Power Platform Boost Podcast

ColorCloud and other news (#84)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 84

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0:00 | 25:50

Origin Story For Agent Academy

Nick

Like I remember last fall we're texting back and forth, go jokingly going, Hey, we're gonna do stuff for ColorCloud. Uh yeah. Um and then the funny joke, the funny thing was I said, Do you wonder if anybody's gonna do anything on co-pilots? Like, ha ha ha ha ha. And then I think he said he said, Oh, maybe we should do the Agent Academy as a workshop. And I'm like, Oh, that's brilliant. I wonder if we're gonna be allowed to do that. And then I immediately text Daniel, who came back, said, That's a great idea. Well, who do I ask? And he said, Ask me. Okay, all right, cool. So we got the green light, we put in the thing, and then here we are.

Going Live At ColorCloud

Ulrikke

Hello everyone, and welcome to Boost Podcast, live, live from ColorCloud in Hamburg. Yep. Yes. So this is day one. We just finished a keynote. Uh Harold Van Tijn did a keynote here at ColorCloud, um, inspirational and talking about how to change your mindset and how you think about agent. And he only said agent seven times in 45 minutes. So well done, Harold. We had a bet. I lost. I was way over 20, was my bet. So that's that's good. Um, and now we are doing the podcast live.

Nick

Yeah. And we did the workshop yesterday. Yes, we did. We did the Agent Academy, and we had about 20 people come in and join and earned their recruit badge.

Ulrikke

Uh new badge, actually.

Nick

A brand new badge.

Ulrikke

A brand new badge for those who go through the curriculum live in a workshop kind of setting, uh, which was really cool. Yeah. And we were a bit apprehensive. You hadn't done it before. Yeah. Because it's a lot to go through. The recruit course, if any one of you is done with that, you know how extensive that can be. Um, and we had a choice to make to kind of if you wanted to kind of be able to go through all of the learnings and content, or if you wanted to kind of go through all the building. And I think we got to a good place of a bit of both. Yep. And I know that everyone got through it, and that was really a cool experience to be a part of that for sure.

Nick

Yeah. And I think the benefit because this material is available online, but having forcing you to actually take a workshop and being in that room and actually be able to bounce ideas off people that you were sitting beside. Of course, we had gone through the content, found maybe a few little detours and bugs, maybe along the way to help people get around that. We did set up the environments, which helped everybody as well. So a lot of that pre-work was done. So I think it was just a great experience for uh for the live participants. And if you missed it, don't fret. You can always have another chance at the European Power Platform Conference in late June, early July, something around there. Um, and because we're doing that uh workshop again at that event, so you can check it out there.

Ulrikke

Yes, you can. That's gonna be very cool. I'm excited. That's gonna be so cool. Uh, and we're here today in the mentoring purple violet room. Uh, sponsored by the mentoring hub.

Nick

We see Sharon over there. We're waving.

Sessions Prep And Venue Tour

Ulrikke

So we have a few people. Matt's is standing by the door, Bleen as well. Jan just passed by. We have Jonas Rapp in the audience, you know, just a few random friends. Um, it's all cool. Um, but unfortunately, I don't think they can hear us as well as you know, maybe the people on you know, it's all good. Um, so we also have a few sessions to prep for um and to deliver here the next two days. Yes. Three-day conference is growing. It's pretty cool. Uh so you have a uh session today. No?

Nick

Uh session tomorrow. So tomorrow. Don't fresh, don't stress me out.

Ulrikke

It's trying to trip you up a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

Nick

No, the session is tomorrow. Uh we're doing with uh with Chloe Moreau, who's uh who's here as well. Uh not here in the room, she's somewhere here, but we're doing uh a session on uh multilingual power pages. So if you've done exist, it does. And it's it's uh and all the little caveats and the things and things to watch out for, and of course, looking to the future as well of as we move to more agentic created power pages, which we'll talk a little bit more on some of the news and updates, how that's going to how multi-language uh affects that. Very interesting. Yeah, and you're doing a session on ALM.

Ulrikke

Yes, I am. I'm doing my uh pipeline session as well, which is gonna be a demo and how to do power platform pipelines right because it's hard to get it right, but once you know what to do, it's actually pretty simple. Yeah, so I'm gonna give you some uh tricks and tips that I learned in the trenches so you don't have to make the same mistakes I made.

Nick

Yes.

Ulrikke

Yes, that's tomorrow.

Nick

Yes, that's also tomorrow. Okay, cool. Yep, so there's lots going on today. There's sessions starting right now. We hear them in the in the background. The venue is amazing.

Power Apps Gets Agentic Canvas

Ulrikke

This is such a cool place, actually. Yeah, we're gonna do a little bit of a filming thing afterwards, I think. Just gonna show you guys all the colors, all the lights, all the different bubble rooms. It's really crazy. A big hangari type of building, and it's very cool, yes.

Nick

Right, but of course, there's also news and updates this week, as there always is.

Ulrikke

What? Wow, wow, yeah. Right, so uh let's kick it off with uh Power Apps, news and updates, because what I saw this week was uh video from Reza Durani. We've talked about his videos, it's amazing, yeah, and how he was building canvas apps with an agent. Oh wow, yeah, and it didn't create React, so it's not a code app and it's not a generative page, it is an actual Canvas app, a YAML canvas app.

Nick

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's it's amazing to see these things like we we we were talking about how canvas apps are dead. Uh apparently they're not.

Ulrikke

Apparently not.

Nick

Well, I think it's just um because there's so many canvas apps out there, so many people are used to building them, but now taking those benefits of agentic qualities into uh Canvas apps as well, which is pretty cool.

Ulrikke

Yes, so you can actually use call code or whatever coding agent you want, um, hook it up to your canvas app. So what he showed was that you go into the old canvas, create a canvas app as you would, you go into the settings and you enable the collaborative feature, and then that allows your agent to collaborate with you on this app, and then you bring it back to the CLI and you work with your coding agent, and then you can see the updates live. It created global functions, it did it the right way, guys. So actually really good. And I'm so excited to see where they're going forward with that. So well done, Reza.

Nick

Yeah, as always, his videos are amazing, just to the point, go through the stuff. It's great, uh, great time.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah.

Nick

Cool.

Ulrikke

Um, so and there's another thing uh with power apps as well. I think I have that my my one out doesn't sink. This is always the issue when we do this. It's like, where did all my newest items go? Well, it's all in my local one. But I'll bring it up because this is also very important, even you because the collaboration and the seamless integration now between power apps and and uh copilot, the there are now one and the same. So you can have the and we talked about this last time as well. It's now become, I'm not sure if it's GA, but it's with more content around it, where you can now uh work with your Dataverse data through your Canvas app or your model-driven app directly in Copilot. Yes. Uh so we have another um uh link in the show notes uh about that as well.

Nick

Yeah, because that became GA. I think there was a there was a you were talking about the blog by Ryan.

Ulrikke

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the blog. Yes, that's the one.

Nick

I saw that as well this morning. All right, good.

Ulrikke

So we'll face the link in the show notes.

Nick

Right, and this is something we've been talking about for a few weeks already. The things uh we know people on the team, uh uh Claudio, big shout out to them, he's part of the team. Um, Mitty as well, and a few others, uh, and just yeah, great work, guys. And it's beginning to bring all this agentic world into the world that we've been knowing so well, model driven apps and other canvas apps, and it's kind of everything's blending together, so it's kind of bringing everybody else into this agentic world as well. So you might be very soon enhancing what you've been working with, um, but still utilizing that old way of doing it.

Ulrikke

So and I think that also plays to what we've always known to be the most beneficial thing about this platform is you don't have to move anything. It's not a you never do migration projects with PowerPlatform. True, yeah. You connect to the data where it is, and that now goes for apps and other features as well. You don't have to move your app or refactor it or do anything, you can actually just bring that capability into where you're already working. So you're working Micro3C25 or Teams or Copilot as your workspace, then you just bring the capabilities you need into that. Right. And that really makes sense to me.

Nick

It's yeah, or or on the flip side, work within Microsoft 365 Copilot, which I think a lot of people are beginning to do, but they can instead of flipping over, switching screens or contacts to your model-driven app or your other apps in Dataverse, you can bring those features are now surfacing within Microsoft 365 Copilot as well. Yep. So it's just it's it's amazing when we had now like we used to have a model-driven app, and that was the only way, and it's expanded over the last few years. Now there's different ways to interact with that, and it just kind of aligns to the way that you want to work and how you work efficiently, and of course, then you can start factoring out all these other things like the co-works and the skills and all those other things, and it's just it's a lot of information. But if we begin to piece these puzzles together, then we can actually become very efficient and get to that. What Harold said this morning about the 10 times uh 10x 10x.

Power Pages Copilot And CLI

Ulrikke

Yes, absolutely. And uh there was some news on uh PowerPages as well.

Nick

Um, we saw a very interesting um um post from Ashish Ashish Chaudre, who's uh principal develop uh engineering manager, I think that's his title. Um Ashish is a great guy. Uh big shout out to Ashish. I know you do listen because you you do like her posts, or maybe just be polite. I don't know. Uh, but really smart guy, does a lot of amazing things within the PowerPages team. And he wrote a really interesting blog article um about DOTA, which is oh, it was a it's a game. Uh acronym, what was that again? Let me open up the yeah. Uh it was a game that he played where it's a lot of if you play video games, there's this was a uh Defense of the Ancients. And he described it's not a game that I've played or was familiar with, although I do have played a lot of video games in the past, but it's like one of these resource games where you're collecting resources, and it has and he described it as having a bit of a steep learning curve, and to get once you're good at that game, but how it kind of helped you learn as you went through the game. So we interesting, he compared this to power pages. Of course, he works with power pages every day, uh uh designing, uh kind of building it, and talks about using the new plugins from either GitHub Copilot or Cloud Code to build power pages. And we've talked about this technology, but he took it from a sense of learning, and because he he hears from the customers, and we've heard this too, to learn power pages has a very steep learning curve. And I back when I started, it was like, okay, where do I even start with all of this? And how do has it how does it piece together? And that's kind of how I started blogging and ended up here in a way. So, but what he described it as, and of course, if you're working with these tools, what I love about Claude, especially when it's thinking and it gives you the plan and it goes to the steps, so using that plugin very much say I want to build a website that does this because you begin, begin with the end in the mind, one of the seven habits. Um, and then it's sort of breaking out what it's gonna do, and it starts out with the the UI, the data model, the permissions, the accessibility. But as it's going through, it's justifying these design decisions. Of course, it's bringing you when I worked with this, it brought you into the loop as well to get your input because you kind of need those skills, but then through that whole process, you're kind of learning why it's doing things, getting new insights. So, very much like as Shay's just saying in this blog article by playing that the game, the defense of the ancients, and developing a power pages site, you're learning as you're going, and then based on this new information, it's just gonna help your next designs get so much better as you iterate through this whole process. So it really goes to show how AI is a powerful tool, but really needs that human to kind of interact with it and collaboratively make amazing things. So, Ashish, this is a great article. Of course, I'll put the link in the show notes for the rest of you to check it out.

Ulrikke

Um also the idea of having the skills with the agents as well, right? So you work with PowerPages and you have it learned because I think that's the most unmentioned but also un most powerful thing about these agents. You they can create skills and they can learn. So you can go in and critique it and you can have it kind of iterate over its own work and then also rectify and change and learn. So you kind of prompt the agent to learn itself, yeah, and then bring that in and create a skill from it that you can share with the community, open source it. Because I think that's kind of the collaboration of the Fusion team going forward is when we share these skills and open source them, right?

Nick

Yeah, so this is really cool. It's funny, I think I talked about the last time too. It's like, you know, we used to we used to share code and then we got to sharing prompts, and now we're sharing skills, skills files, and you see these skills for a lot of different things.

Ulrikke

Yep. So a quick uh other mention for PowerPages this week that uh crossed our uh path is uh the ability to now clone PowerPages with the PAX CLI. Yep. So there's a new um a new node in the PAX CLI for PowerPages, uh, which is really cool, which you can now utilize.

Nick

And this is something I think we've been wanting for years, right? To be able to create a like, yes, you could download it, but to clone, create a copy of that PowerPages site. Yeah. Um and there's a lot of different things you can do with that, of course, for development and things of that sort. This is uh I think it was a link to pointed out to us by Nikita Polikov. Of course, Nikita, uh you know, a good friend of the podcast, good friend of ours as well. Uh so yeah, if you're building power pages um and in Visual Studio Code, like very much I am these days, uh definitely check out those new pack CLI commands.

Ulrikke

Yes, and also I saw Valentin Um Kasenko, which we also had talked about on the podcast a lot, uh, he discovered what we talked about when we did the release wave episode, right? Yes. Because we saw the unification of the authentication for PowerPages, uh, the last release wave and this release wave, and it never really came through. So we had a bit of a discussion last time about will it ever happen? Maybe not. But then now we've seen traces of it in the UI actually. So then it is coming. Uh so thank you, uh Valentine, for alerting us to this new setting. So it's on the PowerPage kind of the admin level that you'll see. This it has uh enhanced authorization and it's default set to null. But probably in the future you'll be able to go into the admin uh settings to set this to use.

Nick

Right. And what we're really what it's really all about is that merging of your traditional Dataverse users and security roles and power pages users and web roles and things like that, getting some synchronization there.

Ulrikke

Yeah, so the system user and the contact will be unified at some point to allow you to kind of have a so then you'll not have the um modified by system user anymore. You'll actually have the contact or the name of the user that actually made the change.

Nick

And then some, yeah, and then auditing as well is just gonna be so much more enhanced with this.

Copilot ALM And Dataverse Skills

Ulrikke

Absolutely. Right, and there then and there there is a post for um dynamics in here, yeah, which is always interesting because they that does live on as well, CRM. And we saw a few people coming in from the CRM side yesterday. That was so fun to see. Yeah, so in the audience we went through because we had 20 attendees, we have time to go through and ask everyone where they're from, what kind of context they're in. And we had everyone from Power BI to CRM to admin to potatoes to developers, we had them all in there. Nice. Business central people as well, the ERP side. Absolutely love it. That's so much fun. Right. So this uh Dynamics 365 post was from Andreas Adner. We've had him um featured on the podcast before as well, and the custom co-pilot agent in Power Apps with an MCP app UI, which is kind of the same thing we talked about um uh before, I think. Also becoming GA, the fact that you can now have your co-pilot with so this is kind of a matrix mind bend because you can have a Canvas app in uh agent, so copilot panel in the model-driven app. So it's kind of gone full circle at that point.

Nick

But um yeah, it's it's and it's well the it's the agent itself is the that discussion panel is built with right directly in your app. Yeah, yeah. So it's almost again, it's is it is it slowly taking over? Are we going to have these or are gonna be our new interfaces?

Ulrikke

Maybe, yeah. Um and also because the UI for agents is uh fairly new still, and I think it's kind of kind of jumped over the fact the the make it yourself part is now just for the agentec, which you would expect, right? So this is now the the agent can use the MCP app to serve UI components in the agent. It's like um on a need-to-know basis or just in time UI, which I really think is so interesting. I really like to see that. So great post, Andreas, and uh yeah, keep it coming.

Nick

All right.

Ulrikke

So we have a few um posts here from the cat team. Yeah um oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nick

So from we we post, we we we put these links in and it's almost like, oh yeah, we forgot about this. Yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke

So from Deb2Prod, auto install and pinning for Copilas Studio Agent. So this is talking to the ALM capabilities of Copilas Studio agents uh in Teams and how you can now customize the manifest. And we had a question about this yesterday as well. How what do you do when you have a copilot agent and you have an ALM story? Can you use environment variables? How can you change the name or the behavior or the links from in your agents from one environment to another? So this is a story of the manifest and how you can actually use that to transition or to have different values for different things in your agent across different environments. Because when you're working and developing or testing and you only see that little space, and how do you know which agent that is, for instance, or what environment you're in? So this is a very good uh resource. We have two links from the PowerCat team that goes through the deployment and the shortfalls and what to look out for, and then deployment path comparison where you can actually see um the different approaches you can take and also the benefits and the caveats with both of them.

Nick

Yeah, and it was interesting, and going back to linking, you know, kind of segueing a little bit or back to the keynote this morning about as they're deploying these agents is to get more people involved.

Ulrikke

Yes.

Nick

And so we go through a lot of dev testing cycles, and in the past we always had a small subset of users trying it out. Where here um the message he was giving was no, actually try to get more people involved at this point because and realize it is an experimental phase, but to get that better feedback of how these agents can work. Um so that was kind of an interesting point, kind of a little bit of a yeah, to that way you you can kind of begin to get more and more people using it, more people excited, get that enthusiasm building, and get that feedback so you get those agents right.

Ulrikke

Yeah, that's so crucial. And testing and testing and testing and testing, right? We cannot say that enough times. That's crucial, and especially with agents. Uh, you change one little thing, it can have a huge impact. So testing's never been uh more important than it is today, I think. Yeah, yes. So um this last post um getting started with dataverse skills, install, configure, and build your first agent-driven solution.

Nick

Right, and it's funny because I was talking to somebody about this too, like about how a year ago would we be creating Dataverse tables? We would go into make.powerapps.com. Yeah. And then things like plan designer, and even within make.powerapps, there's still that dataverse designer where you begin to describe things, whatever.

Ulrikke

Yeah, the ERD diagram, the mermaid stuff, and all that. Yeah.

Nick

But now, if I was to go in and create a whole bunch of tables, I'm doing it in Visual Studio Code with Claude Code, uh, following these Dataverse skills that just sort of just been released as an option. It's just sort of like this is where you know, where the the pendulum is swinging, maybe back to pro dev, but again, it's natural language, natural language being the purest form of low code. Um, so interesting these tools. So it was really interesting article going through the whole process of the Dataverse MCP server using the PAC CLI, um, and then doing the Dataverse skills into Claude tools or using GitHub Copilot. And this is gonna be an interesting horse race. I'm pro-Claude right now, yeah, but GitHub Copilot is sort of there, and it's just sort of like we're gonna see.

Ulrikke

I'm not gonna place my beds at this point, it's so close. I mean, every week it kind of goes back and forth, so we'll see where they go with us, but it's such an interesting space to be in right now. And just to your point, I mean, so you know Sarah Lagerquist, she's the low-code champion. Yes. I talked to her, she was in Scott Drow's uh workshop yesterday, which was all about pro code, didn't even go into the maker studio of Power Apps. She was so excited, she said, I'm never gonna create another table in that space ever again. This is the way to go. I mean, if you can convince Sara PP Lagerquist to not go through the maker portal anymore, I mean, that should tell you something.

Nick

Right.

Ulrikke

So yeah. So if she's convinced, uh there's no one, everyone else needs to get on board.

Nick

Yeah, if you're low code, you're gonna be a pro coder of some sort.

Ulrikke

Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. So though this is really cool, and I love the step-by-step, the prerequisites, the checklist of this resource. It's absolutely amazing. Um, make sure to check it out.

Nick

Uh yeah, and that was by did we mention the name? It was uh Zolt.

Ulrikke

Yeah.

Nick

Oh, yeah, we did. Okay, cool. Yep.

Ulrikke

Very cool. So I think that actually concludes the list of the things we wanted to talk about this time. Um or did you have anything?

Nick

Nope. Uh no, nothing else. Actually, we're we're on time.

Community Events Mentoring And Wrap

Ulrikke

I know. Yeah, we just got feedback. Like we have 10 minutes left. So we're like, no, no, we don't need it because this time around, we are on time. So we got this covered.

Nick

So we can talk a little bit about uh you know what's coming up in terms of events. We did we did mention briefly European Power Platform Conference where we're going doing the Agent Academy again. There's still tickets available from what I understand. Um, still a little bit. I I say we have a little bit of time, but this snuck up on me as well. Like I remember last fall we're texting back and forth, go jokingly going, Hey, we're gonna do stuff for Color Cloud. Uh yeah. Um, and then the funny joke, the funny thing was I said, Do you wonder if anybody's gonna do anything on co-pilots? Like, ha ha ha ha ha ha. And then I think he said, Oh, maybe we should do the Agent Academy as a workshop. And I'm like, Oh, that's brilliant. I wonder if we're gonna be allowed to do that. And then I immediately text Daniel, who came back, said, That's a great idea. Well, who do I ask? And he said, Ask me. Okay, all right, cool. So we got the green light, we put it in the thing, and then here we are. It feels like a week later, but it's months later. Months and months. So, all that being said, these things come up fast. Um, before European Power Platform Conference, I will be at Dynamics Minds in Slovenia. I have a couple sessions there. I think one on Dataverse and something on vibe coding, maybe.

Ulrikke

Maybe, yeah, you'll have to look.

Nick

Yeah, I'll have to look.

Ulrikke

You have the um and there's BizApp summits, of course, where you'll find and also you have Bill coming at May. Yep. There's so many community and Microsoft events to look out for. And of course, we all know that there are gonna be uh some important announcements both at the BizApp Summit and at Build. So make sure to check that out.

Nick

Right, and then if and if you're interested in at you know joining joining the traveling circus, well, yeah. Um, I believe that call for submissions is still open for Nordic Summit till the end of April for Scottish Summit. I believe they're still open.

Ulrikke

Yeah, and you can also join the mentoring program for um Nordic Summit. So go to the Nordic Summit website or search for Nordic Summit 2026 and mentoring, because we have a few mentors on the list still available. So if you need to maybe this guy could be your mentor and you could collaborate, maybe be on stage together, who knows? So it's a good way to kind of get into this, like you said, traveling circus.

Nick

Yep, and uh yeah, and don't be shy. Uh like you, if you all of you probably have very interesting stories, stories from the trenches, things that you're learning. And yes, even if you don't see, you do, like we said before, even if you see similar content, you have your own perspective on it, you have your own experiences, and sometimes that's very much appreciated bringing that into the into the world. Definitely. So, yeah, so and don't be afraid of with the ment the the the mentoring thing at the Nordic summit, which was I thought was amazing because I worked with last year with Menju Go uh Gajar, and we had a great time. Uh she basically she put a lot of that presentation together. I think I was just up on stage for iCandy by the end of it. And uh that's why you're here. That's why I'm here as well, exactly. Sure. All right. Um, so that's coming up, and then of course there's things in the fall coming up, and yeah, and they still have a day or two here at Color Cloud.

Ulrikke

Oh, yes, I'm so excited.

Nick

So our brains are gonna be oozing out of knowledge and things we're learning and uh and check Instagram and LinkedIn, it's gonna be all over the place.

Ulrikke

You're gonna be spammed. Um, but yeah, it's all very good. So I'll see you guys around. See ya. Bye bye.

Nick

Thank you for listening. Uh 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, Luric Akabeck, and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

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Nick Doelman

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Ulrikke Akerbæk

Host