Podd: CRM Audio

Solid Liquid with Web Templates

23 december 2024 | 27 min

Wave 2 2024: Release Notes Don't Make Sense Anymore

30 september 2024 | 38 min

Wave 1 2024: Deprecation is not a reason for depression

17 maj 2024 | 45 min

Back to School or What's New Wave 2 2023

16 november 2023 | 34 min

Payments in Power Pages or Show Me The Money

24 augusti 2023 | 37 min

The Hunt for Script October or Where TF Did You Put That Script

27 juni 2023 | 40 min

Life As a Template

18 april 2023 | 36 min

Release Tsunami 2023

21 februari 2023 | 33 min

Program Manager in Principal

9 januari 2023 | 51 min

The Dark Side of the Moon

15 november 2022 | 33 min

Power Pages Licensing: Show Me The MAU

24 oktober 2022 | 35 min

Goodbye Portals, Hello Pages

11 oktober 2022 | 31 min

Power Apps portals Release Plans 2022 wave 1

13 februari 2022 | 42 min

Moving on from being a Dynamics CRM (365) Developer

16 november 2021 | 33 min

Details

In this CRM Audio podcast episode Elaiza Benitez talks to Luke Hopton based in Jersey, United Kingdom, and Matt Ngan based in Toronto, Canada. Elaiza, Luke and Matt previously worked for the same Microsoft Partner in New Zealand where Luke and Matt were CRM Developers. Since then, both of them have moved away from being Dynamics CRM developers and Elaiza talks to them about their decision and what they're doing now in their current roles. Elaiza also quizzes them to see how much they remember about Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 as a developer. Note: Elaiza refers to Dynamics 365 as Dynamics CRM in this podcast episode to avoid confusing Luke and Matt. When Luke and Matt were developers, it was called Dynamics CRM at the time.

What we talked about Background to how Luke, Matt and I know each other.

Matt and Luke introduce themselves.

Matt worked for a product company in London that specialized in Wealth Management where Dynamics CRM was the platform and he now lives and works in Toronto for an HR software company that has nothing to do with Dynamics CRM.

Luke moved to a Senior .NET developer role before leaving New Zealand and then moved to London in 2015 where he joined two other product companies. Eventually he moved home to Jersey and is now a Solution Architect where he works with RegTech (Regulatory Technology) solutions – due diligence and KYC (Know your Customer) for Wealth Management companies.

The decisions Luke and Matt made to move away from being a Dynamics CRM Developer.

That last Dynamics CRM version Luke and Matt worked with was Dynamics CRM 2013, possibly Dynamics CRM 2015 for Matt.

Matt talks about the frameworks and tech he is using now.

Both Luke and Matt talk about applying what they've learnt in their time as Dynamics CRM Developers in their roles now.

What they use for source control now.

Matt talks about the differences in Application Lifecycle Management for product development compared to consultancy projects.

What Luke and Matt use for source control these days.

Who would be in their search results when Googling for issues experienced in Dynamics CRM and tools used.

Who showed Matt the ropes in being a Dynamics CRM developer - Rex Wessels, Sophie Khun-Hammond, Maryse Botros, David Brown mentioned.

Elaiza quizzes Luke and Matt on their knowledge of being a Dynamics CRM Developer

Question 1 – Matt
Question 2 – Luke
Question 3 – Matt
Question 4 – Luke
Question 5 – Luke
Question 6 – Luke
Question 7 – No one
Question 8 – Matt

What Luke and Matt miss about New Zealand.

Bizapps career: partner, independent, or Microsoft

11 oktober 2021 | 62 min

Power Apps Portals: Power Platform 2021 Release Plan Wave 2

11 augusti 2021 | 40 min

Independent connectors for Power Platform

31 juli 2021 | 61 min

Dataverse for Teams: is it a platform?

6 juni 2021 | 44 min

Power Apps portals terminology changes and community forums

24 mars 2021 | 25 min

Making a Power Apps Portal not look like a Portal

6 februari 2021 | 51 min

When NOT to use Power Apps Portals and other updates

11 december 2020 | 43 min

Microsoft Dataverse

26 november 2020 | 24 min

Fall into Portals Virtual Conference Recap

6 november 2020 | 40 min

In-line code editor and Project Oakdale

29 oktober 2020 | 39 min

Connection References

28 september 2020 | 24 min

Power Apps portals webAPI and virtual conferences

20 september 2020 | 31 min

Getting ready for DynamicsCon with Jon Stypula

20 augusti 2020 | 35 min

What's new with RPA in Microsoft Power Automate

14 augusti 2020 | 52 min

Notifications in Dynamics 365

10 augusti 2020 | 30 min

Are you an app person or a flow person?

7 augusti 2020 | 24 min

What is Dataflex

30 juli 2020 | 27 min

Why Power Apps Portals needs an API

21 juli 2020 | 23 min

Power Apps portals 2020 Release Wave 2 Updates

9 juli 2020 | 31 min

We react to the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Release Plan Wave 2

8 juli 2020 | 64 min

Training, Certifiaction, and Brain Dumps with Julie Yack

2 juli 2020 | 37 min

Field Service Mobile with Dian Taylor

28 juni 2020 | 24 min

At Your Service: Preview features in field service

21 juni 2020 | 30 min

Power Apps portals Tools with Jim Novak

2 juni 2020 | 58 min

Teams + Power Platform as a platform

31 maj 2020 | 30 min

At Your Service: Pandemia and Customer Service

25 maj 2020 | 27 min

Role of Solution Architect in Power Platform Projects

23 maj 2020 | 67 min

API Limits and Throttles in Power Platform with Sean McNellis

12 april 2020 | 67 min

Power Apps Portals Webforms, Virtual Entities and Local Authentication

5 april 2020 | 38 min

Imposter syndrome and cats with Emma D'Arcy

3 april 2020 | 28 min

Power Platform update and deprecation deadlines are delayed

30 mars 2020 | 42 min

Working from home, To-Do, and PowerPoint Coach

25 mars 2020 | 38 min

What you need to know about D365 and Power Platform Wave 1 2020

21 mars 2020 | 54 min

Everybody should use CDS

6 mars 2020 | 59 min

Power Apps Portals - What if we were Program Managers at Microsoft

23 februari 2020 | 52 min

Learning and certification productivity

18 februari 2020 | 39 min

This episode is brought to you by Inogic. Check out their new Kanban visualization for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

Learning is important. Joel has started a bi-weekly LinkedIn newsletter about learning--why it is important to be a life-long learner, choosing a learning goal, and tools to help learning. On the podcast we discuss our learning goals. Matthew Anderson has also been pursuing certification, and he talks about his strategies for learning and test-taking.

Other topics in the episode:

Smart pens: Neo Smart pen and Moleskine Pen +. https://www.amazon.com/smartpen-N2-Bluetooth-Digital-Smartphones/dp/B00ST8GT8W/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=Neo+smartpen&qid=1582039395&sr=8-4
Edge collections: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/20/collections-now-available-microsoft-edge-preview/
Microsoft certification poster that shows the intersection of all Microsoft certifications: http://aka.ms/TrainCertPoster
Taking certification exams: how to read the questions and scenarios to optimizing finding the correct answers.
Going to testing center vs. online proctored exams

Show notes:

[00:00:23] And Matthew. How are you doing day, Joel?

[00:00:27] I am excellent. Welcome to 2020.

[00:00:29] A little bit late in a little bit. Yeah, yeah. But we've been so productive we haven't had time for a podcast.

[00:00:36] Exactly. it's prioritization. And I think we both had that silent agreement that we have some things we're focused on right now.

[00:00:44] Well, actually, last week on my My Analytics for the first time I hit 42 percent of time for focus.

[00:00:53] Oh, congrats on that. I feel like I've graduated to new level.

[00:01:00] Yeah, I can say I have that much focused time scheduled. I am not hitting it, but I am getting more and more people to respect that time that I've got out there. So it's a it's a process. We'll say that.

[00:01:17] Right. So I've been putting a focus for 2020 on learning, trying to get some certifications as well as learn some other other things. I find that, you know, sometimes you get a little stale and you need to update your skill set, especially working with technology. You can do anything with learning in 2020.

[00:01:37] Yeah, absolutely. So the most recent certification I earned is the Azure A.I. Engineer Associate Certification.

[00:01:47] That's the A.I. 100. It was the exam. The core exam behind that one.

[00:01:53] So is this like super deep data science stuff for what is it?

[00:01:58] So it is a collection of cognitive services, including language, understanding and prediction, translation, and getting into machine learning pipelines. And how do you actually build and structure those services together to be able to meet the need for some sort of end user use case?

[00:02:22] Cool. So what what made you decide on that one versus all the other many things you could study?

[00:02:31] Yeah, so I had a stretch goal for myself around kind of getting outside of the business applications kind of silo within our product cloud, the different solution areas, I wanted to do something in Azure and I looked toward what are those things that are that I talk about the concept of in the biz app platform a lot, but I'd like to be able to go deeper and, you know, chat with folks about what's going on behind the scenes, talk intelligently around what some of those capabilities are and what really comes up a ton. Is these things around cognitive services and kind of improving those experiences using prediction automation around that. So it seemed like a really good fit. And then with the advent of the A.I. Builder Capabilities and power platform and some of what we have inside of customer insights and being able to make predictions about this kind of super set of information about customers, it just seemed like a really appropriate place to put some of that learning effort into.

[00:03:43] Definitely a hot area there. So how much time did you allocate to preparing for it?

[00:03:53] Yeah, so I have had this on my radar for about the last four and a half, maybe five months. I've been trying to go through some of the Microsoft learn capabilities or rather the learning paths that they have around that just to get familiar. But I really got serious about it when I put the I put my money where my mouth was and I scheduled the certification exam two months out. So it was mid-December. I made the decision to schedule it out for middle of February or rather early February. And just kind of use that as a way to pressure myself and really ratchet up the prep and training work that I was doing. And labs. Yeah.

[00:04:41] So that's that's key, I think. And I've been I've been writing a series of Linked-In articles about learning, because my focus has been on that since last year. I got the sales and customer service and marketing Dynamics 365 certifications and he first power platform certification. I didn't have to study at all for those because I've been doing it so long that I could just walk in and pass, maybe with just a cursory review, but the one I haven't had is field service because I just don't have as much experience with field service. I've dealt with it and worked with it. But I've never I've never taken the certification test on it before. So that was sure that was my goal. And my goal with this is just to broaden my reach outside of the normal projects that I work with. So with (the field service exam), that was kind of the first one I really had to study. And like you, I set myself a pretty aggressive goal of actually scheduling the exam. You put some teeth behind it. I've got people that are on my team or my mentor and they set a goal that “I want to get certified in xyz,” and then they never do it because they don't have a date. You got to have a date.

[00:05:59] What was going through my head the night before the exam, I was just panicking and saying I don't know if I'm actually ready. I went in and I was one click away from canceling the exam that I had for the next day. I didn't. Partially because I don't want to pay twenty two bucks to cancel this within the window. It's like five business days or something like that. You know what? I've done this much. I've put in the effort and I go take it even if I don't feel 100 percent ready. And I came out on the other side feeling pretty glad that I didn't spend the money to defer on something or I was going to pass it anyway.

[00:06:50] Right. I think when you take the more of those exams you take, you kind of recognize patterns. Not that taking more exams makes you more likely to pass another one, but it could. I've developed my own approach to taking a certification exam that helps me be more sure that I'm getting closer is the right answer. Doesn't always give me the right answer, but it gets me closer. I read the question backwards because the questions generally are set up with a scenario and a question. So the question is last and sometimes the scenario gives you extra details that you don't really need. So if you read the question, read it backwards. Read the bottom section to get the questioner and then look for the details in the scenario. You can be a lot more focused and avoid having the extra details throw you off. And then look at the scenario and then I look at the answers. And if it's not if I'm not really, really, really sure of which one's the right one, I start weeding out the distractors, and those are the ones that aren't right. And if you can weed out the ones that you know aren't right, then you have a 50/50 chance and then you can pretty much narrow down if you if you have a cursory knowledge of the topic.

[00:08:26] I have a variation on that approach that I use quite a bit. And I think that definitely that that concept of narrowing down the field of possible answers to what's important and also not getting hung up on a bunch of potentially extraneous information is really important. And that's consistent even on the exam that I just took here recently, as well as certainly some of the dynamics ones that I certainly know well, just given my history with the platform and most of those questions you can get rid of to maybe sometimes three and you barely have to read the whole range of what it's going to be.

[00:09:18] And the new ones have introduced case studies, which is sometimes a lot of text to then get to the questions. And that can be kind of intimidating. You have, you know, the scenario, the requirements, the details. You've got half a dozen different tabs on that thing. Then you have questions. Here's one thing I found is on the and this is this is for the what is it Pearson view or whatever Microsoft uses for the testing centers as well as the proctored exams. You can ctrl+f to search the text. That's a little tip I found to where if you have a question about “what should the sales managers do” and you go to the scenario, do a ctrl+f to search for “sales manager” and if you find it. That usually leads you to the answer or enough detail to get the answer.

[00:10:13] Yeah, that's a good one, I was not familiar that you could actually do that. Very cool.

[00:10:19] Do you go to the test center or do you do the the proctored exam at home?

[00:10:25] I am a firm believer in going to the test center. That is the way I like to do it. There is no worry of someone walking into the room. I don't have to have the anxiety that comes off like shining a camera around to show that I don't have any cheating materials or anything I'm going to cheat with. And it's just one less thing that I have to deal with. Also, it feels official. I can actually protect that time. I don't have a. Now I have to travel to physically get to the test center so I can tell people, no, I need to be done with this call at 9 o'clock because my exam starts at 9:30 and I have to physically leave and get there. And I like having that little bit of buffer. How about you?

[00:11:15] I am the opposite. I do all my exam as online proctored exams, and a year ago when they first started doing it, it was kind of rough because you'd have to have a webcam to show all around the room. They've changed a little bit now where you they text you a little app or a Web page on your phone and you just take pictures of what you're facing, what's behind you. I've got to unplug my my external monitor and flip it around.

[00:11:44] But generally, that goes that goes very well. I lock my door. I do it from my house so I don't have co-workers walking in if my wife or kids are home. I make them swear that they will not try and get in the room because otherwise I'll fail. And maybe in Minnesota you have really nice testing centers. Frankly, the ones around me are all like dumps with computers that are 10 years old with desks that are falling apart.

[00:12:16] And I've had technical problems going to my local test center, so I think I trust it more doing it from home. And I get more flexibility. Like I have a meeting cancelled tomorrow. I'm going to take a take a certification exam and have more flexibility than when I do a testing center, usually it seems to only have availability a week out..

[00:12:39] Yeah, I'm I'm definitely scheduling mine more in advance, so that part's not an issue. Pearson is headquartered in Minnesota. So we have a million testing centers around here. There there's one that’s a ten minute drive from my house. Then I'm going to be moving soon, and the place I'm moving to there's a testing center one mile from the house. You know, I can walk there in under 20 minutes if I really needed to. And like all of them they have been reasonably nice.

[00:13:12] I mean, it's not crazy. You know, hardware quality of the machines that I'm on, but they've physically worked.

[00:13:19] The only argument or complaint that I have is I did try to take my customer service exam, which I just for whatever reason, hadn't taken previously. And this was in mid-January. And there was the threat, the threat of snow in Minnesota. Now, it hadn't actually started snowing yet.

[00:13:40] So that's like every day in the winter, right?

[00:13:43] Right. They were concerned that there was going to be snow later in the day. So they canceled at 8:00 in the morning. All the exams that they had. Now, my exam was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. I showed up at 8:45. They said, sorry, it's been canceled. You know, it's supposedly you get, I don't know, 210 minutes or something like that. Ridiculous amount of time for that exam at least.

[00:14:07] I'd never personally taken that long just because I have worked with the material so long. So I literally would have been out there out of there, even if I took that full time, by noon. Not a flake of snow fell from the sky until about 2:00 in the afternoon. I was just I was very, very frustrated with that. That was the biggest chink in the armor for going to an actual testing center.

[00:14:42] And people like Shawn Taber have this elaborate routine where he goes to the same Starbucks before he takes his exam and feels like if he doesn't do this he will fail. I don’t have this routine myself, I schedule and just jump in and take it.

[00:14:58] Sure. So I don't quite have that rigorous of a of a series of things I have to go through. It's not that regimented. I have a couple of different test centers I go to. I try to make it there about 15 minutes early. But beyond that, I just focus that energy on knowing the material and having that carry me through.

[00:15:21] Right. So the series I'm writing on LinkedIn has been a departure from the normal kind of content that I usually write. But it's been kind of an experiment because I got in on a preview of a new LinkedIn feature called newsletters. I like it because it's basically articles that are grouped into a series and people can subscribe to the series of articles. And currently I'm limited to just one newsletter, but I can see once this gets released then that I will probably have newsletters on different topics. And the really cool thing is I have people following the series that don't follow me or aren't connected to me. So it seems to have a little bit more of a life than just writing individual articles or LinkedIn posts. I created both like a WordPress blog and the LinkedIn articles. And by far, the LinkedIn newsletter is getting more traction than the blog version. So I really like that new feature of LinkedIn.

[00:16:31] Yeah, it's been great. I. As soon as I saw Joel Lindstrom is starting a newsletter, I said, oh, give it away. I'll try that out. See what it's all about. And yet I've continued reading.

[00:16:42] I don't know when they're going to release it as more of a general feature, but I would imagine it's coming soon. Once they do, I think you'll really like it. I think the problem with articles is they've just been kind of one off things. They have good findability because you can find them through Google and other places. But, you know, it seems like this is the missing piece to make articles a little bit more sticky.

[00:17:09] Yeah. If you have a topic where you have some authority or want to be able to communicate a lot without just doing a novel in a single post. It gives a way to be able to chunk that out and get good feedback from people, because when you are managing your own blog and that type of thing, you know how many people are going and leaving meaningful comments or interacting or sharing their views. If it's within LinkedIn and doing that, I think it will be a pretty cool feature. I'll take advantage of it once it is a little more prime time.

[00:17:50] So you mentioned you're moving. Where and why are you moving, Matthew?

[00:17:54] So I am moving within Minnesota. This is not weather driven. Actually, it will only be about a 10, 15 minute drive from where we are now.

[00:18:10] But so my kids are going to be in school age, coming up in the near future here. And we wanted to try to think through where do we want to be for them to go through all of their schooling and hopefully, depending on what happens, not have to move because of you need to go to a different school or not thinking that that far ahead. So we started the search. It was about eight months ago at this point that we started casually looking with a timeline of within the next couple of years, we want to try to move in. Sure enough, we found one that we were really excited about, with a good school district that we're excited about there. And a little more space. We like what we have. But as the kids start to get and a little bit more space to themselves, it'll give them that that space that they need.

[00:19:17] Great. I'm going to bring back a feature that we haven't done for for a while, which is “is that productive.”

[00:19:34] So for today's is that productive, I'm going to review my smart pen. This is something I have been using for over a year. I intentionally wanted to live with it for a while before I reviewed it. We have talked about Evernote and OneNote, and we have talked about physically writing your journal versus electronic notes. The idea of a smart pen is the merging of the two: a physical pen that can easily be transitioned into digital notes. So the pen that I started with is the Neo Smartpen N2, which is a pen that uses a specially coated paper. You can buy notebooks, such as the Moleskin notebooks, the ones that look a little bulbous, the paper sticks a little bit. It works with them. And the idea is you take notes like you would normally take notes, but you can sync those notes to your phone, to your computer, to your iPad, to almost any device. It will sync and OCR your notes. You can sync directly to OneNote or Evernote. And it's something that I found pretty indispensable. And I said my original pen because I broke my original path. I somehow damaged the sensor.

[00:21:04] I think I pushed the pen part too far in or something. And so I had to replace it because it actually got in 2018, it was out of warranty. So there's also the Moleskine version, which is the Pen+, which is basically the Neo Smatpen N2 and branded Moleskin. They're shaped a little bit differently. The N2 is more rounded where the Moleskin is kind of flatter. They have the same technology in them. But I find the Moleskine version feels better to hold In some ways, but either one are not are not bad.

And I had terrible handwriting. One of my goals has been, over the last year and a half, to improve my handwriting. And I've been successful with that. But it successfully transcribes my handwriting.

I'll give you a for instance, I was in a meeting where we were doing discovery and then transitioning the notes into user stories into Azure DevOps. So I intentionally just wrote in my Moleskine with Moleskine Pen + notebook rather than typing them into my computer. Then I was able to very quickly sync my notes, take the text transcrption, wordsmith it, and then copy and paste it into stories.

[00:22:26] And it it went very quickly. So I find it I find it extremely effective. Not every note I want to keep, but it's kind of per page I can choose. There's als a little checkbox. If you want email the notes to somebody, you can just check it. And when you sync with the app, it will email it. And what I find very useful about it is I can go into meeting and don't have to fire my laptop. I can be writing in my notebook and it saves me a ton of time transitioning that into OneNote, sharing the notes with other people, or taking an OCR of the notes. There are other things like the Rocket Notebook, where you use a regular notebook with specially designed paper to scan it with the phone. I find that the smart pen is better and there's other smart pens like I think there's one called the live scribe or something. I haven't tried those. But as for the Neo N2 or the Moleskine Pen +, which is basically N2, I would say that for me it is productive and saves me a ton of time.

[00:23:32] All right. Well, that's cool. I don't know. I mean, I still like my pen and paper for both journaling and for planning. And I'll call it more limited note taking. And my go to is still the Office Lens app to be able to pull that in, push directly into a OneNote notebook. And I can choose from either my work or my personal one notes or drop it into PDF or any of those kind of things. So that's that's still my go to I haven't graduated to trying that digital pen.

[00:24:13] Right. When (the digital pen) syncs, I don't know how it does it, but if I have a red notebook and a black notebook and if I write in the red notebook and I write in the black notebook, it knows which notebook that I'm I'm writing it in. So I don't have to deal with each page necessarily. I can just sync the pen. I've actually got three or four different notebooks, one to use for more of a journal, one I use for just personal to do type things, and one I use for meeting notes, And it keeps them separate. So you could you could do the same thing with Office Lens or whatever. So I’m not saying you have to use a digital pen. I'm just saying for me, it's very productive.

[00:25:03] The pen and multi notebook combo. Exactly.

[00:25:09] So kind of kind of related to that. Have you tried the collection feature in the chromium Edge Dev?

[00:25:19] So I have not tried that yet.

[00:25:21] I did write about that in one of my articles on my learning series, and it is something I find to be a very useful learning tool. Specifically, you can have multiple collections, you can drag and drop text and images. It's basically like the clip to OneNote, but having it in the browser and being able to build the collection, and then you can send the whole collection to OneNote or whatever you want to.

[00:25:45] I found that useful, especially for learning, because you go through Microsoft Learn, or whatever learning content you want and just grab these snippets, put them in the collections, arrange it the way you want to, and then copy that to OneNote. It could be from different pages versus sending each snippet to one note. It's kind of easier to arrange it the way you want and build the build the collection, then send it somewhere.

[00:26:14] Sure. Now, as you're using that, are you finding that you get stuff that's like partially done in transition, sitting in that collection and hot? How do you not have orphaned content that sits out in those collections?

[00:26:32] I don’t have orphaned content. For example, when I'm studying for my field service exam, I have a collection for resource scheduling. So as I go through the multiple articles about resource scheduling, I'm grabbing sections or lists, such as the statuses of work items, because I know that's probably going to be on the exam.

[00:27:00] And then there's a diagram of the stages of work and I'll drag that over. And so then you can rearrange those pieces, drag them up, drag them down, delete them, whatever. What I'm building is kind of a study sheet that has all that detail that I want to remember on it.

[00:27:24] Got it. OK.

[00:27:25] And it's live. So if you have part of a Web site on there, you can click on it to go directly to that section of the webpage. Right in the browser.

[00:27:37] Yeah, I do like that concept, though, I feel I would have to try it, but I would still be worried that it would be one other thing to manage. I'd be trying to think back to where is that content stored, and I won't necessarily remember it was part of my learning that I was doing there. I'll try to go search one note. It's not there. It's one where I think I'd have to get hands on to figure out what the actual workflow would look like for me. That’s not a judgment, good or bad. I just can't see how that's going to land. Or I've maybe tried too many of those things and thought “oh, this is going to be great.” But it turns out it's just one more place to have to go look for something later.

[00:28:25] I don't think I'd make it my permanent home for anything. That's not what I did. I used it when I'm in a session learning things and collecting pieces about them. But I then moved it to OneNote.

[00:28:38] Yeah. And that's like a staging area.

[00:28:41] But also, I was recently researching mattresses, for example, and going to different pages that had different models and pages like Consumer Reports. Besides learning, I found Collections to be very helpful when compiling research amongst different pages for something you want to purchase as a way to collect all that information arranged the way you want. Maybe you're not keeping it permanently, it might just be for that specific focused time, then delete the collection. But I think if I was going to keep it in perpetuity and come back in and be able to find it a year from now, I would agree with you. I wouldn't keep it there permanently.

[00:29:27] Yeah. So it's important then to have that habit of actually moving it somewhere if you want to be able to get it, get it later. Otherwise, you have that challenge of one more place of contact. So either stick a fork in it because it's done or move it forward to a more permanent repository.

[00:29:45] The thing about me and taking notes. They're not so much for perpetuity. I have very few notebooks that I need to keep for long term.

Power Apps Portals - 2020 Wave 1 Release Plan

12 februari 2020 | 46 min

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) in Dynamics 365 F&O

3 februari 2020 | 50 min

Customer Service or Salad Cream with Sarah Critchley

11 januari 2020 | 34 min

Refresh the Cache Season 2: Holiday Episode with Dileep Singh

27 december 2019 | 43 min

Power Platform Updates and Scott Millwood Interview

23 december 2019 | 22 min

CRM Audio Holiday Party 2019

23 december 2019 | min

F&O Enhancements and Managing Change with Sukrut and Satish

20 december 2019 | 49 min

Power Platform Updates and Interview with John Gravely

12 december 2019 | 27 min

ProdCast: Limit your WIP

10 december 2019 | 43 min

Time for another personal productivity and effectiveness podcast (brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic), and the goal of this episode is “limit your WIP (work in progress). With due credit to Personal Kanban, WIP is a concept from Kanban that refers to the number of things that you are working on at any one time. In your personal life, it can be easy to say yes to too many things and overestimate your capacity. This can increase your stress level and make you ineffective, and result in poor quality output.

This ties into re-evaluating what you are currently doing, as your priorities may change over time. Something that is low value now might be higher value tomorrow. This is one of the reasons we have changed our focus and release cadence at CRM Audio—by reducing the number of series and episodes we are producing, we can hopefully increase quality and value of the output.

We also discuss some of the latest updates to some of our favorite productivity tools. OneNote desktop is back from the dead, and Matthew is excited about the Microsoft Fluid Framework and its promise of making office documents and applications work better together.

We have discussed Microsoft MyAnalytics and how it can help you quantify how you are spending your work time by analyzing the digital dust of your meetings, emails, and conversations. But if you haven’t checked it out for a while, it has become significantly more useful—it will now proactively discuss focus time and block it off on your calendar, help you plan for upcoming meetings and see how what percentage of attendees have accepted and if you forgot to insert a web meeting link, and will block off time on your calendar to prepare for meetings or review documents that have been sent to you.

We end with a review of one of our most frequently used tools, Snagit from TechSmith. You know how great it is for making screenshots, but did you know that you can also use it to record video screencasts? And that it is easy to take high quality screenshots from your video?

Refresh the Cache

1 december 2019 | 39 min

Modern Patterns and Proven Practices With Sean McNellis

26 november 2019 | 53 min

What is a #PowerAddict with Vivek Bavishi

20 november 2019 | 44 min

Introducing Power Automate with Stephen Siciliano

13 november 2019 | 47 min

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.

Not at Ignite

9 november 2019 | 32 min

Microsoft Ignite: AI in the Power Platform with Ben Vollmer

5 november 2019 | 51 min

Editorial: Why you shouldn't fear self-service license purchase options

24 oktober 2019 | 8 min

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:

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?
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?
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.

Getting ready for Ignite with Anna Chu

22 oktober 2019 | 28 min

UG Summit NA 2019 with Tony Stein

11 oktober 2019 | 20 min

Getting ready for User Group Summit

9 oktober 2019 | 43 min

PPDB 10-07: Customer Engagement is gone, or is it?

7 oktober 2019 | 11 min

PPDB: DynamicsPower Dublin and new Surface devices

4 oktober 2019 | 16 min

PPDB 9-30: More insights are coming to Dynamics 365

30 september 2019 | 6 min

Power Apps Portals ALM

27 september 2019 | 46 min

Best practices for demoing Flow with Jon Levesque

24 september 2019 | 23 min

PPDB 9-23: Data Flows, Service update 84, and solution based Flow

23 september 2019 | 7 min

This is the Power Platform Daily Brief for Sept 23 (brought to you by D365ug).

Show notes/Transcript:

News on the data flows—Common Data Service data integrations have been renamed Data flows

"This month we’re introducing an enhancement that allows creation of Dataflows containing only Analytical entities. This option can be selected within the “New dataflow” screen.

Analytical dataflows allow free-form entities to be created, but also provide built-in experiences for harmonizing those entities into standard Common Data Model entity schemas, using the “Map to standard entity” dialog accessible from the Power Query Editor. Dataflow entities are also stored in CDM Folders within Azure Data Lake, allowing integration with other Azure Data and AI services, analytics and insights scenarios."

This update also adds support for new data connections like PDF files, Teradata, MySQL, and new data transformations.

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/whats-new-in-dataflows-and-data-integration-september-2019/

PowerApps checker now includes app checker results for canvas apps in the solution. The App checker lists any formula errors, accessibility warnings and now also performance optimization tips

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powerapps-checker-now-includes-app-checker-results-for-canvas-apps-in-solutions/

I had a positive experience on Friday—I found I could add existing flows to a solution. The flows outside of solutions area has been there for a while, but the ability to add existing flows to solutions hasn’t worked yet, but it does now.

Let’s take a look at some of the new connectors for the Power Platform:

SerwerSMS
Azure Monitor: Connect to your Azure Monitor Logs solution to run and visualize various monitor queries.
ModuleQ: ModuleQ's proactive AI technology equips you for success. Use the ModuleQ Flow Connector to trigger notifications when new recommendations are available. More details at https://moduleq.com (requires existing ModuleQ account).

Service update 84 rolls out in North America on the 26th. Some highlights addressed by this fix:

Bookable resources not visible from related records
Flow approvals timing out
When a mailbox was configured with a Gmail address, and "recent mode" was enabled, sending an email produced a duplicate email.
When a queue's owner was changed, the new owner was not added as a member of that queue.
Custom activity entity icons did not render.
The Account Timeline displayed modified case resolution records as being "Resolved by ..." instead of "Cancelled by ...".

And finally, only 48 hours until Power Platform 24. Let’s look at some of the sessions:

We start with Shane Young PowerApps, Flow, and Sharepoint, Oh My!

"You probably know one, you might know them all, but do you know how they best work together? In this session, you will learn about how the three work together to help you build great solutions. The session will be demo heavy so come prepared to see the products in action. Topics to be discussed include: * How to choose when they all do the same thing * Real world use cases we are seeing * Some of the quirks of the trio * Discussion of some of the other data sources that may come up * How you can also incorporate your on-prem SharePoint"

Then we have Ben Vollmer talking about Field Service: Come learn in an hour how to leverage Field Service and PowerApps to meet your customers needs.

Dynamics 365 information overload, experimental features, and George's new Tesla

21 september 2019 | 40 min

PPDB 9-16: Preparing for conference presentations

16 september 2019 | 11 min

PPDB 9-12: The end of Dynamics 365 classic UI

13 september 2019 | 14 min

Power Platform Daily Brief 9-9-2019

9 september 2019 | 5 min

PPDB: D365 for Talent MVP Malin Donoso Martnes

6 september 2019 | 11 min

PowerApps Portals with Dileep Singh

6 september 2019 | 40 min

PPDB 9-5: Stay Motivated and Remote Assist updates

6 september 2019 | 14 min

PPDB 8-28: Marketing wave 2 and prepping for hack 4 good

28 augusti 2019 | 16 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: 8/26/2019

26 augusti 2019 | 8 min

License Driven Development

24 augusti 2019 | 50 min

PPDB: Interview with Michal Guzowski

16 augusti 2019 | 16 min

PDDB: Your workflow assemblies might break

15 augusti 2019 | 4 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: August 14, 2019

14 augusti 2019 | 6 min

PPDB: Announcing Power Platform 24

12 augusti 2019 | 10 min

D365 F&O Wave 2 Early Access with Sukrut Parab

12 augusti 2019 | 44 min

PPDB: Mike Harley

8 augusti 2019 | 14 min

PPDB: Get Power Platform 2019 Wave 2 Today!

5 augusti 2019 | 8 min

PPDB: Dual Write with Wayne Walton

2 augusti 2019 | 8 min

PPDB: Mark Christie on holiday

2 augusti 2019 | 13 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: Interview with Matt Wittemann

31 juli 2019 | 13 min

PPDB: Power conversation with Jon Levesque part 2

27 juli 2019 | 11 min

Licensing updates with Steve Mordue

24 juli 2019 | 41 min

Document generation success and future of mscrm-addons with Michael Dohr

23 juli 2019 | 24 min

PPDB: Power Conversation with Jon Levesque

19 juli 2019 | 9 min

PPDB: Friday Power Conversation with Andrew Magnotta

12 juli 2019 | 13 min

PPDB: Fourth of July

4 juli 2019 | 11 min

PPDB: Go learn something!

3 juli 2019 | 8 min

PPDB: Canada Day and Embedded Canvas Apps

1 juli 2019 | 5 min

PowerApps Portals

25 juni 2019 | 30 min

PPDB: Power Platform COE with Evan Chaki

21 juni 2019 | 12 min

PowerPlatform 2019 Wave 2 Release Plan

21 juni 2019 | 50 min

PPDB: A seagull stole Claire's sandwich

20 juni 2019 | 20 min

PPDB: Power Platform Wave 2 with Evan Chaki

19 juni 2019 | 13 min

AI Builder and dinosaurs

13 juni 2019 | 18 min

AI Builder and dinosaurs

13 juni 2019 | min

PPDB: Business Applications Summit

13 juni 2019 | 11 min

Not the Microsoft Business Application Summit

10 juni 2019 | 51 min

Not the Microsoft Business Application Summit

10 juni 2019 | min

Friday Power Conversation with Kylie Kiser

7 juni 2019 | 12 min

PDDB: Capacity storage and export to Excel tracking

6 juni 2019 | 11 min

Mailbox approvals, new connectors, and virtual agents

3 juni 2019 | 6 min

Power Platform Daily Brief 5-30

31 maj 2019 | 9 min

PPDB 5-27: Add existing apps to solutions and new view designer is GA

27 maj 2019 | 7 min

PPDB 5-24: Dual Write with George Granata

24 maj 2019 | 12 min

PPDB: Community blogs and video update May 23

23 maj 2019 | 14 min

PPDB: Community blogs and video update May 23

23 maj 2019 | min

PPDB: Kylie Kiser

22 maj 2019 | 14 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: AAD groups and importing PowerApps Components

20 maj 2019 | 4 min

PPDB: Power Conversation with Nick Hayduk

17 maj 2019 | 12 min

PPDB: New Power Platform blogs and videos

16 maj 2019 | 6 min

PPDB 5-15: Solution Layers, D365 for Marketing, and new training on Microsoft Learn

16 maj 2019 | 9 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: CDS capacity, session timeouts, and automatic activity tracking

14 maj 2019 | 6 min

PPDB: Polymorphic lookups, release 57, and accessibility guidelines

13 maj 2019 | 8 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: Power Conversation with Jake Farrell

11 maj 2019 | 11 min

PPDB: May 9, 2019

9 maj 2019 | 11 min

PPDB: Build update and vision keynote

7 maj 2019 | 9 min

CDS Portals and Maintenance Mode

7 maj 2019 | 43 min

PPDB: Build, Solution Checker, and Tech Talks

6 maj 2019 | 6 min

Dynamics 365 learning material strategy with ClickLearn

4 maj 2019 | 27 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: Friday, May 3, 2019

3 maj 2019 | 12 min

CRM Audio: Live!

2 maj 2019 | 63 min

PPDB: Power Platform connectors are going open source

1 maj 2019 | 8 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 29, 2019

28 april 2019 | 5 min

PDDB: Power Conversation with Shawn Tabor

26 april 2019 | 11 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: Conference Schedule

25 april 2019 | 7 min

PPDB: New community videos and events

24 april 2019 | 11 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 22, 2019

22 april 2019 | 8 min

PPDB: Power Conversation With Scott Sewell

19 april 2019 | 13 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 18, 2019

18 april 2019 | 5 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 16, 2019

16 april 2019 | 9 min

Power Platform Daily Brief 4-15

15 april 2019 | 7 min

PPDB: Friday Power Chat with Scott LeFante

13 april 2019 | 10 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 11, 2019

11 april 2019 | 4 min

PPDB: April 10, 2019 -- we have questions

10 april 2019 | 9 min

PPDB: April 8, 2019--Customer Insights and Research Opportunities

8 april 2019 | 5 min

PPDB: Power Conversation with Matthew Anderson

6 april 2019 | 10 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 4, 2019

4 april 2019 | 6 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 2, 2019

2 april 2019 | 6 min

Portal Best Practices with Megan Walker

2 april 2019 | 29 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: April 1, 2019

1 april 2019 | 6 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: March 29, 2019

29 mars 2019 | 7 min

Power Platform Daily Brief: March 27, 2019

27 mars 2019 | 10 min

Daily Brief: March 26, 2019

26 mars 2019 | 5 min

Daily Brief: March 25, 2019

25 mars 2019 | 10 min

Learning Flow with Chris Fairfax

23 mars 2019 | 28 min

Learning New Things

22 mars 2019 | 42 min

ProdCast: Becoming a better Microsoft Team's player

17 mars 2019 | 38 min

ProdCast: Becoming a better Microsoft Team's player

17 mars 2019 | min

XrmToolCast: Naming Stuff, It's Hard with Marc Schweigert

8 mars 2019 | min

Marketing Portals With George Doubinski

5 mars 2019 | 58 min

CRM Audio 107: Power Platform in the Real World

16 februari 2019 | 45 min

AYS: What's new in Field and Customer Service

13 februari 2019 | 43 min

ProdCast 45: Are you an autodidact?

9 februari 2019 | 30 min

Implement This 34: Dates in the Common Data Service for Apps

5 februari 2019 | 25 min

Portals April '19 Release Notes

28 januari 2019 | 42 min

CRM Audio 106: April '19 release notes part 2

27 januari 2019 | 61 min

ProdCast 44: Habit stacking and predefined outcomes

24 januari 2019 | 24 min

CRM Audio 105: April '19 Release Notes

21 januari 2019 | 49 min

Coming up the week of January 14

12 januari 2019 | 1 min

Implement This 33: What's a "Maker" and where do I fit in a Power platform world?

11 januari 2019 | 43 min

ProdCast 43: Generating Content

10 januari 2019 | 29 min

Power BI & More 46: Dynamics 365 interactive charts and dashboards

7 januari 2019 | 32 min

Portal success with Nikita Polyakov

3 januari 2019 | 48 min

CRM Audio: 2018's Top Episode

1 januari 2019 | 42 min

CRM Audio: Unified Interface and Outlook App

27 december 2018 | 34 min

CRM Audio 104: End of 2018

23 december 2018 | 50 min

Power BI & More 45: Security and User Adoption Reporting

19 december 2018 | 26 min

CRM Audio 103: Solution Checker with Aengus Heaney

19 december 2018 | 36 min

Implement This 32: Importing data to Microsoft Business Applications

14 december 2018 | 31 min

F&O Podcast 2: Reporting in F&O

10 december 2018 | 32 min

ProdCast 42: Personal mission statement revisited

5 december 2018 | 35 min

Implement This 31 - Auditing in Microsoft Business Applications

29 november 2018 | 24 min

Dynamics Portals Learning Resources

26 november 2018 | 32 min

The Ben Vollmer Song

23 november 2018 | 2 min

CRM Audio 102: LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Brian Galicia

16 november 2018 | 59 min

CRM Audio 101: Dynamics 365 V9 On Premise

14 november 2018 | 37 min

CRM Audio 100: The Enabler

11 november 2018 | 40 min

F&O Podcast 1: Introducing the F&O Podcast

6 november 2018 | 30 min

Implement This 30: Make PowerApps / D365 management easier by using XrmToolBox

2 november 2018 | 23 min

ProdCast 41: Community contributions with Marius Agur Lind

31 oktober 2018 | 45 min

Nicholas Hayduk and Sheila Shahpari

29 oktober 2018 | 22 min

CRM Audio 99: D365UG Summit 2018

22 oktober 2018 | 47 min

CRM Audio 98: Ignite 2018 Recap

16 oktober 2018 | 22 min

ProdCast 40: Digital Wellness and Deep Work

15 oktober 2018 | min

Power BI & More 44: Introducing Dataflows with Scott Sewell

10 oktober 2018 | 38 min

CRM Audio

CRM Audio is a network of podcasts about Dynamics 365, Dynamics CRM, personal productivity, and Power BI hosted by Microsoft Business Solutions MVP's Joel Lindstrom, George Doubinski, Shawn Tabor, Mar...

Om podden

Avsnitt