CRM Audio

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This is our last episode from Microsoft Ignite 2019, and today we talk with Vivek Bavishi (That API Guy) about what it means to be a #PowerAddict and best practices for development of Power Apps.

Topics discussed on the show:

• What is the story behind #PowerAddicts
• Are there any requirements to be a #PowerAddict?
• Does Vivek have a developer background?
• Learning how to work with api's and how he became That API guy
• How Power Platform can change your career
• Does using Power Platform in your day job reduce the desire to work on Power Apps on nights and weekends?
• What Power Apps does Vivek use himself every day?
• When should you use CDS in your Power Apps?
• Limitations in CDS connector
• Does Vivek focus more on Power Apps or Power Automate?
• Should you start learning the Power Platform with Power Apps or Power Automate?
• Experimental, preview, and GA: which features should you use in production deployments?
• Power Virtual Agent
• How do you make Power Apps performant?
• Working with delegation
• Working with multiple personas in a canvas app
• Does Vivek put his canvas apps and flows in solutions?
• Monthly Power Addict hangouts

This is our second episode recorded at the Microsoft Ignite podcast center. Today's guest is Stephen Siciliano, Principal Group PM for Power Automate. MVP Jerry Weinstock also joins us to discuss his white paper "A guide to building enterprise-ready flows."

During Ignite 2019, Microsoft announced the rebranding of Microsoft Flow as Power Automate. During this episode, we delve into the rebranding of the platform and some best practices for Power Automate flows.

Reminder: Microsoft is giving away Surface earbuds to one lucky listener–register at https://aka.ms/PodcastSweepstakes for your chance to win.

This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic.

Show notes:

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate in one sense is a new name for what we know and love as Microsoft Flow. We decided that now was the perfect time to make it part of the Power family, along with Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agent.

What was the thought process behind the name change?

Another factor driving the change was the introduction of Robotic Process Automation. With RPA you can now build automation that uses the user interface of applications to be able to automate them. So you can write data to them, read data from them, and simulate mouse clicks. There are a bunch of applications out there that don't have any api—even with custom connectors, you have to have some kind of rest api to be able to work with something. Our goal with the new UI flow capability is to open the door to anything that you can do on your PC you can now automate with power automate.

The way that RPA works is you have to directly interact with the UI. There are two types of RPA, one is attended RPA. That means somebody is actually sitting at the computer and has the UI in front of them and presses a button and it pulls the data from the application, the other type of RPA is called on attended RPA, which runs somewhere else without a human interacting with it. The best place to run that is in an Azure VM. For on attended RPA, you need to make sure that the automation does not depend on any type of human interaction, including things like login, getting credentials, handling error handling, for example you might have a dialog box pop up. The benefit of unattended RPA is you can scale it and have multiple operations happening in parallel.

How do you manage performance with RPA?

When you record a UI Flow, you record everything, including delays waiting for things to pop up and for jobs to complete, and you can adjust the amount of time that it takes. Say you have it save a file, and sometimes it takes twice as long, we have built-in retries, so if the dialog hasn't appeared yet we will keep retrying to look for that control for some period of time until it pops up. You need to make sure that as you are building your flows you are testing them across a variety of file sizes and data types to make sure that it works, so that when it takes longer the retry policy will catch it, otherwise you may find yourself in a situation where your process times out and fails.

Will there be an RPA custom connector?

Today we support two types of technology: for Windows applications, we use the UI automation framework that is included in modern versions of Windows and is the same framework that all of the accessibility features in Windows use. As long as the application supports the UI automation APIs, we can automate it.

For web applications, we use a framework called Selenium, which is a very common web automation framework. As long as your web app is scriptable via Selenium, that works as well.

There are some applications that don't work with the Windows UI automation framework and are not web-based. For those applications today we don't do a very good job of handling automation for them. For example, if you hover over Java-based application, you will get a warning that we don't support this application yet. Over the next few months we are going to add a few more application types that we can support, and someday even having a custom connector equivalent where we can have our own custom application type is something we've thought about, but we think that the UI automation framework and Selenium will cover the majority of applications, and what we are looking at doing is leverage Computer Vision to provide automation, even if there is no API at all.

How will this help on-premises customers?

The Power Automate service runs in the cloud, but with the on-premise data gateway, which we have had for almost five years, you can connect to anything running on-premise, and the UI flow itself executes locally on the machine. So theoretically, if you have a long-running process, you could unplug the ethernet cable while the process is running and if you plug it in again before the process finishes, it will just work. We don't support offline yet where I could queue things up and send them down to the machine and replay them later, but that's another thing that we are looking at in the future.

Do we still say we are building "flows?"

Absolutely—"flow" is like the parent class, the base for everything. The core thing is a flow. There are different types of flows:

• Business Process Flows, which come from Dynamics 365
• UI Flows, which are the newest type of flow
• Automated Flows, which have been part of the Microsoft Flow product since the beginning

You use Power Automate to create flows.

What does this mean for Logic Apps? Any plans to bring RPA functionality to Logic Apps?

Not exactly—even before these announcements we had functionality in Flow that was not in Logic Apps. Business Process Flow and building on CDS solutions are some examples. We are going to continue to invest in types of flows that are not the automated flows, which are the Logic Apps equivalents. As we continue to invest in Business Process Flow and UI Flow, these are additional types of abstractions that continue to build on top of that layer, and these won't necessarily be brought back into the Logic Apps code base.

Other topics discussed in this episode:

• Plans for synchronous/real-time flow
• Plans for improvements to connector documentation
• Why can't I run a Flow when a row is added to Excel?
• When will the Dynamics 365 connector go away?
• Improved documentation for using actions in flow
• Managing order of operations with multiple flows
• Should you put your flows in a solution?
• Should you use nested conditions?
• Calling solution based flows from a canvas app
• Best practices for enterprise flow

In this episode, Nick and Colin discuss the general availability of Power Apps Portals as well as updates from the Microsoft Ignite conference which they are enjoying from their office chairs in Canada.

We are podcasting from the Ignite podcast booth this week. You could win Surface earbuds--register at https://aka.ms/PodcastSweepstakes for your chance to win.

Today Ben Vollmer from Microsoft joins Shawn Tabor, Sarah Jelinek, and Joel Lindstrom to talk about how AI in the Power Platform has advanced and exploded into all areas of the Power Platform and Dynamics 365.

Discussed on this episode:

• Power virtual agent
• Use cases for mixed reality
• Product visualize
• Customer Service Insights
• Customer Insights
• How to get started with AI
• Common thread of AI across the platform

Watch the Ignite Vision Keynote with Satya Nadella | Microsoft Ignite 2019 ...

Join us later this week for episodes about Power Automate and Power Apps.

In this episode, I announce some changes going on at CRM Audio and share my thoughts on self-service license purchase options for the Power Platform. This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic.

Microsoft recently posted a notification in the Microsoft 365 Message Center this week notifying customers that starting in mid-November, end users would be able to start purchasing licenses directly without Administrator approval.

This has resulted in the typical doomsday reaction by some people in the community. It seems like whenever Microsoft announces some change to the way that software is sold or licensed, somebody will be outraged. This speaks to the breath of Microsoft's customer bases, and you can't always make everybody happy.

Predictions are made that CIO's won't trust the platform and won't use it. Yet, based on Microsoft's latest financial numbers, they are doing something right and the sky is not falling.

I think that, like usual, this outrage is overblown, some arising from misunderstanding what is happening, and some from people who work for very large enterprises not recognizing that the majority of companies' environments are not like theirs.

The Power Platform is just that—a platform. Saying that end users can buy their own licenses does not mean that they can buy access to data—it means that they can buy licenses—using their own money—to build their own apps, flows, and reports. It doesn't give them the ability to bypass any corporate data governance.

So here is why I think that self-service license options are nothing to fear:

1. Users can do it anyway. Even before the self-service option is introduced, if an employee or department wants to build PowerApps or use Power BI, they can buy their own licenses outside of your tenant. With the self-service option, at least you get visibility for who is using Power Platform and your data and access policies still apply. Also, many Office 365 services and add-ons can be purchased and used without admin approval today, so what is the difference?
2. Users can do it with most competing systems. Slack, Salesforce, and Lucidchart grew to what they are today by selling their services directly to individuals and departments without corporate approval. In many companies, these grew to be corporate standards based on the number of people in the organization that were using them. Saying that CIO's will not use Power Platform because they offer self-service license purchases is a fallacy because what alternative are they going to use that doesn't also allow self-service license purchases without administrator approval? Why should Microsoft be held to a different standard than equivalent services?
3. You still maintain control—DLP rules determine what connectors can be used in end-users' apps and flows, security roles in SharePoint and CDS grant or block what records they can access and actions they can perform in corporate systems, and Active Directory SSO limits where users can log in to Power Platform apps and services. Plus you have full visibility for who have purchased licenses and what they are doing with them. And most importantly, just because an end-user buys a license, that doesn't give them access to your precious corporate data. How is someone buying a license and building an app with their own data any different than someone doing the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet? If your organization has a policy against people buying their own licenses to build apps, you can see who is doing this and go knock them in the head or cut off their access to the other services.

Based on these reasons, I feel this is nothing to worry about. Would it have been better to give the option to disable self-service license purchases? Maybe. Will some admin somewhere not know about this and have users build ninja IT? Likely. Is it reasonable to say Microsoft shouldn't do this when it would put them at a competitive disadvantage in many situations? Absolutely not.

This episode is brought to you by mscrm-addons.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 is two weeks away, and Anna Chu from Microsoft joins us to share the excitement.

As Microsoft 365 Product Marketing Manager, Anna is responsible for working across the Microsoft Tech Community and MVP communities to engage with the IT Pro audience. This involves driving partnerships between engineering and marketing that influence product roadmaps and leading community strategy to enable best practice sharing between customers – in turn facilitating a natural feedback loop between the people who build Microsoft Office products and services and the people who implement them. She is also the Community Strategy Lead for major Microsoft events such as Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Ignite | The Tour.

Discussed in this episode:

• Demographics of Ignite attendees
• Unconferences
• Strategy for selecting sessions
• What's new this year and how the keynote will be different
• What to expect at Microsoft Ignite | The Tour

Can't attend Ignite in person? You can still make a schedule and watch sessions via live stream when they happen at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite. This year you can also interact with presenters and submit questions.

This episode is brought to you by mscrm-addons.com.

Tony Stein from Dynamics Communities joins us to talk about what you can expect from next week's user group summit.

• Extreme365
• Power Platform user Group
• Dynamics 365 User group
• Silent disco
• All star awards
• Changes from last year

Music: Ben Vollmer Song

This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic.

Next week is User Group Summit 2019, and to help get ready we have Nick Doelman, Darly LaBar, Jonas Rapp, Jim Novak, and Sara Lagerquist join Joel Lindstrom and George Doubinski to talk about their sessions. Even if you aren't attending the conference, you will learn something from this episode, as each panelist shares some of the tips that they are going to present in their sessions.

Sessions mentioned on this episode:

• Unit Testing for C# Dynamics 365 CE/CRM/CDS Developers (https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=566088) Monday, October 14 8:00 AM – 5:00
• PMDEV07 - Creating a Plugin With Unit Tests From Scratch (https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583252) Thursday, October 17 9:30 AM – 10:30
• AMDEV09 - Ask the Experts, CRM Developer Edition! (https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583254) Thursday, October 17 4:15 PM – 5:15
• PMADM23 - Top 10 Free Tools for CRM Admins and Functional Consultants (https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583255) Friday, October 18 1:15 PM – 2:15
• PMUI10 - Deep Dive into Model Driven Forms JS for Non Developers(https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583253) Friday, October 18 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

• DEV03 - Developing XrmToolBox Tools https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?embedded=true&pfp=D365CEcrm&Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583336

• DEV08 - Working With Liquid Templates in Dynamics Portals https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?embedded=true&pfp=D365CEcrm&Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583335

• PP11 - Building Canvas Apps - Time to Jump on the Bandwagon https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583381

• NAAP06 - 5 Steps to Create PowerApps for Any Device https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583382

• EXCE03 - Let's Build an XrmToolBox Tool! https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583380

• DEV07 - Creating a Plugin With Unit Tests From Scratch https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/summit-orlando/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=583252

• ADM15 - Improve Your Dynamics 365 Data Quality With a PowerApp https://cdmcd.co/Rz6Z4

• UI04 - Tips to Help Drive an Aggressive CRM Roadmap at Your Organization https://cdmcd.co/baqKJ

Music: Ben Vollmer Song

This episode is brought to you by ClickLearn.

In this episode:

• Dynamics 365 Marketing Wave 2: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/it/2019/10/04/the-dynamics-365-marketing-2019-release-wave-2-update-is-rolling-out-starting-now/
• The recordings from Power Platform 24 are now all available to watch online. You can see them at https://365.training/Courses/Detail/power24
• Microsoft last week published updated details about the new api limits. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/api-request-limits-allocations
• One week until user group summit www.na.usergroupsummit.com
• Power Apps component framework is now generally available https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-general-availability-of-the-powerapps-component-framework-for-model-driven-applications-and-powerapps-cli/
• Microsoft has released some of its internal PowerApps as the Employee Experience starter kit. https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powerapps-employee-experience-starter-kit/

Music: www.purple-planet.com

This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic.

Mark & Iain talk about their recent visit to DynamicsPower Dublin! With a rundown on the sessions, Mark talks about his recent run on the PowerPlatform24 event and we cap it off with the new Surface Gadgets.

Remember that user group summit is coming up in Orlando October 15-18. Register now.