CRM Audio -- The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Podcast 1sm4q

This is a special episode of CRM Audio with MVP's Gus Gonzalez, Neil Benson, and Joel Lindstrom. In this episode we dig into what the role of solution architect means and how it has changed in Power Platform projects with the shift to agile deployment methodologies. This episode is being simultaneously released on their podcasts, the CRM MVP Podcast and Scrum Dynamics, and I encourage you to subscribe to both. See full show notes at https://customery.com/50.

This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic. Today we are ed by return guest Sean McNellis, Principal PFE with Microsoft.  Topics in this episde Changes to the pfe PowerShell libraries and .Net Core Service protection throttles and the reason for them Tips for building future friendly code and limiting API calls Covid-19 driving digital transformation and decoupling things that have always been combined and driving low-code for business agility. Changes in the maker experience

This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic and D365UG. This week we talk with Emma D'Arcy all about what it means to deal with Imposter Syndrome and how it does indeed get better! Shawn & Emma talk about their own struggles and how the Dynamics Community has helped them not only overcome, but flourish and help to elevate others. They also talk a little bit about cats... Emma D'Arcy on Twitter: @tattooedcrmgirl Emma's Imposter Syndrome session from Scottish Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh9NaNsvDxE Check out the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Txc9kMYnEAI

This episode is brought to you by Inogic and their new Kanban Board for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. James Phillips recently wrote a blog post "Our commitment to customers to help ensure business continuity" where he detailed plans to delay mandatory end of and deprecation deadlines to remove pressure from customers and partners during this stressful time. 2020 Wave 1 will still be released in April, but mandatory updates will be delayed until May or June. Team member license enforcement is delayed until September, and deprecation of classic UI is delayed until late autumn US. Joel Lindstrom, George Doubinski, and Shawn Tabor discuss these delays and what they mean to you, as well as the following topics: virtual MVP summit update Goodbye Outlook client (again) and parity with App for Outlook Remote assist and remote assit guides Backup and restore (as long as you don't use SalesForce) Component libraries PCF controls vs components Links: Salesforce discontinues data recovery services: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000322731&type=1&mode=1&language=en_US Revamping the date picker: https://thepoweraddict.com/revamping-the-date-picker-control-v2/

In today's episode of ProdCast, (brought to you by Inogic), Matthew Anderson and Joel Lindstrom share their tips for working from home and review some recent updates to their favorite productivity tools, including on how PowerPoint can help improve your speaking skills through AI. Discussed on the show: Uplift desks Jabra GN PowerPoint Coach To-Do "My Day" view Quickly create tasks from Outlook Web 

This episode is brought to you by Inogic and their new Kanban Board for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Wave 1 2020 for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 is right around the corner. In today's episode, Joel Lindstrom and Shawn Tabor cover what you need to know and how to prepare for the update. Topics covered: Team member license enforcement Dynamics 365 Sales Product visualize Dynamics 365 Customer Service Dynamics 365 Field Service Dynamics 365 Marketing Power Apps Power Automate Check out the deck from this presentation  at https://ptdrv.linkedin.com/h80j3i2

This episode is brought to you by Inogic and their new Kanban Board for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. The coronavirus COVID-19 has changed the technology world. People are working remotely, conferences are canceled. On this podcast, we talk about the changes to D365UG Summit Barcelona, MVP summit, and other conferences. To help organizations combating the crisis, Microsoft is making the push notification adapter for Power Apps available for free to all s, and they have also released a new template targeted at Crisis Communication. Find out more at https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/crisis-communication-a-power-platform-template/.  Shawn Tabor just lead a hackathon, but it wasn't for adults. Shawn talks about how a class of fifth-graders used Power Virtual Agent to educate about climate change and fire safety. We are only about a month away from the release of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Wave 1. We talk about what is new with Field Service, sales forecasting, and team member license enforcement. If you want to learn more about what is coming with 2020 wave 1, check out our video tip series at crmtipoftheday.com.  

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 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 , 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 . 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.  

This episode is brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic and D365UG. This week we are re-ed by MVP Sukrut Parab and Sr. Architect Satish Panwar to talk about what you need to know about ALM best practices for a Dynamics 365 F&O deployment. Phases of ALM Why you need to use a good ALM process Manual vs. automated deployments Automated testing Can ALM work with other systems than DevOps? Common mistakes Common environment and deployment strategies Useful links:  Build and Test Automation -https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/perf-test/continuous-build-test-automation  Sys Test Framework -https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/perf-test/testing-validation Azure dev ops Auto of package - https://community.dynamics.com/365/financeandoperations/b/newdynamicsax/posts/first-azure-devops-task-released Azure dev ops task to deploy code - https://community.dynamics.com/365/financeandoperations/b/newdynamicsax/posts/azure-devops-task-to-deploy-code Version control - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/dev-tools/version-control-metadata-navigation

This episode is brought to you by D365UG. Sara Critchley s Shawn Tabor to talk about customer service (after they finish talking about food). Why is customer service important? How has customer service in Dynamics 365 changed in recent years? Where should you start? The changing world of omnichannel. Why can't Flow Joe get any balsamic vinegar kettle crisps in Canada? Please the conversation and tell us what you think. What have your best and worst customer service experiences been? Where do you start in a Dynamics 365 customer service deployment? Follow Sarah Critchley: Sarah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahcritchley/ …and check out her blog at: https://www.crmcat.co.uk/ …and her YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ_qeQBj6-nQtALIWRBbqCQ

It's the final Power Platform Brief of 2019.  Bringing updates on Microsoft's Power Platform including connectors for components, improved unified interface, Teams domination and an interview with Yesflow co-founder Scott Millwood.  

This episode is brought to you by D365UG. View this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvCOYh7A1QE&feature=youtu.be It's the end of 2019, and we are having a party, with Jim Novak, Julie Yack, Nick Doelman, Lisa Crosbie, George Doubinski, Shawn Tabor, Antti Pajunen, David Yack, Elaiza Benitez, Kylie Kiser, Sarah Jelinek, Emma D'Arcy, and Joel Lindstrom. We review 2019 in business applications, talk about the highlights of the year and make predictions about next year. Plus, a special performance of the Twelve Days of Bizapps Christmas! Have a great holiday break and we look forward to more podcasts in 2020!

This episode is brought to you by D365UG. Today we have a F&O focused episode with MVP Sukrut Parab and Sr. Architect Satish Panwar Discussed in this episode: How the F&O update process works Delaying updates Managing updates during a deployment Feature Management Workspace Dual Write Printing enhancements in F&O Links: Sukrut Parab https://www.linkedin.com/in/sukrut-parab-534ba1a/ https://community.dynamics.com/365/financeandoperations/b/365operationswithsukrut Satish Panwar https://www.linkedin.com/in/satish-panwar-3a79863/ https://community.dynamics.com/365/financeandoperations/b/365fobyspanwar

This episode is brought to you by D365UG. Today we have a F&O focused episode with MVP Sukrut Parab and Sr. Architect Satish Panwar Discussed in this episode: How the F&O update process works Delaying updates Managing updates during a deployment Feature Management Workspace Dual Write Printing enhancements in F&O Links: Sukrut Parab https://www.linkedin.com/in/sukrut-parab-534ba1a/ https://community.dynamics.com/365/financeandoperations/b/365operationswithsukrut Satish Panwar https://www.linkedin.com/in/satish-panwar-3a79863/ https://community.dynamics.com/365/financeandoperations/b/365fobyspanwar

We're back! The Power Platform Daily Brief is now just the Power Platform Brief.  We'll continue to focus on the news and updates related to all thing Microsoft Power Platform and we're still talking to the interesting people who make this community great. In this episode, we discuss the death of Talent, new connectors, Unified Interface scheduling and we talk to John Gravely about his new business, SalesSpark.

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 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?

In today's episode (brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic), we are ed by Sean McNellis, Principal Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft. Sean has worked for Microsoft since the release of CRM 1.0, and in this episode, Shawn talks about proven practices that he is using with enterprise customers. Topics discussed in this episode: What is a PFE How has Sean's job changed with the move to the cloud? The impact of canvas apps and Power Automate flows on enterprise customers Why you need a Center of Excellence (COE) for business applications success Modern integration patterns Simplifying integrations with Azure Service Bus Reliability with Azure Service Bus Traffic Manager vs. plugin Best practices vs proven practices Managed vs unmanaged solutions How unmanaged solutions are like water damage CI/CD and process automation Sean's Powershell libraries and PowerShell cmdlets Why you need to use Application s Dealing with API limits Links: CRM in the field blog: https://aka.ms/crminthefield Is it worth the time to automate: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_worth_the_time.png Sean McNellis on GitHub: https://github.com/seanmcne Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanmcne

This episode is brought to you by Power Platform UG. Microsoft is giving away Surface earbuds to one lucky listener– at https://aka.ms/PodcastSweepstakes for your chance to win. 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 s 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– 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 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 , 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 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 s 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 this application yet. Over the next few months we are going to add a few more application types that we can , 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 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

We are podcasting from the Ignite podcast booth this week. You could win Surface earbuds-- at https://aka.ms/PodcastSweepstakes for your chance to win. Today Ben Vollmer from Microsoft s 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 ... us later this week for episodes about Power Automate and Power Apps.