Jukka Niiranen

Tag: Business Applications Summit

  • 2 become 1 UI: PowerApps Roadmap from MBAS

    2 become 1 UI: PowerApps Roadmap from MBAS

    Have you looked at the MBAS Gallery yet? Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019 was last week and already the majority of sessions have been published online for also non-attendees to enjoy. Even if you attended the conference in Atlanta, there’s a chance that you may have missed a few sessions, with there being 200+ of them in 2+1 days.

    Live recordings of sessions are nice – if you have ~200 hours to sit through them, that is. As is the case with podcasts, I rarely come across a moment in my life where there would be empty space just waiting to be filled with a 1h chunk of audio/video of people talking about something that might or might not be valuable to me. On the other hand, I’m very comfortable with skimming through endless amounts of text & pictures, in search of something that warrants my real attention and further processing. That’s where PowerPoint slides are just awesome. Bullets, tables, charts, diagrams, screenshots, OH YES!

    Last week I started going through the MBAS session catalog and downloading the slide decks for interesting sessions. (I’m not the only one who hoards PPTXs from MS events, check out MVP Jussi Roine’s blog for his tips on learning quick as a consultant.) Now I’ve got a folder with 115 PowerPoint files weighing in at 4.5 Gigabytes. Hmm, looks like some further prioritization is still needed to narrow these down. Well, one thing’s for sure: I know where I want to start diving into the content. The future of business apps awaits in this session:

    Run One UI – the future of canvas, model-driven, and Unified Interface in PowerApps (BRK2073)

    For those with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement background, the topic of user interface unification might lead your thoughts to Unified Interface. Originally announced 2 years ago, this new client infrastructure aims to do away with the earlier divide between web client, phone, tablet and Outlook. More importantly, it’s a foundation for unbundling the application specific UI controls from the platform and opening up the road for everyone to build the kinds of controls that Sales, Service, Marketing and all the other 1st party apps contain. That story is called PCF and it’s a big deal for sure, but something even bigger is on its way.

    This  “One UI” does not simply look at the Dynamics side of the house, rather it encompasses the whole app story in Power Platform. Ever since XRM merged with PowerApps, we’ve had this somewhat awkward divide between Canvas apps and Model-driven apps. These terms don’t mean much anything to customers when explaining them the platform capabilities. For the Dynamics professionals the concept of a “Model-driven PowerApp” sounds artificial. While on the back end the CDS, admin and developer story is coming together quite nicely, on the front end we see two experiences with not too much in common – today.

    We’ve already heard Charles Lamanna make a statement that Microsoft has no intentions of keeping the app types in PowerApps separate:

    “Artificial limitations in app features will be removed, so that choosing [File – New App] will give you model or canvas experiences and everything will work across both.”

    Power 365 Show: Power Platform Changes and Answering Community Questions with Charles Lamanna

    Sounds cool! But how exactly are they going to pull off this merging of the two client frameworks with a very different history? On the platform side it was fairly simple as XRM probably offered a lot of what CDS v1 was capable of and turning it into CDS v2 was not a big issue due to low adoption rate of the less mature technology of the two. PowerApps Canvas apps on the other hand have a huge momentum going on and the number of apps in production is exploding. Dynamics 365 CE ain’t doing too bad either when it comes to growth figures in the cloud, so messing too much with it sound very risky. After all, we’re still waiting for many existing customers to even move from the classic web client to Unified Interface, so do we really need more confusion in this space?

    In the Run One UI session at MBAS we heard Clay Wesener present the master plan of how the two different app types will gradually turn into one PowerApp. Here it is:

    This is really just mashing together the start and end state from Clay’s presentation, so this time you really should reserve an hour of your time and watch the recording, to understand the finer details. And grab the slides for reference, naturally.

    A key part of the plan is that this won’t happen in a big bang. There won’t be an “Even MORE Unified Interface” launched at some grandiose marketing event, rather Microsoft will introduce capabilities from one app type to the other in a gradual fashion. PCF just arrived on Model-driven Apps as a public preview, soon it will start showing up on the Canvas side, too. Canvas Components are bringing the more structured way to define the UI into the previously blank canvas where each pixel used to run free, making it more like the grown up version familiar from enterprise business applications. These new parts are all about blurring the lines between Canvas and Model.

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  • Catching the Wave 2 for 2019 Power Platform Updates

    Catching the Wave 2 for 2019 Power Platform Updates

    Today, June 10th, at Microsoft Business Application Summit 2019 the release plan for the next wave of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform features was announced. It’s of course no surprise that this main event of the year for #MSBizApps would be used as the forum for showing what’s coming next. What kind of did surprise myself was that we actually are already at a point when the focus starts to move to the upcoming release, formerly known as October 2019 release. Wasn’t April 2019 just a few weeks ago? Where did all the time go? And when exactly were we supposed to have taught ourselves all about the current release features, let alone deploy them to real life customers?

    If I had to guess what people working professionally with MS Business Applications would list as their biggest challenge, I bet keeping up the product updates would be on the number one spot – if only for the simple reason that it’s a topic that touches everyone regardless of their role. The pace of change on the technology side isn’t going to slow down, but it’s the breadth of impact from these changes that has grown immensely. The biannual release cadence in itself isn’t anything new, since that’s how the cloud service has been updated from already the Dynamics CRM 2011 days. It’s just that we’re no longer operating within that familiar CRM box, thanks to what Dynamics 365 and Power Platform have become. So, the release waves hit the shore on their steady cadence, but instead of a fun little beach break wave to surf on it may start to look like a tsunami that you should run away from. It’s not, and you shouldn’t, but this can be a very natural reaction when presented with a 350 page release plan document to plough through.

    Lucky for us, this time there’s also a streamlined version of this document, focusing solely on the Power Platform side. If you’re a #PowerAddict like me then this is probably the more exciting part to start from. So, we’ll leave all the first party app goodies for later and have a look at where & how the platform is heading to.

    Release Terminology

    Microsoft has now changed their official terminology on how they speak about these releases for Business Applications products. Instead of the earlier names like October 2018 Release, April 2019 Release, we’re now going to get release waves. Yes, still 2 times a year, so what we’ve now seen a peek of is 2019 Release Wave 2. Nothing actually changed about the process itself, but since the updates covered in these releases are not meant to be delivered on a single date (or one specific month), the terminology is now much better aligned with the reality. 2019 Release Wave 2 will be hitting the shores from October 2019 to March 2020.

    The other tweak in terminology is that now instead of Release Notes we’re getting a Release Plan from the product teams. This is also a much more natural way to describe the intent of the documentation that goes with a release wave. It’s not the exact description of what has been shipped, like you would have seen on a piece of software distributed on a DVD. Rather it’s a near term roadmap of what will be built and delivered, if everything goes as planned. Instead of a static document the Release Plan (and actually the current Release Notes, too) is a living publication reflecting the current status. Have a look at the change history for the current April 2019 release to get an idea of how much things have moved around since V1 of the Release Notes.

    Finally, there’s an added piece of information for each of the items in the Release Plan, referring to the Early Access availability. This will indicate weather the feature will be available to try already on August 2nd. You can read about the latest release schedule and early access policy from this documentation page.

    AI Comes to Power Platform

    The biggest new announcement from 2019 Release Wave 2 is the arrival of the AI Builder. No, PowerApps didn’t become self-aware just yet, but it is nevertheless a major milestone to see the AI capabilities earlier provided via Azure Cognitive Services to now find their way into  the citizen developer world of Power Platform tools. While the data scientists and pro-devs out there probably won’t be resorting to AI Builder in their own projects, the total addressable market for Microsoft’s AI services has now grown significantly thanks to these entry level AI features available in the PowerApps maker portal.

    Is this something that all the PowerApps makes will immediately jump into using then? Probably not at first, since the use cases for machine learning technologies always rely on having a suitable data set to work on. Whereas with a Canvas app you can just start building the features, logic, data model and UI of an application before you’ve got the actual data to be used in it, in AI Builder you’re gonna need to start from the data. It’s going to be hard to fake this thing for a quick technology demo unless it’s tightly linked with a real life business scenario.

    Reaching the people who do have the data and understand its structure and meaning is where a product like AI Builder can undoubtedly lower the barrier for starting to experiment with AI. Just like the earlier PowerApps tools helped people become app makers without any formal training on the subject, why couldn’t something similar happen on the machine learning side, too? As a nice added bonus, coupling the AI Builder configuration and model data with CDS is will help in promoting it as the default storage place for structured business data.

    Features like Form Processing where you can train the machine to understand the contents of documents following a common template (like invoices) offer a way to further digitalize processes that can’t yet jump to 100% structured data interchange via modern APIs. You may not be able to force all your business partners or customers to jump into using the tools and data formats that would be most convenient for your internal processes, but could significantly reduce the need for manual data entry by taking a service like PowerApps AI Builder into use.

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