Power Platform Boost Podcast

Tag! You're it! (#53)

โ€ข Season 1 โ€ข Episode 53

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Nick:

Yeah, but apparently some people like the commentary as well.

Ulrikke:

I know for sure that some people don't. It's like oh, I wish you would just skip the weather. Talk in the beginning, and I don't f***ing care what Nick lifted and what you ran. And just stop already. Just get to the news. Okay, so this is where the news starts, okay, oh, okay, we're calling people out on that.

Ulrikke:

Oh yeah, I said so many names today. This is going to be the tag cloud. I'm going to tag everyone in this episode. The Power Platform Boost podcast your timely source of Power Platform news and updates, with your hosts Nick Doelman and Ulrike Akerbรฆk.

Nick:

Hey, hey how are you?

Ulrikke:

doing. I'm doing good. How are you?

Nick:

yeah, I'm, I'm good, thanks, um, I like all of our listeners who don't know it yet, we're very interested in hearing about how your laptop took a bath story.

Ulrikke:

It's one of those things. I think this was the first time I did that, cause we chat all the time and you're like, so what happened to your computer? I'm like I'm saving it for the podcast. Ask me when we were recording. Oh, okay, and I and also I have a technical question for you that I that I thought about asking you and then I thought for you that I thought about asking you and then I thought you know what. I'll just save it for the episode because maybe someone else is wondering. So, okay, let's go with the story. First, I'm on a new computer and so, okay, what happened was every Wednesday I stayed late at work and then I go directly to a running class with my company and so I stay in Tredikstad and I go there.

Ulrikke:

This last Wednesday I had I changed into my running gear and then I just put my backpack on, filled my bottle backpack and then I ran off to the, where I have the car, and then on the way I was like, wow, it's really cold today. I can't you know these running shorts. You know they're so cold. Like, what's going on? It's very uncomfortable. And she was very uncomfortable. And then, when I got to my car to go for my backpack. It was like what is all this water flying around? And then I go no, beeping, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And then I opened my backpack and the water bottle had turned upside down and then the lock had because it's a thing, that kind of locks it that had flown off and then thing had opened up and the whole water bottle, so it was, everything was drenched. I pulled my computer up and the water is running from. Oh no, absolutely everything I own is drenched. The power bank that I got from me, everything, everything's just pouring water. I'm like, oh, and I'm running late for running class, I'm just throwing everything in the back of the car, just laying everything out, turning the, the backpack upside down, the water's running out of it, just throwing things in the car, just driving off. Of course it's five minus degrees, so I have to bring everything inside. So then repack everything into my running gear bag, dragging it into the, running the gym and then doing my thing and then going out and then thinking I'm never going to. You know, the computer is gone, getting back home, putting it in the bathroom tiles to kind of dry it out overnight.

Ulrikke:

Next morning, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum dum, just hitting the power button and the thing lights up. The thing lights up and I'm like, okay, it works, it's fantastic, it works. And then you know the power bank, yeah, that worked, and the they work, and it's like I dodged a bullet. Can you believe it's? Oh, my god. And then so I'm. And then, of course, next day it's like something's it's not charged, is this? And all of the things start bugging. The next day, worse and worse, and suddenly one morning the computer just wouldn't charge. I think the battery battery was right. So it's kind of a roller coaster week where. So now I have a new computer, okay, so that's what happened.

Nick:

Water bottle accident oh, I think that would be. That'd be good for or.

Nick:

I think we all have those stories of of laptops failing or not working oh yeah opportune time, or you're about to do a presentation and all of a sudden the updates kick in, or you get the blue screen of death, like um. So yeah, definitely for the listeners out there, share your laptop horror stories. Um, we've, like I think we all have them. We'd be interested to uh, to hear. But, oh man, I could just, I could just. I, I felt I, just as you're telling the story, I could just visualize it and feeling it and just know what I would feel too if all of a sudden, like oh, no, like, because, like we, you know, for the work that we do and everything like our everything is on the computer.

Nick:

Like my wife's laptop died a few weeks ago too. And things like browser profiles, xrm, toolbox configurations, like as much as we have a lot of. Like all the files and stuff I have in the cloud and one drive. So that's all well and good, but even all the apps you have to reinstall and okay, where's the like, where's the key to turn them on? And then they're like oh, it's already registered to this computer. You have to unregister and go through that whole process, like to rebuild a laptop. Just the idea gives me anxiety, to be honest.

Ulrikke:

No, but actually I find it really refreshing because I think it's like moving house, right, you have to kind of, you only bring with you and you only put up the things that you actually need. So now, of course, the first day, it's like I press a hotkey to take a screenshot and then, oh, lighthouse not installed. Oh, light, what is it called? The light, something, something that I use for screenshots, oh I have to install that and, of course, xrm Toolbox.

Ulrikke:

All my profiles are in the cloud virtually, but I have to install the thing. So it's a myriad of getting tooling together. But also, you know, I'm now shredding the things that I installed three years ago that I'm not using anymore and I remember so well. We were at a customer I think that's probably 10 years ago now. We were on a big SharePoint project, me and my colleague at a customer's, and then overnight someone had broken the window and stolen his computer from the desk. Of course he shouldn't have that, they didn't have a policy on that then.

Ulrikke:

And the customer is like oh no, you know what did we lose? And he's like well, I just grabbed a new laptop from the office and I'm, you know, not faced by it because everything's in the cloud and they were on a cloud journey and I remember them using that in you know, the whole year after that. That was kind of the star example of what you can do when you're in the cloud. And and we have customers today that are on the cloud journey and it blows my mind how many people still have things stored in local file storage or, you know, on your local computer, and it just blows my mind. So you know, in terms of, like you said, everything right it. It was never, ever a thought of what did? What did I lose?

Nick:

I never.

Ulrikke:

I didn't lose anything, it's just tooling.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, that's the thing too. Like I'm not worried about losing anything digital, like it's digitally backed up in the cloud, assuming OneDrive stays up, sharepoint Online, everything. Like yeah, I mean, I have a horror story. Ten like yeah, I mean, I have a horror story. 10 years ago, I lost something on what like one drive. They actually lost files and I opened up a support ticket with microsoft and it. The files came back eventually, but it was a glitch.

Nick:

But again, this was years ago and I think it's much robust now it's, but it's more the yeah, nothing's lost, but it's the time to get everything back. But you are right, like I did get a new laptop this past summer and it was nice because you know, installing just the things I needed and not having some of the other things, like some of the other apps to try out, or some of these things that I'm not using anymore. So I don't need them. It's all good, but I do. When I am switching computers, I usually have both machines running for at least a few days because all of a sudden you realize, oh shoot, I have this on this machine and I need to get it installed, or or I'll just hop here, like that kind of thing.

Ulrikke:

So yeah, yeah, no, I have. I have the urge to oh, what was that or where was that? Or I'm just gonna go grab that quick thing, but I can't because it doesn't start. So it's like I have to. I'm forced now to get everything up and running, so I'm kind of quicker now than I was in the past. But, yeah, all right. Yeah, so please share your horror stories with us, or the how you save the day stories, cause we love to hear those. Yes, and then we'll, in the meantime, we'll dive in to news and updates for the last two weeks, because there are so many things to go through, and I see that on the top of the list you have a link from my, our good friend, thomas. Answer, what has he been?

Nick:

up to this week um, because we know thomas is a very faithful listener and every week right.

Ulrikke:

So yeah, we kind of tease him because he told me oh no, listen to podcasts, so I make sure to mention him as much as I can. Yeah, yeah, so that way we tag him so that he's forced. Yeah, hey, yep.

Nick:

Hey buddy, hey buddy. So yeah, he is interesting. He wrote this article about Power Platform local plugins, which are now called, I believe, power Facts Functions, If I got my naming convention right. But he said it's a step forward or step sideways, and again talking about the promise and talk about power effects the wrong tool for the wrong job, which I struggle with this too, sometimes I'm very much because my training as a developer has been very procedural where power effects is the declarative, non declarative and to me I can do Power Fx now much better than I used to because I've had some practice now. But it is a different method of thinking and we have talked about this as well. We talked about the limited debugging and developer tools where you do get that in C Sharp when you're writing regular plugins. Talks about the rise of semi-devs, which is the first time I've kind of heard this term.

Ulrikke:

But I mean it's very descriptive right, yeah, I like it.

Nick:

Um, and yeah, because I've also heard of uh, funky techs, like people that are functional, but they know the technology as well I love that funky techs right.

Nick:

So, um, and again, you know, is this really the right revolution? Um, about, talk about extending Dataverse and reducing that friction? Again, talk about fragmented development experience. Now, this is interesting about the fragmented development experience. This is something that goes beyond, I think, just Power Fx functions and plugins and things like that.

Nick:

For instance, this week or last week, working on the project that we work on, um, the, the person who does our qa, oleski, and oh, we love this guy, he's like, he's so cool, he's one of the best qa people I've ever worked with. But he was kind of like he said well, something weird's happening. This other value is getting updated. And I looked at it like, oh yeah, we don't have javascript code. And then I looked at the business rules we don't have anything there. And then it. Then the little light bulb went off in my head because there was no power automate flows, but I had a classic workflow updating a particular field. So it's like, oh yeah, we got to remember that we do have all these other automation things. So we talk about, yeah, the power platform is as much as we love it, we there is that fragmented development experience where, yes, all of it. Why is this happening? Oh, there's a plugin or there's a workflow, or there's a power automate flow or there's a business rule or there's JavaScript, and then now we're going to have other power effects functions kicking in as well. So that's going to be, I think, a bit of a challenge moving forward for some of these tools as well.

Nick:

So that was something he kind of brought up more relating to the plugins, but this is something, I think, that's a little bit more widespread and then, like I said, we'll have the link to the article so you can read through it for yourself. But he has some conclusions and proceeding with caution, and I think it really comes down to the at the end of the day, again I always say right tool for the right job, but again it's evaluating and I think you know, at the end of the day, we still need pro developers. But I do like the fact that we can still bring some of this plugin experience down to the makers and the low coders so again, the developers can focus on the more complex things that, as you and I know, run into in every project where we need that focus project, where we need that focus, and let's not waste, not say waste your time, but let's not focus your efforts on building a plug-in. Where something low code can can do it just as well or even better so great article, just that low code.

Ulrikke:

no, sorry. Right tool for the right job. Because it's the right tool and the right skill set for the right job. That's what it is now. Because now you have right, like six different tools to solve the same thing. And we have this discussion internally all the time because Pat has a plugin and I want to write a part on Makeflow, and then, you know, someone else want to have a. I already have a workflow that does half the thing right, but why don't I just extend on that? And so suddenly there's so many tools and then so it has to to do with skillset.

Ulrikke:

And then whose skillset? Is it always the developer's skillset? Or maybe we have to start acknowledging the people that are going to maintain this solution down the road? Because it's one thing when you and me and Matthias and Per sets up something and we all know, you know plugins and we can be, we're developers, we can, we know how to do this but then what does Tonya do down the line when she has to maintain this right? And that's always in the project that we're in. That's always what we ask ourselves. That's the first question who is going to maintain this, and what skillset do they have and we have a persona in place that we've established in the project and we align all the development that we do towards that person so that we know that down the line, that person, that role, that Dynamics 365 consultant, is going to be able to actually maintain this and know where to find things. That's one thing I want to mention, but also this is really what we're talking about.

Ulrikke:

Last episode we talked about or maybe that was in the release note episode we talked about the new thing that is coming for power automate flows, where you can actually see, you have a visual representation of everything that's going on in power automate flows all the child flows and parent flows and how they're connected, what kind of data and how that flows through. That's going to include, I think, workflows and the plugins as well. So then you'll be able to actually follow what's going on and you would probably see that right. So in this scenario, when you have something updated and you're like, where does this come from? Actually, what you could probably do is go in there and actually see oh, these are all the things that are manipulating this table, or these are all the things that are connected to this flow of data or automation. I can't wait to get my fingers on that, because that is just so powerful.

Ulrikke:

We see it time and time again how important that is.

Nick:

Yeah, and then that would really help, like we were saying, with the fragmented development too, right, but yeah, let's hope that it shows all those little touch points and that would just be a huge help for troubleshooting and the whole question of I don't know if you heard the expression who moved my cheese, kind of thing yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Ulrikke:

Or in, in your case, in your fridge, who ate my cheesecake? You?

Ulrikke:

know, yes, yeah that's probably not mentioned in the other names, um, but also it's one of the things that I feel like we have React developers coming in starting working with Power Pages, that's always the first thing that they go crazy about, because in Power Pages you have JavaScript on this form here and you have some JavaScript on that web page, because they hit different things and have different page ready. So you need to kind of play those things against each other and then you have a global JavaScript and then you have JavaScript on this and that and all of this and they go crazy because it's so fragmented and like well, every Power Pages developer would know where to look, but you have no idea how the beast works, so you don't know where to look. But for us it's logical. And the next Power Pages consultant coming in, it will be logical to go there and look there first.

Ulrikke:

I. And the next power page is consultant coming in it will be logical to go there and look there first. I understand that for you you're used to having this huge library thing with all your files and they all just kind of fall into place. It's a different mindset. But at the same time, who are you developing for and what's the skillset you're developing for?

Nick:

So yeah, and it's the management of that technical debt down the road. It's like everything we build like, to a certain extent there's always going to be technical debt, but basically, who is going to be maintaining that debt down the road and how effective can they do that?

Ulrikke:

Yeah, definitely, and that's a low-code citizen dev story in reverse, and I think that's kind of where the marketing hit the wrong button to begin with, because it's not just development, it's maintenance and it's who is it for, and even though we are developers, we need to take that into account. So I love seeing more of that coming up as well. And we're 15, 16 minutes into the episode and we've covered one story, so I think we're going to have a bit of a. If you're interested in just the news and updates, skip to this chapter, point right here, and this is where we kick off. We promise.

Nick:

Yeah, but apparently some people like the commentary as well.

Ulrikke:

I know for sure that some people don't. It's like, oh, I wish we would just skip the weather talk in the beginning, and I don't fucking care what Nick lifted and what you ran. And just stop already. Just get to the news. Okay, so this is the paul.

Nick:

this is where the news starts, okay oh okay, we're calling people out on that oh yeah, I said so many names today.

Ulrikke:

I'm good, this is going to be the the tag cloud. I'm going to tag everyone in this episode because I everyone I talked about I'm going to tag. Okay, moving on, you saw something other as well this week, from Anna Black.

Nick:

From Anna Black yeah, so I guess I'm not going to talk about what I lifted last week, but that's okay.

Ulrikke:

You can see that on Instagram anyway, okay, tell them, because I'm so proud of you.

Nick:

It's so fun oh I was.

Nick:

I was last week nick uh, I competed at the canadian national powerlifting championships, um which they moved it to the back to the winter schedule. So that's why if for those who are listening going out, wait a minute wasn't that like just a few weeks ago? Like, yeah, it's September, that's when we moved around, um, but I went to Moose Jaw, saskatchewan, and um, uh, went there, I lifted, uh, my, my division was very, like, very competitive this year and I, you know, competing against a friend of mine, scott Robertson, who is the world champion in my age and weight class and he's it's great Cause I love chatting with these guys to kind of find out what their training schedules are Like. Of course, at my age, we're always talking about the different aches and pains and things we have, talking about things like belly button hernias, which I won't get into.

Nick:

But my lifting was okay, not as good as I had hoped and planned, but still way better than I did in the fall. So again, shows the the how traveling affects my training, but, um, no, it was really good. I was, I was happy with the day ended well. I would have liked to bench pr, but I'm going to get that in norway, I promise yeah, we'll see that yep, exactly yeah, so yeah, but anyways it, it was a lot of fun.

Ulrikke:

So, anyways, we should get back to the news, because Okay, so very good job and I'm so proud of you and it's an upward curve, which we love when it's heading in the right direction and you're so good at managing everything and exercising and eating and habits and stuff and yeah, it's so good to see you on a roll and then upward spiral. It's so much fun.

Nick:

Yeah, and thank you, cause I was getting messages from you. You were watching on the live stream and I really, really appreciate that. Like, I know, powerlifting is not always the most exciting sport to watch because people are lifting and you know, and it's sort of like it all becomes the same, a blur, after a while. But I do appreciate it and thanks, and anybody else that happened to be watching. Um, yeah, greatly appreciate it and, yeah, I'm just gonna keep doing this. I'll keep every so often just giving little bits of updates here or other places. So, um, and if anybody's interested, uh, and learning more about it, reach out to me directly and I'll be. I'll chat your ear off about that for hours.

Ulrikke:

So, and I love that, because you don't give advice, because what you do is for you and I really like that. It's opened my eyes to, kind of, because exercise and fitness and how bodies work is so individual and you're not a coach, you're not a trainer and this works for you. But you're so good at kind of keeping that top of mind and when people ask you for advice, I always hear you saying I'm not going to give you advice for what to do for you. I do this because this works for me and if you want advice, get a trainer, because the best thing you can do is to get a trainer. I love that. I respect that so much because it's so easy to give advice and what works for you, but you make sure not to do that.

Nick:

And that, yeah, yeah, that's very good, yeah, and yeah, and speaking of trainers, a shout out to my, um, my coach and trainer, uh, chris fudge, and you can, maybe we'll do a tag. You can follow him on instagram and he there's the type of person like what we know about power platform. He knows 10 times about training and fitness. Um, so he's a good guy to follow, plus a few others, um, but, and also a big shout out to my really good friend, lizzie Roberts, who she was lifting as well, but she helped me run the numbers there in Moose Jaw and whatever, um, and Lizzie's great. She's so enthusiastic, she's always jumping around and shaking and just gives me that extra energy that I need for lifting, so, um, so again, thanks Lizzie for you. Do you do with everything like that? It's just so much fun to hang out with you and your friends and your mom, your mom, lizzie's mom comes with her to every competition.

Ulrikke:

Um, so yeah, Anyways, amazing. Okay, sorry, I'm sorry, pack, paul, uh 21 minutes, that's when we're getting into it. Okay, Paul, uh 21 minutes, that's when we're getting into it, okay, so, okay.

Nick:

So did we talk about what Anna did, or Anya did? Yeah, this is really cool. So she wrote a uh, one of these LinkedIn posts where it's like those little the slide posts which folks like Nathan Rose does a lot, and those types of things. Um, it's really cool. But she talked about struggling to build model-driven apps and she gave a framework. So you can read the link as well, but it's called FLARE F-L-A-R-E the FLARE framework that's what she calls it, and it's foundations linking attributes, rendering and enhancements, and she has a whole diagram of going through a process to help build your model-driven app.

Nick:

So, anna, I'm going to probably steal some of this content and some of the sessions I'm going to be delivering down the road on model driven apps. It's a something that I do quite a bit. So, yeah, great, it's part of her power platform cookbook. It's a great resource. So, yeah, kudos to Anna for writing that and definitely check that link out that we'll have in the show notes to if you're struggling on building model driven apps definitely does it say anything about icons in there um, not that I can see at this point, but um oh sorry then true?

Nick:

well, I think it's almost like that's just. It's just common sense that you put. You change your icons, you don't even need to mention it, right?

Ulrikke:

sorry, sir sarah lagerquist. She's the queen of icons. We've learned that the hard way.

Ulrikke:

Yes, sarah we will include icons in our model driven apps. We will. It's one of those, absolutely right. Okay. So, and I caught something, because now we're in the power apps realm still from miguel verve, verve, verve, verve, verve um.

Ulrikke:

He has a blog and he has a series um that he he has a power platform. Challenge is the blog and this is challenge 37 um and it's about plan designer and he kind of he throws himself a challenge on what to do and he like kind of lights it up in the beginning and then he goes through step by step how he did it, what prompts he used um, how he used the new plan designer and tried to get the, the, the data model right, what kind of responses he gets then, what the new prompt that he does or the edits that he do and the results he get. It's really intuitive and very easy to follow his process and then he ends it with some thoughts and some conclusions and, as he says and as we've seen before, it's a great low code tool and it's a good thing to use for inspiration. But also it makes a lot of um, not even junior mistakes, or maybe junior mistakes like you have a you you ask it to create something and it will and you'll have a user in there or a contact in there. It creates a new one.

Ulrikke:

So in this case it was an inspector kind of uh type table that was needed and if he would have made it himself he would have used the user, out-of-the-box user or system user table. And it doesn't do that. It doesn't understand that it can do that and also it's not capable of attaching or using the out-of-the-box tables yet. It is coming but they still can't really use that. So it's still not fully baked, it's not production ready not in my view anyways. But it's nice to see other people kind of play with it and to see their experience and how they go about it, and it's a good resource to check out. And also make sure to check out all of Miguel's other challenges, because that list it's on 36, challenges. It's fantastic. So absolutely great job and keep it on in that future.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's cool that this is evolving. And I think, talking about Sarah Lagerquist, she has a session at European Power Platform Conference on that. I know I did a video a few months ago on this, but it's just everybody. It's nice to see different perspectives on this and how they're using the tool as well. So, just, you learn different things from different people. So again, I know we talked about um putting out the same. Well, I don't want to do a blog on this because someone else already did it. No, no, no, no. Do the blog, do the video, because we, you know, everybody has a different perspective on this, and same with Miguel. He has a different perspective than I did on this.

Ulrikke:

Mm-hmm, absolutely, and you no. I sorry I put another link in here from Diane Birkelbach on how to style your fluent UI9 PCFs for PowerApps. And this I was talking about a comprehensive blog post. I mean, she blows me away, Diana. This is just following your blueprint, but I just love these blog posts. I mean, she blows me away, diana. This is just following your blueprint, but I just love these blog posts. They are kilometers long, but you see everything. There's nothing missing here. You have the links to the videos. She made a video to showcase what she did at the end. She has a link to the GitHub repo where you can get all her code. She has links to resources where you can learn more on both Microsoft Docs and other resources.

Ulrikke:

This is a one-stop shop for everything you possibly need to know about Fluent UI 9. And the appearance, the style. She talks about something called Griffle, which I've never heard about. I learned about how React actually works when it comes to colors and what it actually does when it translates the things you write into JavaScript and what CSS and how it plays into it. It blows my mind. She's absolutely fantastic. And, yes, not hard-coding colors. Amen, woo-hoo, go, diana. So absolutely, check out that blog post. If you ever consider diving into anything visual about you know pcfs and power apps, which she also talks about, how you can use it for a custom page and model driven apps and she had. The video she showcased is what the component looked like in a model driven app and a canvas app and how you can actually create something that looks exactly like a model living app and it's fantastic. I just love it. It's so great, so well done.

Nick:

Yep, so much and I love it. When you go through, you're seeing code snippets. It's amazing, it's so cool. Yep, cool, you made a blog post as well this week.

Ulrikke:

I made two this week.

Nick:

I know.

Ulrikke:

And two videos.

Nick:

Yeah, and there's a reason for that. So basically, it kind of started with one and I kind of thought I'd do the other. So, overall, the big, the big news, or the big news, the big release of the week, of that's beginning to roll out, is the ability to use site settings. Have that site setting value and power. Talk about power pages. Site settings have very much unique configuration for a power pages website, which has to be unique on different environments. So think about authentication providers, like whether it's Azure, ad, b2c or Okta or Entra ID. Basically, that has to be different on every site. What do we have to do now? If we're using solutions with the new enhanced data model and power platform pipelines or how we're moving it, we would actually physically have to go to those downstream environments and configure those authentication providers for that environment on that environment, which, of course, is going to create an unmanaged layer. And then sometimes we also have to run some power automate flows to make adjustments and those types of things. So the ALM story was good for power pages, but this was a huge gap in terms of we couldn't get those unique variables. Now how do they do it in power apps and canvas apps and flows and all the other ones. They have something called environment variables. So I think most of us have used environment variables so now. But because site settings is kind of a different data structure, but now they've kind of merged well, not merged the two, they've made the ability that you can actually store your site setting values in environment variables, which for PowerPages, alm, is huge. So this was beginning to roll out.

Nick:

We had a meeting with Microsoft. They said, yep, this is public information, we're rolling it out. I actually started to play around with it. You had to be a certain version on your PowerPages site which the version wasn't quite there yet. So some of the pieces were there, some of the pieces weren't yet. So I actually had a lot of the content created for the site settings but it wasn't quite ready yet. And I even pinged Microsoft. It says, okay, is it rolling out? Like what's the deal? And they're like it has to be this version, so wait. So I turned on the early updates on my site and kind of waited for it as soon as I saw that version. I was able to finish off that content in the meantime. So check that out Site settings as environment variables variables very cool if anybody's doing power pages and alm, they'll know exactly what this is all about and exactly the problem it solves yeah, and just to put a pin in it, I just want to enhance this because it's very important.

Ulrikke:

Those of you who have been using ado because that's when you can use deployment profiles with power pages to move it. This enables you to go ahead with Power Platform Pipelines instead. This has been a showstopper for so many people that want to use pipelines but they can't because they can't use deployment profiles. Now we can finally transition over and start using pipelines. It's that huge, so it's so, so big.

Nick:

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So I did a blog post and a video on that. But in the meantime I thought, oh, entra, I thought this is a good excuse for me to try out Entra external ID. So I went through that process. Now we did talk in the release plan that there is a wizard coming out that will help configure it, but right now you have to do it manually.

Nick:

And don't get me wrong, I love the docs because it's a big part of what I did for two years. But the documentation is good at explaining the PowerPages side, but not so good at explaining the external ID side. So if you're going in the docs you kind of have to hop around back and forth. So I found that pretty confusing. So I actually went through and did step-by-step of what I did to get everything to work and it is a lot of screenshots, a lot of jumping around, but for it's at the end of the day.

Nick:

It's for me, because I know in a couple of months I'm going to have to do this for a client. So this is really why I did it, but I shared it with everyone and then I also did a video. If you're the more of the type, you need to follow the mouse and see where I click and that kind of thing. So anyways. So that's why there's actually two videos and two blogs this week. I was trying to be more strategic and space things out, but then, as soon as I saw the site settings was available, as soon as that lit up, I'm like, okay, this is too good, I need to share this. Now I need to like let the world know, to the point where I even released my blog before the video was ready, because it's like, okay, this is, this is just too good, people need to know this.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, it is huge, and thank you for putting that content content out there and and and sharing it with everyone. And it's uh, it's like we said before usually our blog post is just so that we don't forget, and uh, and also I have a one note, huge one note, with snippets and bits and pieces that are supposed to be blog posts. So when I'm old and I am and I have time, I'm gonna just, yeah, do all this bug post, but I'm so happy that you have more time on your hands than I do so that you can actually get this out there, because it's so important and it's so?

Nick:

yes, it's. It's what happens when you have self-cleaning and self-feeding and self-sufficient kids yeah, I can't wait for that.

Ulrikke:

Sounds so awesome. And and do you uh, have another thing in the list as well from Michelle Mendez? Is that right? Because I said that wrong the last time.

Nick:

Michelle, it is Michelle. Yeah, michelle, he has it. Michelle Carlo, but his name is Michelle Mendez. So yeah, did I put that one in? Maybe I did. I thought maybe you did, but no, this is so. This is about.

Ulrikke:

It's about the capture liquid tag and this is fantastic. So if you don't want to talk about it, I can talk about it, because this is something people don't know.

Nick:

You go.

Ulrikke:

Actually, it's very simple blog post and I love this as well. It's not new, it's been there forever and it's one of those things that is hidden in the documentation. And it's one of those things that is hidden in the documentation. Just suddenly you come across and it's like why did I not know about this before? So Liquid guys if anyone worked with Power Pages in the new designer, liquid is very not obvious that you can use, and I have juniors on my team that will kind of go in and look at my code and go what did you do? How did you do that? It's like well, liquid is pretty powerful.

Ulrikke:

If you just read the docs, there's so many things in there and in it, and this is one of those things where capture is. You can have on a, on a web template, for instance. You want to capture something up here and then you want to display it down here. So, uh, when you have um variables in context or you have multiple bits and pieces that you want to then dynamically put together at the end, this is fantastic. And so I love that blog post where it kind of goes through a scenario of what you can do and how you can use it to play dynamically with your template and your HTML and your layout structure and there's so many other things that you can do. So I absolutely recommend people who don't know liquid to kind of go through and see all the things that you can do with it, because it is pretty powerful, yeah. So thank you, michelle.

Nick:

Right, and it's a nice segue. Yeah, okay, all good. So, yeah, yeah, it's a good segue into the next thing, which I think it was one you put in here from, from nicholas hayduke. And, speaking of nick, I actually had lunch with nick on friday because when I was in saskatchewan, um, so met up with him, so it's just actually really cool. And then seeing his blog post here about liquid and fetch xml. So do you want to continue on about the liquid discussion and talk about this?

Ulrikke:

Yeah. So Nick says in the beginning of his blog post as well that this was very clickbaity kind of blog post title, and he is right. But it's also very interesting because so the title is Power Pages why Liquid and Fetch XML is better than Web API for read operations. And it is. That's the short of it. So I just want to read a little bit of what he says.

Ulrikke:

So, despite the fact that using Liquid and Fetch XML might be a bit more work, I think it's important to make that informed decision about the risk that comes with opening the web API door. It is most certainly a bigger door than using Liquid and Fetch XML, and I suggest just only opening it when necessary and defaulting to Liquid and Fetch XML whenever possible. Amen, nick. Yes, and this is actually my question to you, because I have now a case where we have a list of. So we have a manager's portal and they have candidates and you want to see only the candidates within your part of the organization. So you create a candidate in your org and you only want to see that on the list, right?

Ulrikke:

So we use table permissions to go through that loop in a parent-child hierarchy so that when you log in, you are linked to your org, which is linked to the candidates kind of thing, so that when you have a list that shows all candidates, you only see the ones you have access to Perfect. But then also I need the web API to be able to go in and create contracts for those candidates and I have to use the web API to do that. If I use the web API, I have to have or I used to have to have a global table permission with global scope, and that has to have read access as well as append to on that candidate table for it to be able to link it. So my question is is that, does that still apply? Because I heard somewhere that you now are able to use a hierarchical table permission with the web api for power pages. Do you remember anything around that?

Nick:

I I don't like. My gut feeling is that that the table I mean you do need to I. My gut feeling is you don't, you shouldn't have to use global permission like global read for that. But this would be something I can't find anything on it.

Ulrikke:

I can't find any documentation, anything regarding that. So, from what I can tell, from what I can Google and find, it is just a global scope that works with a web API. So, unless you know, top of your mind, go oh yeah, in March that's opened up or anything. It's something that we should actually get back to the team on, because it's something that we should actually get back to the the team on, because it's it's it's. It's hard to create a good a security model when you can only do global scope.

Ulrikke:

Um, and also this ties very much into what nick is saying and also the vulnerabilities that we've seen, or the, the data leakage that we've seen with power pages recently. It is it only the. The product out of the box and in of itself is as secure as secure can be. It's misconfiguration. That's the problem. That's what happens in every one of these cases and that's the same with WordPress or wherever you want to use. It's the same thing. But maybe also the capabilities and how kind of fine-grained we can be in what we can do has an impact on this.

Nick:

Right, so I will take that question and I will go back and experiment because I do need this would be something that I am doing a session on PowerPages web API in the end of May in London at the, I think, the Dynamics Power User Conference session day or something. So we'll need to figure this out and we'll hope next episode we'll have an answer clarifying everything. Definitely Good or bad? Yes, Perfect.

Ulrikke:

And also one of the things that I discovered while searching for an answer to this question was PowerPages Quick Tips series, A YouTube series by is it not Gomo? Let me see, by the Power Platform Learners. They have a YouTube channel and one of the playlists is a Quick Tips series and they have like what is it? 23 videos on PowerPages. They seem to come out every week and if you want to learn more about power pages and you like videos and nick hasn't covered everything and nicholas hayduke and engineered code hasn't covered everything then please go and check that out, because they have a lot of resources on great topics for power pages awesome, that's so cool now I think we've talked enough about Power Pages for one episode.

Ulrikke:

Let's move on to Power Automate.

Nick:

Right or no, we don't have anything on Power.

Ulrikke:

Automate we don't have anything. Sorry, folks, sorry, sorry. No. Power Automate. Yeah, all right, so let's move on to Dynamics 365 then.

Nick:

Right, and this is interesting because this is a link that you put in and yeah, so I'm interested to hear your take on it. But I looked at it. I'm kind of like I'm going to have a confession. I haven't used Word templates in Dynamics 365. And just so you know, what is being described here would also work in model-driven apps like regular model-driven apps as well. Work in model-driven apps like regular model-driven apps as well. What I've been doing for Word templates is actually using Power Automate and using the Office connector to create my Word templates, but let's find out a little bit about the way you can do it directly within model-driven apps.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, no, because I'm not a dynamics person either. So when I saw this, that was my question to you have you used this and is this something that you would use? Because I didn't know about this. So can you just tell me what it is to begin with, and I'll tell you why I put the blog post in there afterwards, because there is a point to this.

Nick:

Okay, fair enough. So way back in the early days of dynamic CRM, before Power Automate, before the office connectors and all of this, sometimes you wanted to generate either a Word or Excel out of dynamic CRM and you could create these templates where you could Like. On the Excel side, it's pretty cool because you can get the data out of Dataverse into an Excel sheet and, of course, if you work with a lot of folks to work with data, excel is such a great tool I mean, obviously it's like the number one tool for any kind of data management in the world is with Excel and it has built in those Excel templates into Dynamics 365 or into model-driven apps, where it can even be dynamic with Excel Online, where you can manipulate the data in the Excel online and it writes it all back to Dataverse. So it's really cool. The other thing, of course, is Word templates because, like you're doing an opportunity or something like that, you want to generate a letter out of that or you want to generate things in Word documents. So, built into Dynamics 365 is this Word template system. That goes back to probably Dynamics CRM 3 or 4, like back to the early days. It's good that you can put these document templates in and upload them and have them available for your end users so they can just press buttons and generate documents.

Nick:

The problem is linking that data. So once you have to link in a multi-hierarchical meaning child records, parent records and pulling that in it gets very complicated. And then the other problem is is, once you've created that template, to go back and edit it later is, I would say, next to impossible. I know our friend, jim Novak, who now works at Microsoft. He actually wrote an XRM toolbox tool I think the document, the document manager or whatever like that as a tool to help alleviate trying to be able to go back in and edit these documents. But honestly it just became a huge pain in the butt.

Nick:

So that's why, as soon as Power Automate came out, of course with the Office Connector, power Automate retrieve your data from Dataverse using Fetch XML, including your child records and all this, and then you could actually go in and populate your Word template and this became so much easier and from an editing perspective, you could go in and edit your Word document to the point I actually had end users who could go in and update the content and everything like that in their Word templates, who could go in and update the content and everything like that in their word templates and we could still utilize those in Power Automate without me having to go in and fix all of this stuff. So that's just sort of my opinion on it. The feature is there.

Nick:

I would say I don't want to call it a good feature because it is clunky, or it was clunky To be honest. I haven't looked at it in quite a few years because I've been doing it the Power Automate way. So I'm very interested. I did a high-level scan of what Jordan had wrote in this blog post, so I'm interested to see why you've added this to our discussion today.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, no, actually for me it's more of a, because I didn't know that this was a thing. Even so, I guess a use case for this would be kind of a certification or a contract or something like that, where you have data versus data and you want it to be inserted into a structured document and exporting it without having to cut and paste that those data points. So for me it was one of those things where, oh so this exists. Great, I didn't know that because we're in a meeting and we're in the customer project. Now we're doing it with Power Automate.

Ulrikke:

So that was kind of my first first reaction. And then also it's about the new ui and the new experience, because every so often microsoft will throw out, uh, the old and in with the new and you'll have the. You will have access to the old or the classic interface for so long until they moved all the functionality over into the new designer or new interface. Well, this is one of those things where actually, what Joran is pointing out is that the new experience is nearly impossible to use.

Nick:

Whereas the old experience.

Ulrikke:

The classic experience was very logical and easy to follow. So one of the things where the improvement in the new way of doing it is absolutely useless and you find yourself going back into the classic every time you want to do something. I have the same experience for a while with the timeline control. Every time I wanted to configure one I would have to go into the classic because I couldn't do what I needed to do from the modern view right. And so every time you do that now it asks you what is it that you're going into the classic interface for again, and I like that because then you can actually tell Microsoft it's the timeline control because the new one doesn't work, or it's this new Word to Excel document template thing because the new experience is not working.

Ulrikke:

So I think my point was that make sure that if you need to look into something and you can't find it in a new experience, look for the switch to classic and see if the classic experience is better. And on your way there, make sure to put in because I know that they're looking at that why you are moving into the classic experience. It's so valuable feedback and if we don't, you know what's going to happen. We're going to be stuck with a new experience in a very short amount of time. So that was that. So thank you, joran, for pointing it out and doing what Joran is doing and making it into a blog post so that people share it and people are aware of it also helps.

Nick:

So good job yeah, and.

Nick:

I'm interested if people want to comment, of if you're using the, if you're still using the built-in document template capabilities within Dynamics 365, and why there might be some very valid reasons of why you would use this over the method I'm using with Power Automate. Like I know it's a, the Power Automate way is a little bit dis I wouldn't say disjointed but to me it's just a lot easier to manage. But there might be some good valid reasons. So interested in hearing that. And yeah, again, just plus one into what you said about when that little box pops up, don't put in a bunch of swear words, just sort of say very clearly I am going into the classic user interface because I need the table mapping. You know table mapping section that doesn't exist in the new interface. So they know that people are a using it and B. That's another thing they need to add to their backlog, to add or fix within the new interface 100%.

Nick:

Yeah, great Interesting. You talked about the timeline control. Just a quick little shout out to our um about, you know, the configuring the timeline control and stuff too. It's, uh, our friend, uh, jacob from resco, um, and I haven't done this yet. I promise I will. But they have a part of their pcf controls. They have a visual timeline which looks really cool. So I'll, I'll try. I promise, jacob, I am going to try it out.

Ulrikke:

I will report back on uh pages, or is that for model driven apps? Or is that for model-driven apps?

Nick:

It's for model-driven apps yeah, amazing.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, can't wait to see that. Another name for the list Whoop, whoop, jacob, pela, yep, and you have put in a link here from our favorite Nathan. Nathan Rose is our favorite ranter.

Nick:

Yes, is this another?

Ulrikke:

rant Because I haven't seen this.

Nick:

No, no, no. No. It's actually not a rant, but it is a. It's a. It's a back to your, and he has a few, and he's actually posted a few more since then, but this one I really caught my eye. He said the math problem that predicted AI's future and why your sixth grade teacher was right all along. So I'm talking about it brings me in.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, I just love his Nathan.

Nick:

I just love and I'm looking for I'm going to be meeting Nathan in a few weeks in person finally and but I just love how he, how he just goes to his content. He tells a story, he's a great storyteller and to me this really kind of appeals to my way of consuming content and sort of delivering content sometimes. And he talks about the agent and he talks about a math problem and about you know where you just get you know on a test, a regular math problem, and relates that to just regular automation. But then he talks about where an agent is more of that question of like you get a math problem, well, what is two plus two? Well, it's four.

Nick:

To me, to him, that's an automation where the you know you get those word problems and it's sort of like, um, sarah's baking cookies. For a school fundraiser, sarah needs three and a half cups of flour for one batch of cookies. If she wants to make four batches, how many cups of flour will she need in total? Those are the types of things that agents can begin to be used and break down for these types of math problems.

Nick:

So it's just his way again to explain to dummies like me that are fighting with Co-Pilot Studio, with my power automate brain um, how to to consume all this. So, again, this is a again one of these um, I don't know what you call these posts where they're doing the pdfs with the slide, little slider post kind of thing. We see a lot of those and I love them because it's very quick to consume that content. Like we talked about early, anna does it, nathan does it, a few others do it as well um, where you just need just give me the facts but give it to me in an entertaining way, and Nathan definitely does that. So, nathan, awesome work, keep it up and, yeah, looking forward to finally meeting up with you in a couple of weeks.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, absolutely. I love that Brilliant yeah. And then we had and I saw something in you know talking about co-pages scenario. When you have, like you just showed in your video in your blog post, and you have external ID authentication on your PowerPages and you have a CopaList Studio agent, then you want that to be authenticated the same way. So it's a blog post and it's also an episode from Local Revolution with Gomolemo Gomolemo Sorry, gomolemo Mabi and Jolin Kirui and Fabian Alves, which goes through how to set it up and how it works step by step. So it was a very good couple of a couple of resources there. If you want to dive into how you use authentication, enter external ID and go by the studio.

Nick:

Awesome, cool. And then you have another one from Hamish about Power Platform adoption. Hamish is another one of these great content creators as well.

Ulrikke:

And Hamish is another one of these great content creators as well. Yeah, 100%, and I look for this kind of content all the time and this is conversations I have with my customers all the time and also with my colleagues and the Low-Code versus Pro-Code and where the challenges lie and how to make it happen and kind of where the battle is, so to speak. And I think he makes a great point throughout his article. He kind of lines up where the challenges are and how to kind of overcome them. Where the challenges are and how to kind of overcome them, and at the end he kind of concludes and I agree with this to succeed, you have to show the ROI and to secure your funding. I have customers that think that Dataverse is too expensive so they use SharePoint as a relational database. It's absolutely crazy and it's on me to show them how the return on investment for using Dynamics and Dataverse and Power Platform is immense compared to SharePoint. You have to work with IT, not against them. You have to have that support and they have to understand what this is and also build strong teams with the right mix of skills.

Ulrikke:

I love this, hamish. It's exactly what we've been preaching the mix, the hybrid, the fusion, the call it what the beep you want, but you need people's competency and skill to overlap. It's in the fringes, the overlap. That's what we need. I see so many projects. It's kind of head to head or there's in the fringes, the overlap. That's what we need. I see so many projects. It's kind of head to head or there's a gap. You lose out. You need the overlap of skills to make it work, and I think it's such a good point. So I love posts like that. I think Hamish is so structured and organized in the way he delivers the points and is so spot on. So please go and read that article if that's up your alley.

Nick:

Cool, all right. So I want to kind of wrap up. We always talk about events and stuff like that, and then I think we're probably I don't know what. I don't see where our time clock is, but we're probably a little over 55.

Ulrikke:

So I think this is going to be another long one. Okay, we're gonna put. So I think actually what we're gonna do have to rearrange this episode so the first 21 minutes where we just talk about random stuff is going to be at the end, so that actually people can get to the juicy stuff in the beginning. We'll have to see what we do.

Nick:

No, we're gonna right, I do want to finish up with um. There's a link here that we're going to share, and our good friend, victor Dantas, is behind this. It's Power Platform for Ukraine, and you go to the website Transforming Lives with Digital Skills power Ukrainian refugees living in Poland and neighboring countries by equipping them with valuable skills in the latest Microsoft low-code, no-code and AI technology. So, okay, they're looking for sponsorship and I am trying I'm going to try my best not to break up here. We have friends there.

Nick:

It's a shitty situation. We have people that should be leaders and role models being exactly opposite that. So I know it's angering a lot of people. So this is something, and I know we're all trying to figure out what can we do ourselves to help out. So this is something that we can do. I know there's a lot of other things, but if you're feeling angry about the situation, like I am, this is something to get involved in or something else. So, anyways, check out the link. Like I said, I'm trying to hold it together here, but but yeah, so, and we're hoping to get some sponsors. I know Victor's trying to get some sponsors and things like that. So I think it's for a good cause and it's our way that we in this community can help.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, 100%. We have colleagues and we talk to people in the Ukraine every day. It is it's an impossible situation. It's crazy what's going on and it's an impossible situation. It's so. It's crazy what's going on and it's it's unbelievable. I struggle with it too. I don't have the words, um so yeah, it's. Um. Usually I'm not lost for words, but in this situation I really don't know what to say. Yeah, you know it's, I'm not scared to say the wrong thing, even just really don't know what to say. Yeah, you know it's, I'm not scared to say the wrong thing, even I just don't have words to describe how I feel about this.

Nick:

Because, it is out of this world, yeah, and despite what political leanings or whatever, that doesn't matter. We're talking about people here. We're talking about families.

Ulrikke:

Oh yeah.

Nick:

You know, of families.

Ulrikke:

Oh, yeah, you know 100 people living in a bad situation. Absolutely so, uh, let's um.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, let's celebrate what tech can do and people and skills and uh, like you said, and the the fascinating thing. So, itera, we have offices, we have I have proper colleagues in in the whole of ukraine and in neighboring countries, in the whole of Ukraine and in neighboring countries and in the whole of Europe. And talking to these people, they don't. I'm in meetings with people in the Ukraine every single day. They don't talk about it, they just want the world to continue. They want to move on, they want to work, they want to create value, keep the balls rolling, keep the economy going. They want to survive and this is what they do in the it's um, what they're going through is absolutely crazy. So, on a like, like you said, it doesn't matter where you lean politically, these people, they need us to to help, yeah, uh, keep keep it going. So, help people get into tech and then upskill them in technology. It's a fantastic way to do that. Let's make sure that. Let's contribute. Cool, and also, even though we don't have a lot of time, if you want to know what we're doing the next couple of weeks, go back and listen to an old episode. No, I'm just kidding.

Ulrikke:

We have Canadian Platform Summit coming up on the 21st and the 22nd of March, which you are very much involved in. We have ColorCloud, or I have ColorCloud April 24th and 25th, when I'm doing my first big workshop alone on PowerPages from creation to go live and I'm doing a session with Andy Wingate on Business Central and PowerPages together. Then we have PowerSummit on my birthday 24th of May Power Platform Developer Community Boot Camp. You have a session on Power Pages deep dive using the web API and I have a session on Power Pages how to style Power Pages. So we're going there and it's going to be awesome. I'm going to celebrate your birthday when we're in seattle. I'm going to celebrate my birthday in london, so that's going to be great.

Ulrikke:

And then you're going off to dynamics minds on 26 and 28 of may, where you have a session on what you started this podcast, talking about the power lifting and mental health and what that actually. What that is all about for you. It's not about lifting heavy things and putting them back together. It's about mental health and yeah, and and everything like that. And also the cage match and power pages versus the world with matt and george is gonna be absolutely crazy. And then we're both going to european power platform conference in j Conference in June, where we're back with the Top Gun outfits, together with Victor Dantas, which we just mentioned, we have a crash course for Power Pages and Power Pages, top 10 Tips and Tricks. So this fall is no sorry, this spring is already fall. We both said we were going to slow down down and we did not. It's already fully booked. So looking forward to it so much. It's going to be so much fun.

Nick:

Cool, all right. So, yeah, long episode, which is good. So you have two weeks and the thing is you don't have to listen to it all at once. You can listen to the first half and then listen to the first half later, kind of thing. But yeah, we really appreciate. We do appreciate the comments. We're getting a lot of great comments just sort of randomly, whether it's on the YouTube channel or through LinkedIn or even just sometimes just talking to people too. It's just sort of like sometimes we do this a lot of work and then someone just sort of says we just love the love what you put out. Uh, love getting our update. This is how we get our power platform updates. I, we do realize we probably lean a little bit more to some areas more than others, but uh, we would like to talk about what we know.

Ulrikke:

But uh, again, thank you to our listeners, and I think we have an anniversary coming up. Uh, because I think the first episode that we ever launched was somewhere in March. So, because I'm me and I have a goldfish memory, I can't tell you what the date was, but we're going to figure that out and maybe we'll have a bonus episode around that time. So, yeah, looking forward to catching you. And the next episode is what? March 19th.

Nick:

Yes, I believe so. So that would be actually the day before Canadian or the day or two before Canadian Power Platform Summit starts. So we bring everything up. There'll be a lot of info Again. That's going good. Still a few tickets available, but get them now because we are selling. We will sell out guaranteed, so get it.

Ulrikke:

Get it, definitely get it, and I can't wait to see you in Seattle for MVP Summit. All right, guys, take care until next time and I'll catch you later. All right, bye, bye-bye.

Nick:

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, Luric Akebek and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

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