the ERD diagram way of working with tables that we've seen come along. And as you said, that's a feature of the new plan designer as well.

[15:20] But also talking about Dynamics 365, model-driven apps, co-pilots, etc um last week we saw from the ai tour in london a new announcement um coming through about something we've been excited about for a while um that's autonomous agents yeah so you put this in the show notes so let's hear first nick what what's your kind of top level take on agents, did i or did you.

[15:54] No, I just altered your links because I opened up one of the links that you put in our list of show notes. And I just completely got sucked into the rabbit hole with this. Because first of all, you have Charles Amana and Jared Spataro at the keynote talking about autonomous agents. Now, this is something we've known about for a little while. We couldn't really talk about. But it's now being kind of pre-released and it's going to be probably going to be the main topic of Ignite. I can't think anything else could be the big thing. So it's kind of that little introductionary, just a sneak peek of what we're going to see more of, I guess.

[16:39] Yeah, and it is hard to say how this is all going to work because you've got

[16:43] to kind of sort through the Microsoft marketing rah-rah and what's going to be real as well. But i basically see this is is a case of now um you know of course we can build co-pilot studio where you can interact with it and of course you can trigger off power automate flows you can pull data from dataverse and you know it's just a way to really streamline your gathering information but this is kind of going to the next level kind of getting you know going out and getting it to do a bunch of things or even working with it to build um automations where you'd have to worry about different apis and things like this and this is again it's all tying into yeah how we can actually get these agents to do a lot of that tedious work for us and even even it will just kind of go and get triggered as opposed to us triggering it uh so it's kind of like the i would.

[17:37] I don't even know where to start with some of this, to be honest. But it was interesting because Mark Smith, as you know, we talked about last week, Mark Smith is doing these short little videos. And he said something very profound about that the year 2025 is going to be the year of AI agents. And we're seeing this more from just Microsoft. There's other, of course, Salesforce had a big thing. Of course, Salesforce threw a few digs at Microsoft, basically calling Co-Pilot Clippy version two. But this is just tech companies and very much like politics. But also looking at some of these other things about, you know, AI being able to move and interact with mouse and keyboard movements, that type of thing. So taking that power on a desktop to the next level.

[18:24] So it seems scary because all of a sudden now it's doing a lot of the stuff that we do, but someone needs to orchestrate this and plan this and put these pieces together. And that's where we come in. And so, yes, AI is actually now, it's not only, you know what, yeah, AI may take your job, but guess what, AI is also going to open the door for a brand new job and it's going to make you twice as busy because there's so many new things that it can do.

[18:51] So, yeah, I don't think I gave much. Sorry? I was about to say I don't think I gave you really many good specifics just again more of my little visionary rant uh because I really like until I get my fingers on it in the next few weeks it's really hard for me to say because of course a lot of these things we just assume that oh there's this new feature it must do these 10 different things and then you get into that feature and you realize it only does three of these things like let's take a quick step back in terms of setting expectations the ERD ERD designer that we talked about yes it's very cool yes I can describe an app yes it will generate these tables but then as soon as i say well please link into the contact table no it doesn't do that yet i mean we know that stuff is coming or i even asked it okay make sure you add these 10 fields it added eight of them um or it added a couple other ones that made no sense so yeah it's sort of against level setting yourself and i think i've kind of, i you know have level set myself a little bit on some of this stuff of course in power pages, using the new PowerPages co-pilot to create a site. I have yet to actually build a site using the co-pilot. Yes, I've gone through it a few times. Yes, it looks good. But you know what? I can build a site faster based on the designs that I have.

[20:07] To provision it it's it's it the we're in the we're in the case of see what's going to stick and what what our roi is on some of these tools the roi and some is going to be great the ability to to i don't have to key in 20 different fields or create 20 different fields on a table.

[20:23] Awesome ai go nuts designing an app that i have to keep reiterating on and i'm just to the point where you know what let me just build it from scratch kind of thing we'll see and and actually to be fair. I mean, until the time comes when I can edit the schema name of a column, I'm not going to be able to use Copilot. But guess what? It doesn't confirm to my name and standards. And I can't go in and change the schema name afterwards.

[20:48] I'm just going to use it in a sandbox environment. I'm going to build what that suggests for me, if it had any good ideas, myself. Because I need to make sure that my schema names on my columns follow my naming conventions. And as long as I can't really set that anywhere, then it's no use to me because it creates crazy names so you know it's small things like that we can still not edit the schema names well that means that we cannot really use it can we so it's one of those things where yeah sure as an inspirational tool but then again no so i just wanted to yeah go ahead no it's going to be to be fair these are the types of feedback that you know working with microsoft and the plan designer now for example this is the type of feedback they're looking for where is it important and things that you know don't get me wrong i love my i love my people at microsoft the engineers building cool stuff but sometimes and like i like to think that i bring in the dose of the real world to them sometimes and this is the type of feedback they're looking for well in the real world we need this to happen and if you're not involved in a big enterprise project or even any even a small project you sometimes don't realize these things so this is where the community is so important to provide that feedback.

[21:54] Yeah, and I think maybe that's why I've not been able to give a lot of feedback on these features back to Microsoft. Because I am prompted by the team often to give feedback on different features. It's like, well, because it's so not fully baked and half-assed sometimes, I can't really use it in a real project. And guess what? I don't really have a lot of time outside of projects to kind of experiment with these features.

[22:22] So it falls between two chairs in my world. No, I can't use it in a real project, so I can't test it. And no, I don't have the time to play around with your new thing to give you feedback on it because it's not going to work. So it's one of those things. But let me just backtrack a little and be more specific about what agents are. So imagine you have a power automate flow and now you have desktop flows and we have what we call AI flows. They still have one single trigger. agents can have multiple triggers at once so they can.

[22:52] Actually monitor you real human interaction in your system and trigger based on multiple triggers that's one thing and of course it can also draw on multiple sources so it can draw from dynamics 365 or dataverse stuff it can draw from sharepoint can draw from external websites if you want you can configure it how multiple sources of knowledge and then also you can configure your actions but you can also give it guidelines and guardrails in terms of what it can do and it can figure out steps to do themselves and suggest it and also once it's run you can go in and you can give it feedback and say you know what i don't like it when you do this and this time you got it wrong try again and you will learn and develop over time and that is the real difference between an agent and a regular co-pilot or an ai flood that we've seen in the past so it is really taking it a step further and if you look at so charles Samana's announcement, it's a blog post, and we'll post the link to that in the show notes. And also, like I said, Satya Nadella and Jared Spartaro, sorry, I need to get it right because I'm so horrible with names.

[24:00] They also did a keynote showing actually what it is. And they already have over 10 agents ready in Dynamics 365 for a supply chain, for F&O, for customer service, for sales that is already ready for you to use. And also what I saw in another announcement by, Peter Reuter is that you have it from SharePoint, for instance. So they talk about how, you know, SharePoint libraries, so much documentation, so much knowledge saved in SharePoint libraries across the world.

[24:36] Now, actually, what you can do is you can start from that perspective that you can create an agent on top of that knowledge, give it additional knowledge sources, and have it be a part of your team's chat. So imagine you have an HR or a finance or some sort of SharePoint library or a group or a team site, and you have a group chat and you can actually add then the agent and as another participant in that chat, you can add name the agent and ask it questions and you'll draw on the knowledge from the SharePoint library as any other of your colleagues would. And it will also give you the source of where that knowledge is coming from.

[25:16] And then also they showed in the demo how you can then go in and edit that agent experience to also, for instance, give it access to supply chain and give it the permissions it needs to create orders for you. So they show in the demo how they just add that agent name and say, create a sales order for this. And it asks, it needs confirmation before it can go in and do it. It says, are you okay with me adding the sales order? It says, yes. And then actually goes into supply chain create that order for you so this is pretty next level and i agree with mark smith completely 2025 is going to be the the agent year and this is also kind of the news that all has been sitting on since yeah sometime this year and waiting for the big bang to to come so this is pretty amazing.

[26:07] In Mark's short video, he reiterated what the OpenAI CEO, Sean Altman, said about 2025 could be the year we see a one-person, $1 billion company, because if they can utilize agents to do that. I'm thinking, I am a one-person company. I can think of three or four things. Like as soon as I, let's say I book an airline ticket and the email comes in, if an agent's going to pick that up, log it in my accounting system, do all that stuff for me and just sort of even not even tell me about it, just do it.

[26:44] That to me seems just, you know, these are those little things that I do. Like at the end of the month, there's an agent that's just going to go into my time tracking system and immediately generate the invoice. And ideally it would ask me before sending it out. That's that's the kind of cool stuff that we're beginning to look at so yeah i'm looking at the travel agencies and i'm thinking when i have the agents where i can go i'm going to mvp summit in march book my travel for me and it goes to whatever a hotel service app that i use expedia hotels.com or something right and i give it my credentials going through my account use my account on this website as a resource and book the best uh 4.5 stars or above the hotel hotel closest to the da-da-da and then also book me a flight they'll take me from also to whatever I'm going to and give me something a full summary of what the cost and how much I travel da-da-da and I can also then teach it no I don't like two transitions I will only be satisfied with one and I have these preferences right and it will learn how I operate and they will be able to book my travels for me and then as you said it will also be able then to expense it for you and do all of that imagine what that looks like it's um the potentials are huge.

[28:05] Yeah, it's just, but again, it's also a bit scary because all of a sudden you're, you're flying. Yeah, exactly. Like you want to have, the human has to be in the loop because the last thing you want, you're going to like Oslo, Oslo to Seattle. And by the way, you're stopping for a 10 hours layover in Boise, Idaho with nothing to do. Yeah. I never said that I didn't want to approve it. Right. Cause that's the whole thing. It needs my approval to book anything, but give me that suggestion, right? I'd fill up those dates and those flights and those hotel rooms that I could get and give me three suggestions, right? And different time ranges, different times, different how long it takes. And I would be happy to have it do that. And also then when I say, yeah, sure, book option number two. And it goes in and books it for me. And then adds the receipts in my accounting folder and expenses for me. Yeah, I'll be happy with that. Yeah, cool. All right. By the end of November, you'll be able to do that with the agents. Perfect. Yeah, maybe that's something I should look into to making. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Yeah, so all the resources that I've found points to Ignite as the kind of the source where this will be kind of announced as the big thing.

[29:18] This is all just preview stuff being kind of, I don't know, it seems like a pre-marketing campaign at this point. Things are being announced now. So it kind of all points to Ignite. So we definitely will keep an eye on that. Yeah, which is odd because usually having worked at Microsoft, they usually want to keep those cards very close to their chest. But now it's actually they're being very open of what is going to be. So it's almost making me kind of wonder what are they holding back that's going to be the big splash bang for them. So I'll report back from Chicago. Yeah.

[29:56] And, you know, next week we have the business applications launch event where we also usually see a lot of big announcement. I can't really imagine what that would be at this point because there's really nothing left for them to rah-rah about. So we'll just have to see. But there are improvements in other areas as well. Well, I see that we have a little bit of a list of announcements regarding Power Pages at this point. Let's get into that and leave the autonomous agents behind. Yeah, because we'll probably talk about that soon enough. Okay, Power Pages announcing intelligent forms. This is kind of neat.

[30:37] It's, you know how you go to a website sometimes and you need to fill in things like your driver's license or your, like you know airline sites exactly filling your passport details whatever this is where it can actually you can upload a pdf or of an image of your of whatever it is and it will take that info and pre-fill out the form for you so that's like a time saver for your end users and that's for certain situations a pretty handy feature i think other situations maybe not but that's that's cool that that's there now and again quick win for the power pages team because i think that's a pretty neat feature that um people definitely take a use take use of um but that doesn't mean you can use the camera right because we had a question in one of the whatsapp yeah so if you didn't know first of all there are whatsapp groups for the different projects in the power platform that you can join to ask your questions and there's one for power pages specifically where we get a bazillion messages every week one of them was can you trigger the camera on your phone from a Power Pages site. And it doesn't have a pre-built component that you can add because you can do that with a Canvas app, for instance, you can just add the camera component and it will trigger the camera on your phone if you have it open on your phone. No, there's no pre-built Power Pages component for that.

[31:56] But you can, if you use it as a PVA, a progressive web app, then you would be able to trigger the phone, the hardware on the phone, like the camera, the microphone, things like that. So it is possible. And you can, of course, use PCF components for that. And of course, this could be a nice extension of this, right? Because this feature that you just talked about requires you to have a picture of your passport or your card or whatever it is you want to upload as an image or a PDF. But actually, it would be pretty neat to be able to use a camera for it and capture it on the camera itself. Yeah. And this exists on other websites. Like when I rented a camper van this summer, they had to see my driver's license. It was all done online and I had to actually hold it up to the camera for it to, you know, they said it was secure. I hope it was to scan in my driver's license to get that info.

[32:51] Yeah, absolutely. Right. So moving on to the next one, you can also then now control the use of generative AI features for end users on Power Pages. And this is a preview feature and it comes with a whole set of things. So what this actually means is that you can now admin how the different sites in your environment uses generative AI. So maybe as an admin, you want to disable the use of generic AI for end users in your PowerPages sites. You can now choose to ban it or disable it for all sites, all sites, but a few just specific sites you want to enable it for. Maybe you want to just have it open. So now you can actually set that from an admin perspective. And this also comes with, so diving into that rabbit hole as well, you now through Purview, have the ability to track audit logs for what admins do on PowerPages as well, right? So you have the ability to use Power BI services. You can embed Power BI reports, for instance. Same thing with SharePoint. You can connect it to SharePoint document libraries.

[34:08] You have different other things like restarting your portal site or edit the information, convert it to production. all of these things you can do with a PowerPages site as an admin, you can now track and log through Purview.

[34:22] And that, again, is another step in a larger picture of, where you can, from Purview, log and track all the different, not all, but a lot of the different admin things you can do in your environment as a whole. So this is kind of one of those stories. It's actually a Purview story, more than anything, I realized as I was diving into this, where Purview enables you to log and track actions that you do in the platform as a whole, and also now specifically for Power Pages. And I bet this goes for the other product as well, though I haven't really looked into it. So if you require logging admin and tracking admin settings and admin actions, this is really something you need to look into. And as our good friend Chris Huntingford says, learn purview. And a quick shout out to Chris. Happy birthday yesterday.

[35:21] Absolutely. Yeah. And I also wanted to shout out to another community, a friend of the local community that you put in here, which really spoke directly to the core of my heart. Nathan Rose. Oh, I love Nathan. As much as you guys know, the people you listen to us regularly know, we love rants. That's one. We love co-pilots and we love low-code and we love the whole platform. Now, Nathan Rose, that rant just...

[36:00] Spoke to my heart. And he had another one after too. I can't wait to meet Nathan in person because I think we'll be like, I think he's our people, right?

[36:12] Brother from mother, mother. Yeah, exactly. So he was going on about how he went into a client about, you know, taking a low code first approach and about how everything was just customized up the yin yang, no access to the source code.

[36:27] This is a story that i have heard and experienced multiple times all of a sudden you go in you realize what platform is this oh this is dynamic 365 like what did you do to it oh yeah our developers and don't get me wrong i i'm a i you know i have a pro developer background i manage developers i've had this argument of okay why would we do it in a power automate flow because i can write a plug-in 10 times faster i'm sure you can but i also know that if i need you to fix this plugin you're always telling me how busy you are in other projects so you're going to do this in a power automate flow that's not to say that's always the best way to do some things i think you need to always evaluate the project and it's always the right tool for the right job but going with the low code there is so much you can do with the low code tools um and get the devs to focus more on those on the you know the the where they where their skills are best applied and this is kind of what nathan like go check the link watch nathan's rant it's a treat i found because it's sort of like yes brother i know exactly what you're saying so yeah yeah that was a good rant for sure and also we're kind of battling with the same growth and cons ourself we have a huge project with a huge solution that we want to run through power platform pipelines and we're running into all of this.

[37:48] Problems and issues and errors and are not consistent and we don't know really what to do with it and you know every other day we're tempted to swap it all out for Azure Pipelines it would make our lives so much easier but we know that the people coming in after us won't really understand how that works and they'll be dependent on developers to to run it and to understand what's going on and to make edits in it so it's always kind of that battle with yes if you have the knowledge is so easy but then you have to realize that no not everyone has that knowledge so it's it's always that going back and forth um but yeah definitely all right so i i see that we're uh on time uh we need to get this uh wrapped up i just wanted to mention a couple of podcast episodes that i listened to this week uh one is with the low-code approach uh one of my uh i'm a really fangirl julia strauss i mean she's danish and she runs she's the pm of that she was norwegian.

[38:45] Well maybe she's even norwegian i thought it was danish but yeah um she's with the project sofia which is also um a very danish team so that's maybe why i thought she was danish but doesn't matter let's i'll i'll be embarrassed when i learn that she's norwegian and i didn't remember but that doesn't matter uh project sofia was launched last year it's had a bit of a journey mean what you're laughing at right now well of course yeah of course um so yeah check that out uh if you want to learn more about project sofia and also what's happened in the last year what it's for and and how to use it we did a boost quest about it just a um kind of half a year back i think uh so it's really interesting and also uh a nordic summit podcast we did record uh episodes at the Nordic Summit. And this week we launched an episode with two Icelandic guys, you and Benedict interviewed at Nordic Summit. It was a blast to listen to. And I love that one of the guys say, well, actually in Iceland, we're so few, we all have to be like Swiss army knives. And that really resonated with me. I know what that feeling is. And it used to be that way with all power platform developers back in the day. We all had to be Swiss army knives. But now it's more and more kind of streamlined in what we do.

[40:00] Um yeah so listen to that for sure and then we have some events upcoming right yeah so there's uh well i mean the the cycle never stops so uh but i'll be next week it'll be at directions emea uh that's uh primarily more of a business central conference but we are there's a big power platform section we're talking about intro to power pages so if you're, just completely new to PowerPages. This is the session I've done a lot of times. Of course, it's evolved.

[40:29] It's the new co-pilot edition. So I'll be talking a lot about that. And then also, it's an interesting thing I've been experimenting with is actually getting Business Central data being surfaced on a PowerPages site. So if you're a customer or a vendor, being able to log into a website and seeing data directly from Business Central. So that was, it's been an interesting journey for me, putting all that together and getting that presentation ready so i'm excited to a little bit nervous to be fair but excited to be presenting that, in front of a whole bunch of business central people so we'll see how that goes that's in vienna so if you're there definitely say hello and uh yeah grab a sticker grab a handshake we'll talk about anything then not the week the two weeks following that um like we mentioned earlier i'm going to be at ignite um angeliki and i are doing a work a lab on model driven apps but i'll also be in the the experts area um with that oh actually one step back to directions i'm actually helping our good friend eliza benitez she's doing a co-pilot workshop so i've offered volunteer to help to be kind of in the in the crowd to help people out along the way i went through those labs over the weekend like again it's a very short little workshop but if you need to get wrapped up in co-pilot studio it actually is a good little intro on how these things work um so i was you know gone through that and i learned a few things so that was pretty interesting hey back to ignite um yeah be doing the workshop that or the lab there on the experts booth um.

[41:55] Following that we for those of you in canada in toronto we're having the dynamics user group canadian regional meetup there will be a dynamics 365 ce track power platform track and a business central track it's a one-day event it's free it's part of the same people that bring you dynamics con um they've asked me to kind of help put the power platform track together so i was able to put some great great sessions there on governance on co-pilots of course some alm a model driven app so check that out moving into december the power conference in prague again the workshop that angeliki and i are doing in ignite the 75 minute version we're doing a full day version as a part of the pre-day.

[42:40] But there's a whole bunch of other people from the community. I think Joe Griffin will be there. Hugo Bernier will be there.

[42:47] Natalie Leanders and a bunch of people will be presenting. I think Brian Cunningham's doing the keynote, from what I understand. So that would be a pretty interesting show if you're in the Czech Republic or close by. Yeah, that's a quick drive for you, right? You should pop down and join. Yeah, you seem to think that Europeans just every week, we just jump from one city to another, and it's just like taking the bus. So sure. Yeah, just like a big supermarket, isn't it? Yep, perfect. Of course, that works. No, actually, I'm conferenced out. So I'm going into winter now. The winter depression is a couple of weeks away. So I'm going to hit the wall and be under the covers until January. So looking forward to it. So for you, kind of the conference season doesn't end. But for me, I made a conscious decision. I'm going to have to kind of,

[43:36] I don't know, schedule these in bulk. So I know that my late summer, early autumn is going to be busy and I need the winter to kind of recover, focus on my family and my kids and have a good Christmas. And then I'll be back in January, the end of January for Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge. And so that's actually something that I need to mention as well. If you want to register and get your team at ACDC in the end of January, you need to sign that team up.

[44:05] But now we have until 14th of November, I think, to sign your team up. So you need to do it. And we'll have a very good lineup of judges. It's going to be published on the social medias this week or next week. And we also have a very cool new team who's going to sign up. So yeah, keep an eye on the socials that are at the Cloud Developer Challenge for that. Right. And I think that's all we have time for. You haven't really added the date. Usually you do that. You add dates for next episode. So now I'm diving into the calendar to see what that looks like. No, no, it's all good. so it's week um we're gonna be having the new episode it's gonna be 13th of november so yeah, definitely the time travels fast wow okay and until then people enjoy have fun and take care all right talk to you everybody 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 hosts, Lurica Akebeck and Nick Doleman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

[45:35] Music. See you next time.

[45:43] We'll be right back.


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