How can you keep up with the broader Microsoft stack that should be leveraged when designing modern business solutions? In addition to blogs, courses, documentation, sometimes you just need to leave the comfort of your work desk and meet other experts in person. If you're in Finland for TechDays 2020 on March 5-6, here are the top 3 sessions to catch from each key area: Power Platform, Data Platform, Azure, Microsoft 365.
For the past 20 years, I have worked in many different roles around CRM data, processes, technology and people. As I'm now taking the next step as an entrepreneur and building a new company, I wanted to look back on my professional career and reflect on the experiences that have gotten me to where I am today.
The revenue growth from Microsoft's cloud business across Azure, Office and Dynamics is not slowing down, based on the recent quarterly results. But how will they keep up this momentum in the future? In the earnings call Satya Nadella talks about one key concept we can expect to hear a lot more in the future: Customer Data Platform (CDP).
On Jan 27th Microsoft published their plans for the upcoming 2020 Release Wave 1. We have a lot to digest once again, so here are my top picks from the Power Platform side of Microsoft Business Applications. If you don't have time to read through 100+ pages, then maybe you should start checking out these features and work your way through the rest.
The tricky part about ensuring your solution design is aligned with the planned set of licenses that the system users will be assign is that there is often no way to technically validate this. Many aspects of the MS Business Appliciations licensing model nuances have been implemented only on paper. Things are about to change, as we'll see a specific access rights enforcement around the App Module concept.
In addition to standard color picker options, Power Apps also supports CSS color names to define the appearance of text and icons. To make these color names work in conjunction with our custom SVG icon library from the previous blog post, let's also build a custom color picker for grouping and visualizing the available colors inside Canvas apps.
To create high quality visualizations for apps that can both scale to high resolutions as well as be dynamically manipulated via formulas, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) would be a great choice for Canvas Apps. While there is no native support for SVG features in Power Apps, you can bring in their XML definition and work with it to create a gallery to browse a complete library of icons imported from open source repositories like GitHub.
What were this year's top 3 most notable themes in the world of MS business applications? We saw the rise of the low-code movement, a number of changes in the already complex licensing model of Power Platform, and the evolution of Microsoft's data story to help organizations make better use of new AI innovations. Here are some thoughts on why these will continue to have an impact in 2020.
Binary data is getting better support in Common Data Service, thanks to the new image and file datatypes. How could we leverage these in Power Apps? Here are some use cases for binary data storage in CDS, as well as comparison to the familiar Attachments feature and the built-in SharePoint document management integration.
Welcome to Thinking Forward - my new blog built on top of the foundation that was laid by Surviving CRM in 2008-2019. As we're approaching the turn of the decade, it's a great moment to push myself into more actively exploring the world beyond CRM.
