UPDATE 2023-01-03: After Twitter decided to shut down the Revue newsletter service, the Forward Forever newsletter was migrated to Ghost. The content remains available at the same forwardforever.news domain.
Back in Spring 2020 when we launched Forward Forever, one of our guiding principles was to openly share with the outside world the new knowledge we gain when working with Microsoft Power Platform tools on a daily basis.
Team FF has been quite active in community contributions, with content regularly shared both on our team blog as well as personal blogs like the ones written by Timo, Antti and myself. Sometimes when I’ve been looking at our social feeds, I’ve wondered “are people actually able to keep up with all these updates our team is sharing?”
Now there is a place that brings together these streams of new Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI related information: The Forward Forever Newsletter. This monthly email newsletter is available for anyone to subscribe to at forwardforever.news:
To quote our team’s announcement of the newsletter:
That’s what the Forward Forever Monthly newsletter is all about. A summary of both our own writings as well as the best bits from the Power Platform community. No ads, no hard sales push. Just the most relevant content that our passionate team of Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI experts has discovered.
Our newsletter runs on the Revue engine (recently acquired by Twitter). You might already be familiar with it, since there are at least a couple well-known weekly Power Platform related publications on that newsletter platform:
We don’t intend to compete with these community driven newsletters, because they do such an awesome job already. Many of the FF team member blog posts have been covered in the issues over time. Recently PP Weekly celebrated its first full year in operation and I wrote a bit about the importance of such content curation initiatives over on LinkedIn:
I encourage all customers and community members interested in the latest events around especially Power Apps, Power Automate, and also Dynamics 365, to add themselves as subscribers to these publications.
There is no shortage of great blog posts, podcast, videos and free tools to cover in this ecosystem. What I do think we have a shortage of is ways take control of our precious attention and consume information at our own pace. A monthly email digest that doesn’t scroll past in your real-time feed may offer a calmer way to stay in the loop.
Subscribe to Forward Forever Monthly
Just one email per month on cool Power Platform things we’ve come across.
The second Microsoft Ignite event of 2021 included several important updates on a topic that I cover regularly on this blog: Microsoft Business Applications licensing. The biggest announcement of course was the pay-as-you-go licensing model (PAYG) for Power Apps:
Here’s a few thoughts and observations on what was announced & updated on the licensing front.
PAYG and Azure
Despite of its name, the biggest impact from the Power Apps pay-as-you-go plans isn’t necessarily the pricing model. Rather it’s the currency in which you pay for it: Azure money. This is something that most larger organizations will already have in their virtual cash reserves, which makes it considerably easier to spend on services.
Licensing agreements are both an enabler and a blocker for Microsoft cloud services, especially on enterprise level. Getting something new like Power Apps premium licenses included into the IT portfolio available to the business users can take a lot of time and effort. Once it’s included, though, there’s plenty of practical benefits for using these as opposed to some fancy new cloud service that might come along.
Having an official “exchange rate” that converts these new low-code tools managed on the Microsoft 365 side into tools and terminology compatible with the pro-dev work already done in Azure is key step in selling the Fusion Teams story to organizations. Even if the PAYG model wouldn’t be cheaper in practice, having Power Apps license costs show up in existing reports on Azure Cost Management side will make it less of an unfamiliar beast to IT and developers. Also the discounts customers may have negotiated based on their Azure spend will presumably apply to Power Apps, too.
PAYG and apps
PAYG is specified on environment level, by defining a billing policy and selecting which environments are included in it. However, you can exclude specific apps from the model and require their users to have a Power Apps Per User license instead. Mixing PAYG with Per App subscription plan isn’t allowed, though.
I believe that underneath the covers the PAYG Per App plan and the regular Per App plan are mostly identical. The major difference is that at the end of the month, the PAYG pass is removed from the user until he/she opens the app again. With the regular Per App subscription plan, the pass allocated upon the initial app sharing to the user and isn’t revoked until the app is explicitly unshared.
So, which one should you go for then with your Power Apps that use premium features? Subscription model or PAYG? First we must keep in mind that the recent 50% price drop in Power Apps subscription plans took the price of a Per App license down from $10 to $5. At the same time the Per App entitlements were updated to cover a single app, rather than up to 3 different apps (existing customers have been compensated with 3x passes). Now with the new options, you can either pay $5 per user per app per month in the subscription model, or pay $10 for the exact same features but only for those months when a user opens the app.
If there was a quick & easy way to assign, unassign and report on the Per App subscription licenses, it would clearly be tempting to save 50% and pay with the old model rather than PAYG. In practice, Per App licensing management remains a nightmare that has surely cost customers (and partners) lots of money in time spent figuring out who’s got access to apps, why someone doesn’t, and how much licenses are actually being used. It’s been over 2 years since the Per App plan was launched and we still don’t have a report in Power Platform Admin Center that would give customers the information needed for managing this process.
If the PAYG mechanism can both automate the assignment and removal of licenses, as well as provide detailed reporting in Azure Cost Management, then it could well be worth the price premium for process efficiency and cost visibility. For any smaller app experiments that you’re not yet entirely sure on how widely they will be used, starting with the Azure subscription based billing makes a lot of sense. You’ll be able to cut down on the initial admin hassle and get real data on the app usage to base your future licensing decisions on, whether to use PAYG or committed subscription passes/seats in the long term.
PAYG and capacity
It’s important to understand that the PAYG model doesn’t completely transform Power Platform into a pure consumption based model like Azure. After all, a single app launch during a calendar month will cost you the same as 1000 launches by the same user, and using 2 different apps will double the cost regardless of how much load you generate to the cloud services. Think of it more like buying a monthly pass for public transportation in your local area vs. taking an Uber and paying in proportion to the actual duration and length of your rides. If you travel to another city not covered by your current pass, you’ll need to purchase another pass. In the case of Power Apps, there aren’t any per hour or per day tickets sold, so the monthly pass is the minimum charge for the Power Apps per app meter billing rules.
Having said that, there is also the concept of pay-as-you-go capacity when it comes to Power Platform licensing. API capacity is something that Microsoft says a normal user shouldn’t have to worry about, since there is bundled capacity included with the app/user licenses. At Ignite an announcement was made that increased the request limits for both licensed users and non-licensed users (check out Gustaf’s blog for details). If you do run out of requests, though, there will soon be a PAYG Power Platform request meter that can be used to pay for the overage.
Something that does already exist today and is a much easier concept to approach than API consumption is the storage capacity. Unlike the traditional subscription licenses that are paid upfront, the PAYG model doesn’t have any storage capacity accrued per each user or app pass. This makes sense, since those numbers are only known as-you-go by the end of the month, whereas data storage is something a lot more persistent.
Whenever you activate PAYG for an environment, it means it no longer draws from the tenant’s common capacity pool. The environment does get 1 GB of “free” Dataverse database capacity + 1 GB file storage capacity, but after that you’ll pay for everything based on what the Dataverse capacity meter shows. These rats are slightly higher than subscription based capacity prices, at $48 and $2.4 per GB respectively (note that log capacity is always paid for at $12/GB). If you’re used to leveraging the tenant level capacity accrued from user subscription licenses for your storage needs (coming from Dynamics 365 users, for example), then this can be a surprising additional cost when activating the Azure based billing policy for your environment.
There’s one gotcha in the current way how PAYG storage capacity can be used. You see, in order for you to assign a PAYG billing policy to an environment, the environment must first be provisioned. What this means is that the tenant will need to have a minimum of 1 GB database capacity available for the environment creation to succeed. So, you’ll need non-PAYG capacity from elsewhere (such as a paid Power Apps or Dynamics 365 plan) before you can use an Azure subscription to start paying for the capacity instead. Presumably Microsoft will fix this issue in the near future, since it’s in no one’s interest to block PAYG as the sole billing method.
While storage capacity has been reported and technically enforced for a while already, Power Platform requests are still something that exist on paper but cannot be reported on nor paid via actually assignable licenses. In the FAQ section of their documentation page, there is now a new answer to the following question: What are the timelines for Power Platform Request limits?
The concept of limits was first introduced in late 2019 and documented limits were substantially increased in late 2021. Generally available reporting for Power Platform Requests is expected in the first quarter of calendar 2022. Any potential high usage enforcement wouldn’t start until six months after reports have been made available. Assignment of add-on capacity packs should be aligned to high usage enforcement.
Let’s assume that the reports would be launched in March 2022, after which there will be a 6 month grace period before the technical enforcement kicks in. This would mean that the October 2019 licensing changes that started all this confusion around what the platform can & cannot be used for will have taken full 3 years to truly come into effect. That’s a long, long time. Yet I do think it’s encouraging that Microsoft haven’t rushed into enforcing a rule that might have caused way too much collateral damage if not thought out well enough.
Power Automate licensing updates
There isn’t a PAYG model available for Power Automate. Sure, you can use premium connector cloud flows within the context of a Per App licensed app (although I’ve found this to be difficult/impossible in practice). The nature of a background process automation is fairly different from the interactive usage of an app UI, so it kinda makes sense why new options haven’t been introduced. Besides, if the Power Automate licensing model doesn’t work for your scenarios, then moving to the consumption based Azure Logic Apps is already a good option to consider.
While there weren’t any major Power Automate specific licensing changes announced at Ignite, there was a wealth of new documentation released on the topic during the event. The flow licensing FAQ contains some interesting answers when it comes to what we would have traditionally considered to be multiplexing. I’m one of the few people who have ever dared to blog about multiplexing, yet it seems that there are things I haven’t fully grasped about the topic either. This infromation in the FAQ caught me by surprise:
A common question is, “If a flow is triggered when a SharePoint list item is updated, and many users interact with that list, will there be a cost for each user?” The answer is if the flow does not use a premium connector such as calling Dataverse in the full production environment (not the Microsoft Teams environment), having an Office 365 license is enough. If the flow uses premium connectors, since the trigger is an automated trigger, only the owner needs a premium license.
Having a web form that any user could submit to create a lead record in Dynamics 365 used to be the scenario where I’d say “sorry, you’re violating the licensing terms”. Now, Microsoft explicitly calls out that if a user enters data into a SharePoint list and that in turn triggers an automated flow that uses a premium connector to push the data into Dataverse, it’s enough for the flow owner to have the premium license.
This little change opens up many scenarios where recording entries into Dataverse / Dynamics 365 may have previously been considered too expensive. Using a SharePoint / Microsoft List as the intermediate data storage is now officially a supported method to reduce the need for Power Automate premium licenses when using automated flows. I personally find it hard to understand how this statement wouldn’t contradict Microsoft’s core definition of multiplexing, but what can I say? Other than: welcome to Business Apps licensing!😂
AI Buider
One more small but significant change: there will now be AI Builder capacity included with Power Apps Per App plan (250 credits) and Power Apps Per User plan (500 credits).
How much AI that will actually give you depends on the usage scenarios, which you can try and estimate with the AI Builder calculator.
Why is this a big deal? Well, for some mysterious reason, Microsoft had earlier decided that the starting price for buying AI Builder capacity was $500/month for 1 million credits. Need just a few runs for your little cloud flow every month? “Sorry, we can’t be bothered to support anything below 1M.“
This was a prime example of how not to price cloud services for citizen developers, as they should be given the chance to focus on building apps instead of building business cases for software licenses. The starter capacity will now make it possible for app makers to leverage AI models in small solutions and experiments beyond just a 30 day trial.
At the start of this year, we made the decision to go all-in on Microsoft Power Platform and founded a company that focuses on helping organizations on their journey to take ownership of this low-code business application platform. You could therefore say that it’s pretty darn important for us that there is compelling roadmap for the products that represent the technical foundation of our services.
Luckily Microsoft doesn’t show any signs of slowing down the investments into Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents and all the underlying elements of the platform. Our MVP team at Forward Forever already did a “Top 3 x 3” highlights article on what each of us found to be the most exciting feature announcements in the 2020 Release Wave 2 release plans that Microsoft published yesterday. I wanted to expand a bit on that top list and reflect on how I see Power Platform evolving based on this new roadmap information.
But first: what happened to Wave 1?
Ah, true. We’re actually only halfway through the April-September period that 2020 Release Wave 1 represents. This means that many of the features I highlighted in my earlier first impressions posts have not yet shipped. Just because there’s a virtual launch event every six months doesn’t mean that it would be the exact time when a big box full of new software is made available. There are no version numbers in the cloud, it’s a continuous release train that runs on its endless route.
It’s important to keep in mind that these are release plans, not release notes. The thing with plans is that they tend to change, and such is also the fate of some items in 2020 Wave 1 that I picked as the higlights in my post back in January. If we look at the change history page in the release plan, for Power Apps alone we see that 15 items had their release schedule changed and 7 were removed from Wave 1. And remember we’re only a bit over 50% through the April-September period, so more changes are bound to still occur.
Changes do happen for the better, too. 8 new features have been added for Power Apps already after the initial release plan. In total there are one hunderd new features added to 2020 Release Wave 1 after January 27th. Wow! I can’t recall how many items in total there were originally, but this really highlights two things:
The Release Plan is not a static document, rather it’s an evolving backlog of planned features.
Microsoft has been very actively maintaining the online version of the Release Plan over on docs.microsoft.com.
This is what the product roadmaps for clour services are like today. You can’t simply have a look every 6 months and then forget about them, rather you should always refer to the latest information online. Also, you can be 100% sure that there will be a lot more coming for Power Platform between October 2020 and March 2021 than this first Release Plan version reveals. Just look at Wave 1: we would not have seen from the plan that MS would acquire an RPA vendor like Softomotive, or that they would announce T-SQL support for CDS during MS Build. Get ready to be taken by surprise during Wave 2 as well!
Wave 2 features to keep an eye on
Portals Web API with CRUD support was big news in Wave 1, but the GA date for the feature isn’t until February 2021. It’s all part of the story where Portals is being made more compatible with the two other app types in the family. Wave 2 now promises a preview of PCF control support for Portals in December 2020, which should certainly be a nicely wrapped Xmas present for pro devs if that schedule will hold.
If Portals is getting closer to the mainstream Power Apps types, then the unification of Canvas and Model-driven apps into “Run One UI” is also moving along. By the time the custom pages feature hits public preview in December 2020 it will have been 18 months since we saw the roadmap, but I’m not actually that surprised it’s taking a while for making these 2 very different client technologies work in harmony. It’ll surely be worth the wait from an UX perspective, as the Canvas app embed story has been somewhat limited in its impact so far.
Once Canvas apps can be natively placed on pages that appear inside the app navigation, they’ll be ever more likely to become an integral part of more complex enterprise applications. This means that also Canvas development practices need to become more mature, which is exactly what the reusable components for business logic are aiming for. PCF components for Canvas apps are also critical to allow the pro dev audience to contribute into low-code app development projects. Code components have already been in preview for a while and GA is expected in March 2021, so obviously injecting custom code into what was originally designed as a “PowerPoint + Excel” experience for citizen developers is a big investment that takes time to polish.
Power Automate has grown into an all-encompassing process automation service that covers both API and non-API (meaning RPA) scenarios. I have to say that for me personally it’s one of the scariest parts of this “low-code” platform due to how much secret formula knowledge one must posses to achieve something where XRM workflows offered a full GUI experience. I’m glad to see that MS is investing not only in the UI flows territory from their Softomotive acquisition but also in making Power Automate work more seamlessly with Power Apps. Simplifying things even further, the coming “diet designer” and templates desined for Microsoft Teams users is an example of how broadly the PaaS foundation of Azure Logic Apps is being productized via its Power Automate UI experiences across the whole MS stack.
From the Data Platform side, we will finally be seeing the ability to use Power BI on system dashboards for Model-driven apps. It’s one of those things that the vast majority of customers probably would have assumed to be possible for ages already. Getting proper support for parameters like environment variables has been a prerequisite to make these components play well together in the Power Platform ALM story. Now, this still doesn’t mean PBI would replace the built-in visualizations from CRM 2011 era, rather we see that MS is actually only working on catching up with the year 2011 when it comes to Unified Interface charts customization (i.e. supporting ASP.Net chart XML based features with the new Highcharts).
Come to think of it, there isn’t a single mention of the TDS endpoint / T-SQL support in either 2020 Wave 1 or 2020 Wave 2 release plans. It’s a good reminder to everyone that despite of the huge volume of information in the release plans, they don’t reveal the complete story of what’s happening with Business Applications beyond the immediately visible end user and app maker features. You’ll still need to do a bit of 1+1 yourself to figure out how things like DirectQuery support enabled by the TDS endpoint might have a dependency on unlocking more modern visualizations on top of CDS data in Power Apps.
While creating charts on a sales pipeline etc. could be seen as just doing old stuff with new tech, what’s really net new in terms of data analysis capabilties is all the goodies coming into CDS integration with Azure Data Lake. Time series data: get the full historical values of business record in a format that you can actually report on (i.e. not audit logs). Soft delete support: instead of keeping all historical data in that fairly expensive CDS database storage, delete the transactional record but still keep the data in the analytical system. Support for entities with attachments: if you’d like to get some value out of the annotation data clogging up your CRM system, push it into the Data Lake where AI can crunch it and generate new insights from it. All in all, this built-in continuous replication of data from the Power Apps / Dynamics 365 app database into Azure Data Lake seems to be truly delivering on the vision of The Real Common Data Service that goes far beyond the boundaries XRM used to have.
If getting data out of CDS is evolving, so are the mechanisms for getting data in. Power Platform dataflows have a lot of potential for sure, yet just like with Power Automate, it’s been difficult for these new generic cloud services to complete with the built-in XRM tools when it comes to feature completeness for CRM customers to achieve their common business goals (use a GUI to automate a process, run a Wizard to import relational data). Power Automate already has the path to “upgrade” the business logic into Azure Logic Apps and now also Power Platform dataflows can grow up to Azure Data Factory, once the March 2021 preview arrives. In the big picture, this ability to start from citizen developer tools and then transition to pro dev methods and systems is a very powerful value proposition from Microsoft to all their customer organizations who are looking to empower their subject matter experts to take steps forward in the day-to-day digital transformation. App creation & automation is where this Maker revolution has started, and I bet we’ll see more and more data driven features in the next phase of Power Platform evolution.
Finally, as the number of apps grows and they become an irreplaceable part of critical business processes, there’s a growing demand for tools to ensure the digital machine is well oiled. As we know, data is the new oil and in this context that means organizations need broader access to telemetry data on how their business apps are working. The 2020 Wave 2 feature that promises to deliver CDS errors, performance data, and diagnostics data in customer’s own Azure Application Insights should do exactly this, by complemeting the built-in metrics available in PPAC with a way for customers to build their own alert systems for both proactive and reactive maintenance. Yet another “grow up to Azure” path that illustrates how closely the low-code application platform-as-a-service will be intertwined with Microsoft’s PaaS offering.
In my previous post in this series on Power Platform’s sources of licensing complexity I explored the internal product structure at Microsoft and why changes in this commercial packaging of different technnologies may lead to confusing messages. Now it’s time to move further into the actual usage of these products and discuss how the depth of integration that you – the customer – build between the systems can affect the licensing requirements.
Multiplexing is a term that isn’t necessarily familiar to anyone who hasn’t worked with either selling or buying enterprise software. This is the core definition that Microsoft is using in all of its documentation:
“Multiplexing refers to the use of hardware or software that a customer uses to pool connections, reroute information, or reduce the number of devices or users that directly access or use the [X] service. Multiplexing does NOT reduce the number of subscription licenses of any type required to access the [X] service. Any user or device that accesses the [X] service – whether directly or indirectly – must be properly licensed.”
There’s has never been that much information made publicly available by Microsoft on how the multiplexing topic – probably because it’s a hairy beast that no one would want to let out of the closet. But the beast is there nonetheless, an if you’re not careful in how you design the technical solution architecture and the software products included in it, that beast may jump at you when you’re not ready and mess up all your plans.
The price of data entry
Let’s look at a simple example first, one that is a very common requirement from customers. Imagine there are employees out there in the field that work with customers and may hear about their future plans or identify current needs for which the organization could offer services or products to. They’re not in a sales role themselves but would love to pass on the info to the actual salespersons who manage these customer accounts. The lead entity in Dynamics 365 would be the obvious place to record such information, but this would require the employee in question to have the necessary license for creating new records into it. So, even if these field employees would be equipped with a Team Member licenses or even the Field Serivce Enterprise app, this is not an operation that they’re allowed to perform, according to the Dynamics 365 licensing guide.
“But wait, we don’t need to actually have the users themselves interact with the lead record in the Dynamics 365 application in order to achieve this!” you might think, if you’d be viewing it purely as a functional requirement. Yes, technically we could create a custom entity like “Incoming Sales Information” and store its records into CDS, then run a workflow or Power Automate to copy that data into the lead entity’s corresponding fields automatically. Commercially speaking this would not reduce the need for licensing the users who are initiating the process. You’ve just designed a software solution that does the multiplexing, but the end result is still exactly the same, thus the actual problem remains. First of all, you are automating the data entry into CDS, and second, you are indirectly using an entity that is not covered by all Dynamics 365 license types (funnily enough, it IS covered by Power Apps, but that’s another story).
The important thing to remember about multiplexing is that it essentially only concerns the internal users of an organization (this includes employees, contractors, vendors, agents). You can have a “Contact Us” web form on a public site with the same fields as you have on your Dynamics 365 lead entity, then have that form call a webhook and use Power Automate to write the submitted form’s data as a new lead record. Everyone else in the world can use that, but if any of your internal users would go onto this public web form and use it for data entry into Dynamics 365, they would have to have a user license that grants them sufficient privileges. (How would you in practice stop employees from using a web form that requires no user identification? Good question.)
Multiplexing within Dynamics 365
As Microsoft is making their Dynamics 365 apps more & more tightly integrated, we’re encountering scenarios where the traditional boundaries between the CRM product and the ERP product get very much blurred. The GA launch of the Dual-write feature means that Microsoft now provides an out-of-the-box way for entities common to both sides to have near real-time two-way synchronization. For example, you might modify the field of an account record in CRM (or “model-driven apps in Dynamics 365”) and this will right away be reflected on the customer record in ERP (“Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations apps”). From an end user perspective, there is only a single system to work with. Awesome!
How does this align with Dynamics 365 product licensing then? As of today, I haven’t seen Microsoft make any announcements on the multiplexing definition being relaxed as a result of their Dual-write feature. So, if a user creates or edits any record in one of the entities on the CRM side that gets almost instantaneously replicated over on the ERP side, they are using two systems at once and should be licensed for them both. All of a sudden, that $95 Sales Enterprise app license isn’t enough and you’d need something bigger. With Dynamics 365 Finance or SCM App starting at $180 as the base licenses, then adding a bit more of attach licenses to cover the Sales App, you’d be looking at a doubling in costs for the users who are stil working in the one and the same user interface but leveraging functionality that now connects seamlessly with another Dynamics 365 system behind the scenes.
Setting the licensing dilemma aside for a moment, there are scenarios with very clear benefits from having the CRM and ERP side work together hand in hand, where the cost from the current way of working may well be higher. For example, being able to transiently call the product data and pricing engine of the ERP system to produce the details needed for quoting a customer on the CRM side can potentially remove a lot of context switching from the end users as well as reduce the amount of custom code you need to build and maintain. In the far end of the spectrum, brand new product offerings like Project Operations can emerge from this unified platform that can now replace the prior mix of apps like PSA, Finance and MS Project. They don’t actually need to suffer from the multiplexing “tax”, since all Microsoft needs to do is design a targeted commercial model for offering this functionality.
Power Multiplexing
The concept of charging for access to data that has originated from of flowing to another system has been invented at a time when software was deployed to dedicated servers and data had clear boundaries of the system in which it resided. Back when the old Dynamics CRM era rules on multiplexing were defined, I bet most of the Microsoft people working with the product surely couldn’t have imagined that the data used in managing the business processes for sales, marketing or service might one day also be stored elsewhere than the application’s own SQL database. We are living in very different times today.
With Power Platform the whole purpose of these new cloud native tools is to combine data sources and manipulate their contents by sometimes bypassing the original application altogether – at least on an UI level, when talking to an API via Connectors. It’s effectively a whole platform designed to multiplex all the things!
In today’s world many of us no longer perceive the value of a software application to be delivered only via the user direclty interacting with the user inteface. Especially in the context of business processes, we’re more concerned with the outcomes from the digital orchestration of data, business logic, and users – both the internal ones and the actual end customer. Despite of this, on commercial level we still need to pay attention to the number of individual systems involved in a process that’s triggered by the user. In a recent interview, Charles Lamanna from Microsoft stated that you should be able to instinctively know when you’re crossing the line to multiplexing.
“At its core, if you’re using or doing something to circumvent a user license and you’ll know you’re doing it because it will feel unnatural because the system’s not built to behave that way, that’s multiplexing and not allowed. Everything else, the intent is to have it be allowed.”
The question of whether data is replicated between systems in real-time or in scheduled batches used to be a reasonable criteria for evaluating whether something was multiplexing or not. Today when any citizen developer can build a Flow that pushes data across systems almost immediately, or construct a custom app that pulls & pushes data via Connectors and presents it in potentially a much better UI than the originating enterprise systems, the lines have blurred down to a level where they become almost useless in trying to navigate the licensing maze. The systems are built one way but the business users are now armed with low-code tools that they’re going to use to try and get the systems to work their way. Governance of remaining compliant in this new world is certainly going to become more and more challenging for organizations as a result.
The business of software
We can’t escape the fact that while the code based PaaS of Azure is mainly charged by API and resource consumption, the low-code application platform (aPaaS) of Microsof Power Platform is founded on the per-user licensing model. The pricing dynamics of a platform are such that the more workloads you can move away from individual applications (be it legacy on-prem systems or SaaS point solutions) onto a common app platform with a Per User licensing model, the more cost savings you can achieve. However, if you were to try and automate the processes up to a level where the number of licensed employees needed in total is reducing as a result, then that’s actually not a favourable result to the platform provider financially. Hence the strong stance on requiring every user involved in the business process someway to have a license.
It’s not only Microsoft that has this complexity built into its product licensing. SAP is known for chasing the Indirect Access of data that has touched their system. Oracle talks about Named User Plus. It is one of the core principles through which enterprise software vendors have traditionally defined the rules under which their IPR can be made to be a part of the digital processes of an organization. What this means is that any modern platform which strives to connect these type of systems as data sources or targets in the new application UIs or automations built as low-code solutions is subject to the same licensing impact. Creating new avenues to use the data and business logic of these third party systems may well incur new costs as a result of extended usage.
It’s tempting to argue that systems like CRM and ERP should not be able to place down a commercial lock on access to core information like the organization’s customers or the pricing of the products they sell. We should still keep in mind that often there would be no such single source of valid records that reflect the business reality in a digital form, had there not been the design and implementation of an enterprise system that can govern all the various processes around it. The API to any system may look deceptively simple, precisely because it abstracts the complexity behind it. Managing that data and process complexity is one of the key reasons why these systems exist, and why companies are usually willing to pay their licensing fees in exchange for the value they get. Unfortunately this tends to push down the complexity to those scenarios where power users and citizen developers might want to build new, creative solutions to that tap into the data managed in these systems.
Other parts in this article series can be found here:
Our company, Forward Forever, is 1 month old today!🥳 It’s truly been exciting times starting a company that goes all-in on Microsoft Power Platform. And that’s even without considering all the surprise elements that COVID-19 is bringing into the equation right now…
The start of April also happens to be the official launch moment for Microsoft Business Applications 2020 Release Wave 1. Since MS will host their own Virtual Launch Event on April 2nd, we though this is a good moment to also set up the first ever FF webinar. So, without further introducions, here it is:
Please join me, MVP Timo Pertilä, Jouko Nyholm and Lasse Teeriaho in our 2020 Wave 1 Release Highlights webinar on Monday, April 6th, 11:00 AM (Central European Time). We’ll be talking about the coolest Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Dynamics 365 features in this April-September release wave, as well as analyzing the many demos that MS will undoubtedly show in their own event.
Just fill this Forms Pro form, which will create a record in our CDS, then trigger Power Automate to send you an ICS calendar invite file hosted on my OneDrive. The link for the Teams Live Event will go live on Monday, if everything works according to plan. Yes, obviously we need to be dogfooding these tools in everything we do😊
Register for our webinar!
First 50 people get in for free, the rest will have to… Oh, alright then – you’re all welcome to join our event, no strings attached.
NOTE: This post was originally published in March 2020, the last revision of pricing information is from November 2022.
As of today, there isn’t a single place from where to check the actual prices of the different license types covered by the Microsoft Power Platform suite of products – like there is for Dynamics 365, for example. The information of prices vs. what paying that price actually entitles you to is distributed across several information sources and formats – starting from the individual product pages, to the learn.microsoft.com documentation pages, to the PDF licensing guides.
To stop myself from having to always use a search engine to discover these pricing details, I decided to compile a list of links to the places where each individual Power Platform product team has made their pricing information public, as well as write out the current subscription prices in US Dollars and Euros. I’ve also included a few relevant licensing model elements that describe what the particular subscription entitles you to do (capacity, features and so on).
Most of Power Platform product licensing is done via the prepaid subscription model familiar from Microsoft 365 (Office 365). More recently the pay-as-you-go (“PAYG”) option has been introduced for some of the services, allowing payment via an Azure subscription (read more about the November 2021 announcement here). It’s important to note that in general prepaid subscription prices are cheaper than pay-as-you-go. The PAYG option is primarily aimed as an option for customers to use, before they know the true consumption level and are ready to commit to a prepaid subscription. Where applicable, I’ve included the PAYG prices here for comparison.
Your actual licensing costs will of course depend on the types of agreements your organization has with Microsoft. So, consider the prices on this page as mainly a starting point for understanding the relative costs of different Power Platform services.
Allows you to access one Power Apps app (canvas, model-driven, portal/website).
The same app in different Power Platform environments (dev/test/prod) requires a per app license for each environment.
Pay-as-you-go option: $10/monthly active user/app/month
Power Apps per user plan: $20 (€16.90)
Allows you to access an unlimited number of Power Apps (canvas, model-driven, portal/website) in your tenant.
Can also be used for accessing canvas apps shared to guests in another tenant (not applicable to other app types).
Power Apps pricing change on October 2021
Before Oct 1st 2021, the Power Apps per app list price was $10 and Power Apps per user $40. See this blog post for more details on the price reduction as well as changes in the per app license entitlements. Note that your license agreement may still apply to the old terms, based on the contract duration.
AI Builder capacity add-on: $500 (€421,70) per unit per month
Each unit contains 1 million service credits on the tenant level
Allows the organization to use any of the AI model types included in AI Builder
AI models consume service credits when they are trained, used in an app or flow, or scheduled to periodically run. The amount of capacity consumed varies based the AI model, as well as the size and complexity of the data set. See AI Builder calculator to estimate the capacity requirement and cost of your model.
Add-on requires at least one paid Power Apps, Power Automate or Dynamics 365 license
For the built-in Business Card scanning feature in Dynamics 365 Sales, there is free capacity included in Sales Enterprise App licenses: 10 scans per user per month, pooled at tenant level. Sales Insights has a capacity limit for business card scanning of 200/user/month. If additional Business card scanning capacity is required, Sales Enterprise customers may purchase additional Sales Insights licenses. (Taken from Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide PDF document.)
Power Virtual Agent: $1,000 (€843.20) per 2,000 sessions per month
Allows the organization to have an unlimited number of bots
In addition to the tenant license, internal users will need to be assigned a user license. The tenant license costs money, but the user licenses that are purchased via the same mechanism are apparently free.
“A session is an interaction between the customer and the bot, and represents one unit of consumption. The session begins when an authored topic is triggered. These sessions are referred to as ‘billed sessions’ in the product. Sessions are deducted for both testing and production usage.”
March 5-6 marked the annual conference for Microsoft geeks in Finland to gather in Messukeskus Convention Center and enjoy two days full of expert sessions on the latest MS technologies and real life stories on how all this tech is making an impact out there. In this blog post I’ll reflect on the sessions that I attended at TechDays this year and share some thoughts on what I think are topics worth exploring more. You’ll also find links to slides and a few social media posts from the event.
Let’s get one thing straight first: Power Platform is everywhere these days. Even a Microsoft IT & Dev conference like TechDays 2020 was opened with a keynote presentation that stared with the 4 pillars we’ve come to know from the Digital Feedback Loop, familiar to all Dynamics 365 professionals by now. Engage customers. Empower employees. Transform products. Optimize operations. The goal of digitally transforming organizations has become the overarching theme of Microsoft’s product offering, supported by global cloud infrastructure, enabled by Azure services, integrated with Office 365 productivity tools and ultimately unlocked by the apps created on top of Power Platform.
For many of the attendees, the journey of how exactly we’ve reached this tipping point of low-code applications isn’t necessarily familiar yet. For us at Forward Forever, a new technology agency focused 100% on Power Platform, being able to participate in discussions with MS tech professionals around this theme was of course of highest importance. Our whole team was present for the 2 days of the event, to ensure we’ve got a thorough understanding of the state of the ecosystem. Thanks to everyone we had a chance to meet at TechDays! Lots of great dialogue and awesome feedback to encourage us to push forward with the vision that we have for our new company.
Our very own Power Platform guru Timo Pertilä had two sessions at this year’s event. The first one was aimed at the broader audience of non-PP professionals, to help them get started on creating Power Apps Canvas apps. Timo gave us the kind of tips he wished he had been given back in 2016 when starting to explore these tools. When it comes to Canvas apps, the most important step is to A) decide on an app that you would actually want to use yourself and then B) just creating it! Following along the lines of a simple IT asset management app built on top of a SharePoint list, Timo’s session went through all the common areas that an app maker should be aware of. I encourage everyone to pick a training lab from one of the many Power Apps learning resources and just follow through a scenario, to understand how these new tools can really democratize the creation of simple business apps on top of existing data sources.
Step by step, in 30min, we already have a nice lil' device management app working on #TDFinland stage after starting from scratch. pic.twitter.com/AvjbLgZQT1
The second session by Timo was about exploring the capabilities of the new UI Flows in Power Automate. RPA, Robotic Process Automation, is a smoking hot topic and the addition of such capabilities into Microsoft Power Platform has gotten even cool-headed Finns like Timo excited about the new opportunities. Yes, while integrating software properly via API based automation remains the core of what Power Automate excels at, the option to connect to systems that for one reason or another can’t be accessed via APIs can close the final gaps and turning manual processes fully digital. In the TechDays session we saw a demo story of an employee onboarding process for HR deparments. Using UI Flows to create user accounts in a non-API enabled legacy system such as Microsoft Access is now possible with these graphical tools that record the steps in the UI and then execute them by using variables like employee name as inputs from other parts of the Power Automate flow.
Although the use of a “proper” relational data management system like CDS would be preferable in building apps for enterprise wide use, the fact is that SharePoint remains both a commonly used as well as easily accessible data store for many citizen developers. The session by Mikko Koskinen showed us how you can leverage tools from the Power Platform to improve the user experience and also auditability of actions that users take on SP list and document data. Custom forms built as Canvas apps and process automation implemented as Flows can do wonders to your SharePoint based business apps, and of course they also open up the connectivity to many other Microsoft services to further extend the feature set as the demands of enterprise customers evolve beyond Office. Having a common set of low-code customization tools across the whole MS stack is where the real Power of the Platform lies.
Microsoft Teams is becoming ubiquitous in the business world as pretty much all organizations on Office 365 are moving away from Skype for Business. The end result of this mass exodus towards Teams may not always be the automatic improvement of teamwork and employee productivity, if all you do is enable the licenses and activate the new services. The Teams MVP duo Vesa Nopanen and Karoliina Kettukari delivered an entertaining story of the rogue cowboys (end users) vs. the central command center (IT department) and how their perspectives on how Microsoft Teams should be implemented and managed can differ wildly. There are plenty of smart settings that the IT guys could automate behind the scenes for a more productive workday experience, but at the end of the day, a lot of the everyday usage of Teams relies on the real life teams to agree on common practices and expectations on how everyone will use the software tools. Educating and encouraging both parties to do their part is therefore essential for achieving success with MS Teams adoption.
Teams is not just a communication tool, though. It is quickly becoming a platform, which from my perspective is the most exciting aspect in its rise to popularity, since this paves way for a wealth of scenarios to better leverage Power Platform tools for a broad information worker audience. MVP Christina Wheeler presented us to path on how to get started with developing Apps for Microsoft Teams. It’s worth exploring the wealth of Teams App Templates that MS has published on GitHub, as these will give you many ideas on how to link various Azure services into the UI that your people are spending a growing part of their days working in. From a low-code development perspective, though, the options for bringing in Power Apps into the Teams navigation experience is the low-hanging fruit that you’ll also want to explore.
— Jukka Niiranen mstdn.social/@jukkan (@jukkan) March 6, 2020
Another super hot MS technology alongside the low-code Power Platform and ubiquitous Teams is Azure Synapse Analytics. In the TechDays 2020 keynote, Data Platform MVP Vesa Tikkanen and Anne Komscha from Stora Enso presented what opportunities this brand new cloud analytics offering from Microsoft opens up for organizations to rethink their data architecture. Vesa demonstrated the unique capabilities that Synapse brings to the table by connecting to and from a SQL Server 2000 virtual machine to the modern data cloud. It’s therefore not a “rip & replace all the things!!1!” type of a scenario where Microsoft is aiming at here, rather they are playing on the compatibility card here and ensuring that your complete data estate can connect with Synapse. Thinking about the Customer Data Platform scenarios where this same underlying technology will be leveraged to identify customer profiles from various sources, it’s easy to understand why MS is so bullish on their position in the emerging CDP market.
As your data and your apps are all either moving to or at least being connected with Azure, it’s no wonder that questions on how should we secure all of this are bound to surface more and more. Azure MVP Karl Ots explained the role of security in the cloud adoption journey to a packed room full of MS tech professionals that probably have all done hands-on experimentation with many Azure services yet not necessarily paid attention to how to limit access instead of enabling it for their own super admin accounts. Role-based Access Control (RBAC) gives you a comprehensive toolkit to configure the permissions in alignment with the identified parties who need to access resources in your subscription, but it may still come as a surprise how much rights can be inherited from the top down to the individual resources if your model isn’t well planned out.
Rob Kuehfus from Microsoft presented a possible solution for approaching the wider journey to the cloud: Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. This represents MS efforts to consolidate their earlier fragmented whitepapers and information sources (up to 40 earlier, based on what Rob told) into a single source of guidance and best practices on what to do on each step towards the cloud. From planning the organizational roles needed on the journey to building focused “landing zones” where the first customer workloads can be dropped on, this framework should become the go-to resource for establishing common understanding between customers and partners on what’s actually needed when adopting Azure at scale inside an enterprise organization.
— Jukka Niiranen mstdn.social/@jukkan (@jukkan) March 6, 2020
As an example of one customer organization that has taken the steps recently, the Azure adoption story of Terveystalo was presented by Development Director Ilari Richardt and Polar Squad’s Azure Lead Masi Malmi. Terveystalo is one of the two private healthcare giants in Finland and their history is full of consolidation projects, which makes it all the more impressive how throughout history they have aimed at having a single patient information system in place. The decision to choose Dynamics 365 as their CRM and ERP systems actually ended up driving also the custom software development investments towards Azure and now building modern DevOps practices in the MS cloud are a key focus area. Bridging the cloud and on-prem wolds in healthcare naturally involved building a lot of APIs and Masi’s exploration of the capabilities of Azure API Management has produced some interesting findings on what the challenges are on this front.
Having chosen #MSDyn365 as CRM and ERP made Azure the smart (but not obvious) choice for @Terveystalo digital tools development. Great example of how the systems of record will pull in other MS stack components via synergies when building systems of differentiation. #TDFinlandpic.twitter.com/6aoLXn7iJg
— Jukka Niiranen mstdn.social/@jukkan (@jukkan) March 6, 2020
Last and probably least… OK, definitely not the least. Mr. Järjestelmänvalvoja a.k.a. firsname.lastname, also referred to as Sami Laiho, wrapped up TechDays 2020 with his packed session on the main arena. Even though I myself have very little to do with managing endpoint security on a professional level, it’s always interesting to hear what the world of securing the Windows laptops and the Azure resources accessed via the credentials used on those laptops actually looks like out there in the enterprise space. It doesn’t make much sense to aim for 100% security, but you just need to be better secured than your neighbor. Considering that just by enabling multi-factor authentication you’re already more secure than 99.9% of the compromised accounts out there, this isn’t always rocket science but rather behavioral science. Sami’s examples of the extent to which people (employees and CIOs alike) go to in their effort to remove inconveniences that could actually put them into near 100% safety is a welcome reminder to all of us that any new innovations we come up with in the information technology space will need to pass the “but what would humans do with it” test before achieving real, tangible results.
It’s that time of the year again when all us Microsoft Business Applications geeks are blessed with two huge documents to consume: the Release Plans for both Power Platform and Dynamics 365. While I gotta say that it’s awesome to have this level of transparency on what specifically is in the next 6 month release cycle, the amount information does feel overwhelming – at least if you’re trying to cover more than a few specific products within the stack.
Ultimately we should at least aim to have a general idea of how each piece of the BizApps puzzle is evolving. Especially the Power Platform side is very relevant for anyone who’s not strictly focused on training/delivering/administering just a single app from the Dynamics 365 portfolio, because this is your low-code toolkit for making those applications meet the real life needs of customers. Unlike with past CRM projects, the customization tools are not part of single server installation, rather they can be discovered from all around the Microsoft cloud.
To make the Release Plan easier to digest, I’ve picked out the new/improved features that jumped out when I went through it for the first time. Instead of the PDF versions (which are coming a bit later anyway), I prefer the online documentation, so below are links to each of those items for you to drill deeper into – and also keep track of possible changes to the original plan.
I’ve added my comments on why I consider these to be the most important items in the Release Plan. Time will tell how they actually land and what the impact will be. It’s going to be fun to review this list October 2020 when Wave 1 is over!
Offline improvements: the need for accessing data without a live connection is still very real in mobile scenarios. What is somewhat of a bummer is that the efforts here are targeting Model-driven apps only for now.
Modern solution explorer makeover: Yes! There are a lot of areas where app maker productivity could be improved, so it’s great to see investments are being made here.
Canvas app Monitor tool & Test studio GA: the wave of the future. Low-code app development isn’t going to be restricted to personal productivity scenarios, we’ll have much of the same needs as in the pro dev side.
Generate app from data with responsive layout for phone and tablet: it’s been an awkward limitation before to only support phone layouts. The bigger story is in bringing out these templates for how to actually make Canvas apps responsive, as it has been quite a mountain to climb for citizen developers. In 2020 Wave 1 we’ll also see a preview of the awaited responsive Canvas app pages.
Canvas Components GA: very impactful stuff here. Component libraries, solution awareness, support for galleries and forms, using collections and media files. These are big steps in bringing the two app types of Canvas and Model-driven closer together.
Unified Interface enhancements: important for many Dynamics 365 experiences. Forms as modal dialogs in particular looks useful, better filters are about closing the gaps to legacy web client, search in this view is an age old requirement.
Improved themes reflecting modern Microsoft Fluent themes: UI matters, the power of the Apps is not just in the logic, data and automation. MS should be more aggressive here when competing against other low-code development platforms.
Power Automate
Interactive adaptive cards: we’ve surely been waiting for this. Very important for bridging the user experiences across different tools in different MS clouds (Office, Dynamics, Power Apps). Could 2020 be the year of the Adaptive Cards? Potentially yes, if you look at how Teams & Power Automate can make use of this feature.
UI Flows solution awareness: aligning RPA with the common shipping vehicle of Power Platform. Being a new preview feature, there’s of course a lot of other parts moving around still, but the important bit from a platform play perspective is getting everything to play nice with solutions (including non-UI Flows…)
Use business process flows in Office 365 apps: interesting yet logical step. From a process automation perspective there’s no reason to keep BPF functionality tied too closely with the familiar CRM sales process stages mentality. Again, it’s the platform that counts.
Power Platform governance and administration
Environment life cycle support: much needed in the real world implementations. To be able to test new standard and custom features in complex business systems, copying and deleting environments needs to be compatible with all the platform components used. Power Automate, Canvas apps etc. have to support healthy ALM patterns for enterprise development scenarios.
User access diagnostic experience: again, very much needed for keeping larger environments operating the way IT would want them to. The process of managing access to applications should be isolated from the actual app maker tools or features specific for Dynamics 365 admins, to ensure there’s help available on a broad enough level when users encounter problems.
Admin connectors & PowerShell cmdlets Generally Available: because they need to be. Low-code Application Platforms for enterprise customers will have to provide automation tools for not just app creation but app governance and administration. If the number of business apps within an organization will explode thanks to these tools, trying to scale the old admin practices isn’t going to be the answer.
Bring your own data lake: allowing customers to control their own adoption metrics for Power Apps. Just like the GUI for admin tools might not meet the requirements of all organizations, it makes sense for Microsoft to allow customers to also take the telemetry data from apps and use Azure services to put it into their own reporting context.
Power BI
Paginated reports enhancements: the next generation SSRS has been a long time coming. The new features like API to render a paginated report to any format (e.g., PDF, Excel) and subreport support will bring the cloud reporting powers of Power BI close to what you could do in on-prem 15 years ago. They might not be the coolest of features, but for many CRM scenarios these “pixel perfect” A4 outputs are still a very practical solution.
Copy and paste visuals into other applications: supporting the modern flow of information. If the paginated reports represent the PC era way of working, then being able to grab a part of your analysis and quickly paste it to a conversation in Teams with a link back to the full report is the way today’s information workers expect these cloud apps to work with one another.
Data lineage GA & enhancements: when cross-referencing data from anywhere is a breeze, how can you tell if the analysis is actually accurate? The lineage visualization is an effective way to illustrate how this modern world of self-service BI operates and bring tools to do meta-analysis on what’s the actual source of the truth being presented to you.
Adaptive Cards: see my comment in Power Automate section.
Single Sign-On: if attempting to go beyond generic website chat popups, strong identity management features are a must.
Pass context to a bot from the calling site: “Hi, how may I help you?” That’s not how a smart agent would initiate the chat, so after identity comes context management. Bridging the gaps between apps is where I see bots being particularly powerful, so URL query string support is a good start for making this happen.
AI Builder
Power Automate integration: building the Cognitive Service for citizen developers. The patterns from Azure need to become more accessible in the BizApps frame of reference.
New models like anomaly detection and receipt scanning: making AI Builder ready for business. Training AI for unique data sets is one thing, but where I believe wider adoption will start is through these more “ready to go” scenarios.
Common Data Model
Empower out-of-the-box analytics: delivering on the promise of CDM. It’s all just theory until we see Microsoft deliver on those promises about making it easier to integrate data sources and analytics/AI via a common semantic model.
CDM visualization and management experience: making CDM more than a GitHub repo. “Increased focus on growing the Common Data Model ecosystem requires enabling users to work with Common Data Model in their native data environments, such as Power Query, Insights Apps, Synapse, and Power BI.” Yes, it certainly does.
