Power Platform Boost Podcast

10 Coffees and a RedBull (#85)

• Season 1 • Episode 85

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0:00 | 49:19

Cold Open And Host Catch-Up

SPEAKER_02

Yes, I've had ten coffees in a red bowl. Don't ask. Don't ask. Come on. You can do this. Ten and this is also a tongue twister. Ten tips for the timeline. And I love this. So what are you writing? Never let Enrica have Red Bull, but different.

SPEAKER_01

No, no, I've written down the title ideas as I do. See ten coffees in a red bull.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you might be onto something.

Nick

With your hosts, Nick Dolman and Litka Akkabek.

SPEAKER_02

Hey, Nick. Hey, Illika. Hey.

Nick

Look, I'm in my own space.

SPEAKER_02

I know you do have a house. I was beginning to think it was just currently.

Nick

If anybody's looking, hit me up. But, anyways, that's another conversation for another day.

SPEAKER_02

That is very true. That is very true. And I also want to share with the public that a thing you just told me offline that I think is amazing that your wife actually, she saw that your plant in your office was droopy on YouTube and then went into your office to water it. Yes. I mean, you guys. Wow.

Nick

But it's it's Anne Michelle's job to water the plant. Like she's the plant person around the house.

SPEAKER_02

That's very true.

SPEAKER_01

I did see some seed leaves for the garden that were all dried up, and I kinda I said, What are these? And she's like, Yeah.

Nick

I mean, get the poor kid, she's been trying she's been she applied to university, she has to accept, she's applying for residence, she's back at work, she's got a full plate, so yeah, a few plants are dying. You know how it is.

SPEAKER_01

Life takes over, right?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and then next year, maybe no seedlings because she's off teeny.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

The little one grows up and applies the nest.

Nick

Bird leaving the nest.

SPEAKER_02

It's emotional.

Nick

It is.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So then we are gonna do this every weekend.

SPEAKER_01

What?

SPEAKER_02

Out outweigh it.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, absolutely.

Power Apps Inside Copilot Conversations

SPEAKER_02

So what's also Okay, yes, let's go.

Nick

News and updates from the world of the power platform and Microsoft and AI and has anything really been going on since the last time we chatted a couple weeks ago in Hamburg? Or has it been quiet? I don't know.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you say that, and then the truth of the matter is that I have really have been so busy and I haven't really c kept tabs on anything, so I've I've d dove into this just kind of now. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is half of these things on the list have you talked about them already? Which is a little bit weird because they're all brand new, but then they're not.

Nick

And it it goes out so fast, and then does it really Yeah, and I think we're running into a case of something somet we we see something in a private preview uh as part of the MVP program, and then we see it's in public preview, and then it becomes GA, and it all becomes a bit of a blur as to what's going on. And I'm like, even for example, taking a look at the very first one, yeah, we've talked about this multiple times, but there is yet uh you know another blog about the the Microsoft Power Apps applications can be part of M365 co-pilot conversations. So, and this is also just continuing on that story that more and more people I think are moving out of apps and doing more of their work directly in Microsoft 365 uh co-pilot or in co-work. And that's sort of the surface of where they're doing all the work in terms of interacting with their business applications. So they're not opening apps. I mean, they still can, and then within the apps, you have your M365 contacts. So it kind of is working both ways. So there we had uh you know an article here by Hemet Garr, who's of course on the Microsoft team, and we know Hemet, he's a very enthusiastic guy. I always enjoy talking to him at conferences and stuff, and he gets so excited about all these things that he's working on. And he's also like he's like pulling up his laptop and oh, check out this this, it was at Ignite, and he was showing me all this stuff. He said, I did this last night and we pushed it out this morning. So um he wrote an interesting uh uh article uh about this and how it integrates with work at IQ and sort of the custom UI interfaces that's sort of being surfaced and co-pilot, and of course, co-pilot in the model-driven apps, going on with what the team is doing there. So it's basically continuing on this conversation of the merging of the world that we're used to and the whole new world and just it becoming more and more day-to-day. So yeah, check out that link.

Command Bar Editing With AI

SPEAKER_02

And I think so. The thing that kind of throws me a little bit is that Microsoft uses so the marketing language around this, which in technical terms is an MCP app. An MCP app is not PowerPlatform or Power App specific, it's an anthropic, I think, term. They started it and now it's agnostic. So an MCP app is an agnostic thing that you can plug into anything, can have an app inside an agent, on-demand UI, charts, lists, forms, maps, you name it, right? So that's the idea. And then now this is public preview for Power Apps in agents kind of configuration. But this could be any service to any agent experience, not all also outside of Power Apps. But this specifically is for Power Apps, of course, which I think that's what's confused me because it it's called different things in different contexts, and inside and outside of Microsoft is called different things. And this article is very much kind of the the rich UI experienced the app inside the agent experience, and now being a public preview. So yeah, check out that uh that blog post. It has a lot of videos. So if not, then just to browse through to see the videos to get a grasp of what this can do because it is really, really powerful. And it's I'm sure they're gonna evolve what you can do with this. Now it's kind of limited to what kind of UI you can create, but I think down the line we'll see a lot of things opening up for this. So yeah, keep an eye on it. And then moving on, we have something which is on the other end of the spectrum. So this is kind of pushing the needle for what we think about when we think about apps. This is the opposite direction. This is the old when I think about model ribbon apps, and kind of one of the first things I learned was the ribbon workbench in Scott Juro. And this is kind of that it's modifying paraps ribbon, but with agentic agent recording.

Nick

Yeah, and this is really cool because like I remember like back in the the old old days when you wanted to modify the the menu item in CRM three or four, which of course is the great great grandfather of model-driven apps. It was a straight up, they called it an isv.config file, and it was just a straight up XML. You would plunk in your, I think the link and the name, and it was really easy to work with. And then around comes around CRM 2011, I think. And correct me if I'm wrong, people out there. But then we had this whole thing about using the ribbon, and of course, the ribbon was in Office, it was in all the Office tools like Word and Excel and PowerPoint, and you would use the what they call the ribbon. And of course, you have to, if you're gonna use the ribbon, the ribbon works everywhere. You have to have it in Dynamics 3 or that time dynamics CRM as well. Okay, no problem. And then you started to try to add your own little buttons and icons, and it was a pain in the ass, to be quite honest, because you had to modify this thing called the ribbon diff.xml. And Microsoft was like, Yeah, you have to edit this. We'll build a tool someday. Thankfully, Scott came around and built a tool, I think originally in Silverlight, and then rewrote it again, uh, more modern tools. So it's been one of these workhorse uh tools, a standalone tool, but it also works in the XRM toolbox. And it's almost been the de facto standard for modifying the command bar and the ribbon up until a year or two ago when Microsoft started adding their own tooling, but it was a job half done, I think is the best way to describe it. And then all of a sudden, I see an article from Shashank Garg. And I this is a new name. It hasn't really popped up on my radar before, but basically goes through, and it's very interesting. You read his article, or your very first thing, he has this obviously an AI-generated image of the ribbon workbench being this big kind of blimp type thing, but old and built of wood, and saying, I'm leaving you in good hands, and thank you, ribbon workbench. And he has this new little robot that's called the CLI agent workbench and goes through just basically, and it's it's pretty elegant in terms of the solution. It's taking the ribbon diff that we were always was a pain to work with, but using GitHub Copilot and some of the agentic tools to basically go through, and it's a skill that he's created to go through and modify that as a way to add your commanding and be able to upload that and kind of do that. So basically, it's a I would say probably a natural language way to edit the command bar. Honestly, I have not tried this yet. It is on my radar to check it out because on a couple projects I do need to do some button configuration and I'm just very curious to see how it goes. He's got a bit of a video, he has the instructions there. So maybe next time I'll report back to see how well it works. But this is the cool thing about all of these new skills and tools, is we're beginning to see people rethink ways of doing traditional things. It's like that blog article we talked about a couple weeks ago. Um, uh about the I'm trying to think of his name, Frederick, who did the JSON for the Power Automate flows and used Claude to manipulate that. That I tried this week for a client, and holy crap, it was like magic of how well it worked. So seeing things like this gets me pretty excited about the type of work that we can do going forward for, I don't want to call them legacy clients, but clients that are still using things like model-driven apps, canvas apps, the command bar, power automate flows. I have Claude Desktop running full-time on my machine. That's probably a whole other topic of conversation, but it's just for doing things like this, it's pretty exciting times. So definitely check out the link and Shah Shank. Great, great idea. I'm really eager to try it out. If you're experimenting, keep experimenting and keep sharing what you're learning. It's a fantastic.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And I love how we uh created a blog post about it because so e so many times when we solve things like this, we think, oh, anyone could do it. Or it's yeah, I let me just share my prompt and see how you go, how you fare with your agent setup, right? But then you kind of lose a little bit of the, I don't know, the the idea and the approach and how you would think and what tools to use. So it's the same story we've been iterating again and again and again is that you do something, bring your perspective and bring some screenshots and some videos, because it's interesting to see. And I think I'm still, and I might be the last person on earth that this is kind of still a thing for, but I sometimes forget I can use AI for these kinds of things. And it's like, oh yeah, of course. Why didn't I think of that? Why did I go in and try to fiddle with the freaking thing and bash my head against the wall? Because it still takes a little while for my brain to go, hmm, I wonder. So I it's good to kind of jog my uh instincts to always think AI first and to always get help from these tools. So I'm not sure. And what's the worst can happen?

Nick

If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and you move on, or you probably in in your if it doesn't work, then you probably learn something along the way. So it's all good.

SPEAKER_02

Or you get you use some of the swear words you you'll learned when you were younger, like I did today. When one agent, same setup, two different customers, one agent could do it, one the other agent could not.

DIY Agents For Links And Names

Nick

Well, yeah. And in terms of swearing at agents, and this is this is not in the show. Well, it is in the show notes, but it's not. So part of what we do is people who follow us know, like basically we see articles, we read the PowerPot from Weekly, we look in our LinkedIn, we see a link, we throw it in a OneNote, and then every two weeks we kind of go through the OneNote, find out what's cool. So we might remove a few, we might add a few. I created an agent. I used agent builder because I thought, oh, why not use our own dog food from Microsoft? And I said, I'm gonna give you a link. I want you to give me the author, I want you to give me their LinkedIn profile and give me a summary of that particular article. We'll post that in the show notes and categorize it so it just gives us a little bit more context. So we're not looking at random links going, was this yours? Was this mine? Like, what was this one again?

SPEAKER_02

This is a week old. Yeah.

Nick

Yeah. So it was really cool. It generated it. Of course, there's a bit of iteration. And then I thought, ooh, what is the one thing that we're really bad at? Name pronunciation. So I went back and I said, Oh, do I want to update the agent? I said, Yeah, can you give me the the actual how to the sound out how to say the names of these authors? And it's like, yeah, no problem. Do-to-do, okay, we've done it. I've even renamed the agent. It's no longer content creator, it's now called uh phonetic names pronunciator. I'm going, great, but what about my what about the whole other bit that you did for me before? Yeah, yeah, we got rid of all that. Like, no. Bring it back? Yeah, can't bring it back. It's all gone. So I was like, oh, so basically to rebuild the agent with all that. I mean, talk about experimenting and swearing a little bit because it's like, no.

SPEAKER_02

I know, yeah, yeah. Oh no, but good thing you can bring it back. And also kind of, yeah, so one agent for one tool type of thing. And also before we started recording, we're like, yeah, so uh because then I yeah, I created a skill, and I was like, yeah, yeah, and I did this, and then it created a plugin for me. It's like so can so plug-in MCBs can be in plugins, but MCBs can have resources and skills and skills can have MCP and agents can have and then we kind of could just go like we use tools every day. We keep on top of all the news and updates updates, we get confused. I just want everyone else at home to hear this and go, it's not just me. No, it is definitely not just you. And as the only way I can describe it is that this mental map of how this fits together is still blurry and a little bit kind of, I'm just chasing these little blurry shapes. It's not crystallized, it's not crystal clear to me yet how this all fits in a structure, hierarchy, circle uh process process, not not figured out yet. So it's still work in progress if that helps anyone. It's like, yeah, it's like that for us too.

unknown

Yeah.

COE Starter Kit Support Shift

SPEAKER_02

Okay, um, cracking on. So no power platform boot boost podcast episode without a Yuka post, obviously, that we've established that long ago. And this time he knocked our talks off a little bit with the statement that CEOE starter kit for PowerPlatform, which is the uh solution that you would install in your environment to get an overview of all your flows and your apps and the data that flows through them and the environments and the owners and the all of it, right? That's how you start. You start all the customer relations with do you have COE? If not, let's install it, let's crack on. It was never a Microsoft product, so Microsoft cannot deprecate it. It's Microsoft supports it.

Nick

Yeah, which is COE is center of excellence. Yeah, it was the the history is it was never an official product, it wasn't a license or a SKU that you could buy. It was uh a tool of collection of flows and uh Power BI dashboards and whatever as a governance tool. Of course, within it was supported within Microsoft. It was Manuela Picture, I think her name was.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. The PowerCat team created it.

Nick

They sort of created it, maintained it, enhanced it. They had a year ago, they're having monthly updates as part of the newsletter here. The updates to the COE. Customers were getting excited about it, but more and more the Power Platform uh admin center started adding more built-in tools like supported tools. So we think managed environments, but looking at flow runs, looking at capacities, like all the things that the COE is meant to do, those governance things weren't being provided as a an open source or a freebie add-on. It was actually being now being baked into the power platform or admin, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

When you buy the very expensive license, the premium license, of course.

Nick

Right. So that now it's been announced that it's not it's not necessarily they're gonna delete it or remove it, but it's no longer gonna be enhanced or supported by an internal Microsoft team. So that was what Yuka brought up. The point was, well, they can't really deprecate it because there's nothing really to deprecate in a traditional sense.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, but if it was an official product from Microsoft, they would have deprecated it as they deprecate all other things, right? That they own and maintain and and keep. But this, of course, they can't do that with. It's an interesting little thing where you have a whole industry that for years and years have relied on this tool. It's been kind of it's one of those things where it's been con, like I said, continuously updated and petted and nurtured and kept alive. Uh, and so many customers have it and rely on it every day. And then suddenly they're not gonna well, and then we could also someone in the comments makes the point that, you know, there's APIs and there's endpoints, and there's kind of you can connect MCPs you can connect to to create your app on top. You could probably easily actually feed the solution to an agent, a coding agent, and have it create what you need. If you need a center of excellence, dashboard, governance, app, or whatever it is that you need, you could probably code it yourself. And that's probably also what they're seeing is that to maintain this code thing is very expensive and labor-intensive, and people can easily create it themselves. And then PPEC, like you said, with managed environments. If you pay for that, then yeah, yeah, you get those benefits.

Nick

And I would expect as this news begins to percolate, because I think the official my messaging is coming from Microsoft this week, is I expect the community community if you would step up and there was probably going to be a community probably driven repo or something that will have a version of this or will continue on with this. That's what we've seen that in the past as well. So, I mean, if you're looking forward to a way to gain a lot of notoriety, this could be something to take on and maintain. Um, and of course, the community will contribute to that. So we'll keep we'll keep our thumb on this and uh see how see how this evolves.

AI App Building And Model Strategy

SPEAKER_02

Which is a little bit ironic because the ribbon workbench, as we talked about earlier, was the other way around. It started as a community thing, and then Microsoft kind of embedded it into their own systems. Um and this will maybe go the other way around or something. I don't know. So yeah, let's keep tabs on it. And of course, if you want to contribute, like so the guys behind XRM Toolbox, they've now moved X Rom Toolbox to be part platform toolbox, and they're investing so much time and energy to rewrite and to refactor all the tools that we're used to and relying on for everyday work. They put their feed time into that. And of course, this is something that's close to your heart, and you know this your CUE started get in and out, and you want to help, then by all means, just dive right in there because yeah, people will appreciate that. So it's everyone to grab for sure. All right. Moving on, we have David Wyatt, also someone who comes up on this podcast a lot because we absolutely love his uh content. Uh, and also his brain works the same as my brain, so then it's easy for me to grab and go with this content. It's just the way that you are, right?

Nick

So yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And also David's very cool. He's one of the cool kids. I like to hang out with the cool kids. Another, so what what that what David's famous for is his blog post series. So this is a four-part series on developing with AI from low code to AI development, power apps, a cooler way to use code apps, how to create your own AI coding agent, and now finally power apps comparing different ways to create apps. What are your thoughts?

Nick

Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, we've been uh we see, of course, Charles and Josh are doing videos on this kind of stuff all the time. So again, this is another take on it. It's comparing different ways to create apps with AI. He, of course, talks about um, you know, vibe.powerapps.com, which we've all played with. It talks about generative pages, which of course built into model-driven apps. Um and then also about building a code app with GitHub Copilot, which is of course is something that I think a lot of people are focusing on, whether they're using GitHub Copilot or using Visual Studio Code or sorry, um, Claud code to build these things out. And it's interesting because he says sometimes it's a little bit citizen developer territory, goes out of citizen developer territory because they're talking about creating apps, creating with React and those type of frameworks. Um, but he's also talking about building a code app with JavaScript Plus. So not using React, but kind of going more to the bare bones way of building it. Um, like you said, he's using it in vanilla JavaScript instead of React, UI to add buttons for the CLI commands and those types of things. So it's just kind of interesting to show to see the different apps he's building, the different ways and compares pros and cons. So if you're again confused of a way to build power apps, there's a lot of good content out there, but this is yet another way of things that work well and they don't work well as they're going through the process.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And also what's interesting when he rounds up is he talks about how important the models are. Which is annoys, if I can say that, it annoys the That that's so important. So when he created this blog post, he used what he was using was Opus 4.5, it was the latest Opus, I think, that was out. And it talks about how um, yeah, okay, so along with higher opus and GPT uh 4.6 and also the the lower GPTs. And I mean it's the same. So we have without going into too much detail, we have policies that means that we cannot really use anthropic models with our customers, so we have to use the GPT ones. But of course, for my personal project, I can use whatever I want. And the difference is just night and day, and it why? And then I hear people at the office go, yeah, yeah, Claude had his moment, anthropic has had his moment. Now open it's open I has gonna come back and smash it out. GPT last latest GPT um model is knocking everyone's socks off, and I'm like, um no. But then also there's economy in this, right? You look at the Visual Studio Code and the model switcher, and you can see kind of yeah, this X and the 15x and how expensive it is. And it's you know the the latest OPUS, it's like what is it, 15 times what some of the other lower models says. And I'm like, wow, if you need to gauge your credits and how much you spend on these, then that becomes important, right? And again, sound like a broken record, right? Model for the right job. Suddenly it is, right? You want to do very complex coding, very complex architecture, very complex anything. Use Opus to create a plan and make it super detailed, and then pass it on to a developer coding agent which has a lower model, cheaper model to do the grunt work for you. Because then a plan is bulletproof. That is then kind of where the quality is, and then the the do the the developer monkey can just flog away at it, right? Because it it has that architect quality to it. So yeah.

Nick

But yeah And there's a whole there's a whole skill at building the skills and using the skills at the right time to reduce your how many times can you say skill? Uh this is like ignorance.

SPEAKER_02

We haven't we've have so much fun with uh so uh Scott Joe is learning uh Norwegian, and I've taught him this phrase which is gonna sound funny to all the Norwegians. So this is for all your Norwegians out there. Listen, I understand it sounds completely crazy, but it makes sense in Norwegian, right, guys? So that was my little segue for today. So this episode is then gonna be called Skills, right?

Nick

Yep, yep. We needed to figure that out. Cool.

SPEAKER_02

We did. Now we did. Okay. Another we need to expand our group. Another very someone will be mentioned on this podcast all the time, one of my favorite women in the whole world, and the black, is back. Anna's back, back and back. With time for the timeline. Yes, I've had ten coffees in a red bull. Don't ask, don't ask. Yeah, come on, you can do this. Ten, and this is also a tongue twister. Ten tips for the timeline. And I love this. So what are you writing? Never let the Ricca have Red Bull but to print it in.

Fixing The Timeline Pain Points

SPEAKER_01

No, no, no, I'm writing down the title ideas as I do. So 10 coffees in a Red Bull.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you might be onto something. Okay, but honest. So Timeline. And I mean this goes back to what we talked about earlier today, and we're gonna have yet another one of these where it's like AI model, AI agent stuff over here, and then over here, it's like nitty-gritty details in these apps that have been there since the dawn of time.

Nick

And all people But I say and things that drive people crazy sometimes, configuring the timeline, like the nuances involved and everything. We've we've learned on the projects we've worked on. I remember like on daily stand-ups, it was like the timeline this and timeline that, and it's not doing what we expect in the whole bits.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I think you can still see the scar for me kind of bashing my head against the wall here somewhere.

Nick

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so and Anna's been down that road and she's bashed her head against this as well. And she does what all great community people do. If you solve something for yourself and you have this framework around and some tips, then you share it with the world. So these are 10 definitely solid tips on how to improve or work and implement the timeline. For instance, always make sure to not put it on the first tab, make sure to put it on the second or on the third tab, it's name timeline or activities or whatever it is you want to, because that will increase the performance. Restrict the number of records, make sure to just show that the tables you want to display. You can do HTML formatting. I didn't know that. That was really cool to see. She created kind of special formatted cards depending on what kind of activities they were. And then yeah, use icons, automate, tests, things like that. But yeah, really dense, really great article, Anna. Thank you so much.

Nick

I I think this would be an awesome session at a at a user group or a conference or something. So Anna, get on it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

unknown

Cool.

Power Pages Logic And Event Links

SPEAKER_02

All right. On to other nice things. You'll look concerned. I don't know. Okay.

Nick

Yep. We're talking about from Alex Alexi. That's the next one.

SPEAKER_02

Olander Olashin.

Nick

Olander, Alex, Alex, Alexander Olashin. Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Alexander Olashin, thank you.

Nick

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Dancing with CRM.

Nick

Yeah, saw him, he was in Vancouver actually at CPPS, so it was really cool to see him there. Um, again, a great post on PowerPages, the backend trifecta. Again, he's talking about the whole bit of an evolution here, of course. The big thing is uh server logic. And I've actually used server logic in a pro uh project a couple weeks ago. It was one of those things where if we had the conversation like a few months ago, we would be kind of like stuck on okay, how are we going to solve this? Server logic basically came and solved the day. I said, I think I can do this in server logic, which is gonna address this problem. So his uh blog article goes through things like companion apps, launching cloud flows from power uh from PowerPages, which of course is another option, but talks about server logic and um, of course, how to use that, how to use it in the agentic tools and how to invoke that, and gives us a little bit of a how-to-choose because with some of these technologies doesn't necessarily mean we're not going to use Power Automate from PowerPages anymore, doesn't necessarily mean we're not gonna use companion apps, but gives it, he gives sort of a context of where to use what and when, which is a really good guide. Of course, he has a lot of experience in this area. So great article, Alexander. Definitely check it out if you're building power pages and considering server logic for to solve a problem in the future.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, 100%. We actually have the same same boat. Have a customer who's struggling with the the float triggers and security, and this is just saving the day. So um, yeah, and it's great to have his opinion on this for sure. And then moving on to something else, Megan Walker. We haven't talked about him her own podcast uh for a while, but talk about little thing, how to add to an output link for sessions or events in Customer Insights journeys. She's kind of teamed up or kind of so Amy Holden has created something. She's coding kind of uh a customer insights stuff all the time. She's hacking that. She has all the workarounds in the world for customer insights. If you ever want customer insight to do something that customer insights was not designed to do, call Amy. I'm like, she can just whip that thing into whatever she wants it to do, apparently. So um Megan is putting kind of on the back of something Amy did. She has evolved it to be to a script where you can add different parameters and add that to your email send out or whatever it is to kind of deep link to an event or registration site or whatever it is that you want, which is really, really cool.

unknown

Yeah.

Nick

And it gets away from it gets away from the your articles about getting away from the ICS files. Because this is probably something a lot of us have done uh in the past is created the ICS files as an attachment and set it out through Power Automate.

SPEAKER_02

In the past, I tried to do that for a community event just two weeks ago. That's how I found this freaking article. Because I was just, how do you export? How do I get that was what I was starting with because I thought, let me just grab this thing and I'll put it in the email and just forward it to everyone. That's fine. I couldn't export the IC ICS thing. And then that caught me on to, hmm, am I just kind of doing something because I've doing done it the same way for 15 years? Maybe I should check. And then I came across this is one of the things on my um that I searched for. And but I also saw you had it in there, so probably that's just came up somewhere. But yeah, nope, that's it. There's new ways of doing it, people.

Nick

Yeah, it's it's something because I saw this is something a few years back I struggled with this quite a bit, probably for the same reasons. The ICS file, the structure is very specific on how it needs to be structured, and if you even get that off by like a dot or a character, then you're you're kind of screwed.

SPEAKER_02

So yeah, free to and this is this is really cool because what you get is you know that button, like add to outlook. So you get that, and then you it's opens outlook and you have the thing already, and you can put like subjects and and body text and all this uh different metadata in there, and it's already created, which is really cool. So I think that's kind of the it it looks a little bit slick and slick and modern, which is also cool. Speaking of slick and modern and cool, did you see Charles Lamano LinkedIn today?

Copilot Co-Work And Work IQ

Nick

I did see it. Uh I didn't I didn't watch the whole video. We was talking about uh co-pilot co-work um to the frontier program. I did see Daniel did a session at Color Cloud. He did another one today on the the Microsoft 365 uh community call as well about co-pilot co-work um and the stuff you can do with it. And the fact now here's the interesting thing. I've been using Cloud Cowork. It works well for me as a single one-person company. And then all the things they're announcing about you know being able to import skills to be able to use at the bobble, I'm like, yeah, I had that in cloud co-work for the last few weeks. But of course, they're very much on a fast follow. And the benefit of the Microsoft co-pilot co-work, it is built for enterprises, it runs in the cloud. Yes, cloud co-works works well for someone like me, but if you're an enterprise where you have you know tens or hundreds of people, this is sort of the way to go. So we're beginning to see a lot of those features either show up in kind of the same way or their own Microsoft version of it. So there's pros and cons to each, but yeah, uh, definitely there's there's things. If you're if you're not onto Microsoft cowork yet, um it's definitely something to check out. You do need to get it turned on by your administrators. It is part of the frontier program if you're not part of that. But if this to me, these this way of working is the future of work for a lot of people. I think a year from now, we're just it's gonna be almost the same as using Outlooker Teams or cowork. It's just gonna be, yeah, I got my cowork to do this or whatever, right? It's just gonna be a thing.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And also the benefit of co- uh uh cobalt cowork is that it's automatically create uh connected to work IQ, which means it has access to you in a safe way to your inbox, to your calendar, to your colleagues, to your project meetings, to SharePoint, to your teams, the channels, everything, right? So it's innate, you can prompt it to do things and it keeps within the bounds and also within your teammates' fair, right? So it keeps to the bounds that are already there in a way, which is this kind of also in a safe space. It's very sandboxed. And also the what I liked, so what Charles actually demonstrated was how he asked Copilot to do something on his phone, and then he closed the app. It didn't, it runs in the background, and then he went over to his laptop and it brought it up and he was continuing to work, drawing from work IQ, bringing it all together, and then he flipped the switch and he went, okay, do something for me. Let me prep for this weekly meeting on the laptop. And then he picked it up on the phone, and then he said, All right, actually, do this for me every week. So it's a seamless thing, which is a bit of a hat you can dispatch with uh cloud co-work, but it's not really seamless. It's not that because yeah, that's what I wanted as well as I miss that kind of cloud aspect of cloud co-work. So actually, I do I still look forward to kind of getting um access to this and play with it because you know, if we're over our company, we don't have access to it yet. So yeah, that's one of the things I'm really looking forward to. And I think it's gonna be, like you said, a bit of a game, which is really cool. And also, I think so. I had a colleague with a friend of mine who works at Microsoft uh the uh yesterday, and shout out to Tim. And we had this conversation as well about what co-work can do in terms of dynamics easy five sales, customer service, how it changes the game, how you can, how it's not because a cloud will stop at what you give it access to. This Microsoft will just feed with modules. So, and it says that kind of in the in the post as well. Yes, you have the plugins and the interactions, bring your data, your tools, your skills, and then your systems into co-work, including Dynamics 365. And then it's like, watch what we're doing the next 30 days, and I think we're gonna that's what we're gonna see next. And I have no idea this is me just speculating. I'm thinking the next 30 days is gonna be biz apps. They're gonna they're gonna pull it in. Uh and then if they do that, then what does um marketing look like? What does customer service look like? What does sales look like? Because they've been w wanting to close that loop for so long. I just can't help to think then that that this is it, right? This is when we finally get that story together. And so yeah, uh, maybe next time or in the next episode after that, we'll have some news and updates on this, but stay tuned.

VS Code Plugins And Git Learning

Nick

Yeah, we'll definitely definitely almost keep an eye on what's going on in cowork across the board because it is like I think it is too league, it is game-changing, and it's it's just even like I said, and maybe not even necessarily using the the Microsoft version, but just in terms of how I work on a day-to-day basis, in terms of working with projects and a bunch of other things, it is it's just sort of amazing. And you just get it, it's like an assistant, you get it to go off and do its thing. Like even you and I had to do a quick little video recording last week for the Agent Academy. I actually asked Cloud Copilot, um, or Claude Co-Pilot, Cloud Co-work, go book this meeting and find a spot. And it went off and did it. It was able, I have the connector so it can read for my Outlook, but then it actually said, Is it okay if I open the I can't write to Outlook with that connector? Is it okay if I open the browser and go to your Outlook online? Like, sure. And it went ahead and did it. And like, so again, I'm supervising it, but it's still amazing what it can do.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure.

SPEAKER_01

All right.

SPEAKER_02

As long as it stays within the bounds. I'm just bringing the events in because they were missing for some reason. Um, so I'm just gonna pull these in. Um we have two small other things.

Nick

Yeah, did you wanna well there's there's a whole bunch more stuff that we could probably go over, but one thing I want to talk about was the we're talking about skills and plugins and things like that. We talked about last time the Dataverse skills plugin. I think we talked about that last time. I tried it out. It's actually pretty slick. I installed it. Um, I'm finding I'm living in Visual Studio Code pretty much all the time now. It was able to go and create a solution for me. It was able to create a table, it was able to do the relationships and everything like that. That was pretty cool. It did stumble a little bit in connecting to the MCP server. I did have to interject and do some extra setup on that, but that worked pretty cool. I also installed the Power Platform Architect plugin. I haven't done a ton of stuff with that yet, but again, we we talk about these skills and these things, um, and they're coming from people within Microsoft that are building these out. Again, sort of free or open source or example tools, however you want to call it. But it's sort of like if you're building, I am spending less and less time in the maker portal. I don't think I've created a table using the maker portal in a long time. I've been actually doing it completely through VS Code. Again, these tools are changing, and uh it's definitely interesting to check out some of these plugins um for the power platform. So there's the ones that, of course, we talked about already months, a month or two ago, but the one that creating uh websites using Claude or GitHub Copilot, we talked about the Dataverse skills. This is about um a solution architect skills. It is kind of blowing my mind how rapidly it's changing, but I'm also I'm kind of loving it because it's giving me a new sense of creativity because I'm within VS Code, I'm working with code, but I have these agents that are sort of writing the code for me and I'm supervising the process, but being able to generate code and solutions in a much faster pace than I could before.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing the same thing. I have the same energy around it. I've now worked on how I can let my old laptop sit at home with my Visual Studio Code open, and then I can use GitHub to communicate with it and give it tasks, and then I can submit a pull request when it's done, and I can interact with it from the office, and I can connect it to different apps, and then how can I also switch between my work profile and my kind of my community profile to do different things? And how can I configure? So I've configured a context switch to make sure that I don't use models that I can't use for my customers when I'm uh and then I can switch cleanly between the two. I've created a repo for all my agents. So whenever I pull some, like you said, you have all these resources, all these different agents. I want to store them all in one place and also I want to teach them. So if my work computer learns something and that because the agent kind of uh manifest or the files, they're local to the to the laptop, really. So it's stored on your local machine. But I want that to be stored in the cloud so that once one of my architects learns something, then I can push that to GitHub and then actually my working computer then can learn from what happened on the session at my home laptop type of scenario. And these are things I would never be able to do because I don't understand Git. So I've learned a lot about Git and GitHub and where it comes from. And and now, yeah, it it's so and I've made a complete mess of everything. I've I mucked up so many repos, so many branches, and so many everything's like slashed. But now I know better. So now I can clean it up and then I can go in and I can do it again, and I can do it properly because I've learned. And I love that interaction and the rapid learning and the not having to be stuck in the mundane blocker that we used to be stopped at because it used to be that freaking semicolon, and there's no learning in it. It's just a blocker, and it took us so long to get past it, but now I'm able to access actual learning without as many of the small blockers.

Community Shoutouts And Upcoming Events

Nick

Yeah. And what I like about it too is as like uh using Claude code or these tools, as I was going through it, it's giving you it's giving you the narrative of what it's thinking about, why it's doing a different approach, and showing you the code. And I've actually, from a learning capability, I'm looking at that like, oh, that's really brilliant. Or but you you still get a sense of hmm, that's not how I wanted you to do it as well. Okay, your reasoning is wrong, so you can correct it, you can course correct it. But also there's certain things like, okay, here's how I'm thinking of doing this. And it says, Yeah, you could do that, but here's what you're gonna run into. Maybe you want to do it this way, and here's why. And then you have a bit of that planning conversation before you actually go and start building stuff. And for me, this is how I'm doing and learning at the same time, which is really cool as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, it's so energizing, and I love being kind of enthusiastic about these things again because it's been a bit of a prout for me in this kind of because I don't have the time, but now I really so when I come home from work now, I'm actually diving right in and uh getting involved with the with the hobby projects again, which is really cool. Um, and speaking of hobby projects, a few some friends of ours have new podcasts. So it's and yeah, they it's like Joe says in the first episode, uh so Joe, Egriffin, and Sebastian, they're doing a new podcast called Unresolved Dependencies. And they launched it on April 1st, and so many people thought it was an April Fool's joke. It was not. But what was an April Fool's joke was that the podcast would be about governance. And so many people were disappointed when they learned that it's not gonna be about governance. Can you we're so geeky, come on. It's just the two of them chatting like an unmarried couple that they are there bickering and they're chatting, and Joe's traveling, and Sebastian's eating, and and then somewhere in there there's uh mention of you, and there's the mention of me, and a mention of this podcast.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Because and I helped them out in a little bit of the beginning. We had a meeting about you know what podcast tools to use and all that, and if I had any tips and advice, and also I'm uh helping them out with their cover. Actually, I think they switched now, so now it's actually them. Yeah, yeah. Joe ch switch it. So I I uh did the editing and the photos uh for the podcast. So if you like, and it's like yeah, as I said in the beginning, Joe did the market research, and there was a gap in the podcast market for two white young men in the tech industry talking about nothing. Definitely a gap that needed to be filled. We don't have enough of those podcasts, so yeah, great job guys for taking that responsibility seriously and diving into it. And uh yeah, hop at it. I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_01

Check it out.

SPEAKER_02

Check it out. I mean, oh I l I love these guys. Oh, I laugh so hard. It's so funny. And then I zone up because they're talking about something that just don't register. But usually for me, that's the techie part.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So when they talk about project operations, they're like, okay, my mind is zoning out now. And then there's something about what Seb had for dinner. I'm like, ooh.

Nick

There you go. Yeah. And the fact that he had and I thought I I give good good credit to Seb for explaining to Joe the difference between bodybuilding and powerlifting. It's like, okay, yeah, like, come on, Joe, you should know this by now.

SPEAKER_02

Like, so poor yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. You need to listen. It's it's it's fun. Uh and listen to the first for first episodes. And also I wanna just a little shout out to if you kind of obviously listen to this podcast and you got this far, you'd probably enjoy the podcast format of wherever it's listening because otherwise he would be long gone by now. But if you also wanted to check out some written form newsletters, then the Marxville Power Platform community newsletter may be something for you. Every month comes out and it's uh written documentation of whatever came out from the PowerPlatform the last month. So check that out. And you are home, meaning I guess you're not coming to Europe for Dynamics Minds, or maybe you are.

Nick

I am. I know you're yes, going to Slovenia for Dynamics Minds. Got two sessions there. Um, one on Dataverse, all the things you've forgotten about Dataverse that are still very important. And also I think on um basically it's I think vibe engineering, but really about agentic coding and a lot of the stuff I've been learning over the last few weeks, building my own thing and adding skills to my projects and the whole bit using the MCP servers. I'm going to kind of tie that all into make it more uh hopefully very approachable to makers so they can get in and start using these tools. And it's a whole new way of building power apps. Um and then from there I fly directly to Warsaw, Poland for the World Bench Press Championships. The timing is not the best in terms of everything, but don't worry, we got it all worked out.

SPEAKER_02

If you just lift enough people up on the dance floor, you'll be fine, right? So you can use that as a kind of a preamble, right? So if you lift people, yeah.

Nick

So that's gonna work. And then yeah, and then happening right after, I don't neither of us are attending uh in person, but you can attend online is Microsoft Build, which is Microsoft's big huge developer conference happening in San Francisco. Uh pretty exciting city. It'd be really cool to be there live, but it's like happening right after, right after I think I'm still in Europe at that time. But uh but yeah, looking forward to that because you can attend online and you can actually see a lot of what Microsoft's announcing. And I'm guessing a lot more stuff about agentic coding and agents and co-work and the whole shebang.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Nick

About that. And then, of course, and then we're we're back together at uh European Power Platform Conference. Again, doing the Agent Academy live and in person again. For those of you who missed it at Color Cloud, here's your next opportunity to earn your earn your badge. Well, there's lots of opportunities. Of course, you could do it on your own. Um, what's we don't have listed is there is the Agent Academy or online May 12th. Um we'll put the link in. That's an online event that the advocates team is is putting on. Um, you'll be able to attend that. But going back to EPPC, uh June 29th to July 2nd, I believe. So we have the workshop. I have a session on again building power pages using the agent tools. And you what did what did you have a session as well, right?

SPEAKER_02

No, because I'm on the content team, so we don't select ourselves for sessions. So actually, the fact that I have a workshop is a bit on the edge, but the team was so adamant that we needed this workshop to be in there. So I'm allowed to have this workshop even though I'm on the content team.

Nick

But a lot of our friends are a lot of friends and community people that we know will be there presenting this week. So this episode comes out as this episode's coming out. There's the uh European Collaboration Summit, which is happening right now in Germany. I'm looking on LinkedIn, I think everybody's there except the two of us by the looks of it.

SPEAKER_02

Cologne, I mean, come on. And it's three conferences, it's one. It's the BizApp Summit, it's the Collaboration Summit thing, and then there's an YAI Summit thingy, all at the same time, in the same conference.

Nick

Like, why don't you and then of course in the fall there's a whole whack of stuff coming up, which we're we're getting it's beginning to trickle in and find out, but that's after the summer, so we'll worry about that then. Next episode, May 20th. So looking forward every two weeks. We've been doing this now for well over three years, believe it or not. And no end in sight. Every two weeks, we're releasing another episode, and we appreciate all of you following and listening, giving your feedback, um, deal commenting, liking. Of course, we we already, I think there was about four or five things that we didn't get to talk about today because you guys keep producing so much amazing content. Hopefully, we'll be able to talk about it next time from a f a few of you folks, and we'll get to your stuff.

SPEAKER_02

We will. And until then, uh stay safe and have fun. See you then. See you. 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, Ulrich Ackerbeck and Nick Dolman, and see you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform News.

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Nick Doelman

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Ulrikke Akerbæk

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