Posts

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. ...

In normal times life, liberty, and happiness build upon each other. When one grows our overall life is raised up (and you protect all three because if any shrinks it takes away from your life.) In times of crisis - especially the one we are experiencing now - life becomes more like a set of competing interests, such that more in one area means less in another area. This is the driver of much of the internal frustration people are experiencing right now. It’s vital we learn to recognize the trade-off decisions we are being forced to make so that we can manage the inherent internal and external tension that comes from these choices. Learning to recognize how this impacts yourself, your family members, your colleagues, your friends, and others allows you to be more effective in our interactions and communications. ...

This decade will see the rise of carbon-neutral supply chains which will impact businesses everywhere - even those far removed from serving tech firms in Silicon Valley. As more Fortune 500 companies join this trend carbon-neutral requirements will be pushed deep down the supply chain to the point that companies many layers deep in the supply chain will need to be carbon-neutral (or forgo significant business opportunities.) Source: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-plan-to-go-carbon-negative-raises-bar-for-tech-rivals?shared=a0ca6f346c3fb947 We’ll see the rise of auditing & certification for carbon-neutral suppliers. It won’t be much different than ISO quality standards for manufacturers with one HUGE exception: ISO standards only impacted the manufacturing and operations part of a business - the ISO registered plant only cared about ISO for raw material/part suppliers. ...

2020 is going to be the year that Kubernetes (which really means containers) becomes fully ingrained in the enterprise. DevOps becomes the default model for building and deploying enterprise applications (full code, low code, and no code). Enterprise customers will increasingly want both custom apps and COTS products to fit to a Kubernetes and DevOps test/deployment/implementation model. Cybersecurity continues to grow and is a critical part of every conversation, it will be required that security is baked into every layer. ...

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. ...

Protest filing by Oracle regarding the JEDI RFP issued by the Department of Defense. Software giant Oracle is challenging the Pentagon’s decision to choose just one company for a not-yet-awarded $10 billion cloud computing contract, according to a bid protest document reviewed by The Washington Post, firing off a salvo in what is shaping up to be a heated competition among tech giants for one of the biggest government software contracts in years. ...

I used to have a monthly Gogo Wifi subscription. Then I got rid of it. Flying is better for me now, it’s more beneficial because it helps me to focus. Not long ago I realized that Delta offered free wifi for messaging (iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) Awesome. Now I can stay in contact but not get sucked into Apps and Internet world. I wish American offered this, but they don’t - so choose Delta if it’s an option. ...