PowerPlatform Saturday Oslo 2019 – Attendee

Malin and Mark wrote good post detailing most of the event, but I thought I would add my personal thoughts from some of the other sessions

Both Malin and Mark Smith wrote great summaries
Malin Martnes
Mark Smith

Keynote

Sarah and Marius were speaking of Equal Opportunity. A highly interesting topic that is as relevant today as ever before. One slide caught my eye that I really liked.

Take ownership of your own environment. Don’t wait for others to create an equal opportunity environment, and then complain if they don’t. If you see the chance to own a situation, take it.

If there is a table you want to sit at with a chair, take the chair and sit down. Don’t wait for others to offer you a place at the table. You take it if you want to be a part of it!
Sarah Critchley (quote as I could remember it)

I have grown up in a family where the women are strong, have great educations and excel at their jobs. I am sure they have faced issues along the way, but they keep claiming their place at the table every time they can.

Malin Martnes – Extending Talent

I am sure you all know how proud I am of Malin, so I couldn’t go without writing about her. Talent is not a product with lots of customers yet, but we are working on a lot of exciting opportunities at the moment. We are always in the challenger position when talking about this product going head to head with companies that have delivered HR for many years. This often ends up in a function feature comparison, but one thing we now can focus on is the ECO-System.

Talent integrates to the CDS, and therefore we can leverage all of the cool features of the PowerPlatform. Malin showed a lot of cool examples where PowerApps were assisting in the hiring process.

Stay tuned for updates on Malins blog about talent for our customer journeys later this year!;)

Julian Sharp – IOT

What I liked about this session was hot interactive it was, and how “low code” he was trying to make it. I gained some insights to the IOT challenges when gathering messages in different ways. Also I see the impact of having a device you can pass around in the room that is working while presenting. It was showing live data on the screen, presenting different messages to us as we were passing it along. He later posted the slides on Twitter

Jukka Niiranen – Canvas vs Model

I find it interesting to listen to Jukka. He is like a rapper’s lyrics when talking. There is often some deeper meaning to what he says if you listen closely. During this session he was open and honest about his view on the Canvas apps, and the battle Canvas vs Model is now facing. Will we ever get to the point where these 2 become 1? The answer is most probably, but how!! 🙂

He also had a wonderful slide with the great Scott Durrow in focus. I think we all agree that Canvas is absolutely becoming a code app, even though it might not be complex code. As a functional consultant I say code, but a developer says “cody” to the syntax;) hehe

Mark Smith

The pictures bellow are from Mark’s session. I really loved this session because he made the participants work! The topic was CDS modeling and what you should think about. He made it clear what was out of the box, and how you should begin to think about creating new models not based on the standard applications.

Anything interactive like this is just AWSOME. The participants loved it, and had a great time while working together on the data model. Interactive learning is the best way to learn.

So in conclusion, I had a great time at this event. Hope to repeat this again next year in Oslo. I also hope to see you all again soon:)

PowerPlatform Saturday Oslo 2019 – Speaker

So Power Platform Oslo was a unique experience for me, since it was the first time I was on stage at a community event. Marius Agur challenged me to create a presentation that would showcase my view of Dynamics from a business perspective. I am not the most technical person, so I try to create solutions based on simplicity for the end user within a “do it yourself approach”.

3 ways the Power Platform can increase user adoption

I was using our own company as example for this demo, and demonstrating the issues we have had when migrating from HubSpot to Dynamics 365. A journey with lots of bumps in the road, and long nights to figure out the best solution.

1. Connecting Flow to API

Part One showed how we can connect flow to an API and receive real time data from sources like Bisnode, Proff.no or in my case BRREG. I will blog about how to do this soon.

2. Creating a PowerApp for simplicity

Part 2 was showing how you can create a powerapp to simplify not only the user input, but also create a bridge between those who don’t like Dynamics CRM, but accept using a PowerApp, because it is new and fun. Blog about this will also come soon.

3. Integrating to onpremise data source

The last step was showing how we could integrate our CDS/CRM solutions to an onpremise ERP solution without a single line of code. Read more about hit HERE

People to thank

Chris Huntingford: @TattooedCRMGuy
I would never have even thought of doing community or personal exposure if it were not for your exceptional outgoing personality motivating me when you where in Oslo. I know it sounds odd, but I wanted to be like you, and spread excitement and joy to others. Somehow you made something in my brain say “why not” create a blog and speak my mind! MASSIVE thanks..

Megan Walker: @MeganVWalker
Getting to know you and understanding how you use the tools in regards of blog, wordpress, youtube has been very important. You were also so kind to be my first interview subject 🙂

Mark Smith: @nz365guy
Thank you for hosting the 90 day Mentoring Challenge. Even though you were speaking to the masses, you make it personal to participants. I have also shared many conversations with you that mean a lot to me. Thank you for guidance in som many different levels in regards to creating a profile. I might not be the fastest at getting everything done, but I will get there.

Malin Donoso Martnes: @MalinMartnes
Thank you for being persistent in your work. It inspires others to try:) You gave me the final push to submit my talk, and I don’t regret it!

Flow – Create, Update or Delete trigger error

At the time of writing this post Microsoft Flow will throw an error when you create this flow with the trigger Create, Update or Delete, and the flow is standalone.

Error

This is the following error you will see when you try to create the flow (Create, Update, Delete) without any connection to a solution.

Sollution

All you have to do, is open this in a solution (for the time being).

PowerApps + CSS

I know the title be a little misleading. PowerApps doesn’t support CSS as of now (maybe sometime in future), but you can create a CSS light for simple tings while we await the custom Themes for PowerApps.

I find it extremely annoying when creating a large app and you need to customize visuals. If you make a change to one “screen” you have to make the same change over and over again.

In this example I declared a few variables in the beginning of the PowerApp, and one of these is the button color “RED”.

As you can see, my button color will be read when I choose to give them this color.

So at some point I decide that I want the color to be the same as my heading, and all I have to change is the color code in the app “onload”.

The result is matching buttons without having to manually change each color setting!:)

NB! after changes in the “onload”, you have to refresh the browser to see the effect.

Using Flow to copy Document Location

One confusing obstacle with a new CRM system, is the connection between Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. As a consultant I often have to demonstrate what is really happening behind the scenes to justify why this isn’t straight forward. We have to tell the customer about different folders, different entities etc, while they simply don’t care. They just want it to work together.

One particularly interesting point is when they move between entities. Why can you work with documents in the Lead, and when you navigate over to Opportunity, you no longer see your sales documents? Technically I understand why, but from a functional perspective I understand the customer.

Recently I ran into this scenario when implementing Field Service. Sales produced documents what were important throughout the whole cycle Sales -> WorkOrder -> Assett. Navigating between the entities takes to long, so the challenged me to find a solution.

FLOW TO THE RESCUE ❤

When the opportunity was done, we needed to create 1 or more WO in Field Service. Important factor was to maintain all the work done in Opportunity with the documents, so the Field Service Technicians could see everything in one entity (WO).

Challenge: When I create a new Work Order from Opportunity, I need to copy the document location from the originating Opportunity.

Flow begins with a simple trigger. When a WO is created.

Then I check to see if the related Opportunity contains data. This is just to make sure that the WO actually is created from a Opportunity.

Then I needed to get the document location regarding the Opportunity. As you can see here I am only returning 1. There won’t be any more document locations on Opportunity the way they are using it now. If you wonder how to filter, check my other post LIST CDS RECORDS IN FLOW

This is where I create a new Document location, and set the Work Order as regarding. Flow will automatically add “FOR EACH” to loop through. In my case it doesn’t matter, because I only have 1 document location from Opportunity.

What the user sees

This is a new Opportuinty

The opportunity has documents related to it.

I then convert the opportunity to Work Order via the button in ribbon. I get a message when this is complete.

I open the document location of Work Order, and VIOLA, the same documents.

Personally I love finding quick wins like this that mean a lot for simplicity. Any CRM application will be complex for the end user, so these parts help:)

PowerApps Currency Formatting examples

So far I feel that currency formatting in PowerApps seems to be a little troublesome. Sure everything would be great if we all sold in $ and our offers were all huge! All of the examples out there are based on this. I needed to represent values at 1 NOK and up. In Norway we don’t use “,” for separating thousands.

I am sure there are simpler ways of doing this, and I am hoping someone can fill me inn:)

For US formatting I found this one:

Text(CurrencyField,"[$-en-US]$###,###")

For UK formatting I found this one:

Text(Value(Parent.Default),"[$-en-US]£#,###.00")

For me I need to format PowerApps currency NOK. I have tried manipulating all of the above with no luck at all. Have no idea what I am doing wrong, but that doesn’t matter. I finally found one that worked for me

NOK PowerApps Currency Formatting:

Text(ThisItem.'Est. Revenue',"[$-nb-NO]## ### kr", "nb-NO")

None of this is really making much sense to me. If you have more information about this, please do share!!:)

Composite fields in PCF?

Ohhhh how I miss the Composite fields in dynamics<3

It was introduced in 2013, but was never given much love. It was one of those changes the customers loved, but always wanted to configure. This resulted in many strange javascripts that I personally refused to use. Now that the new UI is being forced upon us, the field will disappear it seems, and that is too bad. The new UI is fine, but it is not as efficient with screen space yet, fields like this actually make a lot of sense.

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/cosmanscrmjourney/posts/crm-composite-fields

What about PCF?

First of you need to see that PCF controls can do. Free community examples have been release here: https://pcf.gallery/ – by Guido Preite

So can PCF controls be the answer to this? I have no idea, but would bee cool if someone with developer experience could answer me:)