Power Platform Boost Podcast

BOOST Frontier (#69)

• Season 1 • Episode 69

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Nick:

Different things, which is pretty exciting. More choice is great, but there's a butt with this. And you found one of the butts.

Ulrikke:

I know Matthew Devaney. Found one of the butts. Yeah.

Nick:

Don't you love our segues? They're so great.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, it kind of threw me off a little bit because now I can't find it. Yeah, there it is. It's the next one on the on the list.

Nick:

So the next one on the list. Hello. Hello, Ulrikke. How are you doing?

Ulrikke:

Hi, Nick. I'm great. How are you?

Nick:

I'm good. For those of you who are wondering, Ulrikke's trying to be mellow because her mic was was calping out like it did two episodes ago. So she's trying this is this is our high tech, our way of fixing things. How about we just remain calm, stand back, you know, change the light. So a lot of you so some of you got to witness this live two weeks ago at Nordic Summit when we did our live episode. So you can kind of saw the chaos. And yeah, it it we we don't learn, we just dive into it again two weeks later.

Ulrikke:

Oh yeah, yeah. Uh so yeah. Brave people to stick with us through the chaos. We love you for it. We really do.

Nick:

Absolutely.

Ulrikke:

Okay. So So and last time we were on stage, there was this we kind of had a OneNote glitch where we lost half of the things we were supposed to talk about, and we were kind of done going through the news in about 15 minutes, which isn't normally what happens. And so we found the missing links, as it were, and then and we can talk about it now. And it's all my fault because my OneNote doesn't really know how to sync without me. So it's like, don't sync.

Nick:

And actually, it worked out for the better because we only had 30 minutes to to do our podcast then. Because at the end of 30 minutes, I had a commitment elsewhere within Nordic Summit to do some uh speed mentoring, which was amazing, by the way. Talk to some cool people, uh the up-and-coming people in the community that had some really cool questions. And I'll talk a little bit more about that maybe a bit later. But so it wasn't this was all time for that. No, well, I was gonna say the the fact that we had to wrap up in under 30 minutes was all planned, so it's all good. But that being said, we can dive into the things we missed. And there was a big one that we missed um from our friend from Sean Astrakhan. And um, he also posted over the weekend this LinkedIn post that just I was dying laughing. It was him and Franco driving, singing along to the killers. Um, not sure if you've seen that. Uh, but if if not, anyways, let's let's not digress, let's focus. Say, would you ever use dataverse routine? Would I ever use dataverse routine? Would you ever use SharePoint? Is it Dataverse? Anyways, Sean, two weeks ago now, but still very prevalent, posted this very interesting article about PowerPlatform in 2030. So I know working in different places and kind of doing career counseling, like where do you see yourself in five years? Uh I hate these questions all the time because it's like, I don't even know what I'm going to be doing next week, let alone five years from now. But Sean posted this article about Power Platform in 2030, talking about things. Now, this isn't official Microsoft information. This is just Sean speculating, which is coming from a lot of conversations that we've all had, like whether we do it on a podcast or whether we just had these conversations at when we meet up at conferences uh over beers or whatever else. And he pointed out what he feels is leaving Canvas apps, Power Automate, and PowerFX is in the leaving category, in the evolving category, custom pages, AI builder, power BI, C sharp plugins, power pages, and has a lot of the center centered around generative pages, which we've talked about, and I think we'll talk a little bit more about today as well, because that's also evolving. And then definitely staying, he said, Dataverse, SharePoint, and fabric. So, yeah, some pretty powerful things here. What's what's your uh what was your reaction to this?

Ulrikke:

Yeah, I think he kind of just put an illustration on something that we've talked about for a couple of weeks already. Sorry, a couple of episodes where we see that the power platform as we know it is changing and it's evolving. And I think he nailed it in terms of what I'm expecting to see as well. The traditional Canvas apps, if you're a Canvas apps developer today and that's all you do, you need to evolve because that's as we know it, I think is gonna go away. And this is also just my speculations, right? We've talked about this before. I don't see the design studio for part of pages. I just don't see it really, not in its current state, anyways. I see the the single page application coming in and kind of swooping this thing um up from where it is. So I think all the products are gonna evolve uh into the age of of AI and web coding and and also making code more accessible to more people. So yeah, I think it nailed it really.

Nick:

Yeah, no, uh, me as well. And I and I think we'll see some things. It's interesting. But we'll talk about a later article that we saw from David Wyatt, specifically around Power Automate and a few other things that have come out around that. I also agree with Canvas app. Like, I mean, I think if you're doing Canvas apps, it's not gonna I wouldn't say it's gonna go away tomorrow, but it's probably going to evolve. And a lot of that app creation that you might be doing now might be changing over time. So I wouldn't uh yeah, it's it's all of these things, and again, we're we're speculating a little bit, but we're seeing, we're seeing patterns, we're seeing where the direction's going. And the thing is, it is changing week by week as well, as we can tell with the even the news articles. But even something like PowerFX, we're going to be talking about Python code coming into the Power Platform in a couple points down below. And even things like that, being able to write to Dataverse and things like that. Okay, why would we use PowerFX? Which is I always found it clunky and a little awkward where we have something like established by Python that's established across multiple platforms. So I don't know, we'll see. But it's a it's a great article. We'll have the link in there, check it out, give your comment because yeah, he had 138 comments and counting, um, 3,288 reactions, which is just mind-boggling for something like this. So it's gonna be uh strap yourselves in, kids, for an interesting ride in the power platform.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, 100%. Um, and yeah, let's uh let's move to the one with the Python code, right? That's the Python code in Copilot Studio, the code interpreter. Uh Scott Durrell did a video on it, and also we have links to the um docs um where this is listed. In his video, he used it to kind of make a more of a deterministic output from a copilot agent where you can go in and you can add a prompt and you can build your own prompt, and then you go into settings, and then you can actually, if you've enabled the code interpreter, you can ask it to, for instance, create a chart based on data or um something else that is more deterministic than what we've seen before. So this is a very good addition to what we've had already. Did you play around with it?

Nick:

Yeah, I took a look at it. It's interesting because first off, for anybody who wants to try it, make sure you get your you have to turn it on. It's not on by default. So that's a big thing. What I liked about it. Yeah, it's in the docs how you develop it. Yeah. Yeah. What I liked about it is the fact that we talk about, you know, AI assisted coding and vibe coding and all of this stuff. And does that mean I need to be a developer if you're working in the power, if you're a low-code maker in the power platform? This is kind of a glimpse into the future where yes, you create this prompt, you use natural language to create the prompt, you give it instructions, you give it your inputs and outputs. Yes, it generates that deterministic Python code in the background. Do you even need to look at it as a maker? Probably, depending on what you're working on, you might not have to. The code isn't even editable, which I find is a bit of a drawback because I'd like to be able to go in and edit and tweak that code, but that might be something that's gonna be coming down the line. But then there, instead of having the same prompt, because I using I'm using AI prompts and AI builder for another project, and it's different. You can feed it the same thing multiple times and you'll get a different result. But this way, you you kind of put in that once, it creates the Python code, and code is code, it's gonna run exactly the same every time. Obviously, your data inputs and your outputs will be different. So, this is a way I see how how we're gonna be building apps and agents in the future. Just basically, yes, using the natural language, but the natural language is going to create code, whether it's Python code or React or whatever else. And then that now becomes deterministic. So you're gonna have the same results. So if you I was talking to somebody in the banking industry, they're getting into AI too. But of course, there's this well, AI can change things, not that it changes its mind, but the results can be different depending on different factors. So yeah, uh definitely very interesting. I saw another demo actually by Damian Byrd as well. He was talking about this and he did some conversions. What really excited me was took a CSV file and actually got it to Python code to call the Dataverse web API. So you're writing directly to Dataverse through this too. So it's okay. Now we're now we're kind of getting next level with things. So now my mind is beginning to, okay, this is where are we going to use this? So yeah, anyways, it is uh it's one of these kind of things that's kind of quiet. I don't want to say not quiet under the cover, like a quiet announcement, but it's one of those announcements that I think has a much huger impact than maybe people are are considering. So definitely check out those links. Um there's uh new content coming for both either Scott or Damien or both, actually, and uh read the docs. And I think this is where we're gonna see actual use cases before like before a lot of the other stuff. So yeah, yeah, definitely.

Ulrikke:

And the fact that you can exit Q code means you can actually make it do math, for instance, right? Which you can't you can't ask in the LM to do math, but now it can actually do math. So those are the kind of scenarios, right? And you use Excel, for instance, and you want these things to so that's kind of where it shines. And also you mentioned uh Damon Bird, right? He's up to something else this uh week as well. And I couldn't go, but you did. Tell me all about it. How did the the co-pilot verse user group call go?

Nick:

Oh, it was awesome. It was I saw it, I saw it on LinkedIn. I saw, oh, it was a you know, kind of a uh a community effort, a virtual group, which I know a lot of there's a lot of in-person stuff happening, but of course the virtual opens the doors for so many others. And um, yeah, so Dave, so Nathan talked about MCP servers, Damien did about you know the kind of connectors and things like that. It was really well attended. There was like definitely over a hundred, a hundred plus people that attended, and it was live as well. Um, I think Sean.

Ulrikke:

So do you mean you can do something online and do it live at the same time? What? That seems like a very hard task.

Nick:

It's a hard task when you spend 10 seconds uh preparing uh and dealing with the code.

Ulrikke:

Maybe they prepared a little more than we did last week or the week before. Maybe. Yeah. Okay, well done for you guys to get it working.

Nick:

Yeah, no, it's good. And I think Nathan, Nathan's uh uh demo kind of went a little bit sideways, but he still he got his points across and whatever. It's definitely so they did record it. I know Sean was not a key, he didn't want to record it, he wanted to make it, oh, you gotta you gotta show up. But to be fair, Nathan got up at 5 a.m. in New Zealand to be able to deliver this. So I think appreciation of the international audiences, uh it is gonna be, I think it's gonna be a monthly thing. If I I know, yeah, monthly. Oh, it says monthly copilot, do you just use your group call? So yeah, this is uh a great way to get ramped up, get involved in the community as well, and see the excitement and see people passionally geeking out over this stuff and having fun but learning at the same time. So good good work, Damien and Nathan, and of course uh Sean and uh Sharon, and I think Franco was involved as well, a bunch of them to getting this all going. So yeah, cool times.

Ulrikke:

100% on the back and all the all the guys.

Nick:

Oh, yeah, yeah. Anna was yeah, Anna was running, yeah. She was the one kind of uh handling the uh the little good job for you. Yeah.

Ulrikke:

I wouldn't want to try that, but uh so well done. Um right, so let's try to to um to go to the top of the list again. You have something here introducing Microsoft Marketplace. That sounds like something I've heard about before.

Nick:

Well, I think we've we've seen app the app source before. This actually I um it was just a quote, it was an announcement. This is basically kind of consolidating a lot of these different marketplaces like Microsoft has more than just app sources, other places where partners can, you know, put their own solutions and stuff. And of course, even if you go into 365 Copilot, you know, you can see that there's agents that other people created or other vendors. This is, I think, is an effort to consolidate everything under one roof. I haven't, to be honest, haven't really looked too much into it because I'm usually currently on the project I'm in now, I don't do a lot of other third-party solutions in this. This is something that the the ERP folks are all over the place with us. So yeah, just another way, just kind of again, the evolving landscape of our technologies. And again, you can see Microsoft is becoming more and more co-pilot AI company, regardless of what tool technology you're using, all the way from Office, all the way through PowerPlatform, Azure, the whole bit. Um so yeah, definitely um if you're AI apps and agents for every use case. So check it out, and then maybe if you're partner, this could be another opportunity for you to get your products and services out there to uh to other folks that are looking for it.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, 100%. You can also you've always been able to post kind of uh consultancy and services and stuff on there as well from the partner portal. If you're uh Microsoft partners, I think it all kind of just now merged together into one, so that's uh pretty neat. Yeah. And we also have some uh news and announcements from the the chief, which is now become the chief chief, chief chief, which is uh Charles Charles Lomana, now chief of everything.

Nick:

Charles Charles is a charge. Yes, Charles is a charge, yeah.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, expanding new uh model choice in Microsoft 365 co-pilot, and this is something that we talked about yet last time as well when we were in Nordic Summit, the name change, right? So everyone now remembers Microsoft 365 co-pilot is now co-pilot light, and uh Microsoft Co-Pilot Studio is now a copilot full. Uh so this is weirdly enough, still, oh, this is from September 24th. That makes sense. Expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 co-pilot, which is now then co-pilot light.

Nick:

Yes. So once I thought everything was cool, we had uh chat GP or GPT 5.0. I'm good, good because it can help you determine as opposed to picking all the different versions and I do use for research. Like, okay, cool. I don't need to think about it anymore. And then as soon as that happens, boom, now we have more choices added from outside of the open AI. So bringing stuff from anthropic like Cloud Sonnet and Cloud Opus, which is interesting because everybody was when that sort of started rumbling, surring, it's like, oh, wait a minute, what's what's happening with the relationship with Microsoft and OpenAI? I think again, at the end of the day, it's just using the best, the best tool for the best job, whatever you're working on, and giving you the choice within your tools, because at the end of the day, all the other competitors are doing it too. So all the other AI tools outside of the Microsoft world are giving you the choice of the different LLM models and versions and whatever else that you want to use depending on your use case, whether you're researching, whether you're building apps, you're doing coding, the whole bit. So this opens up the door for a couple more different things, which is pretty exciting. More choice is great, but there's a butt with this. And you found one of the butts.

Ulrikke:

I don't Matthew Devaney found one of the butts. Yeah.

Nick:

Don't you love our segues? They're so great.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, it kind of threw me off a little bit because now I can't find it. Yeah, there it is. It's the next one on the on the list. So the next one on the list. Jesus, guys. Now, if you're using one of Anthropic services now without a license, of course, like with a all AI services now, we've learned if you use it for free and you don't subscribe and pay for it, what do they do? Well, they train on your data. And that this is was something we talked about before, which I had to teach my kids again, because they're used to I don't create an account, I don't tell them who I am. That's the safest way to browse the internet. Now suddenly it's the other way around. So kind of teaching them that if you touch AI, make sure to tell us so that we can get you a subscription. So they don't train on your data. Now, this goes for anthropic and the cod uh interaction here as well. If you use it without an account, which is very tempting to do when something is free, when something is free, you are the product. So then they use your data to train on. So this is something that uh I saw on LinkedIn that, as I said, Matthew Devaney alerted us to. So something to be aware of, and we'll share a link to it in the show notes as well. Uh, and there was something else that I saw on the post that you had here. It says, so in the blog post from Charles, it says how to get started with Claude in Researchers rolling out through the Frontier Program to Markets of 365 co-pilot licensed customers who opt. Now, the frontier program is something that I really am not that familiar with, but it came up in Yuca's post earlier in the week as well, where Yucca talks about the flow builder in the frontier program, which made me a little bit curious. So normal, traditional Yuca, right? LinkedIn, like bazillion eons long post about very sarcastically discovering a new way to create flows. Because if you now ask Copilot Studio or Copilot C65 in Marcus 365 to, for instance, send an email to my manager when something happens, what it will actually do is it'll use something called called Flow Builder to create you a PowerAutomate Flow Lite type of automation. It will live in the PowerPoint, but you cannot see it. See if you create one of these with your account and then you go in through to Power Automate and you look in my flows, it's not going to be there. Your admin and your governance people will be able to see this flow underneath the hood in their in PPAC in in a platform admin center. So it can be governed. It can also be put into solutions and it can follow traditional ALM strategies, thought, of course, through admin and governance, knowing about it and knowing where it should be. And also it's in a in a special kind of hidden default solution, which raises a whole whack of other old issues that I thought we had solved, to be honest. And this is Yucca's rant is sorry, what didn't we? Or I thought we were done with this again. Marks have seen to do this again and again and again. It's the same thing with SharePoint and the apps and the flows that you could make from a SharePoint site. And this idea that you can you have some light kind of shadow IT-ish solution that is running behind somewhere that you can't see. And also this flow that you can create through the flow builder can only use the free or out-of-the-box connectors that you get with your Microsoft 365 subscription. It's also free, which ties into the connection thing, free in your $30 uh co-pilot my Microsoft 365 co-pilot license. But also it has restrictions. So you can't, will this then expand? It has not expanded to this already. So this is just me speculating. And I think this is also something you can mention. Will it expand into then opening up for custom connectors? And then what happens? And we all know the craziness when someone creates a flow and it's running under the hood and they disappear, they leave, their account is disabled. Who then is responsible for rattling all these loose, you know, exactly. So it's this is my rant of today, I think. And I'm with you, Yuca. This is just an old problem that I thought we'd solved and this shadow I think thing and something being created that you can't see. It's like what you talked about earlier with the prompt, the thing what they that does, or the black box. I thought we were done with the black box already. Just give it to us so that we can see it and manage it correctly. Awareness of ALM and also making people responsible in a good way for what they make and make and enable them to do things the right way. Um and following best practices, I think, is a good idea. It seems like the whole maker experience thing has gone off the rails for some of these Microsoft people. So thank you for allowing me.

Nick:

Of course. Now you're running under the assumption that Microsoft knows what it's doing all the time everywhere.

Ulrikke:

I know, I know better, I know better. Yeah, my bad.

Nick:

No, no, no, all good. But yeah, so yeah, I totally agree because it's sort of like I saw this, like, and and then yeah, you're right. It's like, okay, we've been we've been down this road before, and then here we here we go again. Keeps us employed kind of sometimes, but that's not what I want to be doing.

Ulrikke:

Yes, yeah, we have to do that. Oh yeah, like we need something. I'm looking at a list. Oh yeah. So the frontier program, I don't know. I I should have looked it up. I don't do you know what it is? Do you have any are you familiar with it?

Nick:

So I I think all it is it's the it's sort of the um preview program or the early access program for M365 Copilot Studio, uh, effectively, and some of these AI or all this AI technology. Um, I don't want to alarm anybody, but sometimes Microsoft tries to dream up fancy names for something that's been around for a thousand years. You know, Frontier sounds like oh exploratory and exciting and cowboy-ish or whatever else. So, but that to me, I think front when you see Frontier, think of like early access stuff. It's funny because I I mean I don't know the ins and out either. I went to look in to see how I could sign up because obviously I'm curious. Some and so I wanted like I want to be in the frontier program. It sounds really cool because I want to try all this new stuff as well. So what I it got to my to-do list, and that's about as far as it got so far, because I got a lot of other stuff. But this is something this is okay. Okay, let me guess. This is you're giving me homework, so I'll need to figure out what the frontier program needs.

Ulrikke:

Until next time, your homework. No, because we live in the age of AI. I've already asked Chat DBT while you were uh perfect pondering the question. Uh, and it tells me exactly what you said. Tier is a Microsoft early access or innovation preview track for featured related to co-pilot and AI experiences across the Microsoft 365. Think of it, think of it as the co-pilot insider or the fast ring for enterprise AI. There you go.

Nick:

Okay, so early access programs.

Ulrikke:

Exactly. So well done for thinking that up. Um right. Let's move on. Because, okay, so let's stay on the power automate thing, because power automate is interesting, right? So we st we started talking about big announcement from Charles Lamana, which now which then also derailed us onto something called the agent, um, the agent flow thing. And then also there was another few things about PowerAutomate that I saw this week, which I thought was fascinating, very important. Um, if you have a PowerAutomate flow with an HTTP trigger that could be a manual flow, right? That has that trigger, the URL will be replaced on what was this, um, starting November 30th. November 30th?

Nick:

I think that's the deadline.

Ulrikke:

Yes. But it's already started. So August 2025. PowerAutomate flows is HTTP triggers or team webhook triggers that have logic.azure.com and URL will move to a new URL. So we will put uh link in the show notes to where you can go find more information about this. And also, it's impossible to miss it. You can't even edit one of these and do it right and and and fix it when and it still tells you that you have to make sure that this is so it doesn't leave you alone until I don't know, until this finishes, probably.

Nick:

Right. But this is important. So if you've created flows that are been running for months or years that you haven't bothered to look at because you assume everything's cool, you should go in and double check these. Um and there are tools there to it should be pretty straightforward, but it's still a bit of work.

Ulrikke:

But yeah, so basically this is where good documentation, for instance, is a it's very important, and also I find having kind of um environment variables or having these kind of parameters somewhere else and not just in code, for instance, which is very tempting, makes a big difference. So also make sure you have your parent and child things in order as well. So yes. Oh no, I put the thing on the wrong one. So this is the one that I wanted to because I'm now trying to give my future self help by numbering these. Okay. Other sorry, yeah.

Nick:

No, no, that makes sense. Logic.

Ulrikke:

That's just yeah, logic, I know. So you have one here editing React. Do you want to talk about that?

Nick:

Yeah, so this is by Reza Dorani. So, of course, if you've seen Reza's YouTube channel, he says he's very much very to the point. Just go through stuff. He it was really interesting because I kind of I wouldn't say slip my radar, but it was this is how I found out about it. Like we always know gen pages, we were hoping for the ability to edit the React code that gets generated. Up until this point, if you wanted to change something, you had to reprompt it and it would go through the whole wash-rinse cycle to regenerate that code. And if you didn't like it, you'd have to go do it again. But what he showed is the new updates that allows you to you can edit the React, you can go in, it opens up a code editor, which it's still within the context of Power Apps. Power Apps team, I've said this before. Talk to your colleagues in the PowerPages team. They've been able to put the little VS Code button to open up VS Code in the web. This would be a perfect place for that. Anyways, um, it has but it has its things. You can actually see one version behind. Uh so that kind of so you can kind of do some comparisons, and then there's some searching, there's some search and replace. So those types of things. So it's really cool. He has a it's a great video, goes through pretty quickly. Um, so this way, if you are building generative pages, still preview because I don't think we can yet move them through solutions. At least the last time I looked a week ago, you still couldn't. Hopefully, that's coming soon, because that to me is the big blocker from cowboys like me rolling this in maybe some production scenarios, which maybe it's a good thing. But basically, that's still that's still coming. But if you're building generative pages or looking into generative pages, check out Reza's uh video because a lot of the content up to this point has always been kind of on the the old way to do generative pages by reprompting. So now you don't have to if you are comfortable working with React. And even if you're not, um, there's a lot of tools to kind of help you interpret and uh help you identify what code you need to put in and where and things like that. So uh, you know, still not kind of full-on Visual Studio experience with all these yet. I hope that will come one way or the other. Um, so yeah, good uh again, I mean, I don't even need it. Like Rez's videos are just amazing. So if you haven't subscribed to his channel, do so. You're doing yourself a big favor. Just pure knowledge.

Ulrikke:

So yeah, yeah, absolutely. And other news in terms of yeah, news and updates. This is about a bit out of my comfort zone, but uh enough people have posted about it for me to understand that it's important and it's agent framework. So I saw on LinkedIn, Gina Arenas, which she's now the corporate vice president of Core AI and Azure AI Foundry. She was a judge at ACDC a million years ago, and so I follow her, and she's her content's so good. So if you need someone to follow in the core AI and Azure AI Foundry space, she's perfect. And she posted this week about how they are now unifying, and this is where um my tech isn't really fully up to date. So they are merging the let me see, where was it? Semantic kernel and out auto autogen autogen is unified into something called the Microsoft Agent Framework. So you can build locally, you can deploy uh with observability, durability, and compliance, she says, uh integrate APIs and open API, agent-to-agent protocols and MCP servers, orchestrate multi-agent patterns, and also connect to all the Azure Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft 3CC5 co-pilots and more. So is this something that you are familiar with and the words that I was saying out loud resonates with you? Then that's something to be aware of.

Nick:

To a certain extent. I don't like I haven't done anything in um AI Foundry yet. I haven't had a reason to beyond it again being on my list of a thousand things I want to learn, investigate, learn more about. Of course, AI Foundry is it's interesting because we have in our power platform world, we have Copilot Studio where we're building agents, and of course, we can extend that through our methods, but then there's the the AI Foundry world, which is really the very the pure pro coders building agents in that kind of in in their kind of scenario. So it's kind of like I don't want to call it two silos because there definitely is huge crossover there. Um, you know, you can use AI Foundry to interact with Power Platform. Um, you can build stuff in Copilot Studio that utilizes things from AI, the AI Foundry. So that's my long blabbering way of saying, yeah, I'm not really. I what you sound what you say sounds logical to me. I'm not an AI Foundry expert yet, or if ever.

Ulrikke:

Know there's just so much, and also the semantic kernel and the autogen is not something that I'm familiar with either, but I understand that it has to do with custom agents and the SDKs and all of that. So yeah, um, for sure, news and updates, right? At the top of the list, we have something else. Say the thing from John the Musk, or is that something you wanna uh say for last?

Nick:

I think if yeah, we'll say for that last if there's no other in terms of the technical stuff. I think the last one that we haven't talked about, the technical was the new visual hierarchy experience.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, so this is a very small, simple one. Yeah, sorry. You're gonna tell me how it was back in the day when you were born?

Nick:

No, it's it's interesting. Well, no, because it this is your article, so you tell me about it.

Ulrikke:

It's always fun with you because you can then tell us, you know, this, and then I'll I'll show the new fancy, flashy thing, and you'll go, well, back in the days when I started working with CRM when it was still growing to lanes, this is what it looked like, and then suddenly you realize, oh shit, it's the same kind of technology, or it looks the same way, or did it just brought something old back and then think it's new.

Nick:

I'm not sure if this is this thing, but it no, because there was a hierarchy control that got deprecated, which no one so here's my reason why no one used it is because it was always just you could do a single entity, so you could do like accounts to sub-accounts to sub-sub accounts. I'm like, that's useless. I want to go account contacts to cases, and that was what I would want in a hierarchy control, always assuming that would come, and it never did. So no one used it, and then so they deprecated it, and then you get people like Thomas Sandstorm who apparently were using it, getting their panties in a knot because it was going away. Um and then you got people in like so Resco built a PCF control, which I think they've now consolidated into some other project that allowed you to do the the proper hierarchy control. And then I saw some other community folks built a hierarchy control as well. So this looks like this is a a replacement. Yeah, I will now trick by our friend Jorin Scheffer. So tell me about what Jorin is telling us.

Ulrikke:

Right. So what this is is actually just what you said. It's a way to visualize the hierarchy between your your tables. And so you can in your in your model-driven app, you look at an account, for instance, and then you at the at the top you will have the view hierarchy, and then it will give you a visual diagram of what that looks like. You'll also be able to share it and you can kind of navigate through it as cards, and you can also then customize what the cards look like. And it seems like you can also share it in terms of for documentation and stuff like that. So this is great, but also makes me think that this looks a little bit like the ERD diagrams that we're working in with Plan Designer, right? Or and and actually this week I've gone through, I think, all of the different ERD visualizations of table structures we have in Dataverse, and there's so many. So, you know, when you create a new table, I'm I'm creating a new data model for a new new uh project. And we have uh some CSV files, we have some exports, and I thought, wow, I'll use Chat GPT to help me create a data model. So I took loads of pictures of the uh interface and I dumped the CSV files in there and I said, Oh, let's work with this, uh these resources and let's create a data model. And sure enough, it did, and it created a mermaid diagram, put that into mermaid, put that into um DevOps, just to validate it a little bit. DevOps uh wiki handles mermaid very well. It gives you a great presentation, and that reminded me of uh the post and the tool that uh Louise Fries did that we talked about last week or last episode of how to go from mermaid to Dataverse. She created a tool that allows you to just automatically create something from Mermaid into Dataverse. But I thought it's a fun exercise to see what I can work with in terms of other AI tools and get, so if I could get Chat GPT to create me a prompt that I could use in Plan Designer, for instance, to create this data model then, because I have like six six tables, all uh different option sets, global option sets, lookups, relationships between these tables, all that jazz, right? I hit so many barriers you will not believe. And I have to do this all again and put it into a blog post because this is amazing. That just being restricted to 500 characters in an input field, for instance, which you are in Plan Designer, the first window you get to, and then that will, and I tried using the inspector tool just to to up that up that to 20,000, and I was able to inject my prompt from Chat GPT into it, anyways. So I kind of hacked Plan Designer to uh make it create those tables for me. Actually did a good job. So you're not, it's just a UI restriction, but it didn't do a very good job of what I wanted it to do because well it created it to a certain extent, it worked, but it it wasn't able to understand choices and and um and and those kinds of things, right? So I had to backtrack. And so I then I tried the the create your table from within a solution experience, which formats or removes the formatting of your prompt. You're not able to give it a list of things, for instance. It can't do lists, it doesn't understand markdown, which creates a whole whack of other problems. Then I have to kind of format the prompt using characters like you would in a CSV file to for it to understand what's a table, what's a column, what's an option set, those kinds of things. By the end, what actually worked the best was just to import. So when you you go to create table and you can start from copilot prompt, you can start from SharePoint, you can start from other things. You can also start from a CSV file. That actually worked the best. The biggest problem with that is all option sets and lookups are said suddenly their strings. So that makes it so that I have to now do a lot of editing in the in the back of this. But that actually, and that disappointed me. You have no idea how disappointed I was because we have the we have the mermaid diagram, we have the prompt, we have everything, but I can't seem to find the in that will allow me to post that 5,000 character long prompt for it to do all of it because I have it all and it's all with the right prefix and it's all the relationships are there and everything's there, but it can't do it. And I'm so disappointed.

Nick:

Did you try the Dataverse MCP server in your explorations?

Ulrikke:

No, no, I did not. Definitely not. Maybe that was uh will be my next try.

Nick:

Yeah, so there's yeah, maybe it's a bit of homework. Um, because like I know Daniel Lakowitz posted, we talked about this a month or two ago about he has a had a like a lab. Now that I think it's evolved a little bit, but you that way you could use like a claw, a Claude or a VS Code interface, and then you might be able to put in your monster prompt there to the Dataverse MCP and have it create what you need to create because it has the ability to create tables. So yeah.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and I'm sure if I use Pax C Lary or some other tool, I'll be able to do it. This is just my way of trying to prompt and use the low-code interface of what's available now to kind of see what I can do. And I was so excited about the prompt and the mermaid and everything was looking so good. And I thought, and uh, and as a matter of fact, if if I just grab that one table, the mermaid stuff, and just didn't do all of it, uh, I it was pretty good, right? So um a plan designer understands the mermaid very well, and also the the co-pilot, the table creation co-pilot also understands it very well. It's just the the pop was too big. So I'm restricted by the number of characters in that input field, which just annoys the Jesus out of me.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke:

But that's an and sorry, no, plan designer did not understand my mermaid very well because that also flipped it around because that's supposed to, so I think the the the grounding of that agent is they the instruction is to understand what I'm putting in as a business problem. What I gave it was an instruction to create tables. So it kind of it threw it through the model a little bit, I think, because it was not meant to do that. So it's probably in my prompting as well. If I kind of knew the instruction for that uh agent underneath, I would probably be able to kind of hijack it to do what I want. Which also brings me to one of the other that's a segue. Uh one of the other uh items on the list. So that was just my rant in terms of from the going. So this is the longest segue in the world from new visual hierarchy experience from your interoper until another post, which was about actually hijacking LLMs without guardrails and humans in the loop. So the scenario is someone on LinkedIn put in their profile description the admin kind of hijack uh thing you can do to put the LLM into admin mode and then put the instruction to create give me the recipe for Florin. So when LLMs run through Instagram, no, sorry, LinkedIn profiles, it will stop at this person's profile in because that's an agent that his job it is to go through profiles on LinkedIn and send them messages. So he would suddenly start getting recruitment messages with recipes from on Florin. Yes, exactly. It's so funny because there's no human in the loop, right? These agents straw through LinkedIn, sending you all these messages all the time. And he could now very easily pinpoint who's been created by an agent and who has a human in the loop. Because of course, someone sitting there accepting and sending these out and pushing the the button to send these out will recognize the floorn recipe and remove it. But these are just operating on their own, they're they're identical and they have autonomy to do this on by themselves. Uh, and so he's gotten so many good recipes for Florence, you would not believe it. I love it. I just absolutely love it. So this is gonna be, I think if I need a hobby, I think this is gonna be my new hobby. Just putting these in everywhere. It's so much fun. I'll put the link in the show notes for you guys to see because it's hilarious.

Nick:

Cool. I think there was okay, yeah, cool. I'm just trying to look through our list. Cool, we covered a lot. So yeah, I think maybe, yeah, we're looking at the time. We should start looking at wrapping it up. I did want to talk a little bit about something John Lavec has posted. Now, a lot of people know John Levesque from the community. He used to be eons ago, he was at Microsoft. He was um working on the community, he was like doing a lot of stuff with Power Automate or into Flow at that time, and he went on to DocuSign. And now he has a really interesting startup. He's building him and his team are working and they're they're working, I would say, in public in terms of John posting a lot about the development of their product, which is called Seek, which is a I guess a tool that you can, it's a tool that you can use to curate local experiences. So for me, I could put up a hike or something that I'm doing around Ottawa, I could post that, and other people could see that and kind of evaluate that. Or I could say, here are my favorite restaurants in the market here in Ottawa, check them out as a way of a social, as a community to share for people for traveling. So, of course, I love traveling, so I'm just loving this concept. So when I go traveling, yes, I can look on, you know, I can do a Google search or look at get your guide or Expedia, but now with the Seek app, I should be able to go in and to local places I'm visiting and get more of a what the locals are saying and what the places to check out are, which I think is fantastic. Anyways, that's his product. We'll put a link in. But he wrote and it so, anyways, he wrote a post which really kind of it kind of struck a chord with me, especially going back to the the Nordic summit for the speed mentoring challenge. I met a few people at the speed mentoring challenge, it was great. One gentleman, Martin, Martin Lopez, he was talking about asking me about blogging and getting started and what he wants to do. And I just said, hey, just if you got blog ideas, just start. And then the other thing, and we've said this, and I've said this to you, and we've we've done this as well. It's even though your blog post, you might think, oh, someone else is Reza's already done a video on that, or Scott's done a post on this. It's sort of like, well, don't let that stalk you. Go in and put your own version, your own flavor to it. You'll see all the pros are doing it. Like I said, Damien also did a thing on you know the Python stuff. So, so anyway, so Martin's like, oh, okay. So he he did his first post, which is really, really cool. It was on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Journeys. Um, he has some more ideas coming, which is really, really cool. So, Martin, kudos on getting your post out. We we did chat a little about that. But going circling back to John Levesque's post, his post was called Say the Thing. And he talked about the compound effect of authentic voices and about you know sharing information. And one line that really stood out there saying, You're not responsible for having all the answers, you're responsible for sharing the answers you do have. And by posting the stuff as sharing this content that's meaningful or stuff that you're learning, you're also giving people permission in a sense that they can also begin to share as well from what they're learning. And collectively, like I said, the the compound, or he said the compound effect of authentic voices really helps us all kind of learn better. It's a really interesting, like John's, he basically said, John is like, he has no filter, so he'll just say whatever he wants. Sometimes it's you kind of like okay, but uh it's all good. So, anyways, I did want to I want to bring that, I wanted to kind of bring that up as as this podcast as well. For those of you who are getting started or have been established, it's when you think sometimes, okay, why am I doing this? It's important. It's all helping us learn, and we're all get better. And you sometimes you're going at it in an angle maybe no one else is, or maybe you think you're going at the same as everybody else, but there's something about your everybody has a unique experience. So it's always good to share that. So yeah, that's my uh roundabout mix on that post.

Ulrikke:

Yeah. Oh, it's so important and something like you said, we talked about a lot. And and this goes for conferences as well, right? Even though I know I'm not the ALM expert, I still do sessions on power platform pipelines because I have experience with it and I have my angle, like I said, and my that's important to share. Uh, because we all have something unique. So that's very good.

Nick:

Yeah, or or you could put in a session for stuff that you need to learn, and that puts the gun to your head to learn it, like I've done for Talon, and we'll talk about that next time.

Ulrikke:

Yeah. So we will. But also, uh yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. Uh, and also I wanted to shout out uh an announcement that was um announced just uh a few days ago. Scottish Summit is coming back 2026 in a year's time, pretty exact. October 3rd, 2026, we'll be in Edinburgh for Scottish Summit, which is super exciting. Um, but of course, like you said, there are so many other conferences before then. Can we are gonna see each other in Vegas uh for Pilot Platform Community Conference? We have uh some user groups and uh smaller community events uh before Christmas, but then of course on the other end of or in the new year, we have um Tallinn, we have ColorCloud, we have Dynamics Minds. So there's so many things to look forward to. And we'll hope we'll see you at one of these. Do you have any uh ducks left?

Nick:

I have yes, I have ducks I am bringing to Vegas with me. Um and I just actually nobody knows this yet, really, but I've I'm taking the long way home from South Africa and going to go to South Coast Summit. That was a last-minute decision two days ago.

Ulrikke:

Fantastic. Oh, so you're gonna need be in my backyard and I'm not gonna be able to see you. Sorry. Yeah, but I can't keep up with you and you're traveling, but this is exciting. So uh yeah, that's gonna be awesome.

Nick:

Cool. All right. Well, I hope you have an awesome day and awesome week. And thanks again everybody for for uh for for listening in and uh continuing to support the podcast. We're seeing the numbers. We get more and more listeners all the time or more viewers, and we appreciate it. And yeah, um hoping to see you in person or wherever soon.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, 100%. Until next time. Bye bye. Bye. Thanks for listening. And if you like this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. Make sure to leave a rating and review of your favorite streaming service and makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode. Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts, Ulrika Auckerbeck and Nick Dolman, and see you next time for your timely boost of Par Platform News.

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