Power Platform Boost Podcast
The Power Platform Boost Podcast is your timely update of what's new and what is happening in the community of Microsoft business applications. Join hosts Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman for a lively discussion of all things Power Platform!Like what you hear? Buy us a beer: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Powerplatboost
Power Platform Boost Podcast
Managed Apps (#96)
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In this episode, we cover two big announcements: Microsoft Copilot Apps on Managed Runtime - or Managed Apps, as we will continue to call them (rebels unite!) AND Microsoft's superapp: the new "Copilot OS for all form factors" with Home, Code, and Autopilot!
In other news, we also share content from Charles Sexton, Lisa Crosbie, Danish Naglekar, Michael Megel, and Michel Mendes covering topics like Power Platform Toolbox, Generative Pages, and GitHub Spec Kit. Also, check out the recording of Scott Durow on the Community Call where he presented the new Operative Next Gen course in Agent Academy for the new Copilot Studio Harness!
Nick shared his experience as a speaker and attendee at Scottish Summit, and Andy Kemp shared a gentle reminder in the form of a blog post about what it can feel like to find your place at community events like this.
Puh! That's a lot to cover in one episode - so buckle up for the ride!
Show notes
Managed Apps
News
- Microsoft AI-first Development Weekly: deployment checks by Charles Sexton
- Microsoft Just Changed Copilot. Here's What You Need to Know by Lisa Crosbie
- Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot
- Power Platform ToolBox for VS Code by Danish Naglekar
- Power Platform Dev Weekly #300 by Anwesha Sharma and Mark Carrington
- Never Stop Learning by Michael Megel
- github/spec-kit
- Generative pages are no longer coupled to Dataverse by Michel Mendes
- Create a generative page in model-driven apps
- Operative - New Copilot Studio Experience | Agent Academy
- Hands-on with Copilot Agent Academy on the Community Call with Scott Durow
- Finding My Place: Reflections After Scottish Summit by Andy Kemp
Podcast
- Office 365 Distilled by Marijn and Steve
- Unresolved Dependencies by Joe Griffin and Sebastian Sieber
Events
- Power Platform Community Conference (Las Vegas | October 27-29): https://powerplatformconf.com/
- Anything You Can Code, I Can Code Better: Code Apps vs Power Pages SPA (Ulrikke Akerbæk and Scott Durow, PPCC | Las Vegas): https://powerplatformconf.com/sessions/Anything-You-Can-Code%2C-I-Can-Code-Better%3A-Code-Apps-vs-Power-Pages-SPA
- ESPC Microsoft 365 and AI 2026 (Amsterdam | November 30th - December 3rd): https://espc.tech/conference/espc-2026/
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Travel Banter And Quick Hellos
NickBut I think also because their costs involves, I think IT directors are going to turn into the angry dad that in the wintertime is yelling at his kids to shut the door. You're going to, what are you trying to do? Eat the whole neighborhood kind of thing. So yeah, shut the lights off when you're like leave that. Don't leave the kitchen door or the fridge door open. Like all the things that we know we as parents yell at our kids about, you know, conserving like electricity and the heat and stuff. Like, you know, like turn off the water if you're not using it, you know, the whole bit.
UlrikkeSo 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 Ackerbeck. Hey Nick.
NickHey. Hey, Ulrika. How's it going?
UlrikkeIt's going well. And then I can see that the lag is still a thing. So we'll see how this goes. We'll make the best of it. You are not in your normal surroundings. Where are you? This is going to be the unresolved dependencies podcasts, Joe and Seb. It's like, what did you have to eat? And where are you now? And where are you going next? And what's the quiz of the next city?
NickYeah, so I'm currently in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Never been here before. It was basically, as you know, I'm just touring around Europe, but of course, different stops at different events. I have one more event to go to in Thursday. It's the Irish Power Platform Summit. And I had a few days in between. So I thought, hey, I've never been to Belfast. I want to check it out. I finished watching Dairy Girls on Netflix about a month ago. So was kind of like intrigued about Northern Ireland and everything involved. So yeah, that's that's sort of why I'm here in between. It's just, you know, part of the adventure, right? Like you got to take these opportunities to see new parts of the world, experience new cultures.
UlrikkeIt sounds like you're kind of uh declimatizing and picking up the accent even now, uh, which is awesome. Come on, keep it going.
NickTo be fair, I spent the last few days in Scotland and then of course hanging out with a lot of the UK community folks, like you know, like like with uh Ian Twiddle and um Melissa and Will Dorrington and you know, all all these guys, the folks that have like the you know the English accents, and of course Joe as well, uh Joe Griffin uh and AJ, like you know, our whole cast of characters in our traveling circuits.
UlrikkeSo maybe you want to do this in English then.
NickMaybe or I I don't know. I if I I don't know if I could do an Irish accent, I can I can fake I can fake my way, like the Scottish accent, like what the fuck, what the fuck is going on?
UlrikkeOh, I love it. That's a reason to to live in down in that part of the world, is just to be kind of surrounded by that type of accent. Just yes, I love that. Yeah. Alright, but we're not here to and uh talk about that. We're here to talk about the power platform news and updates, even though we do also like to say that we are getting into the the autumn for sure. Uh it's now rainy and gray and leaves are flying everywhere, which makes me a little bit depressed. So then of course it's good to have a list full of news.
Managed Runtime Explained In Plain Words
NickYeah, and there's and there's lots of news. Of course, there's a you know, the turn the new terminology of the week or the new word that we have to get our our our new sentence or whatever you have to get our word around is the okay, let me try this Microsoft co-pilot managed runtime.
UlrikkeYay! Woo-hoo! And then also more uh famously called managed apps. And then someone told me that they're not a it's not called that. It's very important for Microsoft that it's not called managed apps. So perfect.
NickSo I'm gonna call it I'm gonna call it managed apps. Yes, me too.
UlrikkeI had the same reaction that was like, oh you okay. No, what was it? Uh as a co-pilot managed, so C M C M. It was just it was just yeah, CMR. CMR apps. It's supposed to be. And then I was like, well, CRM, CMS, CMR doesn't work for me. So managed apps, it is on this end. And also, so we had managed you know, a while back we had harness. Sorry, it this is the lag. Riverside just sent you to me in double time.
NickWe're gonna be speaking like like you know, see like a C B, like we used to do, like like, hey, like I'll just say, uh okay, we're doing this over.
UlrikkeAnd then we have to do over. And wait. Roger.
NickRoger, Roger.
UlrikkeRoger, Roger. Okay, this is gonna be fun. So when we talked about harness a few episodes ago, that was kind of the buzzword of the week. And this, and then we talked about runtime then as well, because that was a something my I picked up in another context. But now runtime comes around again. Do you want to kind of give a brief kind of explanation of what runtime means to you?
NickSure. So when I mean like when I hear like the word runtime, and we've had run times in the past as well, right? So you would download, and it's kind of the engine, I would say, the engine that runs things. So with this managed runtime, it has the you know the word managed in there as well, meaning that we have the governance built in, um, the security, the you know, the licensing or the credit consumption, and that is all the runtime. And basically that can run different applications. So even in, you know, sometimes when we have scripts, we say, well, we can run the script, but we need the runtime to kind of run the script kind of thing. So with the managed runtime, not only can we run managed apps, as we're gonna call them, but we could also run apps that have been built in other platforms like Lovable, for example. So it basically like a it's kind of the engine you kind of bolted on, and then the runtime will run this all within the context of the Microsoft platform. I it's and it's the thing is to remember, it's not necessarily power platform or power platform as we know it. There's nothing, as we said last time, there's no concept of solutions, it's not built within Dataverse. This will give people the ability to create apps for their department, but also I think Microsoft has indicated this could be building enterprise apps as well. Of course, and the fact that it can run lovable apps or you know, apps you build in Microsoft also kind of lends to the idea that potentially you could run apps built in other platforms as well. And then if you think about it, you including things like Code App or sorry, code apps and things like that, it's all built on a lot of times like React frameworks and connecting with the connectors that connect to the various, you know, both Dataverse and other data sources. There is sort of within your read some of the documentation, there is sort of they talk about the data, uh a database of sorts and it's kind of unnamed. So that sort of opens up a bunch more questions. So yeah, that's how I see runtime.
UlrikkeYeah. So then it's the place where you deploy the thing you want to run. In comparison, kind of the opposite will be in the editorial. So when you're creating an agent or you're creating an app, you're not, it's it's not on the runtime. So when you deploy it, you deploy to the runtime. That's kind of when it's running. That's when it's kind of effectively in the runtime.
unknownYeah.
UlrikkeSo for me, this is what this is actually in my mind, because I I need mental models to be able to understand this. What I'm looking at this as the managed runtime is kind of what we have when we think about managed environments in Powerplatform. You can you have your your um admin, your governance is security already baked in. You have all of the same kind of capabilities as managed environments in PowerPlatform. It's just that you don't have to rely on Dataverse. So the app can be anything. From what I understand, it still has to be packaged as a managed app, but once you kind of have that little wrapper around it, inside it could be basically anything. You can connect it to SharePoint, you can use Excel, CSV data if you want to. You can connect it to Dataverse if you want to. And I saw the same thing you saw that there's a bit of a maybe there will be a kind of a data storage situation going forward, not really sure what that's gonna be. And then you can host it in a power platform. It can be tied to a power platform environment if you like as well. So it's loosely coupled and and like you said, you can start from various different places. So what was announced with was that you can now, if you have co-pilot co-work, you have then uh an app skill in co-pilot co-work that allows you to create apps from there. You can create it via uh co-palot studio, is now uh with the new, of course, the new harness, the GitHub harness, you can create apps from there. You can create it from the CLI, so you can use your coding agent of choice and anthropic models. You can also use co-claude co-working to get all my C's in a row. And that's about it. And then you of course you mentioned Lovable, which is probably then you know kind of the same as the CLI, which is kind of the the the ways in that we have now. And this caters to all types of users. This caters to the UX first, with Lovable create is applies to the business user or the maker, the local no-coder in in cohort. It uh it appeals to the agent maker in co-pilot studio and it creates and it uh enables the developer from the CLI. So it's uh it's very cool. So and and with that, so that's one announcement. And we talked about it last time. The the CLI was kind of the the thing that we couldn't talk about last time that was announced between we were in Nordic and now. And then also, of course, uh so you know uh Charles and Josh, they have their uh they've had the they've explored uh code apps for a while, and I saw that Charles have now renamed their newsletter to Microsoft AI First Developer Weekly. So that will now be mostly about managed apps, it seems.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
UlrikkeCovers also code apps and generative pages as long as as far as I could see.
NickYeah, and quick shout out to Charles. I saw him very briefly on Saturday at Scottish Summit. Um, but yeah, good again, these guys are killing it. Uh um he also uh I believe he won one of the community awards as well, but we'll talk more about that later. So yeah, this is great, more great resources from uh Charles and Josh. Uh or Charles and Josh, yeah, right. Two terms of uh yeah, the new, you know, about these new things. And of course, there's a lot of other information as well. Microsoft announcements that we'll have in the show notes as well. And then also our friend uh from down under, Lisa Crosby, not so much on the a little bit on maybe the managed apps, but a lot about the new changes in co-work and how they change co-pilot and the new kind of the what they call the super app, which of course also was the the big announcement in between when we uh when we met in Nordic Summit and now. And of course we talk about super app, it's kind of merging co-pilot. It's all gonna be kind of one thing, but it's still whether it uses it the co-pilot chat, and then it goes into the co-pilot co-work, and then it goes to autopilot, which is formerly known as Scout, and then of course, with all the apps and things like that. And Lisa put together a really, again, a really good simple explainer YouTube video going through everything, including how it's the license and the costing will be as well, which is extremely important for folks trying to figure this out as they roll this out into their organizations to make sure they have those controls and make sure that these tools are used in the probably at this point the right the most efficient way. So we're still we're still in the era of tokenomics and we probably will be there for a while. But you know, so but basically, yeah, that's another a couple other great resources as well about this, all these flurry of announcements uh in the last week or two. And that's probably gonna, there'll probably be more or more information leading up to both the Power Platform Community Conference in Las Vegas as well as Microsoft Ignite the following few weeks.
Choosing App Types As React Spreads
UlrikkeYeah, for sure. And I'm doing a session with Scott Duro at PPCC about comparing actually PowerPages SBAs with managed apps because we've known that this is gonna come around for a while. Um, and it's of course an evolution of code apps. So the the title of the session is anything you can do, I can do better. And trying to kind of distinguish a little bit also for people when to use what. What is the difference between a PowerPages SBA now and the Managed App? What can you do? What can't you do? And then also how do they differ? Because now that everything is a React app, everything can be loosely coupled, anything can be what you want. How do you then choose what to use? And uh, I listened to to Joe and Seb on their uh Unresolved Dependencies podcast. And Joe was asking Sebastian, kind of, so will you never create a model-driven app or a canvas app again? And of course, like Joe said, uh, as Seb said, I haven't made two Canvas apps in my life, so probably not start uh creating Canvas apps, but model-driven apps I will still create. I don't think that's going away. I don't think that generative pages is going away. I don't think code apps is going away. I think all of these different apps types have their use case, depending on where the customer is. Because that's the thing that we keep forgetting as we see these new announcements and these evolutions and it's cutting edge and it's private preview and public preview. We forget that there's still people, still companies out there that are looking to go to the cloud. So, I mean, depending on where you're at in your journey, there will be a different app that it caters to your needs.
NickIt was funny because uh at Scottish Summit, Daniel Lakowicz was kind of he, him and Melissa were doing a session on cowork. And then Daniel asked, Well, who here is using Microsoft Cowork? And I jokingly said, I use co-work for the first 17 days of the month.
UlrikkeYeah.
NickSo because my it's funny because my credits, because I set up a few Microsoft cowork uh like reoccurring activities and thing, you know, some autonomous agents running. And yep, all of a sudden I get this message in my email going, You're out of credits, and it put everything on pause. So it's like Uh-huh.
UlrikkeBecause that's what we need to also remember to say. And you touched on a little bit about licensing when Lisa kind of covers it in her video.
Token Costs And Credit Tracking Habits
UlrikkeBut it's very important to understand that now with the new harness, Copeland Studio costs the second you prompt it, the first word you put in and the first enter, that costs you credit. And so when I um you know starting to prepare for our session and kind of demoing things out, I'm very conscious. The first thing I did was to have my agent write up a kind of a lab prereq to what it is that I have to do in my tenant, because that's my personal tenant, right? To make sure that I don't put on pay as you go and la-di-da. We do have some credits or I do have some credits already in my tenant, and I want to keep it low. So every time I do something as well, I'll go in like dash cost. And then I have a repo, a project, and I have a skill that had that its job is to go in every time I do something and update that spreadsheet. We talked a little bit about last time to keep track of the the cost and also between the different ways of creating apps. Because I suspect that there is a big difference between the costs of using co-work or the CLI or Cobalt Studio. I have no idea what lovable is like. I don't even know how that rate relates to to licensing. Um, but it's gonna be very curious to see. So, and I haven't been able to work with co-work at all because Iteras in Norway are uh ISO certification restricts us from sending data to the US, and up until very recently, you couldn't opt out of the entropic models using co-work. Now you can. So when I spun it up and I joined the Frontier program with my personal tenant, now finally I can just act, I can restrict it so that I can access the GPT models only. And that's the default because my environment's in Norway. Uh, and I can finally start using co-work. But that's taken a fair bit of time before we got here. And also, yeah.
NickYeah, and that's I think that's something Microsoft needs to be aware of because like there is some friction to get set up and to get going. And I'm sure that will get better over time. But I think also because their cost involves, I think IT directors are gonna turn into the angry dad that in the wintertime is yelling at his kids to shut the door. You're gonna what are you trying to do? Heat the whole neighborhood kind of thing. So um, yeah, shut the lights off when you're like leave that, don't leave the kitchen door or the fridge door open. Like all the things that we know we as parents yell at our kids about, you know, conserving like electricity and the heat and stuff, like you know, like like turn off the water if you're not using it, you know, a whole bit.
UlrikkeSo that's I have a feeling that now that Anne Michelle's moved out, we are gonna get the tail end of all your dad, your all your built-up dad thingies is gonna come out here and that's absolutely and can I then start yelling at you for putting recurring agents to spin things and go for work and just uh spin credits? Yeah.
unknownCool.
Admin Controls And Environment Group Gotchas
UlrikkeWell, yeah, of course, they're gonna shut this down. And it's I I must say, I must admit, I mean, I know my rare round power platform admin center and the Microsoft Admin Center. And of course, you admin your apps. So if you're going to Microsoft 365 admin center now, if you have access to that, you will see you have your co-pilot and you have your agents, uh agent 365, and then you have your apps. That's where you manage manage managed apps. Jesus Christ. And you can see an overview of your environments and the environment groups. And then it's still a little bit fuzzy to me how managed apps relate to environments and dataverse or sorry, power platform because it is and it isn't. So I had a bit of trouble getting a co-pilot studio to allow me to create apps because I didn't have the environment that I was using within co-pilot studio added to the default managed apps environment group. So now that I did it, okay, it works. Yeah. But there was a lot of bells and whistles that I had to make sure that I turned on. There's a whole new page of settings you can set. And of course, this relates to your tenant settings, your power platform environment group settings, your power platform environment settings, and then of course your managed environment settings. Yeah, I think that's it.
NickYeah, tenants environments this is that managed to do it.
UlrikkeSo yeah, the granular control, let's put it like that. Not confusing at all. No, cool.
SPEAKER_00So yeah.
UlrikkeSo we covered managed apps, manage co managed co-pilot runtime, the new say land capabilities, and then also the new co-pilot OS for all foreign factors, as Ryan Cunningham said it. But it's that's what it is.
NickYep. Oh, love these guys these guys and their terminology and buzzword, big O.
UlrikkeYeah, yep. And and in other news, I thought you had some very cryptic things on the
Power Platform Toolbox Comes To VS Code
Ulrikketop. PPTB on VS Code. What is that? PPTB?
NickYes. Power Platform Toolbox, as we know, is the kind of initiative led by Dinesh and, of course, our friend Cookie as well. So Cookie, Cookie won one of the Hall of Fame awards. So I have a video of Cooking telling the crowd to F off at Scottish Summit, but that's a whole other thing. So the Power Platform Toolbox, as of course, it it is sort of, I'd say, the next generation of the XRM Toolbox. It uh has the community that can build tools uh that you can use to build power platform solutions with. And it was sort of like uh, you know, so Dinesh is uh he is he he him and the other the team members have built this very much like the XRM Toolbox, but it's on modern modern technology. So it will run on a Macintosh, it will run on Linux, but not only that, he has now added a Visual Studio Code extension. So if you're working within Visual Studio Code, which which I am quite real most of the time these days, we I can also have the extension to run my power platform toolbox within the context of Visual Studio Code, which is really amazing. And so that's uh that was a great announcement, and it really goes to show that these guys how they're investing and trying to make this better. I just saw a link today from Dinesh on basically kind of publishing the principles for the other contributors of how to for the Power Platform toolbox. Again, about you know, the fact that you know, don't, you know, don't blame IAI for your code. Like you own the code if you're contributing to this open source. Make sure it doesn't delete data without the users knowing or you know, give indications and kind of listed a few principles which I thought were really good. Um, a lot of them common sense items, but it's good to have these things written down to make sure that this tool is very valuable to the community, but also to make sure that anybody working, again, the IT administrator, you know, yelling at his kids to Make sure that these tools are governed and secure and will work properly. Because I've heard some people I've talked to in the past saying, I said, Oh, you, you know, you need to do this. There's an XRM toolbox. And they say, yeah, we're not allowed to run XRM toolbox in our environments or on our on our systems. And I'm like, wow, you're wasting so much time doing things by hand or the old way. But I also can appreciate the need for security and things like that. So I'm glad Dinesh has thought of some of these things and he's putting that into as principles for developing. And hopefully that kind of appeases uh makes sure folks are a little bit more comfortable using these tools as well. So I'm going to continue to look forward to more news and updates around the PowerPlatform Toolbox and new tools and coming coming forward. And also they have a lot of AI agentic stuff built into that as well. And there's been a couple sessions of the last few community events specifically on the Power Platform Toolbox. And I'd be interested to hear from the our audience as well how they're using the Power Platform Toolbox and if they're building tools as well.
UlrikkeYeah. Yeah, it's great. We wouldn't, yeah, we wouldn't uh survive without it at this point, I think. Uh so it's awesome. And also wanted to highlight uh because a few of the same people that are behind the PowerPlatform Toolbox is also behind Power Platform Dev Weekly. So that would be, let me put the names up. Uh that would be Danish and Cookie, Matt Beard, Ashwana, Shama, uh, Mark Harrington, and also Lynn Wynne. They have 300 newsletters last week. All right. That's just woohoo. I mean, come on, guys. I yeah, so we're approaching 100 episodes. I mean, 300 newsletters. Okay, we're gonna get you guys. Game on. Like, yeah, game on. No, but really, I mean, and and they're they're still keeping it up to date, right? So it's still fresh. And of course, these new tools that we just talked about, these new capabilities, is so code-friendly, code first. Uh, there's a reason why uh Charles is calling his uh weekly newsletter, Microsoft AI First Development, right? So it's all in the name of the developer these days. And uh it's uh it's more kind of uh important now than ever, I think, to keep these new weekly newsletters floating because I think so. Preparing for my session, for instance, it's very important for me to kind of gauge the audience a little bit to see what people think about these new new capabilities, new app types. And I see a lot of channel on LinkedIn, people are commenting on different posts, I see the internal WhatsApps that we have, and there's a lot of different opinions, but also where people struggle, what's the holdup? Where is it not mature enough? Where what needs more work to be able to kind of give uh good answers and and kind of do a good session uh in Vegas? So I think these opinions and workarounds and uh known issues, for instance, that's very important. And we need people's opinions about these things, not just AI gurge slob.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
unknownRight.
UlrikkeOkay, so just wanted to cover the other bits
Spec Kit For Leaner Agent Builds
Ulrikkehere. So do you have another link in here that's never stoplearning.
NickYeah, so of course, you know, we like to as you as as we know, we like to highlight uh blogs by new folks. And it was interesting because I at Scottish Summit I ran into one lady that said, Hey, you mentioned my blog post like a like a couple months ago on your podcast, and I was like so excited to hear that. So I we love feedback like this. So it was interesting. I was at Baltic Summit in Poland, and I happened to like randomly was sitting beside another MVP who I had not met before. His name is Um Michael Michael Meagle, he's from Germany, and he asked me what am I interested in? What kind of what do I do? And I said, Oh, I'm really big into agentic development, power platform, and his eyes lit up. He's like, Me too. It was like, you know, like we're like two friends who found the, you know, who like the same toys in the sandbox kind of thing. And he told me about his blog and we talked about uh a lot of things, but one thing he brought my attention to, and I'm not sure if you've heard about this, is the GitHub spec spec kit. And what it is, it is a set of tools that will, you know, are our skills rather that help you write specifications and planning documents and things like this specifically for um you know building different applications. And of course, this kind of spans the whole, the whole kind of spectrum of things. But Michael's written a lot of articles specifically around Power Platform and using Spec Kit for that. So, of course, if you can start generating good specs, that means that you're gonna be more token efficient, you're gonna be building good solutions, also documentation, testing, those types of things are wrapped into this kit as well. So it's something I'm diving into exploring. I'm reading his blogs because as I build things too, of course, we talked earlier about tokenomics and making sure we're efficient with things. It was just a really good resource. So I just actually just threw the link to his whole blog. So I would highly recommend anybody building using agentic tools in the PowerPlatform to check out his uh his blog articles, a lot of great stuff in there. And again, very nice meeting you, Michael, in Poland. And uh I continue to follow you and look at uh more of your stuff.
UlrikkeYeah, I can see that he has a whole series on spec-driven development, which is really cool. And if there's one thing that I'm struggling with at the moment, it is that the agents, they just love to be spend tokens, and so it bloats everything through oblivion. I think the thing that I'm doing the most, as I talked about last time as well, is to just keep it simple. Don't bloat it, just give me exactly this little thing. And I've now spent a thousand credits on one solution, and it's yeah. Well, so this is good. This is something I like because then it it it it it already in the planning phase of your project, then you'll keep it simple, you'll keep it down, you'll keep it spec specific, and then it can't really derail and go off, which is really good.
Generative Pages Beyond Dataverse
UlrikkeAnother thing I wanted to mention that came to my attention was that generative pages in model-riven apps are no longer coupled to database. And this was really weird. I don't know how this is meant to work, but I saw this post from Michael Mendez and it's like, so what is your take on this? I mean, can you just then describe a page on top of it says here, you know, SharePoint, SQL, other connected services? You like a code app can be created or a manage app can be kind of put on top of connections. So you have thousands of connections like we have in in PowerPlatform. That can be a data source. Is that now the same for genitive pages?
NickYeah. So think about let's say I let's say we had a requirement a year ago where we needed to actually have some sort of interface in a model-driven app, but had to read from a SharePoint list or had to read from a completely different data source. Our options at that time would have been to use a custom page, which really is just a Canvas app embedded within a model-driven app. So the fact then generative pages came along, and we thought, okay, generative pages is going to kill code pages. And I know Sarah and Matt's have done sessions on this as well, but the problem is code pages or sorry, generative pages up until this point could only attach to Dataverse. So if you needed to connect to another data source, you you you couldn't really couldn't do it unless you kind of broke into the code and kind of did it that way. So now the fact that it's no longer it's not that it's no longer coupled to Dataverse. Dataverse will still be, you know, embedded or linked data source.
UlrikkeNow I get it.
NickBut now you can you can also begin to pull in all these data sources. So to me, this to me is another nail in the coffin for Canvas apps or code or custom pages, that whole framework. I've been building some things in generative pages. There's some projects that I'm working on that had a that do use uh custom pages that we're looking now to replace with a generative page because just because of course you have the connection references and and also they're a little bit clunky on how they work. And of course, Canvas apps delegation, like that to me drives me bonkers. Um, if you have over 500 records, then it kind of limits what it can see and all this stuff. So yeah, I think this will be uh definitely looking forward and gonna definitely try this out a little bit as well.
UlrikkeYeah. No, I I misunderstood in the beginning. I was thinking, what would you do with the kind of a decoupled, free-flowing generative page? But of course, it is in the context of a model-driven app. It's just you can create a new page in a model-driven app, and that page source doesn't have to be dataverse. So then, as I said, you can show, you know, SharePoint sites, which is brilliant. I absolutely love the idea. And like I and I completely agree with you. Like this is just maybe killing off one of the things we talked about earlier for the new and adventurous at least. Yes. Right. So just looking at the list of things to
Agent Academy Next Gen Operative
Ulrikkego through. Also, a thing that we forgot to mention last time because we were kicked out of the room. The last item on the list was, of course, our favorite um learning resource for Copeland Studio, the Agent Academy. The team has now released a new version of the operative recruit kind of the one after recruit, say operative, uh, recruit, operative, and commander. So now operative is now out. They call it next gen. Yes, next gen to accommodate for the new harness. So when you go into Agent Academy now, you'll be able to choose the standard harness or the next gen, which is the new harness. Um, and then you can go through. But of course, the operative is uh building on the recruit. So if you want to do next gen, you have to do recruit first and then you do operative. It gives you the ability to kind of download the solution and add that to your environment. So you don't have to do everything yourself, but then also there's a few files that import some data. So there is a bit of manual work to set this up. It very quickly goes into AI security and governance, which is really important. Uh, you'll learn how to set up skills and evaluations and connections, which is uh very important. So yeah, very good resource. And I also saw that Scott Giro was on the community call where he presented this. So if you want kind of a two-for-one type of thing, watch the video first and then go in and look at the new operative next gen Agent Academy.
NickAnd earn your badge.
UlrikkeEarn your badge! Whoop, whoop, go bit, go bit.
SPEAKER_00Cool.
Community Events And Being More Inclusive
UlrikkeSo the last one on the list is uh some uh reflections on what you've just been part of.
NickYeah, and it it was interesting. So I as I mentioned, I was at Scottish Summit this weekend, and as always, a great event. You know, I did uh the the opening keynote was one of the best I've seen in such a long time. Uh from shoot, I just saw his name, a guy from GitHub. Anyways, it was good. I did a post on it. But then, and then of course, like I, you know, did it did a session as well with the Melissa Hale on productivity hacks, which went really well. But this one, and of course, I I could probably talk a whole episode about Scottish Summit and everything about it. But I did want to point out there was I did see this article actually literally about an hour ago on my flight. I was just looking at my phone, looking at LinkedIn. And this is by someone called Andy Kemp, who was a part, he was a speaker, um, but also a fairly new speaker. And to be honest, I I don't know Andy, but I saw his article and it made me kind of think as well and kind of made my own reflection. Of course, I go to an event, I think you're sort of the same way, but we see all of our friends, we start chatting, we start, you know, interacting with people. Of course, a lot of people are not shy, they're not introverts. They come up and they'll say, Hey, we listen to the podcast or we like your session, or I follow your blog, and it's great to have the conversations. I absolutely love it, but I keep forgetting sometimes people are a little bit introverted, they're a little shy. I don't bite, I'm more than happy to talk to anybody, but I also get it. It's a little bit hard to kind of meet someone new. Uh, you know, you go into a new room and okay, what do you say to somebody, or how do you introduce yourself? And it's a little, it can be very intimidating. Not because it's me, I'm just a regular guy. So it's, you know, I'm not trying to, you know, it's like I'm not trying to make myself like out of a big deal here. Like I joke about it sometimes, but really I'm I think it's just meeting new meeting new people is always tricky. And I Andy found like at the event, you know, someone new coming in. It's like, how do you sort of, you know, there's there are people that are kind of in the corner and how do they kind of engage and how to do that? So it was really good. And he had no, he, you know, he wasn't blaming anybody, he was just sort of kind of assessing the situation. Uh, it got me thinking, it's like, okay, for my own personal self, I should, at these events, I should keep an eye out. If there's someone that's kind of there or lingering and wants to be included, try to get a bring them in the circle. A lot of times we say we shouldn't be standing in circles, we should be standing in use or to bring people in. So that's something I want to work on. But I also thought, too, at events, it would be really cool if maybe this is something we should start doing is we have mentoring for new speakers, but maybe we should also, if they're new speakers, also have a buddy assigned to them for the event. Not that they have to hang out all the time, but the buddy to go around and introduce to say, hey, this is Eureka, this is Scott, this is uh Daniel, this is, you know, here's Matt, you know, and hey, have you met this guy, AJ? Your life is going to change from here on in. Those types of things and get people to, you know, you know, begin to meet people and then begin to feel comfortable and have these conversations and of course pay that forward as well. I think this makes our community so much better. So it is something it was thanks, Andy, for for writing this. If I see you at an event or whatever, I'll try to say hi. Please come and say hi to me. And and let's just sort of, again, I think for all of us who've been the more, you know, the senior members of the circus, uh let's make sure that we're to try to be inclusive and bring everybody into the conversation.
UlrikkeYeah. Oh, I absolutely love this. And I remember, you know, uh Nordic Summit for me is one of the conferences that do this the best. I I remember the first year I was there and people were standing in U's, like you said, because Giro was very adamant at the beginning, as Hara was always saying, stand in a U shape. It is very important. Vivian talks about it at Tallinn, and it works. It is so much easier to get into a crowd. At lunchtime, I'm one of the introverts. Yeah, I don't, I know it's hard to believe. But when I go into the lunchroom, for instance, it's really hard for me to sit down next to someone I don't know. So I force myself to do it. And every time I end up having these great conversations and, you know, learn to know new people. So I I absolutely appreciate this. And also wanted to mention that now that Marcel 365 and Power Platform kids are coming together, I think this skill becomes more important now than ever before because we are emerging and we need to get to know each other and we need to create open spaces. And like you said, seeing one standing alone, sitting alone somewhere, asking, hey, you know, do you do you want to hang out for a little bit is a very good skill to have. And not everyone is a as a we were very different that way. You talk to you know, a bazillion people, and I keep to myself and you introduce me to so many people, and without you, I would be very lonely at these events. So I think we need people like you, more people like you. So yeah. So thank you for that.
NickAnd and and people like Andy to call us out on it as well.
UlrikkeYeah, absolutely. Andy, that's
Awards Season Plus Conference Plans
Ulrikkevery good. And also on the topic of market of 365 people, there were some community awards at Scottish Summit this year.
NickYes. So we won't go through the full list because there's a there's a lot of everything, but of course, our the Power Platform Boost podcast was a nominee or a runner-up, I guess, a finalist for Best Podcast, along with um Joe and Sebastian for Unresolved Dependencies. Um, and then Mar, hopefully get this at Marin and Steve uh for their podcast M365 Distilled. Um now they've been running their like 175 episodes. Uh they had they actually had their equipment set up and they were running Scottish Summit TV while there. So our equipment's pretty simple. I have a pocket Osmo and the little mic for my travel kit. Um and but Steve, I think, had enough equipment to run a small moon mission for all the podcasting stuff. So definitely congratulate and they so they ended up winning the best podcast and congratulations to both of them or sort of them and their team for uh for the podcast that they do. And uh yeah, and so yeah, next year, next year we're gonna get it. And then and also, like I said to you um when I texted you after, I said, like, no, we need to both be there when when we win an award, maybe someday, we need to both be there to get it at the same time.
UlrikkeSo maybe that's why we haven't won it yet, because we haven't been there at the same time for a very long time. And so maybe we're just jinxing it. Yeah. That's it. No, uh Scottish Summit is very important to me. Uh I have fond memories, for instance, from the time that I was Joker at the drug show, which is very cool. And I'm excited to come back to Scottish Summit as some other time. But they do every other year and they alternate with uh South Coast Summit. So I believe next year is gonna be South Coast, which I've never been to. So I'm hoping to go there. So that's gonna be very, very cool. All right, let's wrap this up. We I hope to see you all. Not you, Nick. Unfortunately, you're not going to Vegas because you're doing your power lifting instead, you know, priorities. But I'm going to Vegas for a power platform community conference. So make sure you check that out and come to my session with Scott Juro uh and see manage apps and power pages babble it out. There might be some singing and dancing, just putting it out there. I hope Scott don't kill me for that. And and also I will be at ESPC uh in Amsterdam uh for a Microsoft 365 and AI conference uh by the same people that do ePPC. So I can't wait. And you are gonna be in Belfast for a little while, and then you're gonna go to Dublin.
unknownYep.
NickYep, for the Irish Power Platform Summit. That's on Thursday. So it'd be actually, yeah, if this if we do release this on time, it will be tomorrow. Well, tomorrow if this gets released on Wednesday. Yep. So yeah, yeah, looking forward to that. Joe Gill, Joe Gill puts this on every year. I missed it last year. I was there two years ago. Really looking forward to engaging with the community and again making sure that everybody's included in the conversations. I'm doing a session on agentic development and in power apps, like what I did in Baltic Summit. And then, yeah, and then I'm going going home. And uh my daughter also be visiting home the pretty much the same the day after I arrived back home. So really looking forward, and it would be Canadian Thanksgiving. Yeah, it's it I'm having a blast on this trip, seeing a lot of friends, having a lot of great time, and uh, but it's also it's good to get home too for a bit. And of course, we I saw you last week. We hung out for a day. Uh we went, we went, we toured around, we went rock collecting. Yes, had ice cream, it was a beautiful sunny day. We walked a thousand miles, had sushi. It was uh yeah, it was it was a it was a very cool day, it was a lot of fun. And uh yeah, looking forward. Yeah, you two so our next episode, October 21st. So yeah, fall is continuing.
UlrikkeSo probably I'll record somewhere in the Las Vegas area. Okay, cool. Yeah, all right, okay, until then, take care and enjoy the fall and get the hell out into the uh wilderness before it closes over with snow and stuff. And enjoy. All right. Catch you later. Bye folks. Bye bye.
Final Thanks And Listener Requests
NickThank 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 Akabek and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.
