power platform

• Ein tiefer Tauchgang in die Welt der Power Platform Copiloten - weit entfernt von dem, was ihr erwartet! 🌊
• Mode-Dilemma: Identische Jacken führen zu Verwirrungen und Lachern. 😂🧥
• Design-Zauber: Wie der Copilot eure Apps im Handumdrehen farblich umstylen kann. 🎨
• Zukunftsmusik: Die Vorfreude auf den Power BI Copiloten, der die Datenanalyse revolutionieren wird. 📊✨
• Insider-Tipps: Tommy und Stefan teilen ihre persönlichen Highlights und die vielfältigen Einsatzmöglichkeiten der Copiloten. 🤖💡
• Governance: Ein kritischer Blick auf die Verwaltung und Sicherheitsaspekte der neuen Funktionen. 🔒

• Timo Pertilä LinkedInissä ja Twitterissä
• Timon blogi

In this episode, we talk with Azure McFarlane, a BizApps MVP, and a senior consultant at Hitachi Solutions in Washington DC. Her specialty is Microsoft Power Platform and she has an established Flowmance with Power Automate. She serves as Head of Global Partnerships and Growth at TechStylers and she co-hosts a community podcast 'Cloud Conversations'. We talk about her background and how she ended up at Microsoft, where she found her passion in the world of automation and leveraging Power Automate to revolutionize workflows and boost productivity and efficiency. Power Automate is a workflow engine, part of Microsoft's more low-code development platform Power Platform.  It provides an easy-to-use solution for automating tasks and business processes among more than 1,000 different apps and services, saving valuable time. We talk about desktop flows, explore real-world examples and gain insight into the transformative potential of Power Automate, not just for technical people. Furthermore, we talk about mentorship and which cult movies are or aren't a must-watch.

About this episode, and Azure McFarlane in particular: you can find Azure on Twitter @amac_ncheese, LinkedIn and the podcast Cloud Converstations. 

About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel 

In the world of modern work efficiency is the name of the game, but this can leave employee wellbeing by the wayside. Enter: The ethos of ‘Do More With Less’.

Microsoft’s consolidation of multifaceted tools into a single source is confusing for some, but for those who understand the potential, it’s the key to spending time wisely.

Martin Day returns to the Work Happy podcast to share how Microsoft’s tools are evolving, and how you can use their growing services to do more with less.

This episode covers

• Modern work tools’ focus on becoming a single source service
• The ‘Do More With Less’ concept, and how it avoids overworking teams
• How you can consolidate your existing tools into Microsoft 365’s growing offering
• Viva’s role in the future of Microsoft’s services
• Top tips for organisations looking to focus on doing more with less

A brand’s vision and values are integral to the decisions made day to day, but are they imparted onto a business, or rather uncovered to already lie within their DNA?

Being over 14 years into a journey of helping businesses share the big picture, Craig Smith - Founder of The Big Picture People - joins us on this week’s episode of Work Happy.

He takes us through the importance of defining and aligning values between the business and its people, how to share stories with increased visibility of our business leaders, and much more.

This episode covers

• Defining personal values and organisational values, and tying the two together
• Company values not being imposed on a business, but uncovered within
• Use of storytelling to convey a brand vision
• Curating a culture of collaboration
• The need to flex to meet the needs of your organisation, and vice versa
• Getting the values off the wall and into the business

There’s an ever-growing link between internal communications and change management across the board, which is clear to see from observing Asahi’s two functions working so closely together.

Asahi’s Head of Change Management, Soraya Abdelmageed, works closely with Sally Tidman, Internal Comms and Engagement Specialist, to combine the strengths of both teams.

Sally & Soraya join us on Work Happy this week to share how they’re creating ‘Digital Heroes’, tackling the challenge of access, storytelling as an essential quality, and much more.

This episode covers

• The relatively recent creation, and subsequent success, of Asahi’s change management function
• How storytelling is essential to creating change, particularly stories from senior leaders
• Video as an effective messaging medium
• Overcoming communications challenges like language barriers and reaching factory staff
• Asahi’s Digital Hero network

Microsoft Viva is an incredibly useful suite, but to many it presents a dizzying array of tools without the clearest idea on how to extract the most value from them all.

That’s where Silicon Reef’s very own Martin Day comes in, joining Alex Graves this week on the Work Happy podcast to simplify Viva and why it truly matters to your business.

We’ll hear how to pick the modules that best suit your team, allay fears that it’s the ‘death of the intranet’, and much more!

This episode covers

• What is Viva and why your business should be aware of it
• Which of the Viva modules can deliver most value to your team
• How to measure the adoption of these tools
• Pitfalls to avoid when trying to implement a vast number of Viva’s modules

Welcome back to a brand new series of the Work Happy podcast, kicking off with Sam Bleazard from Fortnum & Mason, inventors of the Scotch egg…

Sam is an Employer Brand Content Producer, and while that Scotch egg fact may seem trivial, it’s part of the all-important brand story and human experience that should underpin any successful business.

Join us for the start of series 3, where we dive into how vulnerability mirrors strength in business leaders, why you should roll out the red carpet for employees, and the merging of internal and external comms.

This episode covers

• The growing trend of merging specialisms, and cross-discipline work between PR and marketing
• Why it’s vital that there’s a human experience underpinning a business’ story
• How to protect your brand when it’s presented on external platforms
• Blurring lines between internal and external communications

In this episode of Valorem Visions, we welcome Joseph Hobbs to discuss the topic of Power BI Governance.

#ValoremVisions #TechnologyTrends #PowerBI #BusinessIntelligence #PowerPlatform #Microsoft

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What is the state of scripting in your organization? Richard talks to Christina Wheeler about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and its role in the array of tooling in M365 to take existing scripting and wrap it into modern automated workflows. Christina talks about how Power Automate for Desktop can work with an Excel macro to further automation to make an entire process hands-off or reduce the number of touches you need to make. It can be a bit messy at times, but there are lots of tools, and there is always Teams to put a collaborative UI over top of it. Automation has never been easier!

Links:

• Robotic Process Automation
• Power Automate Desktop
• CONA Services
• Azure Logic Apps
• Office Scripts
• Power Canvas Apps
• MS Learn
• M365 Developer Platform
• UiPath

Recorded September 10, 2022

James and I went down to sunny (sweaty) Orlando for Microsoft Power Platform Conference (MPPC) 2022. Apart from getting to see a great set of announcements, learn a ton, and meet up with past pod-friends we also got the chance to sit down and have a conversation with Charles Lamanna — hot on the heels of his keynote address. 

Join us for this Very Special Episode of Switched On, our chance to share Charles’ deeper thoughts on MPPC 2022 announcements. 

First, our own quick thoughts on MPPC 2022:

• James loved the enthusiasm. “Our industry is about to be turned upside-down.”
• I had big love for the announced collaborative editing feature in Power Apps, with coauthoring. Fusion teams are even more equipped now.

Then — in an effort to avoid falling into a nerd black hole of our own excitement — we jump to the live-on-the-scene interview with Charles. 

IT. WAS. SO. AWESOME. 

Here is a sprinkling of his wisdom. 

Highlights

• Charles loves the real-time coauthoring experience, same as me. Customers often have big development teams working on the same app — now think of it as the current Word or Excel. Your colleagues are there with you, making cool things happen quickly.
• Power Platform as a low-code platform is interesting in its comprehensiveness. Don’t forget that you’re doing a lot more than just Power Apps.
• James notes the Azure backdrop for Power Platform as a game-changer: “substrate”.
• There are “no cliffs” — there’s always an escape hatch to go one layer deeper on customizing and powering up apps. You can always drop into a deeper layer of code or functionality.

Charles Lamanna

• Approximately 25% of Power Platform users are professional developers, and they often collaborate with non-pro devs.
• Fusion teams, CoEs, etc — those are functionally customer innovations on top of the delivered platform.
• 7.4 million Power Platform developers. It’s only just beginning.
• Low-code development platforms in 3 years: 3 trends. Data [there’s a massive amount of data from every system, it’s not easy to put it all together → data poor to data rich, connectors], AI [from big data to big AI, “there will be more UI built for AI than for humans”], collaboration [all this great stuff is happening in tech — it’s still all about the people using it].
• AI is leaking into Power Platform in ways where you don’t see or know it. It’s just there, powering things.
• We talk about humans collaborating, in the future it’ll be humans and AIs collaborating.
• Charles: serverless is the now-future.
• Fun fact: Logic Apps come from an internal hackathon project at Microsoft called Wolfkrow (“workflow” backwards)

Money Quotes

Charles

That’s the amazing thing about platforms: you build it, and your mind is always blown by what people are able to do with it.

Power Platform has definitely entered the ‘flywheel is a blur’ stage…every quarter there’s a game-changing experience. [nod to Jim Collins]

I remember in 2013 what it felt like for public cloud. It feels exactly the same way for low-code in 2022.

Technology is what enables the feature, technology is not the feature.

James

Because it’s getting to a certain level of maturity it’s like…how far can we take this? The answer is: pretty far.

Paul

MPPC 2023: Field of Dreams

Olet saattanut erilaisissa verkkokaupoissa ja muissakin webbisivustoissa kohdata asiakaspalvelubotin, joka on tarjonnut apuja pikaviestikeskustelulla. Tässä jaksossa Antti Jokinen Cloudriven Oy:stä kertoo miten Microsoft Power Platformiin kuuluvalla Power Virtual Agents eli PVA palvelulla voi luoda oman yrityksen tarpeisiin botteja.

Antti kertoo millaisia eroavaisuuksia on itsenäisten bottien ja Microsoft Teamsissa toimivien bottien toiminnassa ja rakentamisessa. Samoin Antti  puhuu bottien rakentamisesta, toiminnan logiikasta ja millaisia käyttötarpeita varten boteilla voidaan tuoda helpotusta ja nopeuttaa erilaisten asioiden läpivientiä.

Key Takeaways

[0:00] Microsoft Power Platform’s governance is all about putting the guardrails around the low code platform so that the citizens can keep on developing apps to solve their own problems, deliver a good user experience, and allow them to innovate without locking their activities with IT policies.

[7:40] Low-code products like Power Platform aim to fuel a bottom-up innovation.
[8:06] There’s a lot of hype around low-code no-code platforms but a lot of companies don’t understand how they can use these platforms in their environment. 

[11:50] Jukka and his team of consultants often find individuals or teams using Microsoft Power Platform to build solutions, especially those who were not able to get them built through their IT departments. These are not necessarily the most beautiful apps from a UI or architecture perspective, but very effective from the business results perspective.

[13:20] You need to find those heroes within the organization who already understand that there’s a business need for low-code platforms. These are the folks who are frustrated by the lack of official systems or how long it takes to build them.

[14:40] Power Platform is better than just using the Power Apps because through the platform you can enforce policies and processes to govern several types of solutions and apps.

[16:15] What people generally misunderstand about Power Platform is its commercial plan and positioning of it because Microsoft has bundled Power Apps, Power Automate, and Flow into Office 365 from day one.

[19:27] The big question is whether Power Platform will also be for vendors to build their own products on top of it. Until now what Microsoft has mostly celebrated is Citizen Developers. Jukka and his team have also built their own product on top of the Power Platform, and they call it the ‘Sustainability Action Pack’. 

[27:25] Microsoft Power Platform charges users based on license-per-user so you have to assess which use cases it is most suitable for. It might be fit for some use cases but not the right toolkit for consumer-facing apps and scenarios.

[28:20] Power Platform’s future direction can be assessed by seeing how it evolved during the past four years. In the first two years, the focus was still on catering to app makers’ needs, integrating capabilities of Dynamics CRM and Dataverse.  During the past two years, the focus was still a lot on admin tools and governance capabilities of the platform.

[32:00] The way we frame Power Platform governance to our customers is that you need policies, controls, and processes for people who are not pro-developers, do not do it for a living, and who don’t have a formal education background in software development. Allow them to use pieces from the cloud in a sensible way.

[34:00] Internal evangelism is important to make LCNC initiatives successful.

[45:00] CRM consultants have done a lot of good work in evangelizing CRMs in organizations, so that type of effort is needed to make Low Code No Code more acceptable.

Quotes

“The way we frame Power Platform’s governance to our customers is that it's all about putting the guardrails all-around low code platforms”.

“We are really more focused on helping the organizations themselves take ownership of their tools and build new applications for scenarios that previously haven't had any apps or automation in place”.

“From an IT perspective, the power platform is unique in the sense that many organizations already have it, even though they haven't acquired it. And that's the result of the Microsoft strategy to bundle it with their Office and Dynamics tools”.

“Users of Low Code tools are people who have usually been frustrated by the lack of official systems or how long it takes to get something budgeted and implemented”. 

Listen to AgilePoint Podcasts at https://www.agilepoint.com/podcast 
Website of Forward Forever https://forwardforever.com/ 

Podcast Episode! Season Finale! SOMEONE DIES

James and I get together to expertly wrap all the amazing guests, topics, and information we digested over the course of season two. Stay tuned! Someone dies!

This season we had the extreme privilege to talk to these awesome folks. Go back and give these episodes a listen.

• Em D’Arcy regaled us with tales of governance
• Shane Young democratized our thoughts on low-code utility
• Matthias Steiner straightened us out on platforms and app delivery
• Holger Bruchelt brought home high-powered SAP and Microsoft unity

If you take anything home from this whole thing, it’s that there’s a lot more to unpack in this universe. We’ve got answers for governance, delivery, integration — but those things are just the beginning! 

Teams have to evolve. Technologists have to evolve. We’re going to plug away at a new question in our upcoming season. Stay tuned to find out more!

James and I talked to Holger Bruchelt, host of the awesome SAP on Azure podcast (also watch on YouTube) and all around swell guy. Holger put us on the right path with thoughts about platforms and infrastructure, integration and Power Platform, and being a futuristic nerd with GitHub Copilot (a perennial favorite topic of ours). He’s just as fun to talk to when the recorders have stopped, so we hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we did. 

Highlights

• Closing out the “Multi-Vendor Mess” series
• Former SAP employee now in program management for architecture and integration
• Started understanding the mashup space all the way back with the MS/SAP partnered product Duet
• SAP IT runs SAP on Azure
• Recurring theme across SAP everything: setting up single sign-on is always a challenge
• Consistent UX is a best-of-breed challenge
• Teams integration is top-of-mind for lots of customers in the integration space
• Holger emphasizes that fusion teams are a thing that people should do more of. We agree.
• Holger shares my enormous enthusiasm for the new AI tools for making programming better, e.g. GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Power Platform also taking a bite of this

Money Quotes

Holger

I honestly think the Power Platform is an amazing extension to what you can do with SAP. 

You can empower users in the company to create their own applications in the Power Platform.

James

We all had this vision of what could be, but there were technical obstacles. I don’t think any of us predicted how fast the cloud would unlock the bottlenecks. 

Paul

The degree to which SAP data is the core to processes is astounding to me. 

Simplifying how you get and interact with SAP data is a trillion-dollar idea by itself.

Podcast Episode! S2E3: Shane Young

James and I talked to Shane Young for the third episode in our second season: “Power Platform Democratization”. Shane is the founder of PowerApps911, helping clients with Power Platform training and custom app builds in the Microsoft universe. He’s a fun guy to talk to, and he’s one of the most informative people you’ll ever follow on Twitter or YouTube. 

Highlights

• Shane is a “Microsoft nerd” — in love with it since the ‘90s
• Prior to PowerApps911, he ran SharePoint911. I’m sensing a formula.
• Digression into Ted Lasso
• Shane says he’s seeing about a 50/50 blend of IT folks and business folks in the Power Platform world
• Power Apps/Power Platform has 530+ connectors (as of the time of recording — more now!)

• Shane said “You’ll appreciate this as nerds” to James and I — and yeah. We did. :)
• Major customer moment(s) for Shane: getting past simply reproducing a paper form, and really unlocking the tech things that platforms add.
• Shane looks forward to continuous democratization of technology.

Money Quotes

Shane

You’ve got to be able to put firm rules around this thing [Power Apps] before you go. 

Paul

People don’t realize how flexible they are, when it comes time to explain their actions to a machine.

The tragedy of IT is that some people [who only incidentally use tech] feel dumb because they can’t figure out the tools. 

Podcast Episode! Microsoft Ignite with Lori Beck

James and I spoke with our highly-esteemed colleague Lori Beck about the recent Microsoft Ignite virtual conference. Lori leads our Microsoft consulting practice, and has great depth of knowledge and insight into Microsoft Dynamics. We had a great time talking about Logic Apps, Power Apps, Teams, and OpenAI GPT-3 (find below the poem that the AI wrote for us). 

Highlights

• I love the Ignite book-of-news feature. Super slick. Other companies should absolutely copy this.
• Power Apps pay-as-you-go plan, making things palatable for a certain class of customer
• Dynamics SCM
• Azure Communication Services now more tightly wound with other things, like Teams — and getting SMS short codes
• Logic Apps can now run fully disconnected in Azure Arc
• OpenAI ALL THE THINGS! New Azure OpenAI Service, Power Automate helper, GitHub Copilot (not part of Ignite but too cool not to mention)
• Listen to me nerd out for like 10 minutes straight on GPT-3.

Money Quotes

Lori

Collaboration and presence awareness and that kind of interactivity, even among developers, is increasing everywhere.

They’re doing everything they can to break down silos in the enterprise.

James

At the end of the day, the customer wins here. In a big way.

The story of ERP up to now has been: I enter the transaction of whatever I’m going to do, and then I turn around and do the real thing [in some other system or platform].

Paul

Red Vines are superior to Twizzlers in every way.

I would estimate that the chances are that almost all of us have read a piece of content GPT-2 or GPT-3 generated, and not known that it was.

OpenAI Enhanced Poetry

Below is the poem I generated from the OpenAI API with GPT-3. Above the dashes is the original poem, and below the dashes is what GPT-3 output. 

And what it generated still kinda haunts me. 

i shall imagine life, a poem by ee cummings (augmented by GPT-3)

i shall imagine life

is not worth dying, if

(and when) roses complain

their beauties are in vain

but though mankind persuades

itself that every weed's

a rose, roses (you feel

certain) will only smile 

------------

to better days

and there are, you are sure,

no better days to dream

about

and there are, you are sure,

no better days to bring

about

and there are, you are sure,

no better days to lie

about

• Azure Static Web Apps is now generally available | Azure updates | Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft is working on HoloLens 3, consumer version - MSPoweruser
• Observability for Event Stream Processing with Azure Functions, Event Hubs, and Application Insights | CSE Developer Blog (microsoft.com)
• SAP steps back from S/4HANA-on-Azure preference | CIO

Build-aiheet

• Microsoft Build 2021 Book of News
• Introducing Power Apps Ideas: AI-powered assistance now helps anyone create apps using natural language | Microsoft Power Apps
• Microsoft Power Platform is the best way for teams to build together - Microsoft Power Platform Blog
• Microsoft Teams announces new developer features | Build 2021 - Microsoft Tech Community
• Build cloud-native applications that run anywhere | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure
• Import a WebSocket API using the Azure portal | Microsoft Docs
• Azure Communications Service Book of Newsissä
• Cosmos DB Book of Newsissä
• Announcing Azure SQL Database ledger - Microsoft Tech Community