Flow &Amp; PowerApps

I’ve been spending some time with the modern tooling and thought it would help to blog some of the step-by-step to help others. Install PAC CLI Open a command prompt and type pac to see if the Power Platforms CLI (command line interface) is installed on your machine. If you get an error (not found) you’ll need to install the PAC CLI. Go to https://aka.ms/PowerAppsCLI to download the installer. Then run the installer. If the CLI installs successfully than the pac command should run successfully and display a list of commands. ...

About 4 1/2 years ago I wrote a post on how to calculate a next anniversary (birthday) date in Dynamics 365. It’s been a top 3 post according to Google Analytics. I’m proud of that solution because it was a real no-code solution to a common requirement for lots of applications (especially CRM systems.) A client of mine recently asked for support to show the next birthday for a contact. Often there will be an ask for a list view of contacts with a birthday in the next month. In this post I’m going to show you how to use a business rule and calculated fields to achieve this functionality without writing any code. This will be a a native calculated field so it can be used in lists, forms, queries, etc. ...

TL;DR: Need to configure a Microsoft Power Apps (Power Platform) Lab environment for a workshop, App in a Day, etc. here is a ready to go script: https://github.com/nicknow/Setup-DataverseLabEnvironment. In the Microsoft Power App in a Day package there used to be a script to quickly deploy a trial environment. It would setup the users, environments, and databases so attendees could get right to work. Somewhere along the way that script was removed and the directions now include instructions for attendees to setup a trial or demo instance on their own. ...

What is the Power platform all about? I get this question a lot. The reality is that the Power platform is more than one thing and it can be “about” a lot of different things. PowerApps is a pixel-perfect mobile-first UX app creation for the enterprise. Common Data Service is a ready-to-go no-limits data service for building an application backend. PowerApps is the ability to rapidly build forms and views over that data service with minimal effort. Dynamics 365 is a series of commercial applications ready to run your business processes. Power BI is about analyzing and visualizing data from anywhere. Flow is integrating data from multiple services and automating business processes across those services. ...

Microsoft Inspire 2018 wrapped up on Thursday (7/19) with a Bruno Mars concert. But, before the music there were a bunch of very useful sessions on Microsoft Business Applications (i.e., Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Flow, PowerBI, etc.) Yes, I know the marketing/branding still a bit unclear but hopefully that will be cleared up by James Phillips next week at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Seattle. You can find all the session videos from Microsoft Inspire 2018 on the web site. I’ve curated a handful of sessions that would be top of list in prioritizing. I still recommend going through the site and finding other sessions that may be of interest. ...

This will be a quick post, but thought someone out there might find it useful if they are working in Microsoft Flow and need to get a local date and time and/or format a date and time. This evening I was building a Flow. In this case it is a Flow that sends an email and I wanted to include the current date in the subject of the email (i.e., “Here are your work items for 01/21/2018”.) The expression design in Flow still seems odd to me - being that I primarily write C# code and a good bit of JavaScript. ...