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Newsletter: Perspectives on Power Platform
Company: Niiranen Advisory Oy
In the past, I have written a lot of posts on this blog under the Licensing category. Ever since I moved on to writing my weekly newsletter on beehiiv, there’s been a bit of a conflict in my mind about “where should the licensing stuff go?” Because I acknowledge it’s not necessarily something to casually drop into the weekly articles of Perspectives on Power Platform.
Now, there’s a dedicated place for that: The Licensing Guide.
What started out as a fun domain I discovered to be free has now turned into a proper website with both persistent pages as well as blog posts on recent events. True to its name, this site does also provide you the quickest possible way to view the latest licensing guides from Microsoft, via the Resources page:
I figured there’s no point in always going via search engines to the latest guide versions. Or to keep some of the commonly referenced MS Learn pages as bookmarks in my own browser only. Better to just put it out there on the internet.
Whenever Microsoft announces something that will shake up their licensing model, like the new per-agent licensing of Agent 365, I will be keeping an eye on the scoops and info leaks as part of this strange hobby that I have. There’s now an obvious place to post these kind of updates, with The Licensing Guide blog section.
The added benefit of collecting your research into one place is that this makes the data easy to chat about with AI tools. That allows turning the complex new concepts buried in MS marketing lingo into illustrations that explain things without the smoke and mirrors. Such as creating mermaid charts from product documentation. Or constructing alternative FAQ pages from product announcement details and docs, like I did with the A365 FAQ page.
As far as topics in the Microsoft ecosystem go, there’s hardly anything less demonstrable than licensing. Yet occasionally I still get the feeling “I’d want to show this in action”, which is when I might record a quick video and put it on YouTube. Like this latest one about the Dataverse Capacity Calculator I built:
Which gets us to another unlikely combination: licensing + vibe coding. Yet that’s exactly what I’ve done with the above-mentioned Dataverse Capacity Calculator. After having a thorough discussion with my AI assistants about the contents of the latest licensing guide PDFs from Microsoft, I instructed them to “go and build me a calculator with these rules”. Now it’s an actual thing that exists on GitHub. Do I fully trust the output? No, whenever problems are found, I’ll just log an issue and assign it to Copilot.
Some might think this isn’t how you should treat serious business topics like software licensing. Yet when I started actively blogging about Dynamics 365 and Power Platform licensing back in 2019, that wasn’t a thing any community member was doing either. These days, you’ll often find licensing-related sessions in community conferences like DynamicsMinds. And even at an upcoming pro-dev conference like Update Days: Power Platform.
I believe the best way to make an impact in this world is to A) find something that people don’t normally do, and then B) just do it. It has been proven to work with citizen development, citizen publishing (i.e. blogging) and all kinds of areas in life.
Remember this, kids: you can be whatever you choose to be. I chose to become the licensing.guide. Because why not? 🦸
