Power Platform Boost Podcast

AI Cowboys (#92)

• Season 1 • Episode 92

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0:00 | 44:13

Yiiiihaa!! This time we spent a fair bit of time talking about the mental model around the new announcements for Copilot Studio, and that it's now based on the GitHub Copilot Harness, and what that means. 

Our amazing friends at the Cloud Advocacy team released a new module for this new harness already! Shout out to Elaiza Benitez, Daniel Laskewitz, Scott Durow, Jack Rowbotham, Dona Sarkar and April Dunnam. Combine this course with the extensive list of recorded webinars by the CAT Team, that cover everything that you can possibly come across when working with Copilot Studio!

We also need covered community content around how to make a podcast recording from the daily digest from all the newsletters you subscribe to but don't have time to read, by Remi Dyon. We wanted to shout out to the newsletter crews that keep us in the loop every week: Power Platform Weekly, curated by Carina M. Claesson, Daniel Laskewitz, Ed Gonzales, and Magnus Gether Sørensen; Power Platform Dev Weekly, from Danish Naglekar and Anwesha Sharma; the Copilot Studio Newsletter on LinkedIn, curated by Bülent Altinsoy; Charles Sexton's series of Code Apps updates; and How to AI, Ruben Hassid's newsletter on Claude and AI tools


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Cold Open And Summer Reset

Nick

I always amazed, like all of a sudden there's a new word like disappears overnight. Everybody's talking about it. So the new word, the word of the week is we need a segment, is harness. Everything now is a harness.

SPEAKER_01

And it's kind of like I grew up on a farm.

Nick

You put a harness on a horse. You put a harness on a cow to lead it.

Ulrikke

Like where is that what that is? Because for me, okay, so in in the farmland, a harness is that the thing you put on the horse's face?

Nick

Yeah. You put the harness on, right? And that's where you control the horse.

Ulrikke

So it's like I guess you're controlling your LLM through this harness, or you're attaching it like 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. Yeah. Hey Nick.

SPEAKER_02

Hey, your face is a little low.

Ulrikke

Wow. Sometimes I need to remember to push the recording button before without you knowing. Because then the wonderful listeners of this podcast will get the little gold nuggets that I get that no one else gets. That is you unrecorded before they're ready.

Nick

This is how politicians get in trouble with the hot mic, right? They call it and they say something like they say what they're really thinking, and then there's still a reporter that has the mic on.

Ulrikke

Mm-hmm. It's my mission until the hundredth episode to have to get a hot recording of you, hot mic recording of you to make make sure we hit the button before you know it. So back to work. Well, you kind of work, but not work the whole summer.

Nick

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Ulrikke

Yeah. Well, you can do that when you're on your own. It's like, well, I'll do the work that I need to do, and then when I don't need to work, I don't work, kind of thing. It's is it called a vacation? Do you feel like you had a vacation?

Nick

Of sorts. Yeah, yeah. I tell well, I tell people it's like when you work for yourself, the the benefit is you get to pick which 80 hours of the week you're going to work, right?

Ulrikke

So yeah. You have a lot of these. It's one of my favorite of your sayings. I know some of them are borrowed and some of them are original. The other one is uh nine women can't have a baby in one month. And that's borrowed, I know, but it's a brilliant saying. I use it all the time.

Nick

Yeah, it's a yeah. So throw more resources at it. Like, yeah, that's not gonna work.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah. More people, more chaos. You should see the baby.

Nick

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke

So do you feel like you've had a summer vacation?

Nick

It's gonna, I feel like to me, it's always been framed around school. Kids going back to school, coming out of school. That's sort of now it's officially summer kind of thing. And here in Canada, for the most part, the kids aren't back in school to either the end of August, early September. I know in other parts of the world that's a little bit different, some or early August. Uh are your kids back in school yet?

Ulrikke

Or no, no, start uh Monday next week. So we have uh one more week off.

Nick

Okay, so yeah, mid-August basically, right? So, and then with with my daughter going off to university this fall, of course, that's a whole different paradigm as well. So kind of still in a summer mode, but I do know like July in terms of emails and things and Teams meetings, it really tapers off. Definitely on the European side, like the Europeans know how to properly do vacation. Like you look at the out of, you know, you've seen all those memes that the out-of-office supplies, off out of office replies basically going, Yeah, I'm on vacation. Like email me back in email me again in September, where the North American ones, like, yes, I'm on holidays, but here's my cell phone number and my pager number and all of these other things. You can get a hold of me just in case. But that's that's not a healthy way to do things either. Should good have a have a break, kind of reset your mind a little bit. Uh so yeah, I have, you know, I did a bit of a road trip, uh a few little things. No big kind of massive trip uh in terms of uh going away somewhere exotic at this point, because I travel quite a bit anyway. So yeah, that's sort of the the summer been so far.

Ulrikke

It's funny when your summer vacation is staying local because you travel so much. And also you did have we covered last time, we covered the whole uh truck uh run rundown story, right? So I think you have had enough excitement on your trip, even though you stayed local in Canada. I mean, it's uh it's still a big country, so you can travel for hours and go on planes and still be in Canada. So, but yeah, cool. All right, so we're ready to dive in then because I have so I'm a caveat, I have my first day back at work since I've been on holiday in this summer. So for those of you who aren't used to having kind of four solid weeks of holiday, you kind of get into a midlife crisis and then you go back to work and it kind of feels like you want to just crawl into a black hole uh with your wine glass or maybe crawl back into the sunbed or the hammock. So my mind is kind of mush already, and it's like two o'clock, three o'clock in the afternoon. So if I zone out, it's just because I'm in my hammock with my sunglasses in my wine. Just pull me back in and I'll be fine. But yeah.

The Word Harness Takes Over

Nick

So for the Yeah, a lot of new stuff happening. A lot of again, the the news cycle doesn't stop. The the features don't stop. And of course, and of course, the the the naming convention, the new words. I I always amazed. Like all of a sudden there's a new word like disappears overnight. Everybody's talking about it. So the new word, the word of the week is we need a segment, is harness. Everything now is a harness.

SPEAKER_01

And it's kind of like I feel, you know.

Nick

I grew up on a farm. You put a harness on a horse, you put a harness on a cow to lead it.

Ulrikke

Like, where is that what that is? Because for me, okay, so in in the uh farmland, a harness is that the thing you put on the horse's face?

Nick

Yeah, you put the harness on, right? And that's where you control the horse. So it's like I guess you're controlling your LLM through this harness, or you're attaching it. Like, and of course, in like in mechanics too, there's an engine harness where you kind of put like it's all about attaching or whatever. Like, I don't I find the word doesn't quite explain what it is. I and this is you know, I'm gonna throw on my my farmer redneck hat kind of thing. This is someone in the city that wanted to use a fancy word and decided, we're gonna use harness, and it's like I don't think you know what it really means, really. But anyways, it's so cute. We love you marketing people and all your craziness.

Ulrikke

Actually, don't lie, we don't. No, but and and it's it's for me, it's like, well, I'm not a trained developer, right? So I didn't I don't have any kind of formal edu developer education training. So for me, for for whatever I know, harness could be a very solid develop co you know, co-developer, software engineer type of term that everyone knows what is, and I feel stupid. And then I kind of go, Claude, a friend of mine's wondering what harness means. And then can you explain it to me like I'm five? And it goes, sure, Erica, I get it, right? So, and also I think a lot of the makers in PowerPlatform and the people that grew up with PowerPlatform as a freaking local platform, don't know. One, for one, that it's not one of those development engineering terms. It just kind of arised. And two, what the heck does it mean? And so what my yeah.

Nick

So I still sneak into the secret super secret developer meetings where we all gather and we all say, Oh, we're gonna start using, let's just use this word and we're gonna use it in conversations and we're gonna see how it's gonna take up. So the word is harness. Let's just use this in some sort of weird context and make other people feel stupid.

Ulrikke

You mean Discord, by the way, because that's where all the coal developers hang out.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Ulrikke

I wasn't invited. Yeah. Okay, so let's backtrack a little

Three Copilot Studio Harness Options

Ulrikke

bit. First of all, what we're actually talking about was that Microsoft released something for Copilot Studio. Is it last week or this week? Where they what the marketing says is that there is a new harness for Copilot Studio. So you now have three named harnesses. It's the standard harness that you're used to, and that's what Copilot Studio has always been. It's more deterministic. It's if this then that more kind of flow and conditional based. And then you have Markso 365 co-pilot harness, which is kind of an extension of what you can create in for Markso 365, which is a deterministic agent, which we've had for a long time, those two, but it hasn't been called a harness and it hasn't been talked about in this way. And now there's a third one, and it's based on the GitHub Copilot Harness. That's always been called a harness. It's the orchestrator that GitHub Co-Pilot has always been has been built on from day one. So what it means is you remember we talked about the Wiggum loop in January or something, right? The identical loop that agents are now able to see their own results. And before they surface that to you, they kind of go, is it good enough? No, maybe not, and then we'll go another round. It's the it's the orchestrator's ability to to assess and go multiple rounds and and do deeper research and also how to choose different skills, different resources, different plugins, different MCP service, whatever it is, at their disposal. So that's essentially, from my understanding at least, of what a harness is. It's not the model. The model, the LLM, is different. That is always that's the same. And a harness is a kind of a wraparound the model. You can choose different models within this harness. So just to stop here, pause here a little bit. This does this, is this the same understanding of this as you have? Or do you know it is exactly what you said.

Nick

Like the like, yeah, like it's almost like the model or the orchestrator is the horse. And the harness is the how you're how you're interacting with it and controlling it kind of thing.

Ulrikke

Interesting way of thinking about it.

unknown

Yeah.

Ulrikke

And you can swap the horse.

Nick

I'm gonna think I'm gonna think horse or animal.

Ulrikke

So I'm not even gonna tell you what my mind does, but that's another thing. Okay, let's move

Runtime Means Live Agent Execution

Ulrikke

on. Because in that sentence, right, so this is what a harness is the engine engine under an agent. The reasoning model and runtime behind it thinks, plans, and acts. This new one is built for hard stuff like long running processes, large files, code execution, ambiguous decisions, runs on frontier models. In there, there's another word that I know is a deep developer engineering type of word, and it's runtime. And I've seen runtime used for a lot of different things in the last few months, and I go, and then so then I also went to uh my cloud agent and I said, hmm, now tell me what runtime means for those who don't know. And then, because that wasn't even clear to me. I feel so stupid. And then also, just on a side note, whenever I come across something that I don't fully understand, I think I can't possibly be the only person on the planet that's worked with PowerPlatform for 15 freaking years and doesn't know what this is. So this is why we're talking about it, because I know that there are people out there that also wonder runtime in this context. And they feel stupid like me, but don't feel stupid because no one can know everything. So runtime, and I I would you like to describe to explain what it is? Because you seem eager.

Nick

No, no, no, no. My um I was I was just I was funny because when you said frontier, I'm gonna go in here. We go, another horse cowboy reference, you know, because frontiers, the cowboys went and explored the frontier, you know, ahead of everybody else. So this is like frontier firms. So it's all on cowboy themes. This whole this whole new world of agents and whatever is all just one big Western movie coming together.

Ulrikke

You just open up a whole new dimension in my brain. All right, so in this, in this is brilliant. So in this context, the runtime is the difference between a runtime and not runtime is so you have your horse, you put the harness on, you put the saddle on. That's stationary, that's not runtime. The runtime is when you get on the horse and you go riding because runtime is the difference between kind of you setting up, creating, uh, configuring, coding, putting in instructions, hooking up the skills. That's not runtime. Runtime is when someone interacts with it live. So the orchestration runtime sends in Copelas Harnet context, is it it's when it's running when you're using it. It's live.

Nick

Yeah. The horse is running or the train is running, you know. Yeah, here we go. Okay, sorry. We'll keep the trades out of it for now.

Ulrikke

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02

Only so many cowboy references.

Ulrikke

Exactly that. Right. And so, uh and then I was like, I heard some chatter somewhere that all this is all good and well, and there's so many. I mean, my LinkedIn is absolutely flooded with the new introducing a new harness for Copilot Studio. Do, do, do. And we're gonna have links to the most important announcements and videos. And I know I just hold I know what you're gonna say and hold that thought for a split second because it's up next.

Licensing Shifts And Copilot Credits

Ulrikke

But there is also news around licensing in Copilot Studio.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Ulrikke

And both of us are gonna like deep breath until the other person speaks. So I guess that means I'll take it. So the one of the interesting things is that if you use this the standard copilot and the copilit chat, which is Microsoft 365 copilot, then you can use it. And if it's authenticator, if if you're using the end user's authentication, then the credentials and the usage is pulled from the Microsoft 365 Copelot seat license. So that's that's included. But if you use the new GitHub copilot harness, you don't get that free ride. There's not even on the build and authoring side of this will you be able to do that for free. So now even building will cost you. Auditing, authoring, testing, as soon as as quickly as the LLM is involved, it costs you. And of course, in addition to runtime execution, right? So that will cost you copilot credits. And it's regardless of what kind of Marcos 365 co-pilot licensing you have in addition. And on top of this, and this is a very important kind of carve out work IQ API usage by co-pilot studio agents is explicitly excluded from the MarkSo365 copilot user license, even for the harnesses that are otherwise covered, meaning the copilot chat and the Mark 2365 copilot. Which means that actually building agents now will cost you. So then the question becomes we used to be able to get developer licenses for this or developer environments where we could play around and it didn't cost us anything. Maybe this is the reason for the change, because I think a lot of people have been using and executing agents wildly without it costing anything. Because it's you if you didn't publish it, then it didn't cost you.

Nick

It's the same concept as if you're doing like pro code solutions and using VS Code to create, like we talked about the new skills and things like that. We're still using, you know, whether we're using Claude or GitHub Copilot, we're still consuming those tokens and credits and everything as we're developing those pro code solutions because it's still activating the LLM, it's still burning things on that side. So I think this is the concept that, as makers, like even if I were to create a new model-driven app, but instead I'm going to use GitHub Copilot within VS Code to do that, or the GitHub desktop app, I'm still going to be burning through those subscription, those credits kind of thing. So this is now, now we're using these Copilot Studio. It's sort of the same idea that you have to, you know, someone has to pay for this engine to be running. And it the thing is, you're right, it is a new concept for makers because we've been used to like, but we're we have to look at it from a different lens. We're we're looking at it in terms of access. Yes, I can build a new app, a power app on Dataverse. It doesn't cost doesn't cost anything. It still needs, but then once I deploy it, my users need a subscription to use it. And then that's fine because they're going to use, and I mean, even developing, yes, we use compute power and whatever else, but that's sort of a I don't know, that's sort of a hidden cost behind everything, and that gets assumingly that gets recouped when you actually deploy it and gets licensed. Now, because these things are more expensive to run, and we did talk about it last week about how you know with Steve saying, you know, hoping the price rises so people use these things a little bit better, it's all about resources, right? Running these things are expensive. These companies are losing money right now, essentially, on build on these LLMs. So, in terms of stock price and board members and stuff, you got to look at the bottom line. How much is this costing us? So all of a sudden, if now we have all these makers that are just going to, oh, I'm just gonna build a bunch of agents and play around and whatever, that's actually it's actually showing up on the needle in terms of costs, in terms of compute power and whatever else. So this is why now you have to go and draw from your credits and your tokens to build these things out. Is this always gonna be the case? Probably. This is the new world we're living in. It's, you know, if yeah, it's uh it's it's definitely gonna be a paradigm shift. I know there's gonna be a lot of there is a lot of grumbling about it that yes, to develop, it's gonna cost you money. The other thing that comes into this is running a workshop. So, like the workshop we ran at EPPC a few weeks ago, we kind of were lucky because we were ahead of that wave. If we were to run this now, we would be blocked because we actually would need to have credits. We'd have to buy them outright or incorporate that in the in the cost of the workshop in order to run it. So this is uh again going to be a different, a big paradigm shift in in in terms of training and things like that. So overall, yeah, it is a new way of thinking. It'll be interesting to see how things sort of filter out. But yeah, this is just be aware, if you're going to create an agents on Co-Pilot Studio, you will need to make sure you have a pile of you know capacity available for you to do that.

Ulrikke

Yeah, and that's a new thing. But of course, there there were still uh trials to get. So you can poke around and you can try and test in within a trial period. So, because of course you have to have that ability to see what it is you're getting before you buy it. Um, but of course, after that, then you need to know what you're doing and to understand. And also, this comes

Token Optimization For Cost Control

Ulrikke

down to something we've talked about in the past as well, to be cost efficient when we use coding agents and agents in general, and to always ask when we're building uh skills, for instance, to make sure that we check that those are not just kind of running through a lot on tokens. I I created as a bit of a side note, I I I do a lot of research these days, and I'm venturing into a whole kind of new area of stuff that I'm researching and thinking about going back to school. There's a lot of things that I'm doing. And I found myself kind of writing the same prompt every time I started a new research project. Uh, so then I I worked with Claude to, or actually, no, Chat GPT and the new model there is amazing, by the way. So if you haven't tried ChatGPT's new models in a while, then please do check it out. And I asked it to kind of can you help me create a base prompt that I can use for all my research project? And it's like, no, this is more of a research kind of uh I called it something else, kind of a platform for research type of thing. And it helped me create this massive, massive framework to help me do research in a way that I prefer it. And then I checked it and I said, can you run this against known patterns of token usage and make sure you streamline this to use as few tokens as possible? And and then I had it run three times I ran it to be more and more critical. And my lord, when I asked it to calculate how much I'd saved by doing that, those three rounds, it's like, yeah, 93% token savage or savings. I'm like, holy cow. Imagine I hadn't done that and run a research project on that framework. Jesus. So I mean, it's and this comes back to something we've talked about before as well. So if you're a developer and you're trained to think about these things, then you'll have the the reflex to go, I wonder, check this, make sure, da-da-da. But if you don't, and if you don't think, then these models are just gonna eat and consume all of your tokens in one go.

Nick

Yeah, and I think you and if you probably have done this as well, and I've noticed this as well, you you get to you get your coding agent working on something, and it's sometimes like a it's like a a kid on like on red Kool-Aid, it's like, ooh, this didn't work, so I'm gonna try this now. Oh, this, oh, let me check this again, let me do this again. Like, okay, hold on. You're you're all over the place here. I mean, there's ways with the context and things like that, you know, re cleaning out your contacts and restarting, but I think you kind of hit on something there. That's something as anybody using these agentic agents to build applications to build that in your instructions or whatever in terms of token optimization and This might be the new hot skill of 2026. Is I am a token optimizer or token, you know, because we talk about, you know, people who are good at security, people that are, you know, prompt engineering was the big thing, like, you know, six months ago. Well, now uh make so everybody add this to your LinkedIn profile, token optimizer or something, or token optimization. CEO. What skills do you have? Oh, I'm good at I'm good at optimizing tokens.

Ulrikke

Yeah. Yeah. CEO. CEO. Yeah, yeah. No, no, I get it. And I absolutely agree. So that's it's it's but it's this is ever evolving. And I think just as you said, I do say that as well. It's running off. And it's if it's not regulated, then it will just eat out all the tokens. So and if you have tokens to spare, what would you recommend people doing with said tokens?

Nick

Well, of course,

Best Resources To Get Started

Nick

now with all of these new harnesses and cowboys and agents and frontiers and everything like that. Of course, people are okay, how do I get ramped up on this? Now, before, and we went we went through and we kind of ran an agent academy by the seat of our pants. On the at that time, the new interface, that was before harness was a word. So essentially was. But we saw from the advocates team that they have refreshed the Agent Academy. Uh, so it is using, it has, it's all written refreshed to use the new harness. So you can go through those exercises and get your Agent Academy badge. Like, of course, and if you were already done it, you can even get a new, a new refresh badge as well. So there's there's that resource, and there's a ton of other resources as well. Uh last week, the cat team, the the co-pilot, what does cat stand for again? I keep forgetting.

Ulrikke

It used to be co-pilot accelerator team.

Nick

The co-pilot acceler there you go. They did an amazing webinar. Uh, I only I was a little bit late getting onto it, but I I did watch a big chunk of it. It is now recorded, so you can view it as well. And even the deck is available as well. So that also is a great resource to get ramped up on this. I know a lot of our our friends have done videos on this. Of course, like Reza had done one a while ago. Uh Lisa Crosby has done a very high-level one. We even saw on LinkedIn, we were talking about this before, Ryan Cunningham, uh, whatever big chief, big chief of AI, let's call him now, whatever. Keep all these titles. I just can't keep can't keep up.

Ulrikke

Big chief of AI, just staying on topic for the cowboys. Yeah.

Nick

Going back, Ryan uh he did a couple videos on LinkedIn giving a very high-level overview of the new co-pilot, of the harness, of course. You know, take a drink when you hear the word harness now, especially listening to this podcast. And he talks through it as well. So there's a lot of resources out there, and of course, get in and try it. But of course, trying it, just be aware that you could be dipping into your your into your uh into your precious cache of uh tokens and credits to build some stuff out. But I have a whole bunch of ideas that I want to try out, and I'm going through the, I'm going through the new agent academy. I started yesterday just a little bit to get going on that, just to see what's been changed and everything. So lots of uh great resources.

Ulrikke

So I need to just uh pause a little bit on the cat team, the webinars. So yeah, we'll have a link in the show notes where you can go in and you can see all the past sessions that they've done. And not only do they have sessions on you know aging 365, getting started in fundamentals with Copa Studio, they have governance, security, risk management, technical deep dives, which is one of those that you saw, Azure and Advanced Integration, Data Knowledge Management, Strategy, Adjobs, and it just goes on and on and on and on. Not only can you see the recordings, you can also access the PowerPoint presentations. How many of us don't have we have sessions, we do um tech kind of meet uh tech meetups, we do internal uh tech days in our companies, and you want to grab some of these, just having those presentations available is like gold. So if you haven't looked through, this is like I don't I can't imagine anyone eating anything else but this webinar kind of list. It's just by the time you get to the bottom, you'll just be fully certified to do anything AI and Microsoft, it seems. So it is just absolutely a golden resource. Yes. And I haven't gone through a single one, but I should. But I'm just gonna go.

Turn Newsletters Into A Commute Podcast

Nick

So this I was about to say this this goes through to I'm just gonna jump a little bit ahead just because we like segues, right? How many do you do you subscribe to any newsletters at all? I know, of course, we subscribe to the PowerPlatform Weekly and the PowerPlatform Dev Weekly, but do you subscribe to any other ones?

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah. So I have a cloud newsletter subscription and I have what is it? The co-pilot one and of course the code app and the generative pages one, but I think also you're talking about the new one. Is it new?

Nick

Well, no, what no, what I was seguing was the fact that I also have in my inbox every day, there's like about five or six newsletters I subscribe to.

Ulrikke

And this is the one you're talking about. Okay.

Nick

Yeah. And then basically I'm like, okay, I I yeah, and I have it like I have an Outlook rule because I look at it in the morning, like, ooh, this looks like a really cool newsletter. They're talking about this and this. Yeah, I am gonna move it to my newsletter folder and I'm gonna read it later. I'm gonna read it later. If I look at my newsletter folder right now, I have 349 unread newsletters here that just get moved, just get moved over. And I like, that looks good, and I completely forget about it. And yes, I'll get to it. And every so often I go into the newsletter folder, I'm like, okay, I'm going through, okay, this is good. Oh, this is really good. This is really interesting. But of course, who has the time? I haven't done this yet, but I do, I really appreciate this. Well, actually, what I have done, I have done with Microsoft with co- with Microsoft co-work. I do at least now goes through the last 24 hours and gives me a high-level summary of what the newsletters were about. Like, oh, just give me a one-liner, which is I found okay, great. I how I have a daily digest of what the newsletters are about, but it's worse now because now I'm like, ooh, they talk about this. I can't wait to read this newsletter. Ooh, what do I like? So, so I did see this article, and this is something I need to sit down and do. But it says, turn your daily digest into a podcast you'll actually listen to by Remy Dion.

SPEAKER_01

You're gonna put us out of business. You're gonna put us out of business. Stop, stop, stop, stop.

Nick

No, no, no. It's just we're because like, you know, people can listen to this like we every two weeks, I think they can squeeze in us if they're doing this as well.

Ulrikke

Yeah, and you won't get that to rant as well as we do, and it won't go off on tangents, and it won't tell tell you the the truths that uh we do.

SPEAKER_02

So that's what you're here for.

Ulrikke

We know. And also the weather talk. I know it's what you come here for. So good.

unknown

Yeah.

Nick

So, anyways, this is an article basically going through it's a co-pilot studio skill, turns any document, email, press review into a two-hour podcast episode with multi-voice SML text to speech, blah blah blah. So there's a lot of well depends on what, yeah. It depends on up, I think maybe up to two or sorry, sorry, into a two-host post podcast. I missed that.

Ulrikke

Okay. Because I was like, well, if you have two hours to listen to a podcast about your daily digest every day, then you probably should have time to read through the the new, but I get it. So keep it under what you can deal with. Your commute, for instance. You have a 30 minutes, so we ask it to create something that is 30 minutes long.

Nick

Yeah, and I know there's people that I I do that we we do know in our community that actually they say, Oh, we listen listen to the boost podcast on their commute, their drive into work, or other on the bus in the the ear. So we're if we're in the ears or you're on the subway now or something awesome, we love you here. But this is another, so when you're done, this this is something you could maybe put together yourself. This is something I'm interested in because I try to, like I go to the gym. There's a few other places where yeah, I can't read or can't do whatever, but I have access to my ears. So basically just a process to set up going through the as a newsletter gets into the inbox, it will actually get converted into an MP3 file that you could actually listen to with two people discussing all the points and the information. So this really kind of uh got me excited so I can maybe get through that backlog. Well, I don't know if I'll get backlog the backlog of newsletters, but keep on top of it in another method by just going through that. So I thought it was a brilliant way, a brilliant use of using skills and co-pilot studio, um, plus other aspects of technology like Azure Speech, um a few other things. So there it is, looks like there are a few steps to set it all up, but it does look like an interesting project where you'll definitely get something out of it. So just wanted to throw that on folks' radar if they're like me that has like a bazillion newsletters they want to catch up on.

Ulrikke

So and also, you know, Azure speaks really cool. Uh just to have a reason to play around with it. I mean, it's is awesome. And this actually is kind of old because we talked about, you know, the Google Notebook and the podcast that creates one and a half years ago, I want to say. So kind of being able to do this is what this is just a use case, right?

Monthly Update Plus Doom In Paint

Ulrikke

But then if you want to do it, make sure you add the new Marks of Power Platform monthly feature update to your newsletter. Because now, and I can't believe that this is new, and I'm thinking, is it new? But actually, so they just released a new update, the July-August 2026 Power Platform Update, which talks mostly about modern grid controls and uh search sorting selection rich column types for Canvas apps, a new security agent for power pages, and then which is in preview, and then also new flow groups. You can share licenses across team across flows if you include the flows in a flow group, which is kind of the three highlights of this month's feature update for PowerPlatform which is awesome. And you'll get links to it in the show notes so that you can keep on top of these uh news items as well. Yeah, and we saw, and then I just want to throw something in there because last time we talked about Joe putting Doom inside a model-driven app, and then because I had Googled and spent time on the internet reading that about Joe's new project, I got surfaced uh another person that did something with Doom, and it's actually um enables you to play Doom in paint. Now, Doom can't, I know so Doom can't actually do any execution, so it's not executed in the the it's not calculated, it's not it's the the engine that runs Doom isn't in paint because that can't do it, but it actually copies and pastes the visuals as paint, so you can it it is running the visual graphics, it's paint, paint paint. So, of course, the the frequency of the frame rate isn't very good, but it is actually playable. And there's a blog post. Actually, the the most fun thing about is this is so Mark Rosinovich, the chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure, that did this, which is uh blows my mind as well. And they have the you can download the Doom one dot wad, and there's a description of how you can do this so that you can actually play Doom in Paint. Stay tuned next week for another in the seg new segment, where can you play Doom?

SPEAKER_03

Where can you play Doom?

Ulrikke

My bet will be on Tamaguchi. That's my next next month's bet and next week's uh episode. I hope someone made it possible for you to play Doom on a Tamaguchi. And for those of you who don't know don't know what a Tamaguchi is, Google it. You're too young to listen to this podcast and Google it.

Nick

So uh something something we didn't have, you did touch on

Power Pages Security And Misconfigurations

Nick

a little bit about uh we talked about newsletters and uh the power pages security features that are coming through. I didn't throw this on here. I do want to address it because there are a lot of questions. Um, Yuka has done the Yucca thing of the week, but uh X Phil Squad hackers, have you heard about this? Um I think we did talk about it.

Ulrikke

We did not talk about talking about it.

Nick

Sorry? No, we didn't. We had a lot about talking about it.

Ulrikke

If you want to talk about it, then yeah, it's it's late in the episode. It's after 37 minutes in the episode. So I think if you want to talk about it now, it's okay because the people that know us will still be here, and those who don't, they will be long gone. So that's fine.

Nick

Well, I I don't want to I don't want to dwell too deeply onto it. So for those of you who haven't heard, of course, every time there's a a breach that involves power pages, immediately the media gets on power page. There's the whole concept of power pages not being secure. And of course, we keep we work on this every day. It is as a very secure platform. There's white papers on the security, it's got the security agents, we have table permissions, we have a whole security harness of around power pages.

Ulrikke

It's the the you know the paddock.

Nick

The Corel, yes.

Ulrikke

It's yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the fins.

Nick

Yeah. And basically they were saying this this group, the X Fil squad hackers in a couple different instances, uh, where they kind of went in and they, I think what happened was these hackers figured out someone took a PowerPages course, maybe someone I instructed. I don't know. I have no idea. I'm just speculating here. But then they went in and they were able to expose a lot of data. Now, here's the thing. Worked in PowerPages product, we both have. We see uh we see this from the community and things like that. People will misconfigure or they're not quite sure. Or, or the war, I think probably the more thing is while you're developing something's not quite working, we can't get the data to display on the screen. What is the first thing people do is they'll just create uh a security, a web role for like anonymous users that have global access to a particular table. That's one thing. So though, and then that artifact, if it's left, if it's there, oh good, we got it going. Great, we can move on with the next task. Well, if this is left open, that's gonna expose you. There's also when the web API is doing leaving everything as star. I know every time I do demos now, I make sure that I'm actually using fields. I know I did stars and I said this is just a demo, it's fine. And like Nikita Polykov would just lose his crap. It's like, no, we need to be make sure that it shows just the fields. So, of course, if the web API is exposed, and sometimes you do need it exposed to anonymous users for specific things, but also if they have if they have access to all the fields, think of like the contact table. Well, then you can actually, in the back end, if you know what you're doing, able to run a command directly in the URL and expose all of this data. So basically, PowerPages comes out of the box completely locked down. It's in terms of the configuration. These developers begin to open doors as they develop it, but there's missing sometimes that security piece. Now, there are security agents that run. There are new tools that are out there. You can load your portal to make sure it's accessible. My clients have been asking me, going, hey, we've seen this article. Are our portals secure? Yes, they're secure. We're going, you know, double checking, generating reports of all the web roles and the web API settings and things like that. Again, just to double check to make sure and to make sure everything has been properly locked down. So if you're using PowerPages, definitely use the tools out of the box. Also check all your web roles, your web API permissions, things like this. And again, let's just say PowerPages is secure, but if you leave the doors open and it doesn't even need to be PowerPages, any system that you're creating that is being exposed to the outside world, this is something security is an important aspect of this. So, anyways, that's just my little rant preaching warning, whatever else. I did want to address it. And again, want to reiterate PowerPages is a secure platform. It has all the locks, the doors, the walls, the gates. But if you happen to leave the gate open and I grew up on a farm, I know this firsthand, the cows are going to get out. So basically make sure your gates are locked.

Ulrikke

Yeah. And it's like if the fox gets into the hen pen, it's not the fox's fault. It's your fault for not making the hen pen secure. So it is on us as developers to make sure that when we do the tests we do or when we do the development, then we actually do make sure that the fox can't get in. And we need to monitor and check the fence every now and again. So and then end of metaphor. Okay.

Nick

Yep, sorry. Back to back to back to what we were talking about.

Ulrikke

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we're at the bottom. We're at the end of the list, I think.

Upcoming Community Events And Travel

Ulrikke

Oh yeah. You posted a post on LinkedIn this week as well about the the traveling circus and your engagements up until I think Christmas. So I know I don't have a lot of time left, but do you want to just quickly go through the things you're doing?

Nick

Yeah, I basically, yeah, let's well, it's more from a highlight. Like these are the ones that I'm traveling to, but I also want to make sure that people are aware that these are these are community events. They're put on by the community. The ones I'm listing here are not necessarily professionals putting on an event. Those exist as well, and those are amazing and excellent. But these are community ones, so definitely you'll learn a lot of great information. Some are, I think, very small fees, some are free. But again, the folks put in a lot of hard work and I want to kind of shine the light on them. But just very quickly going through it, Hellish Summit in Helsinki, Finland, sort of a one-day event there around Microsoft 365 Power Platform. Of course, I'm sure co-pilot, and I'm sure the word harness will be used as well all through all of these. And then, of course, uh going to uh Legoland for Nordic Summit in Denmark. So I'm really excited about that. Some sessions there. And again, great event. It's been, this is the fifth, fifth year in a row. Um, I know I have I have other friends coming from kind of all over, some from Canada as well, coming to Nordic Summit. I think more for Legoland, to be honest, but probably checking out Nordic Summit as well. And then followed into Baltic, the Baltic Summit. And I went last year, and this group puts on a really great event, a really great community in uh Poland as well. So definitely check them out. And then from there, about a week later, into Scottish Summit. And and then I'll be going to the Irish Power Platform Summit. And I just saw you snuck in there something called MVP Doggin. Do you want to uh chat about that?

Ulrikke

No, it's just one of the stops on my agenda as the MVP. MVP is coming together and making the MVP Day in also. So if you want to hang out with us Norwegian MVPs, then head on out.

Nick

They're a cool bunch.

Ulrikke

On October 6th. Yeah. And then October 8th, you'll be so you'll probably be here around there, right? Right? Because it's between Scottish Summit and Irish Summit.

Nick

Yeah, potentially. I haven't figured out my gaps yet. There's a few options uh floating around. So yeah, I'll I'm pretty sure Norway will be a stop in between somewhere.

Ulrikke

You promised me it would be, so I'm counting on it.

Nick

Cool.

Ulrikke

And the kids would be very upset if you didn't, so yeah. But that's another thing. And then we're both going to Vegas in the last week of October. And then it's back in Europe for Amsterdam and E S P C.

SPEAKER_03

Yes, I won't be in Amsterdam. Yeah. That looks like a lot of fun though, but I'm gonna be missing that one. But I'm a lot of the things.

Ulrikke

You can't do all of them, and I think this list is kind of extensive, so I think it's a good thing that you don't do all of them. So good on you. And then I'll see you in Amsterdam because I know you and you'll be there.

Nick

But that's yeah, probably. Cool.

Ulrikke

Next episode is gonna be August 26th, and I hope you have an amazing time until then, and we'll

MVP Advice And Final Requests

Ulrikke

catch you.

Nick

Oh, yeah, but uh, hold on. We wanted to we wanted I wanted to congratulate you on once again being renewed as an MVP. You said we weren't gonna talk about this, but it did the rant to you already.

Ulrikke

It's fine. It's just uh yeah. Thank you, and right back at you. Well done.

Nick

Right. And and I and it's it's funny because I when I was traveling, I did do a quick video because I do I think you and I, we both get asked a lot, kind of like, well, how do how do I become an MVP? How to get into it. I did a bit of a blog post and a video talking kind of my experiences. But if you're interested, definitely check that out because I think I'm not saying that's the exact blueprint, but I think that sort of give you a shine a little bit of light on what it's all about and what it means. And it's like yeah, it's something for you or not. If it's if you've always been curious, there you go.

Ulrikke

Yeah, absolutely. Reach out to any one of us if you like to. And then of course it takes the village, so it's not a single, it's not a solo act to be an MVP. Uh it is definitely a team effort. And so, yeah, definitely reach out if you are talking. And then, of course, uh just like you, I get messages all the time from people just curious and wanting support and mentorship and things like that. And we do do that. So reach out if you need any help.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Cool, cool, cool.

Ulrikke

All right. So then if there's nothing else, let people go get off with their get on with their day. Uh, and I'll catch you next time.

Nick

All right, see ya.

Ulrikke

See ya, bye-bye.

Nick

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

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Nick Doelman

Host
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Ulrikke Akerbæk

Host