Power Platform Boost Podcast

Human Touch (#62)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 62

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Ulrikke:

So do you want to talk about the flows connection?

Nick:

reference replacer oh yeah, I know you haven't seen this.

Ulrikke:

I haven't seen this, so tell me, because now I'm going to get excited and I didn't look at it deliberately, so that you can tell me and I can get excited.

Nick:

Okay. So imagine this You're working on a project, on a project, and then, all of a sudden, there's five bazillion connection references all pointing to the same.

Nick:

Basically the same connection, or the same thing, and let's just say you're in the project let's just say you're in this project and all of a sudden you start kind of yelling at people, at teams, to make sure they get their connection references sorted out before a deployment happens. As you're doing the deployment all of a sudden if it's prompting you to make all these new connections or like letting the team know and shaming people and things like that.

Ulrikke:

So well yes.

Nick:

I'm just a hypothetical scenario here.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your timely source of Power Platform news and updates, with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk. Hi Nick, how are you.

Nick:

Hey, I'm doing good, thanks, how's the summer going?

Ulrikke:

Oh, the summer is not here today, but it was here last week or this week Monday. It was here last week or this week Monday. Okay yeah, so all good, and you had a bit of a heat wave and then it kind of quieted down.

Nick:

Oh man, we've had a heat wave and then we had nice weather, and then right now there's thunderstorms rumbling. So if you lose me, that's probably why. So let's see how this goes.

Ulrikke:

My daughter would be so envious because she's really sensitive to the pressure changes in the atmosphere. So when there's a thunderstorm coming afterwards she feels so refreshed because then all the tension is released and she's been begging for a thunderstorm for weeks. So when I tell her you had thunderstorms, it's going to be so envious.

Nick:

Yeah, my daughter as well loves thunderstorms.

Ulrikke:

But it is something about it. I mean, especially in summer, when we've been outside for a lot and then just having that one day of rain and thunderstorms is just kind of get the blanket and the popcorn and the movie and just stay inside and just, yeah, fill it with other things for a whole day.

Nick:

Yeah, it's good, I don't know. To me it's the power of nature and things like that. I think in another lifetime I would have been one of these crazy guys that would chase storms and things like that, but I ended up in IT. You say other lifetime.

Ulrikke:

I give you 10 years max.

Nick:

Of my life.

Ulrikke:

No, no, until you're that guy. I mean, why wait until another lifetime? I give you like 10 years and off you go, you're going to be chasing thunderstorms.

Nick:

You don't know, After this podcast I could be hopping in my truck chasing down this thunderstorm.

Ulrikke:

That's what I mean. That's literally what I mean. One of these days, you're just going to say I'm not going to be bothered with this technology stuff anymore.

Nick:

I'm just going to grab my camera and run off and chase thunderstorms in my truck, because AI can't do that yet and it's going to do everything else for me.

Ulrikke:

So there you go. Amazing segue. Thank you, nick. I was waiting for a straw to reach to get into the news and updates, because that's why we're here.

Nick:

Yep, exactly. So okay, diving right into it. So there's a new feature that we did talk about I think a couple maybe we mentioned it the last couple of weeks already in Microsoft 365 Copilot. This is the one you get through. It's a license that. It's a license thing that you need that your company generally gets for you, and they've enabled we talked about this already enabling things like the research and some other things, but they enabled something called notebooks. Now notebooks is something we talked about already, has been part of Google notebook LM as well Very similar feature, but it has its own unique things.

Nick:

So Lisa Crosby did a video on this about using copilot notebooks and I started using this and I have a story about using notebooks. Like right after I watched Lisa's video, my wife she also works in the industry. She does Dynamics 365 Power Platform, she's a solution architect and I said what are you working on? She is putting together, basically a requirements document for a customer. You know it's taking me a lot of time and everything like that. I said, oh, and I kind of joked. I said, oh, sounds like a job for Copilot. And she says, yeah, in Copilot and Word it can help you do the writing, but of course I'm trying to collect all the different things the teams meetings, there's different spreadsheets where they're doing estimations, there's different documents they got from the client and websites and like that. And I said, have you seen notebooks in Microsoft 365? She goes no, tell me what's that all about. So I showed her where you can begin to collect all of these different documents and things. And then all of a sudden her like five minutes later she's knocking on my office door saying, oh, guess what I did? I put all these things in and it helped me generate, beginning to generate my requirements documents. It's pulling all of this information from Teams meetings and this and this, and I'm able to actually begin to structure out different things and all this. So that's sort of an example of using notebooks.

Nick:

And then for myself, I realized for people who see me on LinkedIn and the YouTube and the movies, my own personal brand is all over the place. I'm going to think, okay, I need to consolidate this. My blog's been going for 10 years. I want to start. Part of my summer projects I have a list is to kind of consolidate, get my personal brand in order, and I'm actually one of our friends in the community is helping me out with this. And she asked me. She said can you put together some stuff you know to help me, kind of help you with this? And I'm like, oh crap, I got to do this. So again, I used notebooks, I pointed it to my LinkedIn, I pointed it to my Sessionize profile, I uploaded my resume, uploaded some other documentation and, boom, it helped me in iterating back and forth, put together a bit of a brand profile or personal brand profile proposal with different things. I even told it these are my favorite colors, these are the things I want to reflect on. And then it gave me, my next, what's that?

Ulrikke:

Do you have favorite colors?

Nick:

I do, and it gave a little brief. And then I sent that off to her and she said this is amazing, I can work with this. And I said well, just to be full transparency, I use Copilot notebooks. Here's the prompt I use to get all this stuff. So, again, like sharing is caring, so we'll keep on top of how that all goes. But this is a if you haven't looked at Copilot notebooks yet, it is something if you're working with multiple pieces of information and trying to consolidate and work with it, it's. I think it's a bit of a game changer. It's more powerful than really on the surface and I think already a lot of people are beginning to notice it. So, yeah, I'm not sure if you tried out notebooks yet or not.

Ulrikke:

I know, but isn't it kind of the same as the Google notebooks that we've had for a while, where you can upload a document and make a kind of a podcast thing about it, because that's also one of the features, right, you can have two people talk over it, create a kind of a podcast situation, much like we have on top of the information.

Nick:

Yeah, the one drawback I did find, though, the whole podcast thing, because we are going to be talking soon about some other content, but I uploaded a piece of content that we got from Microsoft that we want to talk about. I can't talk about it yet. I uploaded that into the Microsoft 365 co-pilot to say give me an audio overview, because I need to get ramped up on this. It generated a 20-minute podcast, but I couldn't download it. I could only listen to it through the app where, if I go to Notebooks LM, I did the exact same thing. It actually gave me a downloadable audio file that I can throw on my phone. I can listen to it on the gym or whatever else.

Nick:

So there are some gaps and differences. I'm sure that feature will come eventually, like everything right, if there's something missing, come back a week later or a day later, and it might just be there. And we'll talk more about that when other things like plan designer, when we talk a little bit about that later on, about the, have those governance guardrails that you might not necessarily have using external tools with your own personal work information. So there is that benefit, yeah.

Ulrikke:

And also something that Lisa touched on in her video is how important it is to check in with these tools every now and again. Is to check in with these tools every now and again, and also I saw that in a post from Femke this week as well that suddenly now there's a new update to the models that are behind Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot models have had an upgrade is what I'm trying to say, and so if you, like me, felt like, well, I'm not really using Microsoft 365 Copilot because I find that ChatDBT just does a better job, then maybe it's time to go back and give it another go. And this goes for all of the AI tools that we see. If you abandon something, you need to go back and check it again because these things will get updates and suddenly it's a much better tool. So I think, yeah, that is very important. And also, speaking of updates, your good friend, nathan Rose, posted on LinkedIn five new highlights five highlighted five new features more like it.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah and basically and yeah, nathan, nathan does these great little short videos, this short content, very easy to digest. I really, nathan, I really love your content, even though we do disagree on some things sometimes kind of a nice little rivalry going on there but things these are really cool, very simple stuff. Autosave, like seriously like I know these are little things sometimes, but of course if you're working on something in Copilot Studio, then all of a sudden you accidentally close your browser, go away. Then all of a sudden you accidentally close your browser, go away, then all of a sudden you've lost all your stuff. There's nothing more. This goes back to the dawn of time. You know, making sure you hit the save button. I know I've, over the years, there's been multiple times where I've done a lot of work and not hitting the save button or losing power or something as I talk about thunderstorms and power, that it just goes missing. So there is autosave Little thing, big impact. Agent chaining.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, sorry, no, no, because when PowerPages they released PowerPages in New Studio that also had automatic save and that was a big riot for not having it. So it's not always the answer and I can see scenarios where you wouldn't have it. So I think and that was the discussion we had back then as well we could actually retract and I think we said the exact same thing in that episode that if you want to enable auto, anything that the user choose and if you have auto save, make sure you have versioning so that you can actually go back, because there is a need to save all changes and sometimes you just want to experiment with something and it autosaves and you can't go back. So then undo, do, redo. That kind of thing is becoming increasingly important. So it's not just good news in my book, to be honest.

Nick:

No, no, that's a very fair. You're absolutely right, because there's been especially what I've been finding. So, yeah, talk about the autosave in GitHub Copilot, in Visual Studio Code. I've run into this where GitHub Copilot has given me some code and I think, yeah, that's great, I apply it. And then I'm like, oh shit, no, that doesn't work, I need to backtrack. And then I realized I didn't do the commit before I applied.

Nick:

So, yeah, you're absolutely right, there's the auto save is a double edged sword. Yes, it can save your butt, but also it can it could kind of rain on your parade as well. So, yeah, yeah, totally get it. So, going back to it, nathan Rose's feature so, yes, yeah, the dangers of auto save, that could be a whole episode in itself. Um, other thing agent chaining lets your bots have play dates.

Nick:

So we talk about agents, talking to agents, and, yeah, I think, as we get more into this, um, we're realizing you don't make this massive agent that does everything, break it down and have agents do different things and that way you can mix and match and do different things. That's pretty cool. This is something I, something I noticed, and we're going to talk about the, the, the copilot assessment or the applied skills, but actions are now tools. So if you still go through a lot of the learn content, it will say, well, add an action. And I'm like I don't see the action in the interface anymore, realizing it's now been renamed tools. It is mean, it's pretty much the exact same thing, but there are some subtle differences. So that's sort of another thing.

Nick:

This is something with copilot studio. It's changing on a weekly basis. It's really hard to keep up sometimes, um, and so you know kudos to the, to the team that are doing this applied skills stuff that we'll talk about it just to keep up, because your applied skills instructions might change based on the user interface changes, advanced data, opposite screen, power, automate, energy Okay, yeah, some more automation and things like this. Other thing about power effects and agent instructions gone and he said, poof, no one is crying. Okay, maybe one guy, because we all know Nathan's a big power effects guy. But I never got into the point of Copilot Studio where I felt I needed to use power effects. Now, to be fair, I haven't gone deep into projects with Copilot Studio yet, but it's interesting that Power Fx kind of made an appearance and then got pulled back. Do you have any thoughts on this? Or have you used Power Fx in Copilot Studio? Did you get that far down the rabbit hole?

Ulrikke:

No, no, me neither. So to me this is kind of a well, I don't know the benefits or the drawbacks and why they would remove it.

Nick:

Um, so if we can still kind of um reference other content and do what we could always do when they're pulling it back, then yeah sure okay, yeah, it'd be interesting if anybody, if any of our listeners, are really greatly upset about power effects and missing from from Copilot Studio, then definitely let us know. We'd like to keep this discussion going because Power Facts to me has always been this is the language of you know, the power platform kind of going forward, the low code language, so it's interesting that it was sort of there. Maybe it was just a case of an experimental feature. Let's just see if this sticks or if it's beneficial, and maybe it wasn't. So, yeah, good post, nathan, keep them coming.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and if anyone can tell us why he's crying, it should be Nathan. So, nathan, please tell us, why are you crying and no one else cares about this? We would love to hear it. But these are very good updates and I'm loving seeing news from Lisa Crosby and Femke Cornelius and Nathan Rose on these kinds and there's a few others I'm going to mention as well that kind of keeps posting these small little updates on LinkedIn so that we can all keep up to date on a day-to-day basis. And I also found that for CodeCad Studio, you now have release notes actually every two weeks. It seems like the cadence is actually picking up. So there's a June 25th was the last one and in that. So that's another way to kind of keep up to date with the news and updates.

Ulrikke:

And in that I saw something called Copilot Vision on mobile, now available for free in the US, and I was looking at what is co-pilot vision? I haven't heard about that before, so I dove in and I tried to see what it was. And it's like your new Ray-Bans, right, it's like you have a second pair of eyes on your screen and I was scrambling to trying to find it. And also, this is something else. Maybe it's just me, but I found that you had the same thing where it's Copilot Vision for Windows, which kind of puzzled me because I went into Microsoft 365 Copilot app that I have on my Windows machine. It's not the same thing because you have one. You have Microsoft 365 Copilot, which works with your company account, which is a pro license type thing. Then you have Copilot app on your Windows machine, which is your personal account app, and these two are two different apps. I thought that was kind of one and the same or not. They're two different things.

Ulrikke:

So this is where the personal one, as far as I can see, and also, like we said, we couldn't find it. None of us could find it because it's now available in the US. So, for whoever we have listening to us from the us, please report back and tell us if you like cobalt vision. And the thing is it's a, it's a kind of a second set of eyes on your screen, right? So you, um, you show it an image, is it? Where is this? Um? You can ask it to read something and then give you an image that goes with it. You can kind of have it analyze something for you, look at graphs for you compare things and kind of help you with what you see on the screen. So it's something that, of course, we couldn't try because we can't access it, but it sounds really fun and maybe promising. So, yeah, looking forward to checking that out.

Nick:

Yeah, and it'll probably show up on our stuff eventually, like everything, I'm sure.

Ulrikke:

Like everything else. Yes, we have so many more AI news and updates, we need to get cracking, and you updated yourself on Copilot studio this week as well, because we kind of uh uh, so I threw a challenge last um last episode yes and you won, congratulations well it was.

Nick:

Yeah, it was funny because I remember like we, we talked about it and I said I wanted to do it and then you said, oh, challenge. Then of course I understand life. Life sort of takes over, especially on this too. And then last Friday I was sitting down and said, OK, I'm actually going to do it. I went through the material just to make sure I got it was on top of things and the learning material again a little bit dated, but it's really not bad as a good foundation to it was good. It reminded me of all the PVA stuff that I'd learned like a year ago in terms of topics and trigger and all the stuff. Of course, a lot of that has changed. So I experimented a little bit, had a lot of fun, kind of going re, re, re, reintroducing myself to co-pilot studio effectively to get on top of this, and there's a few projects that will more and more get into this. So I did the assessment.

Nick:

The assessment, the skill applied skill assessments are cool and I know we've talked about this before but I like about them over certifications is occasions I think have their place. You need to get a good foundation, but it's you kind of have to. I wouldn't say memorize, but you need to have this knowledge and you fill in, whether it's multiple choice or different questions. You do it at testing center, you can do it online and then you get your certification, like PL 200, PL 900, by the way, PL 900, Vegas boost 100, get a discount. We'll talk more about that later. But then the applied skills they have one for Canvas apps, they have one for model driven apps, Power Automate, some other ones as well, but this one was Copilot Studio. So basically, once you say you want to take the assessment, a virtual machine pops up on your screen and then you basically gives you a set of instructions and you go in. You have to do hands-on exercises based on the instructions. They come in and say do X, and you have to go into Copilot Studio and do X and then, once you're all done, gives you a bunch of different steps, that kind of build on each other. Then you submit and then it chugs away and then it comes back telling you whether you passed or failed the assessment. And I passed with like 96%, which was cool, but I doesn't tell you what you got wrong. So that's kind of where I'm like okay, what am I doing wrong. Is it something fundamental? Is it? Maybe it was just something? I named something incorrectly or whatever, but basically, overall, it is a.

Nick:

It's a great way to prove that you not only do you know the tool, but you can actually work with the tool as well. So if you haven't taken the skills assessments, they're free, no cost. Basically, you log in with your MS Learn account, you can take the assessments and if, for some reason, you fail, then you have, I think, no-transcript. I had to refresh the browser to actually get it to show up, Like. At first it was just spinning and I kind of walked away, grabbed a coffee. When I came back it was still spinning. I'm like, okay, it's eating in my time because they give you two hours to do this. No-transcript.

Nick:

Things show up on your learn profile. You get these little certificates that you can post on LinkedIn. I printed mine off, stuck it to the fridge, morph, just to show my wife that I did this kind of as a thing that we do in terms of like, my wife and I get competitive in terms of certification exams. She goes well, what did you get, Like? What did you get? It's always about who got the biggest score. I'm not competitive at all. But, yeah, definitely try out the skilled assessments and let us and yeah, let us know how it went 100% and I've had two weeks with the holiday with the kids.

Ulrikke:

I never planned to do anything these few weeks. It's all about knowing you well, knowing how competitive you are, I kind of thought I'll just throw that challenge up in there and see what happens.

Nick:

It was strategic, I get you.

Ulrikke:

It was never, ever my plan to do it during my holiday with the kids. Not in a million years, she says so now.

Ulrikke:

No, no, I'm sitting down on Thursday, for I have my first day of working now. I'm going to work the next few weeks. It was always my plan to do it now, so I'm going to dive right into it. I'm excited about it, right?

Ulrikke:

So next on the list is something called Research Agents, powered by Project Sophia and our good friend, anna, which I have a feeling you've been talking to already this week without saying anything more than that she wrote a blog post with seven research agents. That is a way for her to show you how you can work with Project Sophia, to have it help you with different use cases and scenarios. So she shows you the data that she uses going in, and also what Project Sophia and the research agent does and what the outcome is, and how you can use it to do sales forecasting, marketing campaign performance, customer support, trends and analysis, finance support, automation and risk identification, hr, retail inventory projects and portfolio reporting. So really well done, anna. Very good blog post and I love anything Project Sophia, so just keep it coming. Yeah, very good, yeah.

Nick:

Yeah, big fan of Anna, for sure, and yeah, and you're right in terms of how she's helping me out with some stuff because she's so talented.

Ulrikke:

She is very talented. And something else I just randomly picked up was a video called AI Research Feels Smart Until it Isn't. It was actually one of the videos that popped up after I'd seen Lisa's video, I think, on YouTube, but it was a podcast setting where it was a writer kind of podcast where the writer talked to other writers and they touched on how you use as a writer you would use AI to research now, whereas you would have researched yourself before. And then they kind of touched on something that we talked about before that I found was really resonating with me, Because what he says is you do the research, you get the results and you get the material that you use for whatever it is that you're writing your novel or whatever it is. But actually the point of the research is not to get the information. It's about doing the research. It's about reading through all that material and searching and finding the good words to use and kind of submerging your head in that world. That is the point of research, not the information that you get out of it. And I think it talks very well to what we've been saying for a while is that use AI and use it a lot, but use it with care. Make sure that you actually get the information you need inside your head.

Ulrikke:

We could easily have agents and we do have agents at this point that scrapes the internet and gives us the news and updates that we use for this podcast. We don't only do that, we kind of work with this as well, as we've always done but we could easily have AI go through and get all the resources and put that into notebooks We've had that capability with Google Notebooks for a year and create a podcast for you. But would Nick and I learn anything by doing that? No, so why are we doing this?

Ulrikke:

We're doing this for our listeners, but we're also doing it for ourselves, to make sure that we keep up to date with the news and updates for us, which means that the whole point disappears. If everyone are just kind of going in gurgitating, kind of throwing out stuff that they find or that AI creates for them out on the web and it doesn't even have to go through their own heads, Then they don't learn anything, and so it's again like we talked about last episode as well use AI, but don't forget about the doing, because it is in the doing of the thing that makes it stick to your mind and it doesn't have any value. If it's from AI to AI, Then if it doesn't register within you and in between in that process, then you've lost.

Nick:

A hundred percent agree. I started watching this video because you just posted it in this morning, so I hadn't had a chance, but of course, I saw that it was about writing and that's something that I'm passionate about as well, and it is something that friends and family have been Now that I have a bit of free time this summer, and basically my family's like when are you going to start writing again, when are you going to spit out another book, kind of thing. And I saw that, okay, this is interesting and you talk about you're right AI doing the research, and I could just say, yeah, give me some research on this particular topic and off it goes From a writing perspective, part of doing that research. All of a sudden, you get all these popcorn ideas for whatever content you're working on, whether it's a book or a screenplay. Oh, because of this. This means this character can do this. I've researched this bit. Oh, that could make an interesting plot point here as opposed to.

Nick:

So it needs to be interactive and when you were talking through this, this reminded me of the session I recently did at Dynamic Spines that we hadn't really talked about on this podcast after I actually delivered it. It was very hard. It was probably one of the hardest sessions I ever had to deliver. Putting it together was also extremely hard, but I actually worked with, I used ChatGPT and basically it was I would say it was a three hour therapy session, because I just gave it here's a session I'm working on and I said ask me questions. And it asked me questions. How did this make you feel? What results came of this? And I gave it answers and it came back and I'm not saying use Chat2BT to be a therapist for you, get a human, but in terms of for me or this is another tool, I guess you could say but to me it wasn't about going go write this presentation for me, it was working with and this tool allowed me to collect my own thoughts, kind of you know session, like put them in a certain readable fashion also helped me discover things about myself. So looking at this particular video or talking about this too and I heard another story about someone who had a book in them for 20 years and never started to write it started using AI to help them formulate and write this book, again in an interactive process. So again, this goes back to what we've been saying it's co-pilot, not pilot.

Nick:

Ai is great, but don't let it take over. Now there's certain things where AI is good, like, yes, you can generate a podcast. I I've had an 80 page ebook that I needed to read. I think I mentioned this before. I threw it at Google. Lm gave me a podcast and it was a very technical book. It was something. It was a health book on something else. It was a way to summarize the information. That's great, because it was either me reading that book or whatever else. This was another way to get that information. Ai helped.

Nick:

But in terms of the research, I do like this idea of the back and forth and it's like it's vibe coding. In a sense, you're vibe researching where really vibe coding shouldn't. I know vibe coding. A lot of people are saying, well, just go and get it to do the work for you. No, to me, vibe coding is. It is that interactive process, and the project I've been working on the last few weeks it was, you know, using AI back and forth and for development. Now, this could be go for writing, this, go for research, could go for a lot of things. It's powerful stuff, but the human in the loop is what really makes it special in the end to me.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, and I think a good point and you brought up books, which is a good thing. So something they also touched on in the video is that they said that. So shouldn't you know books? Who reads books these days? You just get them summarized and actually shouldn't they just be summarized into an article? And actually, if you look at it, that article could just be a tweet, but then tweets don't change lives.

Ulrikke:

Books does, and it's something about the human condition, I think the act of sitting down and actually reading a paper book from end to end, and how that changes lives. It does, but a tweet never did, and so I find that also what I and it's like what you said about blog posts right. You have people and I have people coming up to me all the time and saying I, you know, you wrote this blog post. I don't need to.

Ulrikke:

Well, yeah, you do, because your perspective on things and, like I said, your popcorn ideas or your associations are unique, and if everyone starts to create books using AI, we're going to have very generic books. If all writers use AI to summarize and do research for them, they're going to miss the small little nuggets that us as individuals will pick up, just because our childhoods were different or our friends growing up were different, or our interests are different, but AI is going to do the same job for everyone, when it summarizes content, for instance, right. So it is that little human touch, that little human detail that we're missing if we're using AI in all of this, which I think I'm kind of getting to as very important. So that was just my this episode's rant quiet rant plead AI plead.

Nick:

The human touch. That might be our title. We'll see.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, maybe, maybe, and also I love this. Okay. So we have a few other things that I want to quickly touch on. We're not going to go into depth with these, but I just wanted to mention them.

Ulrikke:

A new article on the Microsoft Cloud blog how to Leverage AI to Reimagine Cross-Functional Collaboration with Gina Arenas. The reason why I'm mentioning it? Because I'm Gina's biggest fan. She was judged at ACDC a million years ago and we're following her and her kind of path within Microsoft and this is where she's interviewed, talking about some of the hurdles and challenges that we face in adopting AI these days. And through that article, which is a very good article, check it out.

Ulrikke:

I also saw something that kind of tickled my interest a little bit, which was AI Fluency, which is a framework and foundations program, from what I can gather from Anthropic, which is the MCP server people. It was kind of a course-ish, kind of training, upskilling type program. So if you're interested in that, check out AI Fluency. And then I saw that, actually, because we all talk about agents, right, and the holy grail of agents are Jarvis. Everyone wants Jarvis, right. Iron man, tony Stark's AI agent, jarvis, jarvis and now what is it? Is it? I can't remember, cisco now created Jarvis and it's an agent that is transforming platform engineering at OutShift. So OutShift is one of the kind of what is it called in English? I don't have the English words, but it's one of the companies of Cisco where they do AI.

Nick:

We would call it divisions or something.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, something like that, and they are rethinking platform engineering with AI at its core, and they're calling it Jarvis. So I just needed to shout out those few little links, because it's something I came across, so I just had to mention it. Yeah, oh, you put something in here, because now it's all mine, so we need to kind of find one of yours, I think, so that we can kind of go back and forth a little bit. So do you want to talk about the flows connection? Reference replacer. Oh, yeah, I know.

Nick:

You haven't seen this.

Ulrikke:

I haven't seen this, so tell me, because now I'm going to get excited and I didn't look at it deliberately, so that you can tell me and I can get excited.

Nick:

Okay.

Nick:

So imagine this You're working on a project project and then all of a sudden, there's five bazillion connection references all pointing to the same, basically the same connection or the same thing, and let's just say you're in this project and all of a sudden you start kind of yelling at people, at Teams to make sure they get their connection references sorted out before a deployment happens, as you're doing the deployment all of a sudden if it's prompting you to make all these new connections or like letting the team know and shaming people and things like that.

Ulrikke:

So well yes.

Nick:

I'm just a hypothetical scenario here.

Nick:

Yeah yeah, yeah, tool by tangi tuzard, who we all know, the godfather of the xram toolbox, um tangi's basically saved the power platform world millions upon millions of euros and dollars and basically did it for, essentially for free, out of the basically well, to be honest, to really help his own projects out. But he shared it with the world and, of course, all the other tool makers as well. Definitely, big shout out to them. But he built a tool that allows you to take all of these random connection references, select them and then consolidate them into one that you pick maybe the one that you created and clean all of this mess up.

Ulrikke:

I was crying.

Nick:

Really I was like, yes, is it for real? I tried it out on one of my environments because it's still fairly new. But yeah, it basically kind of consolidates everything for you. How?

Ulrikke:

How is that even possible? I have to click the link now and go in and see what this is. Well, this is his post.

Nick:

But yeah, load it up on your XM toolbox and yeah, there you go. So yeah, for those of you who have to deal with multiple connection references and deal with this cleanup. This is a tool that really should help you out.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and also, yes, we are crying with you because it is a hurdle, we know what it's like and you have our sympathies. And then thank you, tangy. And then also, I needed this a year ago, okay, because now it's all sorted.

Nick:

But, yeah, fantastic, yes as soon as I saw that, I just I thought of you right away that you're gonna love this and I'm like no, no, I'm just gonna put it in the one note and see if you discover it yourself. And I do highlight I haven't highlighted this, you know.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, that's very good. Oh, thank you, thank you. Okay, that that made my day. I'm done. Now I do have a few other posts to share.

Ulrikke:

I wanted to highlight my good friend Sarah Lagerquist's post about because after EPBC post about after EPVC, she promised to post about the new updates for Plan Plan mean Power Apps, which used to be called Plan Designer, and she did Just a few days ago.

Ulrikke:

She posted five very good tricks when it comes to using Plan plan designer, and one of them is create your publisher first, which I love, because that's all we have to do that, and then we kind of have to put it in solution. Um, ditch the auto suggested tables and re-prompt your lookups. I love that. That means that you can now um, it loves to invent shiny new contact and accounts tables for you, delete them and your existing, add your existing tables and prompt again for lookups, which is a very good uh tip, which I haven't tried because I've then done it manually but I didn't know you could re-prompt it. So that was a very good tip. And then she has a few other ones. That is why it's worth checking out. And then you posted a link in here with a follow-up post that I haven't seen yet.

Nick:

She did another post this morning actually and I had it here two seconds ago. Where'd it go? Oh, here we go. Yeah, so she posted more of speeding up table creation. Watching about languages, because she is doing things in Swedish, which I think you know you can appreciate doing Norwegian here in Canada, like things in French. The multilingual aspects, the draft mode I haven't looked at it. She talked about how I got aware of this because she tagged both of us about icons. So yeah, you know, and plan design, plan designer, custom met tables magically get cute icons. They don't always make sense, but still an improvement. So, getting away from the puzzle I know she's a not good at that or not a big fan of the puzzle pieces, and none of us should be so, yeah, but this to me, is one of those things like her to post.

Nick:

If people looked at plan designer like I did way back when I did a video on Plan Designer, when it first came out it was missing. It was missing a ton of stuff and now it's, but now it's getting better, sorry, you know, the ability to link in existing tables. There's the also the process flow which is part of the previews, and things like that. So these are the types of things that I'm going to be presenting on basically plan designer kind of with that in a couple sessions coming up this fall. So, yeah, these posts are really helpful because, yeah, we're all learning together and this to me in terms of building apps, also looking at non-Microsoft app builders as well, kind of doing comparisons with each. So, a great couple articles and, again, if you haven't looked at Plan Designer lately and I think you've said this before go back, get back into it, check it out again, because it's changed so much in the last few months and just keeps getting better.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and there are still a few shortcomings that we know about. For instance, we will always create five tables. There's a base prompt in there somewhere, probably, where it's just kind of have these guardrails still, but they are working on making them more agile and making it possible for them to use out-of-the-box tables, for instance, is a big one, and I'm sure it's coming just around the corner. And also, I saw another news about plans Through the Power the cloud advocacy team, eliza Benitez and April Dunham, and that guru has a Pulse News update for Power Apps that we've talked about in a few episodes, and in this one they talk about how you can now export plans as PDFs for stakeholders, which is a really neat feature, right that is cool, yeah. Which is a really neat feature, right that is cool, yeah.

Ulrikke:

And I remember when do you remember when they had the ability to print Canvas apps and that was a big news? I think that was two years ago or something, and we were like but you have to realize that people do have to kind of use, they have to print stuff still to give. There are so many people, so many organizations in the world work in a very old-fashioned way, so enabling kind of then their employees to use modern tools, but kind of then also having that legacy capability to allow you to print something or to export it as PDF or something. That is really neat. So, yes, very good.

Nick:

Especially giving back to a customer or something like that sharing. If they don't, you don't want to give them access to plan designer, but you want to give them the results out of it.

Ulrikke:

The documentation, and also I mean putting that into a PDF format, will also allow you to kind of copy paste that into Leaky or something in a much smoother way. So I think that's probably a part of it.

Nick:

Yeah, nice, I did not know that, so that's cool.

Ulrikke:

Very cool. And then I saw something else that I need your help with, because I don't work with model div enough specifically, but I've seen two major news updates that people are going completely bananas over and you need to kind of help me figure this out. So Naveed Ali Sa at two of his things that I put in here on LinkedIn. So one blog post is about a game changer for model driven apps. Say hello to xrmcopylex execute prompt. So that's one thing that you can use in JavaScript for customizing model driven apps. And then think of it and he says think of it as chat DPT inside Power Apps, but with business logic baked in. And here's the big news this is the first time ever that developers can directly integrate co-pilot powered AI into web resources in JavaScript. No plugins, no flows, no third-party tools, just native code in your model-driven app magic. I mean, this sounds revolutionary in my book and I love that it's for model-driven apps. So do you see like, oh yes, mind blown, this is fantastic.

Nick:

Yes, the thing is I haven't tried it yet and this is this popped up on my radar as well, I think roughly probably the same time. Um, yeah, I could definitely see this being a thing where, um, we can actually, you know, get things like some um cases where because you're about the next article we're going to talk about is the, the prompt column type. I think the prompt column type might take care of some of these things, but this now actually gives you a little bit more. If you're not necessarily needing it to be part of your data, you just need to call out um, some, some ai and things like that. So, yeah, a use case doesn't quite pop in my head beyond a sentiment analysis or some sort of evaluation on particular data stuff that already sort of exists, but I think that probably, the more I think about it come back to me in two weeks and I'll probably have about a dozen different use cases for this now that I begin to think about it.

Nick:

But it is interesting and it is nice to see that Microsoft's still investing in the JavaScript library or the JavaScript commands around model-driven apps. It was always. Are they going to abandon this in favor of Power Facts? I mean, they never said that, so don't quote me on any of that but I do find like JavaScript within model-driven apps is one of those very powerful things. I use it pretty much every project I'm working on. Even last week, I was helping out and we were diving into the JavaScript stuff because that was the only way we could solve that problem with JavaScript within the model driven apps. So, yes, this is really cool. This gives another option there and, yeah, without having to tie in or do some other backend stuff to make that happen. Now, I'm guessing that this will probably consume some either co-pilot or AI builder credits of some sort. The documentation really wasn't clear. Who's paying for this?

Ulrikke:

I guess you could say in terms of resources, co-pilot credits, yeah.

Nick:

Yeah, so we'll see. So definitely, yeah, it is cool because I pasted that in as well. So, yeah, it's in preview right now, so don't dump this into production. But I think I might try a few things in the next couple of weeks to try this out and just sort of see what, and then again we'll get those creative juices going a little bit and could definitely help out in certain use cases, for sure.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, because also what comes with this is a new component that you can add to your model-driven app that kind of summarizes right. So it's not just that you can kind of use it now in your existing JavaScripts or whatever it is. But I saw so we made this Hackathon thing for a procurement process and we have a model-driven app that kind of assesses and goes through and checks all the vendors and if they upload the right documentation and stuff, and we use this little component in the model ribbon app to just to check that the vendors had done what they were supposed to do and kind of give an assessment, but that is the same thing that was in the use case.

Ulrikke:

it's kind of a sentiment analysis kind of scenario where you use it to summarize or give you a summary of the the data that's already there, but it's very, very curious to see what they're going with this and what you can use it to summarize or give you a summary of the data that's already there, but it's very, very curious to see what they're going with. That's not what you can use it for. And also the prompt data type for a database column, which is also a preview and it's refining how we bring AI directly into our data model. It allows you to kind of give the prompt and also in the prompt, reference other data points. You can reference um variables or you can reference uh, other data verse table columns, for instance um and other uh resources so, um, yeah, yeah, that could be like.

Nick:

It's it kind of like calculated columns, but not in a sense, but you're using AI instead of the calculated column. So would I trust this to do like perfect math? Probably not. I'd probably stick to calculated columns, but this could be something in terms like sentiment analysis is good when you get a ticket in. They could read the, or you know how someone could just have a whole bunch of stuff in the ticket. Just give me a summary, summarize this. Help me categorize this. Those types of things definitely could be very helpful as opposed to having to read through the whole case trying to figure it out. Should this be escalated? Which team should this be assigned to? If this could actually read some of that and do some of that automatically or begin to tag it for analysis, that could be really cool. That I could see using, for sure.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, absolutely Right. So moving on to PowerPages stuff, because there is a new thing and we both put this in there. I saw afterwards that I think those two things are the same, that those two links are the same thing. New PowerPages Action Center.

Nick:

Yeah. So this is cool. This brings a lot of the Power Pages admin stuff which I think I don't want to say gets ignored, but kind of gets yeah. Yeah, you can do admin stuff. We're really. This is really a good view for people that live and breathe in the Power Platform Admin Center. So before you'd have to kind of drill down to go in the Power Pages specific stuff or actually go through the Power Pages homepage, this will actually give you a list of all the, basically give you a list of all the sites in your environments and tell you which sites don't have things like their certificates are expiring, which sites are not being visited with, you know zero visitors, which are in trial, they're about to expire, which ones have content delivery network enabled, which ones have the web firewall, web, whatever it's called.

Ulrikke:

The WAF.

Nick:

WAF yeah, web application firewall so it to act on it in a lot more conducive manner. So it really helps the administrators in your world and, of course, they're very important people that sometimes kind of get forgotten because it's not necessarily always visible. But, yeah, this is really cool. It's really showing the PowerPages is still big investments happening on there with PowerPages in terms of really on the governance and security administration side of it as well, because that's so important, regardless of how you're deploying or building your PowerPages, whether you're building the traditional way or you're building it using single page applications, which is a segue into a link that you posted.

Ulrikke:

Segue. I like it Right. So another big investment from the PowerPages team is, of course, using AI driven development to build PowerPages sites. So with PowerPages single page applications, or SPAs, you now have the ability to start your PowerPages project from Visual Studio Code, where you create a new PowerPages site and upload the site to your environment and you can vibe code or you can AI-assisted coding use whatever it is that you want to create that site, and also very quickly actually. Andrew Ellens put together a blog post series about PowerPages single page applications, which I absolutely love. I haven't had the time to dive in through each and every one of them, but he covers things like how to get started, how to do the main setup, the structure, the fragment-based routing, login, redirect and also how you build components. So he's six blog posts in at the moment and I just love it.

Nick:

And I think this is amazingly quick, I must say Well, but actually look at the dates. It was last year that he put these together, really.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, how is that possible?

Nick:

Well, I think this is basically a way at that time to actually do single page applications within PowerPages. And then here we are, a year later, microsoft catching up, making it much more easier. The framework Now. That being said, I didn't go too deep. I read a few of his articles. A lot of these learnings that he's providing information definitely is applicable to this new feature that the Microsoft team is rolling out in terms of single page applications.

Nick:

So I'm not sure if Andrew is going to go back and revisit some of these now with the new feature. I hope you do, andrew. If you're listening, please do, because this is gold and this is going to help us move forward and this is something that's on my long list of things. Move forward, and this is something that's on my long list of things. The next summer list is pretty high up is PowerPages, single page applications, getting playing with that, getting my head wrapped around that. So I'm definitely going to be using this as a resource, because taking Andrew's learnings from a year ago and applying it to these new features now, so yeah, when I saw it too, like holy crap, this guy's generating a ton of content and then started reading, reading it and then reading the dates, I'm like, oh, this is a year old, but wow, this is still so good I'm so glad you caught that, because I didn't really register with me at all.

Ulrikke:

Um and and the reason that I came across this was because we used this in a project last week where I have a team which is putting together created a user interface for um like thing again for that vendor portal using an AI tool called Vercel, which creates a POC kind of user interface very snappy, very good, and you can export React from that. And so I had one of my developers look into it and see if he can grab that React code and use single page applications with Power Pages and kind of create a project using that code and get up and running really quickly. And he could, and I was blown away. And he was blown away too because this is going to change the game in terms of who can now start working with PowerPages, because it has been a really high threshold for getting started.

Ulrikke:

If you're a pro coder, react developer, you wouldn't really want to get into it because it was messy and it was all over the place. This, however, means they can develop the site as they would any other site and it gives them the ability to do that code first. I know that the starting template that Microsoft provides for the single page application doesn't connect to the web API right now, so you need a proxy when you use it, when you develop it, so that you get a local version of that API and the data set in it for you to be able to develop correctly and using the data. But there are plenty of tools around to help you do that, and those who are React developers know this very well. So, yeah, amazing, and I hope that Andrew Allen's update his blog post as well, just like you, so that's a lot of fun. Let's quickly wrap up with your latest podcast episode with Haonang. We were on the. I was on with his on his podcast a few months ago, maybe weeks ago at least, and this week it was your turn.

Nick:

Yeah, and Hooting is, he's amazing. He's you know some people like he's. He's young and I know that there's certain people you know the sort of you talk and I know that there are certain people you know the sort of talk about oh, the kids these days and all the millennials and like hooting is the exact opposite. The guy is very well accomplished, he does a lot, he's very well organized, so well articulated. Like I could talk to this guy like all day. He's like he seems he has this old wisdom stuck in a 20-year-old's body, which was really good. We had an amazing conversation. We talked for about an hour. We talked about Power Pages, we talked about vibe coding, different things about the MVP program as well. So if you haven't had a chance and if you're not sick of listening to me blabble on about this stuff, check out that podcast with Hooting and, of course, with the podcast with you as well that he did a few weeks earlier. Plus all his episodes are so good, like just some great conversations. He's such a he's um, uh, just a great guy to have a conversation with.

Nick:

I met him last year. Um met or talked to him last year on some other stuff like we had. We had a chat and then I think he was one of your students in your session, in your session at ColorCloud Met him in person, briefly at MVP Summit. It was one of those situations. I didn't even realize he was there. We walked by each other and like, hey, what are you doing here? He said, yeah, like I was on my way. He was on my way to something. I said, well, that a little bit, but I'm sure I'll see him again um, somewhere. Um, so, yeah, check out that that podcast, um episode. Yeah, really good, and his check all out all his episodes.

Ulrikke:

Listen like subscribe yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, and follow him on on linkedin as well, because he does. He's also one of those people that keeps posting these updates and he's also one of the people that I saw this new agent capabilities for Canvas apps no, sorry, model-driven apps on one of his posts, where he talks about agent APIs and agent response content, where you can actually customize the content you get out when you use surface co-pilot content. So definitely follow Houdan for a lot of new news and updates. Right, so you want to briefly talk about what you are doing? Uh this, uh fall, because I actually I have a session free fall and I think I'm gonna keep it that way. I'm not presenting anything and I love it, but I'm at. I'm gonna be at all these not all of these, but I'm to be at a lot of these. I'm just loving having a half a year where I don't present or just help out, but you are going to present for the both of us, I think.

Nick:

Well, hold on, you are. We are presenting an online event. Did you not know this?

Ulrikke:

Well, yes, but it's not a conference, workshop or a session.

Nick:

Uh in that respect well, let me talk a little bit. So, the power platform, community high five, um, which is put on, uh, by our friends keith, keith atherton and sarah jones, and, um, I think it says here to be to be what you're talking about. You're talking about Power Pages.

Ulrikke:

Oh yeah, okay, Not really Because we have a plan, but it's so long until we get there, so for me it's one of those. I'll do that when we get there, but I have talked to Sarah about this, okay.

Nick:

There you go, so check that out, don't worry.

Ulrikke:

Oh yeah, yes, okay, okay, there you go.

Nick:

So yeah, check that out, don't worry. Oh yeah, yes, okay, cool. So we're, yeah, we're doing that. I'm talking about uh, interesting, I'm talking about fitness for IT professionals. So Really. Uh, sorry Really.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, I feel like, isn't that what you did in the? You know the I? I got some flashes from you know a TV back in the day. We had Housewives and then there was this program that we'd on the shoulder on the TV and just do this and then up and down and just move your arms like that. That was kind of my associations. When you said that IT professional sounds like so old Old IT guys can get off their chairs and start moving around.

Nick:

Exactly, and start lifting, get moving.

Ulrikke:

It's like for those Canadians, if you remember, participation, um be something like that participation wow, okay so you're going to teach the it people how to move around or to get fit no more on more.

Nick:

No, it it's more on tips on how how to get off, like things to do, to get off your butt, to get fit, to give you the tools or the processes or the prompts basically the human based prompts to help you put a plan together. And because, for those of you who do know me, I go to the gym three to four times a week, even with a busy schedule, and if I don't I'm a mess. I've gotten to the habit. So, just sharing some of the things that I do myself and working with my coach and things like that too, because I do find that in our profession, we you know, people aren't exactly the most healthy all the time, and also, in terms of mental health, we're also not the most healthy all the time, and for me, fitness has helped both of those things.

Nick:

So I'd like to kind of share, basically what I've learned on that. So that's basically what I'll be talking about.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, so important, very important.

Nick:

All right.

Ulrikke:

For sure.

Nick:

So yeah, so I have. So where you basically, where you're not speaking in person this fall, I am in six different things and that's pretty much it. Like that's it for 2025. For sure, uh, so be speaking at the dynamics con regional. The rocky mountain oh, I'm sure heard that that was a crack of thunder.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, that I did collab days finland.

Nick:

On september 11th I just found out baltic summit in poland um, talking about the power plan designer, the intelligent app designer um, that's pretty exciting. I've never been to poland before, so looking forward to engaging with that crew there. Speaking of Experts Live UK I've talked about vibe coding, which is pretty interesting. And then, of course, nordic Summit, teaming up with Manju Gajar. We're talking about Power Pages and co-pilots. And then Power Platform Community Conference, where I'll be doing a workshop for prepping for the PL900 certification, or really just giving the foundation for people who are being sent to PPPC with not knowing anything. Let me at least give you the fundamentals, so the rest of the week will make sense. That's probably another way to put it, and if you want to write the exam, that's great. And then also again talk about plan designer and co-pilots and building apps with Eliza as well. So we're co-presenting on that. So I'm looking forward to that. So maybe it sounds like a lot, but that's going to be pretty much it for my 2025 in terms of speaking.

Ulrikke:

So a lot of these are sort of repeat sessions of the different sessions, so yeah, all right, and then next episode is going to be July 23rd, which is absolutely crazy, and then we might we may or may not have a treat in between. We'll see. We can't say anything else. So that's it, cool, okay.

Nick:

Right, okay, jesus, an hour and 13 minutes, I think this is a new record.

Ulrikke:

It is. We'll edit a bit.

Nick:

We'll see. Yeah Well, it's the summertime, right? People are at the beach and they got their headphones in. They're listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast. You know, make sure you put on sunscreen and enjoy.

Ulrikke:

Yes, yes, I'm proud of you. Thank you Very good, alrighty. Have a fantastic summer, you guys, and catch you on the other side. Bye-bye, bye.

Nick:

Thank you for listening. If you liked 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. You

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