Microsoft Power Platform

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. ...

When IT leaders push back on “citizen development” they are just displaying their closed mindedness and incompetence. Every successful organization is - right now, today - full of citizen developers, people using whatever technology tools they have available (and often finding ways to get around IT limitations to get additional tools) to get their job done. If you don’t enable your workforce to create solutions for themselves they will still find a way to create them. No organization has the budget to solve every use case with centralized IT. Workers don’t have a choice, they have a job to get done and they’ll get it done - with or without IT’s support or blessing. ...

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. ...

I get annoyed with the way COVID-19 data is reported. There is a lot of emphasis put on the number today and on the aggregate (total cases, total deaths, etc.) These make good headline numbers but don’t do much to help people understand the current trend - are we getting better or worse. So I built a report using the COVID-19 Tracking Project at The Atlantic’s data feed and Power BI for visualization. You can access the dashboard at bit.ly/NNCOVID19DB. The data is automatically updated several times daily. ...

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. ...