Power Platform Boost Podcast

Build Bonanza (#88)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 88

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This episode starts with a recap of the biggest 📣 news and announcements for the Power Platform ecosystem from Microsoft BUILD last week. We are still buzzing from learning about Microsoft IQ, the new Autopilot from Microsoft called Scout🦞, the new Closed Loop Learning 👩‍🎓 for Power Apps MCP Server, and the Connector Inventory 🗃️ for governance. 

Our friends from The Cloud Advocacy 🥑 team at Microsoft published some great resources again this week, including a guide by April Dunam to help us understand when to use Sout, Copilot Cowork, M365 Copilot, or Copilot Studio. Scott Durow posted a great visual walkthrough about the completely new ✨️ experience for building with Copilot Studio! It's not just a facelift - it has been rebuilt from scratch, and the whole mental model has changed! If you need to deep-dive 🥽, Resa Dorani has you covered with a video showing all the new bells and whistles. 

There is a bunch of new content from the community again this week! It is an exciting time to be a technologist, that's for sure. We see you guys building all kinds of cool 🤩 stuff and bringing us along for your learning journey👨‍🏫. Listen through 🎧️ the episode or cut directly to the show notes 📒 for content from Kyle Daigle, Srihari Srinivasa, Kent Weare, Suyash Kshirsagar, Yina Arenas, Sean Astrakhan, Charles Sexton, Victor Dantas, Andreas Adner, Ritu Joshi, Valentin Gasenko, David Zoonekyndt, Fredrik Neiderud, Diana Birkelbach, David Wyatt, and Kevin Holland 👏 

We have already started to build the list of items to discuss for next time, so make sure you stay tuned and don't miss an episode by subscribing to our channels wherever you want to get notified about the latest episode.

Until then, take care, have fun, and stay true to yourself! 🥰 Nick and Ulrikke out 🫡 x


BUILD

News


Events

European Power Platform Conference
June 29th to July 2nd 2026, Copenhagen 

Microsoft Community Days Montreal 2026
August 21, 2026, Montreal 

Helish Summit
September 17, 2026 - Helsinki, Finland 

Nordic Summit
September 21-22, Billund, Denmark 

Power Platform Community Conference
Las Vegas | October 27-29, 2026



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Workflow Words Everywhere

Ulrikke

And then agents flow agent this is funny. Agent flows are now classic workflows.

Nick

But what about the other classic workflows?

Ulrikke

I don't know.

Nick

So they now classic Dataverse workflows or CRM workflows.

Ulrikke

Are they like processes? Dynamic 365 processes. It's gonna it they're not. Of course they're not. But it's the new workflow experience that is going kind of swim lane-y or plugins, yeah, and projects.

SPEAKER_00

I remember I don't know, of course. Yeah.

Ulrikke

Just let's leave it. I mean at some point I'm gonna make one of those carousels to tell people about all the places in Microsoft stack that the word workflow appears. And then we're gonna have these are the hundred workflow types that Microsoft has created for themselves. Yes.

Nick

So of course like George Foreman naming his five kids George.

Ulrikke

Yeah. It's exactly that.

Nick

Yeah.

Build Highlights And ePPC Plans

Ulrikke

Hello. Hey Nick. Hey, how are you doing?

Nick

Doing good. I'm in my home studio for the yeah, the rare times this year. And I was actually looking at the calendar. I think our next episode we're gonna be recording, probably if we record it in Copenhagen, that's the scheduled week. So we'll but this year will be a record of how many times we record in the same place, which is pretty cool.

Ulrikke

Yeah. And eBPC is gonna be awesome. I'm so looking forward to it. So we'll make a eBPC special. How about that?

Nick

Yeah, sounds good. Like uh Neil Benson actually asked if uh he said if we were gonna do a live recording there. So maybe we might have a studio audience of one or many. We'll see.

Ulrikke

Maybe we'll see. Right. But for now, let's focus on what has happened in the last two weeks. And top of mind is build. Because that thing just keeps giving. So do you want to go through some highlights from build before we dive into the community stuff?

Microsoft Scout Joins The Copilots

Nick

For sure. So yeah, build, of course, is the big Microsoft uh developer conference. It was held in San Francisco. Of course, you know, the big this is where, again, they save a lot of their big uh announcements and everything. So I kind of gave a little bit of a hint last episode when I said something about OpenClaw. And so Microsoft, of course, took OpenClaw and then they decided to release something called Microsoft Scout, which is kind of based on that same concept. So here we are, we have uh Microsoft 365 co-pilot. We have that's the freebie version, then there's the paid version, and then we also have Microsoft 365 co-pilot co-work, and then we also have co-pilot studio, and now we have co-pilot or scout as well as all of these things. And again, it's supposed to make us more productive and everything else. And of course, it's part of the frontier. So it's not just turned on. You have to be part of the frontier program, which we've talked about before, which is effectively a setting and the back end you're inmins have to do. But from what I understand, to get Scout up and running, you need to also have purview installed and configured as well, because this scout kind of goes and does work for you on its own. It's very proactive. It's one of these things they call autopilots. So we started with co-pilots, now we're on to autopilots. And I know we even said before co-pilot is an autopilot, and now it is.

SPEAKER_00

Now it is.

Nick

Or and I I think in terms of a productivity thing, it's great. You can hand off something to Scout or even like I find co-work works kind of like this as well. So this is where, for me, anyway, the lines get a little bit blurry. But from what I understand, Scout will also have access to your local machine as well, your local files and everything, like your email, your Teams chats, your SharePoint documents, and kind of the whole gamut, and then be able to do work based on that and learn as well of how you work and do that kind of thing. So I'm I'm pretty excited. Like they, I mean, I'm using tools. I mean, we've talked about this before using Claude. I use Cloud Cowork actually now, and then even this week, or last week rather, I had to do a proposal and I was like, okay, I've been putting it off because I'm I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of writing proposals, but I knew all the content. I knew so yeah, we all love PowerPoint. And uh so long story short, I basically got, you know, went to Cloud Cowork, which I could have gone to Microsoft Scout or Microsoft Cowork, kind of to do the same thing and said, take a look at all the emails from this particular client, our meeting notes, the whole bit. Here are my thoughts. I want to propose these three things and go. And like and it turned away and I went off and did other work. And then about an, you know, probably less than an hour later, it did pop up with a couple of questions along the way, which is good. It's kind of like hand it off to an executive assistant. They might come back and say, Well, did what did you mean by this? And what did you mean by that? So get some clarity. And then they actually it actually produced a very viable proposal. And then as I read through it, I basically and I use uh I use something called whisper flow. And I've talked about this another before. I'm using my keyboard less and less these days. And as I was reading through the document, I would just kind of go in whisper flow back to my co-pilot and say, okay, on page three, fix this. On page four, I met this. Do to do to do. Everything looks good. And then basically, once I sort of had my review notes, then I went and then I just gave it back to the agent and it chugged through and got everything done. Saved me definitely a couple hours, and it produced something that I had no problem sending off to my client, kind of knowing full well that they're gonna take that PDF and probably load it into their co-pilot and say, Yeah, just give me the summary, give me how much it's gonna cost, and the give me the bullet points kind of thing, right? So this is, I think, kind of the part of the world we're living in. And again, with Microsoft tying everything together, it's it's kind of exciting tying, but also the fact that they want purview for Scout enabled as well also shows that these tools can kind of, I don't want to say have a mind of their own, but they could make decisions and giving potentially what you're giving them access to could could could kind of go down a few rabbit holes. And I mean there's there's examples on YouTube of people turning on like uh open claw, for example, and it burning tokens, and also when they give it credit card information, it often does a bunch of things. There's one person on YouTube I watch, Hannah Fry. She's more of a scientist, mathematician, but tried to call an open claw experiment and gave it a name, and this thing went and built a whole mug kind of online store based on a few things. So these are the anyways, from productivity side, exciting, also a little bit scary as well. You need to make sure the guardrails are in place. And I think that's whole Microsoft's big thing with all this. The fact that it is within the Microsoft 365 kind of environment there. We have all of these, you know, these guardrails and these governances sort of baked in, kind of is a as a makes makes it a much safer sandbox to uh you know let these agents loose and work within the context and also learn how you work and make things more efficient. Is that going to give us more time? Probably not, because now we're just going to end up doing more. But that's kind of a whole other conversation. So that's my take on it. I'm just curious, what what are your thoughts? Or do you agree or disagree with me?

Ulrikke

I don't dare to disagree with you. No, no. You're spot on from what I can tell. I mean, I think the difference between Scout and the other ones is it's proactive. So it's kind of marketed as what you give it access to will then define what it will be able to do on your behalf. So I think the idea is that it will trigger on things that each sees that needs to be done and prepare it for you and then surface it for you for you to take action on. And it's like you said, you know, proposals and stuff. I mean, how how long until we get to send our customers MD files, right? So I think this is the evolution. Then we'll see more of these autopilots. Um, but I just wanted to mention a good resource that I found from April Dunham and the advocacy team, because she posted a one of those documents on uh LinkedIn and to kind of separate between the, because you mentioned the four big ones in the beginning, just to give people a bit of help to decide when to use what, because that's always what it comes back to. And so she said, so we have one question to define which one to use for what, and it's where does the work need to happen? So from her kind of walkthrough, it's if your work needs to be done on your local machine, Scout is the right tool to use. And this is of course within the Microsoft context. So Cloud co-work will work from your machine or from your phone or whatever device you've installed it on, but it's not Microsoft ecosystem. So Scout is kind of Microsoft co-works local machine persona, if you want, or tool. So that acts on your with you from your machine, but also as access to your online stuff and your work stuff, right? Co-pilot co-work is dedicated delegated in the Marcel 365 cloud, meaning it's for your team. So if the works need to happen in the Microsoft 365 space with your team, that's the right tool to use. And Marcel 365, the normal one that we all have access to, that's mostly for you quick question things in your context in the cloud, in a way, but also on your phone. It kind of crosses the different devices. And then Copilot Studio now becomes for your organization to build new stuff. So I think kind of the builder experience in this context is a bit muted because it's more about how you use it. So it's tools for you, not tools to build agents for your organization, which I really like. And the overview is is very good. It has a few kind of ways to think about and mental models for how to look at the three different, or sorry, the four different things. So yeah, very well done, April. And uh it's cool to see the autopilots coming in. And of course, this is the first one. So they turned Claw into Scout, which is an autopilot. And this is the first one of many autopilots, as far as I can see, which is pretty cool, I think, that we will be able to see more of these. And of course, we also saw Microsoft IQ. We've heard about the IQ stack. We've had WorkIQ, which is Microsoft 365, uh SharePoint Online, your kind of Microsoft space and the personal productivity space and collaboration. But also we have Foundry and Fabric IQ. And now Microsoft IQ is now generally available across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, and Copilot Studio. So it's kind of the tech works kind of leg, and it kind of finalizes the last of the four. So work IQ will kind of interact with Microsoft IQ in this way, and is the kind of work intelligence layer, of course. Fabric IQ is the business data, and then foundry IQ is the is the AI stack. So this is very interesting. And also work IQ API become general available on June 16th. So yeah, that's pretty cool.

Nick

Yeah, by the time this is published, uh they'll be they'll be out and hopefully not shut down again.

Ulrikke

But

Fable 5 Suddenly Gets Disabled

Ulrikke

yeah. Yeah, so that's yeah, that and that brings us to another thing that we wanted to talk about, right? Because it was re re rah rah rah, finally Fable 5 available in Foundry, and then the next day it was disabled everywhere. So I was I I had I've been uh planning the interior trip with the kids using Fable, and I know you're gonna because it's yeah, it costs a lot of tokens. Well, not yet, it's included now in in Claude at least. Uh so I know it's not the right tool for the right job. I just wanted to see kind of what the difference was and how it would kind of tackle that whole job. And then you said, I don't want to use it because I don't want to get reliant on it. I don't want because it's probably gonna be so good, and then I'm gonna be hooked, and then I'm gonna spend all those tokens. So I was like, Yeah, you're right, maybe I'll just add it down a little bit. But but yeah, uh, and now it's shut down everywhere.

Nick

Yeah, it was an interesting thing because it was it was one of those things where like I saw it came out, like, okay, I I I was curious because I thought, oh, wouldn't it be cool to, you know, build uh you know, build an app or a website or something using one of the other models and then compare it to Fable. And I thought, oh, that'd be cool. Like, you know, build a PowerPages site with the Fable model turned on, build one with uh with Opus, with Sonnet, and haiku just to to compare the experiences. But then it was just funny because then I saw something on uh YouTube or or uh Instagram or something about you know how Fable is now shut down. Like someone put one of those clickbaity titles, and I'm like, okay, whatever. Like, you know, it's too good that it was shut down. And I'm like, okay, what's and then actually then I actually saw on the like the the other news that yeah, it was a directed by the US government, and they basically said that nobody outside of the US, like no non-US citizens, including non-US citizens working within the US, should have should have access to it because they're worried about jailbreaking capabilities and stuff. Anthropic is like there's zero way to be able to police how people act who is accessing these systems, so they basically shut it off for everybody across the board.

Ulrikke

Yeah.

Nick

And until they sort of get this all sorted out. And then, you know, again, I mean, this is again the the anthropic is an empathizing that those there is no such thing as a perfect protection against jailbreaks, but even that the current models out in the market now are susceptible to the same concerns that the U.S. government had specifically about Fable. Now, it might be uh, you know, this Fable could do it so much easier and faster and it's more accessible or whatever. But it's very interesting. This is the first I've heard of a government body stepping in and blocking an AI service or whatever. And we've we've had that question before. I've actually had that in one of the panels I did last year at the Power Platform Conference. Someone asked me, they said, you know, do you think the government should step in and block this? And I said, if they can't because of competition. The US government shuts this down. Well, the the Chinese government is going to allow their stuff and flood the market. And it's going to be, it's, it's, we're in an arms race here. So interesting. Well, this will be something to keep an eye on to see how this plays out. I suspect that probably um Anthropic will put in some other guardrails and controls and satisfy the U.S. government again, because part of this is also follow the money as well, and they'll be back up and running with some version of Fable probably within the next couple of weeks. That's my guess. I could be wrong. But interesting little news thing. Because the thing is with how this relates to Microsoft stuff, Fable was uh surfacing within Foundry as one of the models to use because Microsoft is a fast follow with this stuff, and of course, they have a relationship with Anthropic. So they're immediately kind of tapping into these capabilities. But now, like everything, you still see Fable listed, but it's grayed out, it said not currently available. So it's almost like it's not like it's disappeared. It's kind of an a holding pattern right now, let's say.

Ulrikke

Yeah, and that's of course because there are people in the world that can use it. So of course they can't remove it. It's just that in our region, we can't. And of course, the backbone of this is the mythos class model that Anthropic had to kind of dial back a little bit on that found all the security vulnerabilities across the board. And this is very interesting, I found, because Fable is a Mythos class model, but for non-security work, which means to me, how I read that is the thing that made Mythos so powerful, the thing that actually discovered all the security breaches, has been removed from Fable 5, which I find really interesting. Because how, why would you have something? Well, of course, it it adds to what you were saying, that when something becomes too powerful, actually we need to take a second look at this. And probably that's what they did as well. They couldn't really release Mythos to the market as it was because it was able to actually highlight all the you can't give that tool to everyone, but it was kind of built for the long-running co-jobs, the analytic analytics across different environments. It was designed to work for longer and deeper than any other model, and then also to track progress and to really learn. So I feel this is a new class of agents that we're gonna see more of. And Fable Five was just the first one. And I'm I'm with you. Of course, they have to release it to the market again at some point. But it's interesting to see the politics across alongside all of this. Um, so of course, we have articles and uh and uh and posts that go with this in the show notes for you to read more about it when it comes, when it surfaces again.

Closed Loop Agent Learning Arrives

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

Ulrikke

So I I I did have a few other one other thing that came out of build that I wanted to touch on. Um actually two things. So the first one is the closed loop learning via agent feed and power apps mcp server. So Microsoft at Build, they introduced the closed loop learning for agents that are connected to the MCP server for Power Apps. It's and then starting with the data entry tool. So every connection a user makes through the agent will persist and be structured in memory. So on future runs, it will learn from your behavior. I think that's the idea. And also not just from you, but from your colleagues. So it's organization-wide so that actually, and this will be the differentiator. I think because a lot of organizations are adopting AI, but you kind of get the feeling that everyone's doing this. So I need to be in the race to adopt the same tools that my competitors are, but then at the tool level, it becomes about how you're using it. This to me is a different approach. This is how much you use it. So I think this is another layer of the competitive stack, if you will. So that now it's not about do you adopt AI and how do you use it, but also how much you use it and how widely for it to learn. So this is also comes down to the new Foundry tooling, it's the same thing. You can all adapt all the models and create your agents in Foundry. But now the tuning makes it possible for you to tune your agents in Foundry in a completely new way that will set you aside from your competitors. So I see a lot of marketing around this kind of differentiating, learning, adopting that rewards your usage on a different level than just creating tokens. So it's and it comes back to something we were saying last episode as well. It's it's all token generating in a way. So if you're a conspiracy theorist, you might say, well, this is just another one of those, oh yeah, use it more and you will be better. It's true, but it also means you will consume more tokens. So yeah. But I I just wanted to make sure that everyone was on top of that as well, that that is now uh agent feed and uh powerhaps MTCP server will now be learning from how you use it.

Nick

Yeah, and it's it's interesting in other agents. I've seen this sort of begin to percolate up, and it's pretty cool because it said, Oh, based on what you did on this thing, we're you know, we're gonna apply this. And it's like, okay, how like that's freaky. How did you know that? I was like, oh, it's within the same context or the same project file or whatever. So yeah, that would just and and you know, it's just those annoying things like spell check constantly spelling something a certain way. Well, once you sort of correct it, then it's good going forward. Like that's a very simplistic example, but I think that's the concept and that's how I understand it from a much bigger scale of learning and just being better as a tool itself because it will, you know, keep track of all of these things over time.

Ulrikke

Yep.

Connector Inventory For Power Platform

Ulrikke

And then another one, the the last one that I wanted to surface from Build uh is the connector inventory for governance. Because I looked at kind of power platform specific news, and this is also quite big. So we have talked a lot about connection and connection references in the past for PowerPlatform, especially related to Power Automate Flows, which can be a bit of a pickle when it comes to ALM and moving solutions from one environment to another. Now, this is a way for you to see the whole inventory of the connectors and connections that you use in every Canvas app, model driven app, cloud flow, agent flow, 365 agent from both Copile Studio and Marcel 365 Copilot, Agent Builder, so that you can get a holistic view of everything that is going on. It will keep track of your flow triggers and all the triggers you put in your agents and all of that jazz. So for from a governance perspective, it's super important. And I think it was public preview on since uh on June 2nd. So it's not GA yet. But I think this is a great way for you to, and it's one of those things where it not being GA means that not all the regions have the solutions needed or the scaffolding needed for it to work. Uh, but also this is not an end product thing. This is something you will see showing up in your environment. And when it shows up, you can of course use it. So you can rely on it when it shows up.

Nick

But uh, and yeah, it's more of a tool, so it won't really affect your production systems per se, but it will just help you kind of manage and admin. So as a preview tool, I think it's still very viable to use. I think that's sort of the difference between a preview and a product side versus a tooling side. And we've talked about this before as well.

Dataverse Plugin Changes How We Build

Nick

The other, the other thing from build that I saw, the one actually one of the sessions I did see kind of drilling down a little bit more into the details, but it was called the Microsoft Dataverse plugin, um, unleash and coding eight-inch on the enterprise. And this is by uh Kent Weir and Shury Ash Sue Kishir Shigar.

Ulrikke

And don't worry about it. This is when we'll get agents to fill in with your voice to say perfectly.

Nick

Yeah. But it was one of it was a really interesting video. They go through the whole process. And this is something I've been using. Uh, I demoed this, I did a webinar last week. I have this installed in like all my projects now because it's just so cool. It's the you know, the Dataverse plugin basically it has those those guardrails and things. But once you've installed this, then you can do things like get an agent to create tables. Create solutions, create publishers with the right prefix, do the right relationship matching, even do things like create model-driven apps. You can define the forms and things like this. So, and I am working on some more content to you know be released hopefully over the next few weeks. But trying to understand if you're a maker and you're living in the maker portal, I mean that's good. Install, if I've said this before, install Visual Studio Code. Even if you're a maker, it's more than a developer tool, and it will save you so much time on the tedious tasks in terms of creating the tables and creating all of this stuff very quickly and do a really good job of it compared to some of the other tools we've seen before. So uh, you know, Kent and Shariash went through all of this stuff. They demoed a lot of these things, they had a whole little bit of storyline around that. It's definitely one of the highlights that I saw from Build in terms of my what affects my day-to-day work and kind of really, I think, changes how we, and I think we've talked about this before, how we build apps, low-code apps, natural language being the purest form of low code, going forward with these tools and plugins. And of course, there's the PowerPages plugin and the Canvas app plugins and all these co-pilot studio plugins as well. Um, I'm not sure. I don't know if we have the the link in, but uh Sean Asterkin did a d a video of creating an agent within Visual Studio Code for essentially uh a co-pilot studio agent and kind of said, This is how I'm doing this now. It's just forget the maker interface, go here and do it. So definitely a different way of thinking, different way of working, but for me anyway, and a few others, I think huge productivity gains.

Ulrikke

Yeah. And I I I just showed uh a buddy of mine just we had a conversation about kind of a he had a bit of an issue or a challenge, and I was trying to help him come get over it. And I asked, you know, how have you kind of asked A about AI about this? Because it was building a couple of studio agent, and he's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm uh yeah, I'm doing it. I'm asking, you know, used AI from the beginning. And I was like, well, it's because when I use my tools, it kind of gives me the solution. So I'm just curious, kind of, can you show me? And he it turns out he'd been using Chat GPT and asking it, saying, You are a Dynamics 365 developer, you're an expert, and then asked it to solve it for him. And I was like, Well, you know that there are tools out there that actually know dynamics in Dediverse. He's like, Well, isn't it just the same? I'm like, no. And I I remember talking to Sarah Lagerquest after, I'm sorry, Sarah Lagerquist, after a color cloud when she was in Scott's workshop, and she's like, actually, this has changed my life. I will no longer use the maker portal. This is the way forward. And I know that at EPPC, you can get workshops and you can get sessions that will help you get started. So if you're still stuck in the I think I can just chat with an AI chat and get the same experience, it's probably just the same underneath. It is not. This is a game changer. This changes everything. And I was kinda I think this message needs to be said clearly like this, because I'm not sure people realize if they haven't used these tools this way, I don't think they understand how much of a difference it is. Apparently they don't. I talked to someone last week that didn't. So just making the point that no, it's not the same. And this is a tool, it's not just another chat.

Nick

Yep.

Ulrikke

So yeah.

Nick

Yeah. And I did a I did a webinar last week for the Canadian cloud community, which is effectively the same session that'll be giving at ePPC, but basically building now, this is building an SPA PowerPages site. I do not go in the maker portal at all, not until the very end just to preview the site directly. I even so far as creating my Dataverse environment, creating the publisher, creating the solution, creating the tables, creating the whole website, uploading it. Everything was done within the context of the terminal window. Now I use Claude, use GitHub Copilot as well. So yeah, I mean, I I run into the same thing. I said, Are you a guy, you know, I, you know, talk to customers and I'm showing them these things that are they're developers. And I said, if you're using AI, oh yeah, I I go into ChatGPT and I get it to do stuff, like you can do it directly in the code.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah, and then they copy code and I think it's good and it doesn't get it right. And then and yeah, it's it's incredible how big of a difference it is, and also the models you use. So back to the intra-rail kind of planning. I I use Chat GPT on my phone when I'm driving so that I have it in kind of speech mode, and they kept just mucking things up and it didn't do what I wanted to do. And then I discovered Cloud also have the same thing now. So I switched to that, and it was just day and night. It makes such a big difference. So I mean, I'm sorry, Microsoft and OpenAI, but actually Cloud Models is just killing it at the moment. Even chat to you know, DBT5 isn't isn't good enough, especially not when you have Sonnet and Opus and of course Fable. And also, I mean, we we talked about the tools that Sean is using last time. So if you're curious about the new tools that you can use to create Copilot Studio agents from GitHub Copilot Visual Studio Code, you can check out the last episode for the links to the skills that you can get from there. And also talking about Copilist Studio, that's kind of also changed a little bit since last year.

Copilot Studio Rebuild And New Modes

Ulrikke

Actually, they freaking rebuilt the whole thing from ground up because that's what you can do with AI, right? So they probably used their own tools to rebuild the whole cult of Copil Studio from scratch, which is the biggest kind of refactoring I've seen in a while.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

Ulrikke

And not it didn't just change the product, it also changed the mental model and how you use it. So I wanted to highlight one of the first ones that kind of draw drew my attention to this was uh Scott Duro. And he also had one of those. I think it's a thing with the maybe it's a new metric for the advocacy team now. The how many of those document things did you?

Nick

Oh, the cure cells, the cure cells, yeah.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah. So it's another one of those. But it goes through kind of the biggest shifts or the biggest changes. So the first one is that you know the eight, nine tabs on top are now for modes instead. So instead of having kind of yeah, the overview, the knowledge, you now have build, preview, evaluate, and monitor. So you start building, you preview it, you evaluate it, and then you monitor it when it's live. Also, topics, agents, triggers, and child agents are gone. So topics became skills, which makes sense. So actually, what they've done is they've brought Copilot Studio into the new world with the terminology we're used to from working with Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot and Cloud Code, where because topics felt a little bit weird and wonky and a little bit conversational. Yeah, it's from the PVA phase. So now that has become skills, which is more kind of the language you use around anything else. And then it's more like instructions. You can grab an MD file. So you have a skill somewhere, you can actually just copy and paste it in as instructions, or you can create one in the studio experience. Now, this is uh it trips me up. It's so funny. Agent triggers is workflows, and then I'll put a pin at wait for it, which is then mixed path between AI classification and agent calls. So it's kind of the the agent triggers, what triggers your agent is now kind of workflow. And then child agents is now called connected agents, which makes sense. The tooling is simpler, so you can connect your tools just like your connect your co-work to duels, you can connect Copet Studio to tools, and then agents flow. Agent this is funny. Agent flows are now classic workflows.

Nick

But what about the other classic workflows?

Ulrikke

I don't know.

Nick

So they now classic Dataverse workflows or CRM workflows.

Ulrikke

Are they like processes? Dynamic 365 processes. It's gonna it they're not, of course they're not, but it's the new workflow experience that is going kind of swim lane-y or plugins. Yeah, and projects.

SPEAKER_00

I remember I don't know, of course. Yeah.

Ulrikke

Just let's leave it. I mean at some point I'm gonna make one of those carousels to tell people about all the places in Microsoft stack that the word workflow appears. And then we're gonna have these are the hundred workflow types that Microsoft has created for themselves. Yes.

Nick

So it's like George Foreman naming his five kids George.

Ulrikke

Yeah. It's exactly that.

Nick

Yeah.

Ulrikke

Also, knowledge has been um kind of reworked. So now instead of knowledge, you have memory. So it's it's kind of the same way, but also you have the capability of storing knowledge and working with knowledge in a different way. And then you also get instead of the activity map, which felt a little bit dated, you now have the thinking trace that you're used to seeing from all the other ones. Um you just have three ten channels a demo website, web app, teams, and Microsoft 365, and then that's it. So I know someone who's gonna deliver a course curriculum in three weeks, where the course curriculum is kind of built on the old way, and then now suddenly there's a new way.

Nick

And then I'm Yeah, I was about to say, pity anybody that has to deliver a workshop on this stuff very soon.

Ulrikke

Yeah, exactly. And actually, that that was someone else asking me last week saying, So, how does it work for you guys when Marksov changes things like this? I'm like, dude, how long do you have? It's like, can I cry on your shoulder? Like, we have to make this stuff up nine months in advance. How do you think we do that when they change stuff right away? No, so so of course the advocacy team is uh responsible for Agent Academy course curriculum. And it's not like they don't have anything else to do. So they are busy revamping the whole of COPAT, sorry, Copeland Studio Agent Academy. And also, there's a so we have two options, Nick. One, we can actually toggle in Copala Studio to the old experience and go through the old Copalt Studio with our people at ABBC, or we can translate and bring Agent Academy into the new world.

Nick

I think we have to do the new world because I don't know. If I was an attendee and someone said we're gonna flip to the old way, I'd be like, I'm gonna go check out another workshop.

Ulrikke

They won't know. They will not know. I promise, I promise 100%. They go into that workshop. We present what we present, they would have no idea. But of course I'm with you. Of course I'm with you. Of course, we're gonna do that. There's no option, of course, we're gonna do the new stuff. We have to learn the new stuff first. Uh we have to go through it and see what we can do with it. Uh, but of course we're gonna do it. So it may be a little bit more messy um than it would have been, or that it wasn't a color town, but this is the life, this is the world that we live in. And so we just have to make the best of it. So I love seeing the new experience. Really, I do.

Nick

Yeah, and uh thankfully we have folks like Reza Dorani, who he's his video this week is all about the rebuilt co-pilot studio. So as soon as like I was safe as you was like, crap, we're gonna have to figure this out and go through the material and see what's different. Doo doo doo. And then I'm like, okay, Reza did a video. Okay, already this is good because we could borrow some of his stuff.

Ulrikke

No, and also I remember the day that Fable came out, and I talked to you and I said, ooh, find me a tool that can actually translate the whole of the curriculum from the old world into the new world. And I was like, and then it was gone. I was like, no, I had a job for it to do. So yeah.

Nick

We'll get it, we'll get we'll get there. It's gonna be it's gonna be a fun workshop.

Ulrikke

But I know we can't do anything until we're get getting there because one, they could bring Fable back and we can then get AI to do it for us. Two, the advocacy team could probably do it in time. We'll see, maybe. Or three, eh, well, just wing it. We can do it ourselves. It's fine.

Nick

Yeah, we'll figure like this is all part of, I mean, this is the new way of learning, right? It's just in time learning. And the whole idea of this workshop was the fact the material has always been available for free on Microsoft's website. But the idea is getting into the room with your peers, making it a joint learning experience. Because as you and I know, when you're learning within a group context like that, you're gonna see different perspectives, you're gonna learn a lot of interesting things. So still, it despite the the fact that the content will probably still be warm out of the oven when the folks are walking through it, probably even a little hot. Maybe the cheese will be dripping off a little bit. It's still gonna be a lot of fun. It's really gonna be a good uh good session. And we have a couple of our MVP friends that are gonna be helping out with this. And of course, uh, I know some of the advocacy team will be around as well. So if the worst case scenario, we can go right to the source. I just have to probably like jingle a glass of Nedroni or something and get Daniel to appear and uh answer some questions. Yeah, well a lot of other stuff still.

Ulrikke

Yes. Okay, let's move on.

Community Updates And Tool Roundup

Ulrikke

So actually, our good friend was good friend, actually, Charles Sexton, he created code app weekly update. I love it. It's so cool. So on LinkedIn now, if you follow Charles, then you'll be able to get weekly updates for code apps. And he this week he talks about sign-in tools that landed this week. So new NPM command line tool for power apps, uh code apps, clear sign-ins data, and account switching commands, which is really cool. And this is where we'll see so much going on for going forwards. So if you want to keep on top of it, yeah, just follow Charles and I'm sure he'll keep you up to date.

Nick

Yeah, that's awesome. And like like he has nothing else to do, really, right?

Ulrikke

So no, no, I'm sure there's a Charles Sexton agent somewhere pushing all this content out. Yeah. Another one that probably is an agent and actually always was an agent, if you think about it, Victor Dantis.

Nick

Yeah, Victor is an AI for sure.

Ulrikke

If anyone was an AI, it's Victor. I mean, I don't understand how that man can get all of this things done that he doesn't also have a a thriving family and he's he's very active in his community, and he runs his own business, and he does all the it's just yeah, like if I'm gonna place bets.

Nick

Probably because he has all this free time that he can't use his drone, maybe, but too soon, sorry.

Ulrikke

But actually, this this week he had a very good post about um claw code out of the box knows about power platform, but actually, as you were saying, out of the box it can only know so much. It's when you give it the very specific tools for the thing you need that it's gonna excel. And so he has an overview of the Dataverse Power Pages, Code App Generative Pages, and Canvas, model-driven and Microsoft Docs connect connections you can use from the marketplace to enhance your agents with the right tools. So it's a great post, uh Victor. Yeah.

Nick

Cool. And I think the next one was yours, I think.

Ulrikke

Yeah, so this is something that is also actually uh a build announcement.

unknown

Okay.

Ulrikke

And it has to do with Microsoft Fabrics. I'm a little bit out on uh I don't know exactly where this is. It's something I've had hands-on experiences with, but I saw that Andreas Adner posted about how you can build cool cool apps in minutes with Microsoft Braithin. So it was announced at Built. It's an open source SDK and TLA that make it ridiculously fast to create fully managed enterprise great apps that run directly on Microsoft Fabric. So I'm not really sure how this relates to PowerPlatform and what we do, but I understand the need to add apps on top of fabric without all the connectivity that has to happen in between. And if you, because I we have fabric people, they have no idea about PowerPlatform. And I also see Microsoft kind of giving you what you need where you're at, instead of trying to bring everyone into PowerPlatform. It makes sense to give Fabric people uh the tooling they need to create apps on top of fabric. So I thought that was worth mentioning just because it's pretty cool.

Nick

Yeah, and also uh congrats to Andreas Adner. Uh I think, yeah, I think he just got his MVP. Yeah. He did.

Ulrikke

And it was like the second after we finished recording last uh uh week or the week, sorry, two weeks ago, I saw that and I was like, and it's like you said, it's one of those guys where you were like, he wasn't?

Nick

I I thought you were an MVP already, yeah.

Ulrikke

So Yeah, yeah, yeah. It walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck, walks like a duck, it's a duck. So he has all the things. And we thought you were an MVP already, Andrews, but congratulations.

Nick

Yeah, congrats. Yeah, welcome to the circus.

Ulrikke

Yes, you can what is it that they say you can join the club, but you can never ever leave.

SPEAKER_00

Exactly.

Ulrikke

You can, but it's hard.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

Ulrikke

And then I just wanted to touch on something else.

Bulk Delete Jobs Become ALM Components

Ulrikke

This is gonna be something that you're gonna love. Bulk deletion process in Dataverse solution component. Did you see this?

Nick

Yeah, I did, I did see this. Yep, and it's good. It's one of these throwbacks, right? Because as much as all the AI and this and agents and plugins and do-to-do, there's still a lot of old things that need to be fixed. And this is one of them setting up the bulk deletion jobs and dataverse. Now there's going to be so I actually probably should add this as a list because I am giving my talk again about hidden or forgotten features of Dataverse. Bulk deletion, that's actually I need to add that to my list because it is one of those things that we completely forget about. And remember like last year or something, uh, I think Eric Silvay had an article on the bulk deletion or whatever. But here, like your Datavers is, of course, people complain about Dataverse eating a lot of space and whatever, but then you look at it, like, holy crap, there's a lot of you know, unused data, transactional data, you don't need anymore. What do you do? Well, I'm just gonna go into my model-driven app and delete it, and then you realize you can only delete 250 records at a time and you have a million. Um, I suppose you could get you know the cloud browser agent to do it for you now, but that's not the best use of AI.

Ulrikke

Yeah. Or you set up the build Power Automate Flow that does it for them, or stupid people like me that go in and delete five 50 at a time through the UI. There's so many ways around this.

Nick

Yeah. So, anyways, they have the bulk deletion service uh, which has always been there, but of course you you set it up, but then you have to set it up in each environment. So you're downstream, you set up in your dev, cool. You have to set it up again in your your QA, your production, your test, the whole bit. Now, this way it is now an ALM component. You can add it to a solution and you can basically deploy it. Now, a lot of you, that's kind of a boring, like even Valentin says the boring infrastructure features, but it's just one of those things that's going to save a lot of time and things like that. And it also kind of talked about big time throwback before the days of power automate, before the days of you know, scheduled workflows and things like this, because the bolt deletion service runs on a schedule. There was a hack put out by who now works for Microsoft, Matt Whiteman, who used to be an MVP. He basically built a hack where you could use the bolt deletion service to actually kick off automated workflows on a scheduled basis. Like, you know, this is this is kind of the old school stuff we used to do back in the day when we didn't have power automate, whatever. So again, this is the this is the back in my day corner, like old man Nick going around stuff. But it when I saw that, it reminded me of that. So yeah, cool little shout out to Valentin for bringing that us to our attention. And of course, good on Microsoft for continuing to not forget some of these features and move them forward.

Ulrikke

Yeah. Yeah. And it also said that as well in this post. It's like, yeah, when my feed is kind of flooded with AI stuff, it's good to see that actually they that the team get to prioritize these boring things, like making it solution aware, which is uh yeah, which is good.

Studio Tweaks For Canvas Apps

Nick

And another thing that I I really find it's cool as our listeners uh like we love it when you share stuff that you've built yourself or cool things. And we got a message this week from David Zunikin, and he basically he reached out to us about this thing he created called um Studio Tweaks, and it's a community build enhancement to Power App Studio. And now I haven't had a chance to play with it, but I did read through his article and we'll share that with you if you're big into building Canvas apps. But it adds another bunch of menu items to your Canvas app so you can do some other utilities to make your whole working with Canvas app a lot more efficient. So it was uh yeah, I thought it was this pretty cool. So this is again a little shout out to David and uh the other folks that worked on this thing. If you're building cool things, uh whether you're at a conference or something, there's nothing I find more exciting when I have a former student or someone that's seen my content, comes with me to their laptop and shows me, look what I built. So this was one of these situations. And yeah, so definitely put the link in. But if you're into Canvas apps, definitely check out Studio Tweaks. I think it could be a helpful little utility for you, for you as you're in your development.

Ulrikke

Yep, definitely. And I also see someone uh that created yeah, or finally started to build UI tests for PowerPlatform and Dynamics. Do you want to share a little bit more about that?

Playwright Toolkit For UI Testing

Nick

Yeah, this is a Frederick uh Niederude, and of course, he's you know well known in the community as well. But he talks, he has a great article about using playwright within PowerPlatform and of course the new PowerPlatform Playwright Toolkit. And I've just started to scratch the surface uh with playwright and testing and UI testing. And this is definitely something I want to dive more deeper into in terms of automated testing. And he talks about, you know, yes, they had back-to-back unit tests for code testing and their and their ALM processes, but now with uh playwright, and of course, there's playwright MCP servers and these types of things. So playwright used to be a heavy scripting tool. When I first looked at it, it's like, okay, that's a lot of extra work. But now, of course, with the AI tools, it just makes it so much more approachable. And then now we have these this toolkit, which is an open source thing. And uh Frederick's found a really good article of his journey with this. He also had a session at Dynamics Minds, which I missed, and now I'm kind of regretting missing this because I think this would have been a cool one. But hopefully he'll be presenting it again uh soon at a at a conference or something. I'll definitely check that out. So check out his blog post. And uh yeah, if you're into uh playwright and UI testing, definitely something to be aware of.

Ulrikke

Yeah, definitely. And it's something we all should do more. I think I I keep like you wanting to dive more into it. Uh so yeah, definitely something to learn to learn.

Nick

And and the thing is now with with like especially with AI and these tools, before it's like it used to be, okay, I gotta spend like a day or an afternoon, but I'm not sure about you, but I'm finding with some of these things, it's like, oh, there's a there's a a plug-in that we can install and just begin to slowly poke at it a little bit and do little things, which of course is gonna steamroll. So it's also I'm finding with all this stuff, it's a new way of learning, micro learning, because it's a little bit more accessible through the AI. Again, not perfect. There's still things we need to kind of wrap our head or head around, but but already in some of the the tools I'm using, it's playwrights kind of kicking in and checking things out, especially for debugging. It's like it's kind of neat.

Ulrikke

So yeah, absolutely. I use playwright for a lot of things. It's uh good with uh the browser and UI stuff as well. So it's yeah, it's a very handy MCP service, one of my favorites.

Deep Dive On MCP Apps Widgets

Ulrikke

And also, yeah, Diana Vittelova. Yes, this is so cool. I mean, this is so cool. I love it when Diana does this. This is what she does best. Vlog posts that are years and years long that just explains everything just the way that it is. This is kind of a uh I think this is a snapshot of how her brain works because she's so detailed and so thorough that it's just yeah, follow Diana into her rabbit hole of MCP apps. It's amazing. It's all it answers all the questions I've ever had about MCP apps.

Nick

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And and then of course the the whole idea of the new custom widgets in the the MCP for model-driven apps and things like that. Like that is something that it's funny, a customer a couple weeks ago were describing what they wanted and interfacing with teams and everything. And of course, they tried the well, what's the the XML thing, uh adaptive cards, and they just found it wasn't adaptive cards, just wasn't cutting it. Um, and of course, we saw Matthew Devaney a few weeks ago did a video on this, and of course, Diana, like I said, did a deep dive into this. And it's like, for this is one of those areas that if you're if you're not paying attention, you should, because this is going to, I think, radically change how people interact with model-driven apps by going through other interfaces, kind of what they call the headless CRM in a sense. So with these custom widgets, and of course, Diana is the perfect person to learn from because she knows she's the PCF lady, she knows the stuff inside and out. So yeah, great, good, great resources here for for that kind of thing. And and yet another thing to learn.

Ulrikke

Yeah. No, actually, I I showcased this to a customer just last week because it is so powerful. And I just love the idea and it blows people's minds. I think this is one of the the things that I've that are new lately that blow people's minds the most. The fact that you can actually show content from a model-driven app inside a Marcos 365 chat, Copilent chat, it's it yeah, it's great. And it's and it goes both ways. So you and she goes through this as well, how you enable MCP apps on your app to make it available through the chat experience. And then also the other way around, how we can add the tools, the widgets, in that MCP app experience. So it's yeah, and and how to enable it to do more things with your data. And yeah, I'm with you all the way. And this is the UI for AI in a way. Uh, it's delivering on that promise. But also, what's so fun about Diana's post is it's full of snippets and mental diagrams and code, and it's yeah, just video after video, and she's just so thorough. So this is the go-to resource if you want to learn more about MCP apps for sure.

Makers Start Building Their Own Tools

Nick

Yeah, and I think we we we we're kind of hitting our our time crunch here. So we'll probably there's a few other things unless there's something burning that you want to talk about. But the other thing, there's a couple of links in here. I won't just kind of drill down deep in them, but I was beginning to see interesting things. Uh, David Wyatt for one, and another one, what was his name? Here we go. Kevin, Kevin Holland, showing building their own tools because now with the the with vibe coding and all of these things, they're building dashboards. David built his own power platform in Midcenter, you know, and we've seen other examples of this on LinkedIn or people beginning to build their own tools to manage the power platform or do certain things. Or like even when we called out about the Studio Tweaks thing, too. It's like people are now using these tools to build new interesting tools. Of course, we've talked about the XRM Toolbox and of course the Power Platform Toolbox, which is now evolving and catching up to the XRM Toolbox. So if you're building a new tool, definitely let us know about it because like we might we need to use these tools as well and to build our own solution. So just a quick little shout out to those folks.

Conferences And Where To Find Us

Nick

Again, we will have the the event. We'll be at Microsoft uh European or sorry, European Power Platform Conference. So if you're coming, say hi. We'll have stickers and uh check out again our workshop, a few other things. Of course, the fall is beginning to shape up as well. I think we can, I think I can announce now I will be at Nordic Summit, I'll be at the Hellish Summit, and also in a Las Vegas Power Platform Community Conference. So definitely lots of lots of places to come say hi.

Ulrikke

Yeah, definitely. So we'll see you there. And until next time, have a good time.

Nick

All right, see you folks. Thank you for listening.

Share Rate Review And Goodbye

Nick

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 host Ludic Ackerbeck and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

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