Power Platform Boost Podcast

Thrills, Chills, and Skills! (#90)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 90

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It's in the middle of the summer for both of us; Nick just had a serendipitous experience 🏆️ at the local grocery store, and Ulrikke just came back from an Interrail trip 🚅 through Europe with the kids! If you want to hear about our summer experiences, tune in to this cutout: 🏖️Boost Extra! Summer Vibe! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=draieQra5tA 😎 

 If you are looking for something more tech-related to fill your ears with while on holiday, EPPC just published the keynotes from last week's event on ▶️ YouTube! We highly recommend you tune in to watch the keynotes by Ryan Cunningham, Nirav Shah, Leon Welicki, and the rest of the Microsoft team! 🤩 It was refreshing to watch the only non-Microsoft keynote speaker, Chris O'Brien. He talked about what's discussed in the boardrooms and how to align your career to stay relevant. 

We also picked up LinkedIn posts from Steve Mordue, Jukka Niiranen, and Scott Hanselman this week as they touched on the same nerve as Chris did in his keynote, echoing some of the fears - but also proposing solutions for all of us working in this fast-paced⚡️AI era. 

Also, Vesa Juvonen, the Copilot Studio CAT team, Nagesh Bhat, Michel Mendes, Luciano Spiguel, and Kunal Sethi gave us technical deep dives and interesting📣 announcements around M365, SharePoint, Copilot Studio, and Power Pages this week 😀

Hope you are having a great summer (or winter) wherever you are, that you take care to manage the heat 😅 for yourself and your loved ones, and that you stay safe. Catch you next time 🌴

EPPC26 Keynotes

 

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Almost Going Live Again

Ulrikke

But that doesn't mean that we don't cover news uh from Copilot because we will now be power no Microsoft 365 boost button. No, I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_05

I think we're just before.

SPEAKER_01

Like, no, don't. It's like, no, no, we're not.

Nick

Or or or we just go and we just go or just go to the foodie one that we talked about before, but that's yeah, yeah, the foodie boost.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost Podcast, your timely source of Power Platform news and updates with your hosts, Nick Dolman and Ulrike Ackerback.

SPEAKER_05

All right. Now we're recording.

Ulrikke

We're we're Yeah, so we're not live after all. So we've been struggling for four years to do a live podcast recording, and today we tried this is the fourth attempt to not make a live recording because it defaulted to live stream uh for the last three attempts. So um yeah.

Nick

Which which which we may do someday, but not today.

Ulrikke

Yeah, because it was fun. It said connect uh kind of uh connect the channel, connect to YouTube, LinkedIn. It's sound it seemed very simple. So maybe you would just do that for fun one day uh and just uh turn on the live stream. Uh who knows? But okay, uh enough of that. How are you?

Nick

I'm good. Yep, it was uh it's right in the middle of summer. We it's uh of course it's warm out, we expecting some thunderstorms. Um I'm still busy with a lot of client work, um, which is good, wrapping things up on a few projects and kind of getting excited for new ones into the fall. And yeah, just enjoying things uh really, really cool. Um hopefully everybody's um enjoying their summer vacations, hopefully get a bit of time to rearrest and recharge. But of course, there's always new stuff happening with the power platform, so let's maybe Oh, yeah, definitely.

EPPC Energy And Keynotes

Ulrikke

And we've seen some um so we also saw a few waves from ePBC, just keeps on giving. There's so many posts, so many people uh talking about their experience, and it it it shows on on my feed at least the impact that ePBC really had on the community. I love seeing all these posts, and also they released recordings of the keynotes, which I absolutely love. So if you missed it, uh if you weren't there or you were busy at the days, I didn't get to see Chris O'Brien's um because I was busy doing community stuff at that point. So I had um a round table, but I got to see the recording and I absolutely loved his keynote. It was very different, and people were raving about it when we were there. So I love that they recorded it so I can watch it afterwards. Um, did you kind of see any of these um in person or from the recording?

Nick

Yeah, I saw Leon's and Ryan's live, of course. Like Ryan's was day one. Of course, it was really good. We talked a little bit about it on the last episode while we were there, but then Leon's was on um again. Now Leon's just a bundle of energy as well. What I like about uh we're talking about we Leon Walecki from Microsoft. He um is kind of underneath him is like a lot of the power apps and power pages and a lot of these things. Um, and of course, full of energy talking about the future. Um, did uh talk a few actual real-world implementations of people using the power platform. One of them was my client uh Provence, which I am just wrapping up a project with right now, which is was pretty interesting to kind of see their name up there. And like I was kind of poking beside me, like, yeah, that's one of my clients. I'm working with them right now. So just to see all this kind of interconnect and things like that. Um, I did not see Chris O'Brien's, but I do appreciate um the EPPC publishing these keynotes. And again, to the entire crew of EPPC, like you guys pull off such a great conference. Um, like Kevin and Bridget and um uh Ella and uh all the others. Um I I can't I can't remember all of your names, but you know who you are. Um kudos to you for pulling off a great conference, and of course, yeah, my LinkedIn for the last week has just been filled with recaps and posts. Of course, if you didn't go, you're probably crippling FOMO right now, but overall, it is really good and how they treat the speakers and everything like that, too, is just top-notch. Um, such an amazing week. It's still I'm still kind of buzzing from all the information and just the the whole community around it. So great work and yeah, um yeah, amazing. And thank you for publishing these keynotes so we can go back and review and um catch up on what we missed.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love that. And that's uh so fun to see um what an impact it's having. Uh and also you see Microsoft being very dedicated to this event as well by just how many people and how many senior people they send. It is it, it it's it's a big deal. So if you can, and I know I have a colleague that came with us and he absolutely loved it and is also buzzing from all the things he learned, and also the affirmation that he knows what the because he came in kind of not knowing kind of where he was in the am I kind of do I get it? Is there anything I don't know? Where am I? And he's like, no, no, I realize I do know this stuff. I am at the cutting edge. I do know about the newest thing, and there was very little news to him when he came there, which is a great affirmation to kind of know where you are and and and how far ahead you are.

The SaaS Apocalypse Question

Ulrikke

Uh and I also wanted to mention Chris's uh keynote because I I watched it back and something he talked about, which uh came up again in another post, uh the SAS Apocalypse or the SAS pocalypse, I think they call it. Um, because Chris, what Chris did with this keynote is he touched on a few of the sensitive subjects because his is he is not a Microsoft uh employee, right? So he can say a lot of things that the others couldn't. Uh and he is actually pointing a finger at something that uh make a lot of us nervous. How do you stay relevant and how do you uh make sure that you have a place in this space going forward with all the new things that are happening with AI? Um and he drew the parallels between kind of new advancements in other areas of the world, kind of the internet and the smartphone and all those things, but also back to the car, back to TV, back to the back to the light bulb. And he's like, Well, when the light bulb first came around, people were um saying how it's gonna disrupt our whole society, how it's gonna change everything, um, and people were against it. And also what he didn't say, but we've heard this before, is that actually light bulbs still did change the world. Light bulbs made uh it possible to work longer hours. It me meant that we were no longer um just relying on the sun for our daily rhythms. Means that people up north, like where I live, we get to spend more of our day outside or inside and work longer during winter. But also there's research now accumulating hundreds of years of research that shows that actually it did disrupt uh a lot of our physiology and the way that our bodies work and our sleep patterns in a negative way. So, but and the same goes for AI. Point is just as with social media and kids or smartphones and kids, we don't know if it's harmful or not because we don't have the data until it's too late. The same was where the light bulbs, sure. There's a lot of great things that came with you know superficial light, but we didn't have the data to show if it was harmful or not as a greater whole until it was too late. By the time we had that data, it was adopted. And the same thing is gonna happen with AI. I'm sure there's a lot of benefits and there's a lot of negative impacts that AI is gonna have on our society. By the time we have enough data to know for sure it's gonna be too late. So there's no way of changing it, changing the directory, the trajectory, the to stop it. We just have to go with it. And I'm sure it's gonna be positive and negative effects on society as a whole. Uh, but I do want to kind of shout out to Chris for being brave enough to ask the hard questions uh and to take us through the rationale of what it is that we need to do as individuals and as companies to make sure we stay ahead. Um, and this SaaS apocalypse is real. When everyone can make an app and anyone can make a service, what is your unique offering? What is it that you can bring to the table that no one else can? So um, and that kind of brought me on to Steve Merdu's uh post that we saw this week, um, which where he says, I can't wait for the cost of AI to go way up. Um and I think what he means by that is that there's a lot of slop, a lot of AI slop, and a lot of people making applications that maybe they shouldn't, or there's an application for everything uh under shitty little apps kind of thing. Um and he wants the bar to go up, the price to go up, so that only the people that should be making applications and creating software does, and that those who shouldn't can't afford to. I think that's kind of my take on it. What's your take on

AI Costs And Token Reality

Ulrikke

it?

Nick

No, it's a sort of the same thing. I also don't think uh I think like everything else, um, we talk about it's we're into this resource management um kind of wave right now, because as of July 1st, Microsoft started charging for cowork, for example. And then all of a sudden you saw people, I don't want to say freaking out, but all of a sudden what they've been working were the last few months for essentially for free, now started actually costing money to generate that PowerPoint now cost you tangible money. To generate the code is costing you tangible money. Now, it always sort of did, but now with co-work being something that ties into credits, um, it is now you kind of have to allocate, okay, is it worth it? Or do how much credits do we give to our employees? If we have a very productive employee that's using this stuff, are they going to run out after the first week? What do you do? Or do they go three weeks kind of back to the manual way? Or are you going to increase their allocation? What's the return on investment on that? Um, I think we're sort of, and then along with that, we do see that Fable that we talked about last time has now been reactivated in Claude. And it said it was a I found the messaging very confusing. Oh, you can use it for free um at 50% of your capacity, but after July 19th, it's going to you're going to start costing you usage credits. And I'm like, what does this mean? I already pay a subscription fee. What's going to happen? Does this mean I'm going to have to pay extra? So I asked Claude, do I now start paying extra for this? And it it kind of broke it down, kind of, well, yes and no, here's how it all works. And it kind of made sense. And I I won't go through the whole details, but it is, we are sort of, I think everybody's kind of putting the brakes or pumping the brakes a little bit now because they're realizing there is a resource cost. But that being said, if you remember, and I now again, this is this is the Nick going back to the old man's segment. I remember working for a dial-up internet provider. Yep, exactly. Where we at that time, internet dial up. Um, I I you could get a cheap internet plan, but you were only allowed to surf one hour per day. You had or you had 10 hours per month. And then you were always careful of how when you surfed or when you checked your email or whatever, because you only had those 10 hours. Here we like after a year or two, like, and then of course, all of some of these providers starting, well, now you can get um unlimited or unlimited internet, inner unlimited dial-up internet. So, like, oh, do we connected all the time? Um, what would that cost and these types of things? And then, you know, these things evolve. I don't think we're going to run into a place where we have a two-tiered thing in terms of token usage or AI usage. I think we'll get to a point where AI will be just on the same as internet or phone or anything else. We won't think about it. Even like we think about phone paying for long distance, like that isn't even a a conversation anymore. Twenty years ago it was. It's like we wait till nine o'clock before we talked about this last time too. You said about going on the internet after six o'clock.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because then when the office is shut down, then you can use it as a private person because then it was cheaper. So I love it.

Nick

Yeah, so I do think AI is going to be the same way just because there's so many different companies vying for the attention, right? There's not one single AI provider. We have open AI, we have anthropic, we have Microsoft at their models. These, these are, and of course, the you know, uh deep sea coming from the the Chinese companies as well. So there's going to be, we're in an arms race, but also availability. Now, of course, we do have the building new data centers, so there is a physical limitation there of trying to catch up on that. But the technology is just going to increase. So it's it's an interesting conversation right now, but I also don't think it's going to be as dire as maybe Steve is predicting. And he might be wrong, or I might be wrong, or he might be absolutely right. Um, we'll see soon enough. I think right now we are seeing sort of the you know, the allocation of tokens or you know, the make sure you're not burning everything um coming from companies and that kind of thing. I know for myself I bumped up to the highest level of Claude, um, but it is paying for itself on a daily basis the full subscription price in terms of my productivity. Um, so it's gonna be definitely, definitely fun to watch, and I'm sure we're gonna discuss this more and more as we go through it. Um, so again, no definitive answer here, but but the other point you talk about the sascopolyps about building apps, and it's like, why would I go, for instance, why would I go and buy Dynamics 365 customer service when I can just go into Cloud and get it to build it for me? And I think it still goes back to the why couldn't we just build a ticketing system on top of the power platform using regular Dataverse and power apps? Funny, because this is what Steve essentially did when he created Rapid Start CRM, a very much a watered-down um version of CRM, and he kind of sold that as an application. What's stopping you or I from building our own Rapid Start CRM? We could do that even a couple of years ago, um, just building uh regular things on top of the power platform. Um, I even did sessions on this, if you remember from Scottish Summit and a few other places. You know, you don't need a CRM, you need a power app, and really about kind of building these apps. But that being said, what the value that these software companies bring, like maybe you know, a Microsoft, whatever, or URI, is the years of experience that we have. We know what works, we know what doesn't work, we know what customers will react to. So, yeah, um, we talk about Sally in accounting. It's like, or you know, Bob the sales guy, is he gonna vibe code his own CRM system? We've been seeing this for years. Bob has been vibe coding his Excel spreadsheet 10 years ago, but he doesn't know the ins and outs and how all the features work and how we can extend this. So I think there's still a lot of value, especially for solution architects, for people with experience, but we're using the AI tools to deliver the SaaS solutions, the software, whether it's customized, whatever. What Microsoft provides and other providers provide is the platforms, the security, the governance, the things that we don't think about. They've built in, they've baked into these platforms that, yes, we have AI running on top, but we still have that nice sandbox that's going to protect our data, protect us from outside things. So I do realize I'm I'm soapboxing quite a bit here, but that sort of it's very interesting, these conversations we're having now and how things are changing so rapidly. But I also go back to that point of um we still need people with experience to help build out and design and architect these solutions. Just really a lot of the tooling has changed around that.

Ulrikke

Yeah. But I think also what Chris is saying is that actually the whole business model changes and the conversations inside the boardrooms that normal kind of consultants don't have access to is our business model valid? Uh, do we make money going forward? If your 10x, your um efficiency, how many developers do we need? And also who's gonna work, who's gonna use these applications? And if you see on the stock market, the SaaS applications, there are just their numbers are down, they're devalued because they don't have a future and people see that. So it's hard and it's a hard truth, but it's probably also true. Uh so I mean, and also he talks to what you can do as an individual and kind of elevate yourself to the next level, the next tier of conversation. Is this worth automating through automation or workflow or AI? What is the best strategy here? What can we do about these processes? How is this business model? How is this business um the ROI on this uh business case? Those kinds of scenarios. Elevate yourself to be able to have these discussions on a higher level because the developer, if you're not already a great developer and you can use this to amplify your uh what you're already doing, then don't start because there's not enough room. There's already too many great developers out there that know their stuff are going to be 10 times as productive. Find something else to do. Um, but that's just my take on it. Okay, let's move on. We're ranting.

Time Under Tension For Brains

Ulrikke

Um yeah, so uh we have a few other interesting things, and I would just wanted to use this as a segue because Scott Hansenman also had uh post this week a video where he's on his bike and he's paddling away and he's making the case that to exercise your muscle, you need tension. So it's time under tension. T-U-T is something I'm sure you're familiar with.

Nick

Yep, a very, very, yep. We could talk about my my current training plan right now, but yeah, go on.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah. So, and he says, you know, if you send a forklift to the um to the gym, some yes, lift weights were lifted, but did you lift them? No. So you need to apply tension, make sure you have resistance, resistance training, right? That's how you build strength. And if you don't do that to your brain, it's gonna wither away. We've had this, we've talked about this already, but I just find when Scott kind of goes on LinkedIn and posts this video now, it is he does that for a reason because now he's seeing so much slop from so many different angles, and someone's gonna have to clean this up. And if you don't know what you're doing, AI is just gonna amplify your mistakes. So if there is ever a time to stop and to start applying tension or resistance so that your brains don't wither away and actually keeps growing, then this was the time. And I feel this myself. I mean, just a few weeks away from the computer, away from the keyboard, I'm slower as I'm typing. My it takes my mind a while to get back into the game, to get warmed up, to kind of go into the reasoning thinking this is a muscle, and I haven't used it for a while because I've been on vacation, but I really feel like going back that it's hard. Um, yeah, and that scares me.

Nick

Well, I I I totally agree. And I I get the time, I totally get the time under tension um analogy there because you're right, because it is, you know, lifting the weights. And I joke and I'm at the gym because I get into conversations with people, I get really chatty at the gym. You probably no surprise there, but I'm like, one of the things I say, okay, I gotta go, those lit, those weights won't lift themselves. So I got to get back into the routine and picking stuff up. But of course, if I get a I get a program every week from my trainer, um, and it's always a little bit more, a little bit more. There's a whole series of sets. We make variations, and that makes me stronger. What I like about AI and and how I work and part of my workflow is I don't just create a black box and give my agents a description saying, I need to build this piece of code, go. I kind of been working through it piece by piece, saying, okay, overall, here's the structure. Again, let's go in planning mode. And I work with it kind of like here is uh what we need to do, here's this particular function. And when it generates the code, it because it will, it does it very quickly, very efficiently. I still will review it and I will pick up things going, hmm, this isn't exactly what I meant. Um, this is not right, and then having that conversation. Now, this gets better, and I'm continually amazed at how well it does. But I think it's very imperative that anybody working with these agentic tools, and I'll say this in pretty much any session that I'm giving on this stuff, is you still need to understand how these pieces work to be an effective solution architect. Because the minute you sort of give up that power, then it's going to start going down the the rabbit holes, start burning tokens on useless things. And I think we've all seen that where we've created something and it's kind of like, no, no, no, no, no. This is okay, stop because now you're burning tokens needlessly to fix something that's not correct. So this is again where our experience comes in and our whole processing doesn't necessarily mean we know how to write the code line for line, but we should be in a position to be able to read it. So this is where I think the human in the loop is so critical. You know, as part of this process. So this is why I'm not overly worried about losing my job. But if I was just purely a coder, meaning if someone I'm used to someone giving me the requirements and I'll just go and code it, those are the people I think need to be worrying a little bit. You'd need to be actually understanding what's being built and why because AI can do that part of it for me now. But the other part, the design parts, the interaction the human, the human empathy, how they're going to interact with the software, what is it going to do for them, what inputs and outputs, that's still where we need to be involved heavily in as a human. And maybe I'm just I know I preach this every week, but this is sort of my thought of it too. So this is where I think in terms of learning how to code is still critical because if you know how to code, you know how the structures work, this way you can work better with AI going forward.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke

And we've talked about this a lot before as well. So I feel like we're kind of kicking in open doors, but it is important. Uh and I think that's why I keep coming back to it because it's in a very interesting conversation to have and it's a conversation we need to keep having and to remind ourselves that I know when I'm busy that's when I'm the most lazy and that's when I'll just give it a task to do and then grab it and just put it in there without reading it through. Which um I think is very human. But I also need to remind myself to do the hard work. We have a lot of interesting news this week. There's one news item here that I'm a bit cautious of but I also want to

Copilot Studio Shifts Toward M365

Ulrikke

mention it. So um the release planner was released or there was an announcement um this week that was or last week that was pointed out by Yuka and it says starting July 2nd 2026 future feature updates for Microsoft Copeland Studio sales agent, finance agent and service agent will be published under the Microsoft 365 roadmap. This creates a single destination to discover what capabilities are coming next across Microsoft 365 core apps, uh copelet agents and more and of course Yuka is no longer an MVP uh so he where he gets this information needs to be public. And that's why we can also talk about it because it means it's public. It's it's now official um and it is showing signs that maybe coplet studio won't be under the PowerPlatform umbrella anymore but actually will be under the Marcos 365 uh umbrella and I think that kind of shows the direction that this is going in I think we all need to embrace Microsoft 365 and uh work IQ and SharePoint and Teams and all of that as our kind of that's the umbrella that we're now navigating under and we see other signs of it that makes me super excited.

SharePoint MCP Apps And Copilot

Nick

Did you see uh the new SharePoint apps I I haven't but tell me all about it.

Ulrikke

So it's it's MCP apps but for SharePoint and it's built on SA SP SPFX. And so it's web parts essentially that I used to work with back in the day. So it's like blast from the past but it's it's essentially doing for SharePoint what we've done for Power Apps. It's enabling co-pilot as a side pane to actually uh create user interface from SharePoint on the fly. So it's creating the same kind of experience where you can get your uh SharePoint experience inside your copilot chat and also by enabling this and it's also uh it happens automatically so if you're on version I think 2.24 then this will automatically be your SharePoint site will then automatically be accessible through the MCP app in co-pilots or in uh your Microsoft CC5 copilot which is cool because then you can see lists and news items and you can actually do work. You can check that box and you can do that thing uh that you normally would have then had to navigate to your SharePoint site to do. SharePoint is immensely powerful uh so it has a lot of great um there's a lot of great um SharePoint um implementations out there that has until now had to kind of not been baked into the whole world and Teams has of course been the interface for SharePoint for a while and kind of forgot about SharePoint. But I love this uh new adventure maybe I'll go back to being a SharePoint consultant yet we'll see.

Nick

Well I think we're all like uh with the M365 as well I think just the co-point there's a separate it makes it almost sound like Copilot Studio is kind of moving from one team to another team. It's really not the case. I think what we're really seeing is overall the more the merging of Microsoft 365 co-pilot co-work scout and the power platform apps that we're used to becoming more and more of the user interface. We see this with the the Power Apps MCP servers that we talked about a few weeks ago how that's surfacing within Microsoft 365 and vice versa within um the power platform apps as well so you're right I think we need to like if we're coming from the power platform side we need to get a little bit more ramped up on some of the more the Microsoft 365 the work IQ and all of this stuff. I do realize I probably will have to move from cloud co-work to Microsoft co-work just to be on top of all of these things. But it is it is kind of very cool that there are some um so I think that's really the way to read this it's not so much of a re-org or anything like that. The technology doesn't change it's really more becoming more and more integrated. So eventually we just might sort of see the whole the platform as a whole whether it's called power platform or something else be an encompassment of the business software that gets presented to the end users and has all these components and history and a lot of great technology kind of all beginning to kind of merge together. So I I see this as a very positive move. It's just probably just more of a logistical thing that it's on the release planner there. I wouldn't read more into that in terms of anything political or anything of that sort. So yeah it's a it's definitely interesting and um gonna make our our episodes where we talk about the release plans probably a lot more interesting and potentially longer.

Ulrikke

Oh well we'll see but I think it's important what you said and I think it's more of a merging of the two things and and bracing each other's stuff right I think that's very important and it's a high time and for me it feels like home base. So for me it's kind of my two worlds coming into one and I love it. So and also just a little bit of a maybe then ESPC in Amsterdam in December in November sorry it's gonna be even more important because that is Microsoft 365 focused in Europe. So if you want to start merging with the other community if you like then I think ESPC is a great opportunity and a great place to start. But that doesn't mean that we don't cover news uh from Copilot because we will now be power no Microsoft 365 boost button no I'm just kidding.

New Power Platform Skills For Flows

Nick

I think we're just like no don't it's like no no we're not or or or we're just go and we're just go or just go to the foodie one that we talked about before but that's yeah yeah the foodie boost yeah yeah okay but we did have a yes I I got really excited um this was a kind of news that came out on Friday about the power platform skills which we've talked about before for building power apps or sorry power pages. Of course there's the Dataverse skills but they released the ability and this was something they hinted at very heavily or kind of talked about at ePPC as well new skills to build power automate with agentic developers and it was sort of the missing piece for a little while um we could do it there are ways kind of to hack away around it but now with those skills if you're using kind of and I and I am gonna I am going to release a video this week talking about how as a maker you can set up the terminal and don't be afraid of it to increase your productivity but this is where within these terminals we can start building out power automate flows. Now I haven't had a chance to try it out but we do see some of the community did dive in already and started to create some power automate. I hopefully you know with a few little hiccups along the way this is like brand new it's still hot out of the oven um but I could sort of see this helping you know with things like maybe with connection references and that kind of stuff building out so you're not just dragging all these boxes and putting try catches in there like this will kind of you know help you build that out um a little bit more um intelligently so I'm very I will be trying it this week hopefully um but the other little nugget that came out which a few people picked up on and it is public so you can actually go to the site and see this but they dropped the what they call the private preview of the mobile apps in there as well. And they did talk about this at EPPC at a few of the sessions saying this is coming keep your eye open for this so we don't have a lot of actual documentation or information but it is there as the skills so you can start building mobile apps on the power platform but more native mobile so it can interact with your phone from your geolocation like all of these things that we're always really wanted with running apps on our phones. So stay tuned on that particular point because that was sort of the the hidden the hidden surprise in the box that uh came out yeah so um but that was my I was pretty excited about seeing that I I posted kind of a link on LinkedIn on Friday thinking oh I see this just kind of threw it out there and it got a ton of reactions over the weekend.

Ulrikke

So that's really cool. And this is one of the things that I noticed on the keynote as well that I was like oh I'm really excited when this comes out because this is going to be a big game changer for sure.

Copilot Studio Migration Resources

Ulrikke

Uh really excited to see more content around that next time maybe um and there are a few so on that note um we also know that there's um an um a plugin to create co-pilot studio agents. Yes and of course with the new interface or the new built copilot studio we uh there's no real way to migrate from the old to the new so if you want to do that you still need to build it yourself. And then I saw a little post from Lewis Baebat uh on the cat team he presented three different resources this week on LinkedIn um that they have created to help. So it is uh one kind of deep dive power PowerPoint deck to really go through bit by bit a technical deep dive of what Copala Studio is now and how it relates to how it worked before. So that's kind of your resource if you want to understand the workings of it in a really hard detail. And then also um the new MCP to create the new to try out the new orchestrator it has skills and connected agents and it's a way to to to try that out. And also the plugin that I talked about.

Power Pages Security Finally Aligns

Nick

So it is a very good resource uh dive into it there's gonna be a link in the show notes to his posts and also a blog post that kind of talk about all three of these resources so make sure you uh get get in and uh and start working with it if this is something that you need to know more about yeah for sure yep so um yeah one other little of course there's some new power pages updates as well the power pages team as you know we know they're continually coming out with new features and new things uh like lately it's been server-side logic um they're coming out with new agents and that kind of thing but they finally and we saw this coming for quite a while kind of more on the private preview side but finally finally they're talking about it about two release notes it's been here for a few years actually yeah I remember trying this I think a year ago or so and it was still very early days but the ability of the of course anybody's worked with PowerPages uh there's its security model and then there's the Dataverse security model which very similar but they are completely different and the reason they're different is in a Dataverse power power apps canvas app model driven app it's a system user and on a Power Pages site it is a contact that's interacting. So therefore you needed a separate security system. Well now these are becoming more and more aligned with each other um so anytime a new portal user they'll still get created as a contact but there will be a corresponding system user created if you enable this or when this becomes kind of GA. And then with that you can start using the Dataverse security roles um along with that I think they're still sort of separate but the same structure the staying kind of backend um technical stuff. And then so that's basically going to mean that eventually those roles are going to define so if you configure your security model in Dataverse, it potentially can apply to the portal side as well. So that's uh that's definitely a huge move in the right direction. I think it's gonna solve a lot of problems and just make the power platform in terms of power pages much more secure.

Ulrikke

Yeah and also it means that you have more context. So uh whenever a portal user would make a change in at this data set or whatever it is, it would always say system user. But now actually you're able to track and trace that contact through to the system user to see which user it actually was that made the change. But also the wording here is a bit off for me. So I'm not really sure how automatic this is going to be and which way it's gonna go. So it says web roles align with security roles. Roles defined in power pages align with dataverse security roles, ensuring consistent role-based access control. Sure. What comes first? What aligns to what? And then how automated is this going to be so and also we saw another post um Michael Mendes actually uh alerted us to this where you go in and you look at a table print emission today suddenly you could add a fetch X fetch XML in there and have your custom um table permission and they're like okay so do we and the first question of course was how can we add a dynamic uh parameter to this and then uh Nikita Polyakov is like try adding it as a child table permission and scope that under an account or a cash yes yes that's what we do so so that's also kind of ties into this and it's uh very very cool so I'm looking forward to to uh to seeing that live yeah for sure yeah you had another few things in here you had uh uh something on the bottom yeah yeah this this is a cool little thing a little tool because I've been working I work with a lot of clients or big ones and then of course when like some of the bigger ones if I say hey can you enable the MCP server for me if I go up and set up some of my agentic tools it says okay you're gonna need administrator permission to do this of course a lot of IT departments are still a little like yeah no no we're like you know still kind of working through the process and stuff so this was an interesting tool um by Luciano Spigel and he posted it about three weeks ago because we had it sitting here and I did want to talk about it because it is a new tool for the XRM toolbox.

Dataverse Schema Markdown For Agents

Nick

So hopefully he'll also create a version for the Power Platform toolbox um as well. Yes um but what it basically does it will go through and then we've always had the the metadata explorer within the XRM toolbox which you can get the the schema names the field names of your all your schema and all that kind of thing this is a lot like that but what it will do it will generate a structured markdown file of the schema names and everything within your Dataverse environment so what happens is you run this tool against Dataverse assuming you have access to read those tables and read the schema and of course if you're a a system developer a think of the system builder whatever the role is you do have access to that and then it'll export that as a markdown file. So if you are going to use the agentic tools that are kind of air gapped between your environment you can you can actually have your agents refer to that markdown file to get the actual schema names and the actual table. So basically let's say you want to build a fetch XML in Claude code, you say build me a fetch XML that's going to read my custom expense table and my expense lines and blah blah blah. Of course if it's not connected through an MCP server to your environment it has no idea what the schema names are. But then if you actually instruct it to say no I have the schema names in this in this markdown file and you put that in your ClaudeMD file so it knows about it, then it can actually find the correct names. So it kind of works in the same structure as if you're doing early bound plugins in terms of creating the service utility and that type of thing. So of course if you add new tables or new things you'll probably have to regenerate this but that was a really it was a cool little tool and I've actually used this on a couple of projects where I don't have the full MCP access to the environments and it works really cool works really great. So um thanks Luciano for building this little handy tool um very simple thing but also very powerful. I I wanted to kind of bring that to the attention of our listeners that are could be in the same boat and this is just going to help you work a little bit better with those agetic tools and getting the schema names kind of sorted out as a reference there. So yeah great work.

Ulrikke

But but I think also that's kind of a talking about tokens and the way of working I know a lot of I I had a chat with my colleague and he was like yeah um it I'm burning through so many tokens and we looked and he was like yeah because he's querying and going back to the source and he's it's like how about indexing your files how about making MD files of the huge files that you had how about kind of making your work life a little bit easier for your agent so that don't have to burn through all those tokens just to find it. So maybe the MCP server and and it's going back to what you said earlier as well is that if you have restricted um number of tokens that you can burn through and you have to you have to adhere to that you cannot burn more than these amounts of tokens this is the usage you have then you'll have to be more economic with how you use them. And so yeah maybe this is a good way to kind of get a bit leaner on your token usage.

Nick

Yeah absolutely and it's a cool tool as well so yeah it's uh yeah these are the types of things that there's still a huge uh let's say it's a community but a market for building XM toolbox tools I know there's always new ideas but it's uh gonna help a lot of people so you want to talk about the the COE starter kit update because uh we killed it a few weeks ago didn't we we did kill it uh but this was your link wasn't it or is it mine?

COE Starter Kit Exit Plan

Nick

I thought it was yours no so basically um it's uh by Kunel Sethi um he he posted uh an article on LinkedIn um and basically about about the for those of you who using this the COE starter kit of course center of excellence of course it was put out a couple years ago um um manuela was sort of championing that within Microsoft but of course it was always a uh like an open source or a freebie tool never really an actual product line even though they had release notes and things like this um but then of course the power platform admin with managed environment started you know having a lot of these features built in so eventually the you know in terms of support from Microsoft the COE is kind of going away now Canel Cephy kind of put through a roadmap to help people go through if to kind of migrate or reassess their use of the COE and kind of move on to the new things and understand how to manage the tenants. So a good little infographic there um a lot of interesting stuff um so yeah we're gonna share the link to that so you can see the four week action roadmap if you're a power platform administrator to make sure that you're hitting all of those check boxes if you're using the COE to kind of move to the new tools. So that's sort of how um yeah the you said if you're a power platform admin and don't have a plan for the next 30 days the next 30 days will plan themselves badly so that's true that is so true because you're gonna bounce from one one thing to another and just go down a rabbit hole.

Ulrikke

This is a four week action plan that you can actually follow. So that's uh very to the letter and yeah that's a good good job. Thank you.

Fall Conference Lineup And Why Go

Nick

So thanks Canel thanks canal for for sharing that yeah all right so any more new nice news items you wanted to cover before we kind of uh talk about the events you need to sign up for uh before we uh take the people to their summer holidays yeah let's talk about the events we we've chatted a lot about all the news and uh about uh the things we chat about on a weekly basis so yeah yeah um yeah so now it's kind of the quiet summertime so of course ePPC was sort of the I think the closing event for the spring um series of events of course we we had we had color cloud we had uh of course was that dynamics minds and then the epc of course there was uh European collaboration summit there's quite a few other events in between there and then the summer hits and things kind of quiet down for a while and then the fall Is going to hit and the hit's going to come on like a freight train. Um, so basically, uh, I know things that I'm attending, and of course, there's other events as well. Um, I'm gonna be in Montreal on August 31st, the Montreal Community Days. Again, this is talking about all things Microsoft and M365, and then going into September into Finland, what used to be the um Finland Collab Days Finland is now transforming to what they call the Hellish Summit because it's in Helsinki. So kind of naming things there. And of course, then it's all gonna be fun with Lego and Lego land with Nordic Summit. So I'm really looking forward to that one. Um, and then going, I'm returning to Baltic Summit this year as well, which is a really great event last year. They do the organizing team does such a really great job, a lot of interesting content, and they've expanded as wealth to have I think more days this year, from my understanding. Um, and then there's also uh this thing called Scottish Summit. Have you ever heard of this? It's I have it's uh every every I think they do it every two years. Um in sort of they kind of flip between South Coast and Scottish. So that returns to Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities in the world. So pretty keen about this. And then uh I got an email from my friend Joe Gill, and Joe was like, Are you coming to Irish Power Platform Summit? It's just uh you know a few days after Scottish. So can't say no to Joe. He says he's got the pub booked already, so he's got his priorities sorted out. Um, so keep an eye open for that if you're in Dublin around that time. Um, it was a really good event. I was there two years ago. Um, Joe puts on a really good, he's really great at gathering the the community there around Dublin, around the power platform community. So definitely it's a it's a cool thing to do. And then um, of course, in the end of October is the Power Platform Community Conference in Las Vegas, which is the huge one, you know, getting to talk to different Microsoft people and that kind of thing. And then I see that you've you've slipped in ESPC 26 in Amsterdam at the end of November. Um, that again is the the kind of the what really was originally the SharePoint conference, um, but now of course with modern work and everything like that. And of course, so we talked about everything's merging more and more together. Uh definitely gonna be a lot of great content there as well. So a lot of things going on. And I just wanted to quickly slip in after Scottish Summit. Um, I am cooking up an idea with uh Franco and Sarah from Extra Life. So keep your eye open on the socials for that. That will hopefully be happening maybe the the afternoon after Scottish Summit. So more info to come there.

Ulrikke

Oh, cliffhangers, I like it. Right. I think that concludes the list of events that you need to sign up on or up to. Um it is, I mean, it's it's it's easy to kind of, I don't know. Uh we go to all of these events and we learn tons every time. So we share news and updates every two weeks means we keep up to date on a lot of these things. And there's so many things that we don't mention because we don't have time, but there is a lot of things that we do know. Uh and then we can share. But we learn things at these conferences all the time, not only from the the sessions, but also from the come talks we have in the hallways and the discussions we have in the evenings, and it's just to be connected and to to know these people. And as I said, my colleague also came back with a feeling of oh, I do know this. And he was so energized and so inspired, and he's now sharing with the team, even though he's on holiday, just pinging people, going, you know that Copas do you think we talked about? This is gonna change it. You know this thing we talked about that isn't possible in Mother of Nuts? Have you seen uh generative pages?

Listener Shoutouts And Community Moments

Ulrikke

Because it fuels you, right?

SPEAKER_04

So I think coming back after summer, find one of these to sign off to and then and and hug your favorite MVP because you said that remember last time you we talked about this guy? So he did actually reach out. What was his name?

Ulrikke

Um, I've I got a message on uh LinkedIn, and I love it when you when you guys do this. I'm gonna build this up real quick.

SPEAKER_04

Dave Dave Scali.

Ulrikke

Yeah, he so we mentioned on podcast last time I met someone randomly that loved the show and just wanted to say how much they love the podcast, and also actually, I did just randomly hug someone I saw on YouTube, you know, earlier today, and I found it so cute and funny and adorable. I just mentioned it on a podcast, and then he listened to that episode last time and reached out to on to me on LinkedIn saying, I was the one you talked to, and the guy I hugged was Sean Astrakhan. So so beautiful, yeah.

Nick

So big, big shout out to to Dave for calling getting back to us on that. And of course, big shout out to Sean Asterkan. Like he was an ePPC as well, and he was like, he posted about the fact that Leon Walecki came up to Sean and like, yeah, hey, I want to talk to you. I see your YouTube. So that was a big thing. I mean, I mean, of course, everybody knows Sean, right? And his um, and his YouTube, and of course, he does his untethered sessions as well. So uh Sean, you're getting the uh the boost champion of the week. That was a new thing we created. Um oh funny story. So Melissa, who we awarded the first one, we her and I went to the gym last week at EPPC, and she was listening to the episode as we were working out, so she heard it then.

Ulrikke

So it's like she got you double, she had double next going on.

Nick

She was so excited, it was really cool.

Ulrikke

All right, so we see her reaction when she learned she was the community champion. That's funny. Oh, that's awesome. We love you, Mo. We do love you. All right, guys, I think that's it for this episode, and we will see you in uh two weeks uh as normal. We don't take any no vacations here.

Nick

Well, we take vacations, but uh we still do the podcast.

Ulrikke

Yeah, that's true.

Nick

July 29th, I think, is uh the next time and we'll see you then.

SPEAKER_05

All right, take care, bye-bye.

Share Rate Review And Follow

Nick

Thank you for listening. Uh if you like this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a rating and or a review on your favorite streaming service. That makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on social platforms and make sure you don't miss a single episode. Thank you for listening to the Power Platform Boost Podcast with your hosts Lurika Akabeck and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

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Nick Doelman

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Ulrikke Akerbæk

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