Power Platform Boost Podcast

Forward-Deployed (#72)

• Season 1 • Episode 72

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SPEAKER_02:

AI will make devs irrelevant. Stop studying computer science. Now there's an 800% increase in demand for this forward-deployed engineered role across all sectors. Artificial intelligence groups are on hiring SPRE for a rare kind of software developer who can code and talk to customers. Everyone's gonna be hiring FDEs. Keep coding and keep working on your list your listening skills kids. With your hosts, Nick Dolman and Ulrike Ackerbeck.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep, so we're waiting at good morning. We're waiting for morning for me, afternoon for you. I'm in the, as you can tell, I'm in the portable, the portable studio again. And uh you're in the charred remains of your office.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm freezing cold. Just came from being outside for a few hours because there was a fire in the building. And you know what it's like when the fire alarm goes off and you just go, Yeah, let me just finish this post and let me just and then you grab your things and you go, and then you get outside. And then some people actually forgot their jacket inside, and it's like because you sent winter here, it's actually minus degrees here, so it's pretty cold. They're they forgot, they remember the laptop, but they forgot their jacket. So they've been outside in the minus degrees without a jacket for a few hours. But there was actually a fire, so you went through it. Actually, it has a little bit of a fiery the smoke scent here smell, but it was actual kind of smoke coming out of the building on the second floor, and we're on the third floor, so yeah, exciting. And also we have a hackathon going on. So I've kind of gotten my colleagues from all over the country to come here today to spend eight, you know, a full 12, 13 hours here in the office today. We were in the middle of a hackathon because we have a customer day in a few days. We wanted to have something to kind of showcase. And so they're in the middle of that, and then suddenly two hours out of our day to just go and stand outside. So they got a bit of fresh air and now they're really cold and uh drinking hot chocolates and teas and coffees just to warm up again. And uh yeah. So just made sure they were okay. And then in your recording podcast with you, it's all fun, all part of the adventure. Absolutely. You are traveling and in your remote office because you're in.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm in San Francisco for Microsoft Ignite, which kicks off tomorrow. Um, doing a bit of touristy stuff after we record today. Um but already we met up with some friends here. It's I'm thinking they're probably gonna be talking maybe about AI and co-pilots this week.

SPEAKER_02:

What? No, I don't. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't put money on it or anything. Yeah. Well we know that there are some big announcements coming, and definitely so by the time this is released, I think uh the major stuff is already gonna be public. Uh, and also we've had a bit of, I don't know, interesting posts from some community leaders um on LinkedIn and socials lately. We're not gonna go into in detail, but it's been an interesting few weeks. Uh, and now it's all gonna kind of uh come to fulfillment as we enter into Ignite week. So it's gonna be exciting for sure. And again, again, game-changing stuff.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and on top of Ignite, there's a shit ton of community content that came out as well since our last episode at the platform conference.

SPEAKER_02:

The list of things, I don't think we've had a list this long in so long. And I know they have a hard stop, so we're just gonna dive in and get ready for this um this two weeks of of content. Right. So, first off, let's start with Yucca, because we don't know how a Yucca corner, as we're gonna highlight some of the things he talked about in the last two weeks. Um, and this week the rant is about app builder, ready for production, oh co-pilot, app agent, app builder agent, my sweet summer child, his post starts with, and he is ranting about how it's not ready for production, and it's overly confident about what it's doing.

SPEAKER_00:

So, yeah. And we've talked about this as as well, about the fact that it is a very lightweight, it's based on SharePoint lists as the data source. And of course, he tried it and nothing worked. It's funny because we talked about, you know, we're talking a little bit about generative pages, and I actually did some stuff with generative pages, and it wasn't quite working this week either. So a lot of these things, even though they become GA and get really like app builder is still preview. So if it's preview, expect a bumpy ride. But even with a lot of this stuff, everything's coming so fast and furious going through these engineering cycles. There's there's there's two sides of me. First off, it's like I'm not a big believer in this app builder contact concept, and that's just my own personal opinion. Nothing against the technology or the team behind it. It's really just I don't get why we need to have yet another app builder experience. Yet power apps was that thing a couple years ago and before that, before that. And we have power apps and we have these tools that are able to generate power apps, and then we had this power apps for teams that didn't really take off. Anyways, all that being said, on the on the other side too, we have to realize that some of these things coming out of the gate, they're not going to be perfect. If you look at something like Plan Design or six months ago, it really wasn't that great of a product. Now it's actually pretty solid in what it does and it's evolving. So we have to, I think we have to be patient with some of these tools as well, regardless about the maybe the the concepts behind them. But it's good that people like you are calling this out because it keeps Microsoft, you know, on their toes to make sure that these things do get fixed and addressed and move forward and actually make it to be something that people will find useful and confident in. And this is the interesting part because I'm working with some of my coaching clients and they'll try something, and if it doesn't work, they kind of like, oh, this doesn't work. Like this is our this has been our default with software for so long. We try something, it doesn't work. Well, it and then throw our hands in the air, it doesn't work. Well, yeah, but depending on now, it's really depending on how you're prompting, how you're using these tools. But understand that in the cloud, things are constantly getting fixed. It's a case of, well, it doesn't work today. It might work tomorrow, it might work better next week. But that's not to say we still should call it out. So now I'm I realize I'm rambling, but it's good that you can do post and yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_02:

And also, but I do also recognize that as consumers and as customers of this platform, we should also expect that things that are released and our GA, for instance, should work. Right. So I mean, it's it's one thing to understand that this is a platform and it's already it's always moving. And the price we pay for getting access to functionality early is that it's not always working. But I also see the other side of that, that these customers are professionals and companies, they need this software to work. And so to say that something is kind of released and and then not fully working is not really a good thing either. And sometimes you can be a bit a little bit, I don't know, impatient maybe uh of some of the unfinished stuff that we have to to work at and and go through. Then yeah, no, definitely um a a good pose and a and a critique, um, which is what Yuca does. He keeps everyone on their toes these days. So absolutely. And then of course you have on the flip side of that, Microsoft also provides very good documentation and guidance on how to implement and how to work with the products that they release as well. So I find I'm not worked with a ton of other kind of providers, but I know from other people that documentation in terms of power platform for Microsoft is actually very good. And also we've had an addition, which is the Managed Power Platform Assets and the Age Agents on new workshop content, the lifecycle mastery. And do you want to talk a little bit about that? It came out on PPCC, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, this is uh Marcel Ferreira, who's uh he's on the pro the proje uh the engineering team, a super smart guy, super friendly guy. And he put us on his GitHub, it's actually on GitHub, it's the um the assets for the the labs that they've done for ALM in terms of co-pilot studio and everything like that. So not only is it good on the co-pilot studio side, but also about distant power platform ALM using managed environments and that type of thing. So yeah, it's a it's a great link. It's great resources. It has all the labs, so you can kind of sit, it even has coffee breaks in the lab breakdown. So you could What? I think that's I think it's because it's part of the presentation. But I love that the fact that these resources are available for you to try at home on your own time.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And and go through that. So yeah, thanks, Marcel, for for posting that and making it another great resource for the community.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and stop spoiling the attendees of workshops, Marcel. It's not fair. But I was at uh Marcel and Casey's session at PPCC about PowerPlatform pipelines and ALM, and it was one of my top sessions overall for PPCC. I learned so much. And also there was a customer there that took the last 10 minutes to talk about their experience with an environment. I'm sorry, a tenant with over 200 managed environments and how pipelines have saved kind of and how they're working with pipelines across all of these environments and these kind of data layers. And you can imagine how complicated that is. We used to work on a project together when we had kind of 10% of that or half of that. And it's that was challenging enough. But just to hear that first party experience with the platform and also how they they had trust in pipelines and also the platform to do this kind of work and they didn't do ADO. They stuck with pipelines throughout their the kind of the challenges and and the growth of the of those of that capability. So that was really interesting to hear. So yeah. And also wanted to shout out something else while we're on PPCC before we move on, because I saw something that I can't believe that this didn't cross my path before, trying to find the link. So Master Series, first of all, the website for Master Series is on the PowerPages site, which is funny to me. They did a recap of PPCC that I really liked. It's with Jeff and April and Scott. Um, they kind of brought so if you want a highlight and a summary of the most important new features and updates from PPCC, that's a really good recap video. And also, the the library is full of power platform content. This used to be Power Platform Master Series, now it's just Microsoft Power Um Master Series, but it comes from PowerPlatform. So the the list of videos is I just that was a black hole, it was a rabbit hole. I just dove into and I was like, ah, this, I need to see this and this and this. So yeah, absolutely worth checking out. And also, uh actually a few updates that I missed um for Copeless Studio in there as well on the recap uh video that is worth checking out.

SPEAKER_00:

So um definitely it's good because it you know at these conferences you just can't keep on top of everything. I mean, we try and we try to provide that for our viewers, but even us, there's things that kind of come up. There's like, holy crap, like the like the the amount of information. So, I mean, between us, like the news of the PowerPlatform Weekly and PowerPlatform Dev Weekly, hopefully we can keep people somewhat on top. But of course, I I'll look at these newsletters and look at like that. I wasn't aware of the site either. So thanks for putting that in the link. I I love doing this podcast because we we have to keep our eye out for things. If I was just, I would miss out on so much by not putting this stuff together. Even then I feel like, okay, we where's this stuff coming from?

SPEAKER_01:

Anyways, it's all good.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Right. So I, of course, time that I'm usually taking before we record to sit down and go through the list and make my notes. I I was out cold. So there's a link in here by Matthew Devaney on Cold Putter Studio test automation. Stop testing manually. The link is to a video. I know I've seen the video, but I can't for the life of me remember exactly what it is about. But I know that it has to do with Copilder Studio and testing and automated testing, which I'm all for. And I know that Matthew is brilliant, so check that out. And on to the next slide.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Yes, it's pretty safe. A safe bet by a video from Matthew is good to go. And then it probably, I'm guessing it touches on a little bit about what Lydia showed at uh Power Platform conference as well about the embedded testing. So yeah, another great resource. But let's talk about uh what do you want to talk about generative pages? Oh, sorry, do you have one more thing?

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, I do. No, no, no, it's to get excited about the generative pages because so first of all, it was GA in the in US, right? So last week they announced so generative pages is now GA in US, which is a bit crazy because, well, not crazy, but so generative pages. It's you have a model driven app, and you can create a new page in your model-driven app, which you can vibe code, you can tell it in natural language what you want, and then you get the code view and the preview view, and you can uh talk to it and and vibe code it, right? With uh with prompting and stuff, which creates code, which creates an app, and then that code and that app is now DA in the US. Why just in the US? I don't get it. It's like if it was a feature, if it was a security thing, I would get it. But the code that it creates is only to be used in production environments in the US. And the reason why I'm a bit frantic about it is because I want to use it for a customer, because we showed it last week and I want to use it.

SPEAKER_00:

So here's it here's why I think it is, um, because I actually used it in my own. I people be people know this. I build my own apps for my own stuff, my own management. So I built, I built a travel management because I travel quite a bit, but I built an app to help manage all of this stuff. Part of it is I created, um, I used the generative page as part of that. In my developer environment, which is in the US, it all worked perfectly. I deployed it to my Canadian environment, my production environment, and it failed because it was missing some of the components. So I think the reason why it's GA in the US is there's components that have been rolled out that aren't in the various geographies. I'm hoping in the fullness of time, being a very, very short time frame, that these things will be there so we can actually use it in production. I was just amazed, like probably I was able to generate something that if I built using like web resources and HTML, which I would have had to in the past, and we will talk about that because there's a good article on that, it would have taken me days, if not weeks. And it literally took me hours, and I went tweaking back and forth. And it just it just is opening up a lot of possibilities. The thing is we're not out of we're not out of work. We still need a solution architect and work with our requirements. So, but that's why I think it's GA just in the US, because of more technical reasons in terms of the underlying infrastructure. And I don't know the reasons why that's being that takes longer, but I get you. That's I want it everywhere as well.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I know, so we just had Power Pages was enabled in the Norwegian regions, what, a year ago, right? And that's crazy.

SPEAKER_01:

Not even yet.

SPEAKER_02:

So it's of course, yeah. So that's that's why, and I do recognize that. But um, we we're also kind of squished between a rock and a hard place because no one's gonna want to deliver a Canvas app to a customer today when we know what donative pages and code apps can do. And so this week we're pitching to a customer, we're like, well, this is what the model-driven app looks like, and this is what that UI is, and it's exactly what you need, but we recognize that it's not the prettiest thing in the world, and yes, there are too many buttons, and yes, it's a bit too busy, and we're gonna make it better. Just give us a few months, maybe. I'm not really sure. And then this is what you can get, and we can show them what it looks like in a generative page in a US environment, a sandbox environment next to it, and then they go, Oh, wow, oh, I want that. It's like, yeah, I know, and I know you turned off your old system and you need this to be live by December, but trust me, by March we'll have this up and running in your environment as well. So it's, but do you want us to make a canvas app in the meantime? You know, so it's it's kind of creating this little wedge, I find, uh, when we're so close, but yeah, just not there. Um, but bringing it back to the content that we're actually going to talk about. So, Ricardo Gregori, he made a broad blog post that I absolutely love the title of. It's Genitive Pages, the right hype for the wrong reason. And it is so cleverly done. He says, and this is me being guilty. I'm not an Amex developer. I came into Dynamics from Power Pages. I had no idea that you could do what you now can do with custom pages all along with what you just kind of alluded to, custom web resources. You can have React TypeScript and Fluid UI. You can have HTML, CSS, JavaScript, you can do practically whatever you want with the page in the mold-driven app. And you've been able to do that for a long time. You just had to know how. So this is again the story of vibe coding, making coding accessible to people like me who are not professional developers. Suddenly the threshold to getting into it is much lower because I have a button to click and an input prompt window to type, and suddenly I have access to this thing that we've always really been able to do. It's just I did not know about it. So I think he speaks to a very important point. And also it kind of yeah, I I I I honestly did not know that it was possible to make these kinds of adjustments to a model-driven app.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, like even like I it's funny because I see when I saw that poster brought me back 10, 12 years ago for a client. They needed a very specific interface, and we were struggling. That was like the CRM 2011 days where that was even before Canvas apps or any of this, but they needed a specific user interface. And I remember being like thinking about it and waking up at two in the morning, going down to my computer and hack and basically hacking out an HTML JavaScript page that we embedded as a web resource. And I remember I spent like I remember getting to a point, it was like you know, four or five in the morning. And I said, if I can't get this to work, I need to stop, go back to sleep. But then I just I actually, you know, that happy code dance where you actually get to where you want to be. So I got the proof of concept going, but looking, thinking back, reading that article, but looking back now, if I had generative pages at that time, I could have whipped that up like during the customer meeting almost of what they wanted. So again, it's like everything old is new again. It's just the tooling has changed a little bit. So this is a great article. But while we're on the topic of generative pages, when I was working on my generative page, I thought, oh, it'd be great if I could, like, it's a standalone page. I can do a lot of stuff, I can access my Dataverse tables, which is important, the slash pick your tables. That was a lesson. I was like, why is it why is it making up stuff? Like, oh yeah, I need to specify my tables. And then once I figured that out, and I was like, oh, okay, this is cool. But then I'm like, okay, but I want to show this in context within a form or pass some other parameters to it. And I'm like, how is that done? And then I saw this post yesterday, actually. Um, and I'm not sure if you've seen this yet, but it's brilliant. It basically describes uh from Medi E, and basically it's about Power Apps, generative pages, passing the context is the real superpower. And basically, he showed how to pass the context of the record you're in. So let's just say you're in um, well, for the for the example, I'm going, I have a TRIPS record, and I can pass that now to the context of my generative pages to see my flight information, my hotel information within that generative page within the context of a model-driven app. And I can embed that just using the HTML rendering control within the model-driven app. So I haven't tried this out, but this to me is this is next gen in terms of the generative pages of what you can do and enhance model-driven apps. So this is where we're going with this stuff, right? Where we're and this could be, this could actually, scarily enough, could replace a PCF control. Basically throwing the uh concept of embedded canvas apps out the window. If anybody's worked with that, that's cool, but it's also a little clunky. And just again, making model-driven apps to that next level, again, in terms of user inter specialized user interfaces. So uh great, great post.

SPEAKER_02:

100%. And actually, this is I'm gonna pass that on because I didn't see that, and I'm gonna pass that on to the guy that's working on the um the customer app that we're gonna show because this is exactly the issue that he has. We have a a list and we have a side panel coming in, and we have one entity and then we have child entities underneath, but it can't get it to understand that it needs to tie the child entities to the parent because it's lacking that context. So this is yeah, this is it's how to pass that parameter is um is very good. Yeah. And then did you have something else tied to this?

SPEAKER_00:

Because you No, I think I think we've covered generative pages, which of course big fan and can't wait to keep doing more.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Um, and also in terms of co-pilot studio, I saw uh post from Diane Taylor um the other this week. Sorry, Dion, I keep doing it. I spent the week with Dion and I still get it wrong. How's that possible? Sorry, Dion. I know you're gonna call me out, you're gonna send me a message and you're gonna go, it's not that's not my name. It's Dion. I know it, I know it. Sorry. She's gonna give me so much okay, one of these days. And also Eliza, same thing. What? Okay, moving on. Um, she has a blog post that shows you how to group your uh documents. So you have a couple of the studio agent and you give it documents, upload documents as knowledge. And then if you don't have that in a SharePoint site and you still want to group them so that you can so the example she so shows is that you have a restaurant that has a menu, and then you have maybe you have seasonal menus and you want one for Halloween, one for Christmas, one for summer, and then you wanted to give it, you kind of want to group those things together and then give it specific instructions and and descriptions for it to understand the context. And it's all about the context. I can't say this enough, and I talked about it today. It's in the post from um Ricardo. It's all about context, right? So this is what it is about. So if you are working with knowledge sources being documents with Copeland Studio, check this out because it is um is a very good resource.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I will see her probably later today. But just so you know, we have a chat group.

SPEAKER_02:

Give her a little bit of a heads up.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we have a chat group going. We're already making fun of her American uh uh pronunciation of her name, and so she was yeah, so I'm expecting a big punch in the arm already, so I'll take a double one for you.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, and then you can pass it on to me. Okay, that's good. Right. So we have uh a blog post, sorry, a post from our your uh you survivals, or have you kind of buried the hatchet? You and Nathan Rose. We saw Nathan in Las Vegas.

SPEAKER_01:

We we're never we're never rivals. We're we're always good friends.

SPEAKER_02:

For fun. Oh, it's Nathan's come round. You won, Nathan lost, and then now he's on my side. Yeah, okay. So another punch in the arm then later. Okay. He's strong. I mean, I know you're strong, but you gotta flex for that punch.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. He's a big guy. He's uh he's a uh he's cool. I love uh Nathan, he's uh one of my favorite people. I mean a lot of I have a lot of favorite people, but he is definitely in the list.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, 100%. Um, so maybe this is mine, I don't know about you, but this is actually where he talks about coming round. So the post starts about a photo that was taken at MVP Summit, and he was in and he says he was in a bit of a crisis. He's been the power fixed guy, and he's kind of seen the low-code thing being deprecated or killed so many times, and it kind of I can relate to this. The they're taking my thing away now. What do I do? And do I still have value? Do I still have a place? And then he calls out the Scott Juro and Marcel Ferreira's session at Build, where they talked about it's always been about less code, uh smarter code, which is kind of the the, I don't know, the solace that it's always been about the code. It's always been about smartness, and it's low-code was sort of the previous solution to this. Now it's vibe coding. And then, of course, PPCC, Charles Alamana on the stage declare that nope low code is now dead. And I think we all can relate to that, that little, that that journey that Nathan's had with this. But he's come round and he sees that there are so many amazing solutions now that we can now bring to life with AI and disassisted coding or whatever you want to call it these days, advive engineering. And um, yeah, and he says, love to the power fixed rangers. Uh, we'll find something new and AI enabled to assemble us. Uh, and then he calls out the AI Rangers. So yeah, it's a very good post. I must give it to Nathan. He's so brave and so open and honest, and he brings a lot of himself to the to the table. We really appreciate you, Nathan, for for coming out and talking about the difficult things that I think a lot of us are feeling at the moment. Take someone like you to lead.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, yeah, a genuine guy. And of course, I mean, in terms of finding, I mean, I find like I know he was very big in PowerFacts, Power Effects. Not that like, let's not PowerFX is not dead, but in terms of generating code, there's probably shorter cuts and other ways. We don't have to go we don't have to talk about PowerFX and I have I have opinions on it as well. But I know Nathan has done a lot of we don't really have uh in this episode so much, but he has a lot of good content on MCP servers, and I've seen him do presentations on presentations on that. So if I needed to, and I do need to actually get my head wrapped around some MCP stuff, Nathan is my one of my go-to guys for that already. So I mean, this is this is we evolve, we adapt. Um the fact that he sort of shares his journey and he just shows how what of a genuine guy he is. So keep it up.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, keep it up for sure. All right, moving on. One of my other friends did a thing. Thomas Sonso did a thing. I talked to Thomas earlier today, and it's so funny because Thomas used to be this then I'm seeing Ramkeeper, uh you know, young and then now he's a is a dad of two small kids, and he's now feeling the pressure that all of us are feeling. But then, even though he's just drenched in all the baby stuff, he just managed to still do a thing. Yeah, just kidding Thomas for still delivering content.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so so basically he's he's re rebuilt what I think portals from scratch um using using coding. He showed me this in Gothberg.

SPEAKER_01:

He's like, I'll show you what I built. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_00:

But I'm like, wow, this looks exactly what ADX built years ago. But it's still cool though, because he just it's part of he this is what I I I always talk about. People that want to learn something, get a project. And he got up, he took a project to build a community portal. And for a guy that didn't code, like I mean, he's done this before, right? He didn't know anything about plugins a few years ago and then did a wrote plugins and did a whole series, and he built this thing uh or vibe engineered this particular portal together. And it's really impressive. And I was like, I was kind of blown away. It inspired me to kind of get okay, I need to up my like coding game. Like I used to be, I used to code all the time, and I don't do it as much anymore. And it like, I know this is so much fun, and I need to get back into it. So, anyways, check out Thomas's post and his journey. Um, and hopefully that inspires you, like it inspired me. And thanks, Thomas. And yeah, I've been yeah, looking forward to seeing you next uh probably at ACDC, if not sooner.

SPEAKER_02:

So yeah. So in in his post as well, he is very honest. He spent months doing this, and we've talked about it for months and months. And he says, was it fast? No. Was it easy? Also, nope. But it was one of the most rewarding uh learning adventures I've had in years. Yes. And this is, I think, something that we all should, uh, like you said, have a have a pet project. It's uh so important to keep doing that. And also, I think this is yours' new version of the Copeland Studio implementation guide, meaning there was one before.

SPEAKER_00:

You posted it as well, actually. So I saw it a little bit later, so we've doubled up on that one. But yeah, this was uh by the formerly known as PowerCat team, just a cat team. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02:

They had a team doesn't really have that same sound. They don't understand. It's all about the cat team, power cat. It's so I love it. Powercat. Keep it, come on. Yeah, not everything has to have new names, please.

SPEAKER_00:

So so yeah, they put they put together these resources, the implementation guide. It's actually a PowerPoint. It's a 162 slide PowerPoint, but it is just brimming with information and guidance on uh implementing Copilot Studio. It's got like best practices, it's got you know monitoring things, how to build and deploy and manage the lifecycle management. Integration. It incorporates the new features. Like it talks about generative pages, uh, agent organization. So again, this is if you're implementing Copilot Studio or beginning to get into it, this is yet another resource to add to your library of information and um and have as a resource to make sure as you kind of go forward with your journey. So the PowerCat team or PowerCat team has always been great at providing community resources. Like that's their job, like community advisory team. But again, again, this is one thing I love about Microsoft, the fact that they're sharing it with the community. So it's not like you have to go and engage with them and pay for this stuff. Like this stuff, in terms of monetary value, is worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. And we can now get it for free. I mean, we still have to digest and work with it. But this is what's going to make these products successful in long term by having this support and this information available to us. So thanks uh to our friends and the cat team, we have a bunch there. Too many to list. When I saw the 162 PowerPoint, I actually had to think of Nikita because Nikita's notorious for making big PowerPoints. Sorry, Nikita, but all good. Great, great, uh, great content, guys.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. No, it's uh and I love to see so uh because I've uh done a presentation of Copa de Studio today, and so I had to kind of dive in to see what kind of resources there are around Copa de Studio implementation, especially, and also skilling. And I think I could work for a month non-stop and not even get through half of it. It's the adoption guide, the project management guide, the how to think about architecture and security and strategy and governance, and it just keeps coming. There's so much good content out there that if you think you're starting from scratch, think again. And I think this is also one of the most important but under uh valued value propositions for Copa Studio is that it sits within a platform where everything's taken care of for you. And this is kind of the thing today. It's like when do you use Copa Studio? When do you not use it? And if you have to go in and create something custom from scratch in Azure, then you have to know about all of these different things that developers usually don't know a lot about. It is very important to keep that in mind. And so um just kind of on the we I have a link in here also called the AI Skills Navigator, which is a site Did you put this in here? AI skillsnavigator.microsoft.com. It's good question.

SPEAKER_01:

I did look I looked at it before I think I did because I saw that on a LinkedIn post. Yeah. I think it is mine.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, sorry. Do tell about it.

SPEAKER_00:

No, no, it has like the learning the learning paths and everything. And again, like this goes back to Microsoft has a ton of learning resources. It can be overwhelming sometimes with the amount of info, but I think it's better than scrambling to find, okay, where where can I go to learn this? It's almost like you're at a buffet of information. But the skills navigator is good because that way you can kind of chart your path of where you're at and what you need for your customers in terms of I think setting up learning paths and things like that. Like so they they start off executive, developer, IT professional, security professional, sales marketing, customer service, like faculty evening. And then it builds like a playlist on the different videos and resources to help you out, kind of chart your path with the AI skills, which we're all on this path. So again, if you think, okay, it's overwhelming, it's a lot, believe me. I consume so much content every week on terms of just trying to keep up in terms of reading, watching blogs, and I'm still kind of bewildered of sometimes where to start. But it's good. It's getting there. And then not so much part of this particular link, but I know you probably noticed that there are new certifications now coming out, some in beta, some rolling out around AI and becoming an AI um solution architect and that kind of thing. So that also what I like about the certification exams, not so much you're writing the exam, but it's also it helps you, helps understand what skills that you need. So if you can get the skills to pass the exam, those are the skills that reflect the the kind of the marketplace or what you'll need out there with your projects. Because having worked on doing job task analysis and skills assessment for exams for other areas of the power platform, I know the work that gets involved to help map these things out. So yeah. Join the AI learning train that's speeding at 200 miles per hour, but it's there.

SPEAKER_02:

Definitely. Yeah. So you have a Microsoft certified AI transformation leader, for instance. So there are credentials. I don't I couldn't really find a full certification yet that is purely on Copeless Studio. It seems like it's kind of embedded in the other ones. I'd say it should be, uh, from what I could find. Uh so if you have links to some other ones, then that's uh um that's very good. I saw so AI 900, Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence is uh one. So it's it's a lot.

SPEAKER_00:

We don't have the link in here, but our friend who den from the UK actually put together and as he does, he puts some infographics together. Um, and I think he has one on a learning journey for uh AI skills as well. So that's always another good resource to follow.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Um I'm just putting a note in here to get some some certification links. And of course, there are the applied skills. There's one for Copeland Studio specifically that you could also go and uh grab for sure. And then also you can follow our friend uh Anna Uruthia. She has made an agentologo. Agentologu? Agentologo. This is a word I don't know how to say. This is what? How do you say that?

SPEAKER_01:

Agent Agentologu.

SPEAKER_02:

Agentologoo. It's it's probably Agentology.

SPEAKER_01:

It's Agentology, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Agentol Agentology. Not that she misspelled it, just that I don't have the English word kind of words for this. But anyways, she made a series on Link of posts on LinkedIn from A to Z on like the the crazy people from the community do for every now and again. Remember Megan when she did that and she said, if I ever have this idea again, whack me over the head with something so heavy. Well she made blonde posts, right? For all of this. But she did her version of this LinkedIn post on agent and words. And this is so helpful because I think we all now are accustomed to throwing AI words. It's LLMs here and it's RAG and it's MCBs, and there's all these words. And then people come into this space and they go, ha, what? Woo-woo. So having someone to actually put some of these in context for us is very good. Again, context, people. Context.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. And it's for it's and it's just, I know we're kind of jumping quickly ahead, but I do want to quickly mention this in terms of your learning journey with AI and co-pilots. For those of you who are planning out your springs at ColorCloud, you and I are doing a workshop on AI agents. And so if you're okay, it's too busy, I don't have time. But if you go to conferences, now you can dedicate a day and go through the AI agent um the Academy. The Academy, yes. We're doing it live.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm so excited. I'm so stumped. So they actually let us do it. I mean, come on. I was like, we we actually proposed it as a joke. I was like, yeah, would you think they would allow us to do that as a curriculum? We go, well, it's Microsoft, you know, maybe not. And they just went, sure.

SPEAKER_01:

We just said we asked.

SPEAKER_02:

That easy? What?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. We asked the right people, and 15 minutes later, it's all it's like.

SPEAKER_02:

If you have friends in the right places, no, no, I'm kidding. But actually, they're gonna release the the next level. Because this the first one is the recruit that's been out there for a while. They're working day and night to get the next level up and running, and then there's another to the commander as and then the operative. So it's gonna be released really soon, maybe in a day or two, in big announcement at big events, maybe possibly, or later. Who knows? Right?

SPEAKER_00:

So just in the f the fullness of time is fullness of time, exactly right.

SPEAKER_02:

Uh, but we're gonna have a ton of fun uh delivering that content for sure.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Sorry, back to Windows Sigles Path programming to our randomness we have today.

SPEAKER_02:

All the randomness.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for joining the ride, everyone.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so this is a uh this is uh uh a post from Donna Sarkar that I uh didn't fully understand. I had to read through it a couple of times. But then, okay, so this is what she says. Last year, this time, AI will make devs irrelevant. Stop studying computer science. Now there's an 800% increase in demand for this forward-deployed engineered role across all sectors. Artificial intelligence groups are on hiring SPRE for a rare kind of software developer who can code and talk to customers as they raise to increase adoption of their cutting-inch technology. Microsoft is hiring FDEs, OpenAI is hiring FDEs, and everyone's gonna be hiring FDEs. Keep coding and keep working on your list your listening skills kits. And this is this is an appeal to developer out developers out there, us included, find that, oh shit, do I really have a it's only the top 10% that's gonna survive in this space. And she's so right. If you can both understand the technical perspective and your technologist and you're human-friendly, you're gonna pretty good deal going on, right? That's the FDE that she's talking about. The person that can act the who understands the customer and is that bridge back to the technical lingo, for instance. I find that is such a huge part of my job is to talk to customers and speak their language and then take that back to the technologists and the developers here and translate it into their lingo for them to understand the requirements and what it is that they actually need. And so many times we speak to customers, they think they know what the problem is, and we go, and yeah, you might find a symptom, but actually the real sickness is over here. Uh, so let's look at that because they don't really know. So it's so important. And she makes such a good point. So yeah, Donna, thank you for calling that out.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and it's a it's a link to um, I mean, she this is uh she she called and she's been calling this out before, but it's a link to um the uh Financial Times post about the new hot job in AI. So yeah, I I totally agree. It's always been about communications, uh working with with people. And I think this is why uh in terms of skill sets, if you have that technical background, um, I've always said this like the the developers that can communicate with customers, especially in our business, they're the ones that really thrive and do well. So yeah, great post. I like it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep, definitely. Okay, so I have a link here about Houndry that I don't understand myself. So let's just skip that and move on. Is this one yours? Right, so another post from Remy Dion, which also was the guy who had the other post that we just mentioned. We'll make sure to put the names in here so that we get it all right. But this was uh long awaited feature alert for Copilot Studio Makers. This is a way for you to force newest versions on people if you publish your agent. So approaching update will interrupt any ongoing conversations. So this will kind of it's almost like it's a reset, a restart of your chat um or your agent experience. But this is also something that has been long awaited, right? So you can now force an update on your end users for your copelet agent, which is pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's awesome. I again, one of these things that I would assume that already had been there, but I guess not. So good to know.

SPEAKER_02:

Do you want to talk about the server logic thing or is that mine as well?

SPEAKER_00:

We did, and I think we did talk about this last time, right? About the server logic, about how it was released, and they didn't really tell us about it. But since then, there had there was a partner call this week. I'm not sure if you had a chance to see it, or it was last week or the recording, but Nagesh, who's one of the Nagesh I worked with when I was at Microsoft, a super um uh really cool guy, really like really like Nagesh. He's always very smart, very methodical. And he presented the server logic and power pages as part of the power the partner community call, which I believe is should be accessible to everybody. But he walks through server logic, where to use it, where not to use it, um, and those types of things within PowerPages. And I know there's been some uh some rumblings for people who obviously don't get power pages, like, well, why is this important? Why is other it's another like abstraction layer? We don't need any more of these. Well, obviously you don't get it because this removes things like the uh the implicit grant flow with OAuth. It just it actually adds a very strong level of security. So if you're building integrations into payment gateways or any other services, this just makes it like a thousand times easier, makes it hundreds of times more secure, and it also increases the value of building out power pages for your customers as well. So this is something I can't wait for it to be GA because already my head is spinning with lots of ideas. Now, the questions that I had as part of this call that call was okay, is this going to replace the web API? No, it's not. We still need the web API. It actually uses the web API for a lot of things. It's really for that integration layer. And also you can do things like all the stuff that we couldn't do before in terms of Dataverse custom actions, even a potentially batched stuff, stuff that we would kind of hack together with Power Automate. This just makes the pathway so much smoother. Good work on the team. Um, we have the link to the PowerPlatform blog that describes this, the link to the docs. Um, I'm gonna my plan is to start building out some stuff in the next few weeks as well to try this out. I have a few ideas for my own stuff that I want to build. And this to me is just taking PowerPages again to that next level in terms of it being a platform for external users. And of course, this also ties into what we talked about before about single page applications or bringing code first, PowerPages applications. This all is compatible with that. So you can tell the they're laying the groundwork to make the the code, the future of PowerPages kind of work in a much more cohesive, much better manner. And of course, it all ties in with vibe engineering and all of these other concepts we're talking about to make to move this whole platform forward. The other thing on PowerPages, while we're talking about PowerPages, is how many times have you sat down with a customer trying to figure out licensing for PowerPages? How much is this going to cost me? All of this other stuff. And you have the Excel spreadsheet out and everything like that.

SPEAKER_02:

It's simple. I don't understand the hang-up about PowerPages licensing because to me it's so simple. I'm like, why is this still an issue? I mean, what do you and then you go, oh, it's so expensive. Did you expect it to be free? You know, your the other web apps you have also cost you a lot. I mean, come on, look at the value, and then off we go. Usually when so, but this is nice. I know what you're gonna talk about next.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so our friend uh Tino Rabbi from Germany, and Tino, uh Tino has amazing content. And Tino, we're big fans, you know that. But he put together the he put together this PowerPages price calculator, and so you could actually put in how many users, um authenticated users or uh anonymous users, and it will give you the pricing, it'll break it down whether you're doing paper use pricing or kind of the regular pricing. And in doing this, he discovered something which is kind of a known thing, but not so much known. And he found that if you need for so for if you're a customer and maybe you're not using power pages, but you need to buy dataverse storage. We know dataverse capacity is expensive. Did you know that what you can, if you need to get a certain amount of Dataverse capacity, what you can do instead is you could get a bunch of PowerPages authenticated users. And with the pricing tier, with the included Dataverse storage that comes with those PowerPages authenticated users, you'll pay less for the same amount of Dataverse storage, and you'll get PowerPages authenticated users or not both a combination of authenticated anonymous users. So you could deploy, you could actually get power pages for free if you buy the Dataverse capacity at a lower price. And I'm very like, and he asked that question, you go, This can't be right. Can anybody verify this? So I went to Microsoft and asked them or our insider at Microsoft and came back with, yep, that's that's that's a thing for sure. Like it's like, why are you not telling everybody this? Because this is this is a great gateway for for power pages. So yeah, definitely check out uh Tino's price calculator, his post along with that. Uh and again, Yuca actually has his comments in here too. So uh and yeah. Is it endorsed? I'm not endorsed or it's verified, I guess. Like, yeah, yeah. This is I guess you're not. No.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

He talked about this thing earlier as well. So I'm it don't and I know that we you and I we're we're we're fans of PowerPages and and and that sort of kind of our known thing, unfortunately. As much as we try to we do both of us know other shit. We all know this, but uh power pages is one of our things. We're big fans. I've worked with other platforms, I've worked with other website integrations into Dataverse. At the end of the day, what I can do with PowerPages and doing the equivalent in something that a WordPress connector or some of these other connectors can do, they're great, but they still can't beat what you can do with PowerPages. And I'm willing to take that to debate to anybody who wants to fight me on that. So yeah, check out the Power Pages Price Calculator by Tino Rabbi. It is really cool.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, very good job. And with that, I think we're gonna round it off with some events. That was a long list of things and bouncing all over the place. Just before we round off, just wanted to mention that the call for speakers for Dynamics Minds is open. So you can now submit for the party conference of the year, late May, which is uh I have never been and it's on my list, but it also every time it hits me at a very unappropriate time. So I'm uh betting on next year again. But this is definitely uh an event to go to. It's yeah, we'll get you there.

SPEAKER_01:

I'll be there.

SPEAKER_02:

We'll see. And then of course, ignite is this week, uh ACDC in January, Tallinn, Canadian Prime Platform Summit, Color Cloud, Dynamics Minds, and EPPC. And then it's summertime.

SPEAKER_00:

So that's kind of the team that I have my team in for ACDC.

SPEAKER_01:

You got it?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I I submitted a team, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Woo! I have a take today. Good. I'm so happy. Oh, that's gonna be so cool. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. Me and my kids, we've painted boxes. We've now painted like 19 50 by 50 centimeter cardboard boxes, and we've turned them into the obsidian Minecraft boxes. We're actually gonna make a portal, physical, life size portal. Wow, it's so cool. Oh, and we painted all the little pixels, and yeah, it was a lot of fun. My small apartment's now full of the square boxes.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, I do have a life sometimes.

SPEAKER_02:

All right. With that, I think I'm gonna let you go off on your field trip with your friends and uh send me pictures of the con the buildings and all the things you see. No people, because I'm phone way enough as it is, because you're gonna hang out with all the people I love this week's stop it. And then I'm gonna see you soon.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, for sure. You have an awesome week. We'll chat and chat everybody else. Thank you for again for listening and watching. And this is probably one of our more chaotic episodes, but that's what you're here for, right?

SPEAKER_02:

You feel like our other episodes are so structured and kind of easy to follow. Like I know this is like any other episode, like all over the place, all all the time. Right, okay. Well, it was a lot of fun, as always. And uh yeah. See you when we see ya. Bye bye.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a rating and 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 Lurika Akabek and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

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