Tag: PowerApps

Year 2019 in Microsoft Business Applications
For the past couple of years I’ve done a “top 3 themes” post at the end of the year, to reflect back on what were the key topics that shaped the coming direction of Dynamics 365. Just because this is no longer a “CRM blog” doesn’t mean I should give up on that tradition, so let’s do some exploration on what has happened in the past 365 days.

One year ago I described 2018 as the year of the platform and listed the top themes to be 1) Power Platform, 2) One version, and 3) AI journey. What will 2019 be remembered from? Just like before, it was fairly easy to select three bullets that I think have been most impactful on the Business Applications ecosystem:
- Low-code movement
- Licensing confusion
- Data story evolved
Let’s discuss what happened under each of these themes in 2019 and do some forward thinking on why they’ll continue to be relevant in 2020.

Low-code movement

This first topic is a much broader phenomenon than just Microsoft’s Power Platform offering. During 2019 we’ve seen the general tech media and industry analysts give plenty of attention to the rise of low-code/no-code development and how organizations are exploring its possibilities to augment (or even replace) traditional software development methods when it comes to internal app development. Microsoft receiver recognition from both Forrester in March 2019 and Gartner in August 2019 for its position as a leader in the low-code application platform market.

The term “citizen developer” had of course been used already much earlier in Microsoft’s description of the target group for Power Apps (earlier “PowerApps”) and Power Automate (formerly known as “Microsoft Flow”). However, it’s safe to say that the general interest on low-code is rising much faster, if you look at what people are googling:

What has propelled Microsoft to the top right corner in the analysts’ charts is not just the functionality aimed at everyday information workers / power users in these tools. Making their low-code offering enterprise ready has been a clear goal for Microsoft, as can be seen from how the pro developer audience is being presented Power Platform + Azure as the platform for every developer. On the IT administration side the efforts to put together a Center of Excellence (CoE) toolkit for Power Apps are showing Microsoft’s commitment to providing a governance story to address both the common admin needs of organizations as well as adapting to the varied support needs of the new breed of app makers.

There is a wealth of functionality that’s still just in the MS product team’s pipeline to land sometime in 2020 which will make the Power Apps development process much more like “real” app building. Built-in tools like Power Apps App Monitor will be the go-to place for debugging formulas, analyzing performance and in general taking a peek under the hood of what the low-code declarative app development studios actually produce. The coming Power Apps Test Framework will allow the authoring and execution of proper test cases, to ensure the app quality doesn’t erode as new features and platform functionality are introduced. There will be Power Apps telemetry data available in a similar way as Azure Application Insights provides to custom apps today.

All these platform investments together with the growing interest from customers (and presumably partners, too) should mean that low-code app development will become increasingly mainstream in 2020. This will boost the awareness of different vendors in the category and may well steer us a bit further away from the ever so familiar head-to-head comparison of Salesforce vs. Microsoft that’s founded in their CRM product offering. Dedicated low-code players like OutSystems or Appian may start to appear more frequently on the radar, as well as companies like ServiceNow that are running towards the citizen developer territory from a slightly different background. Oh, and you should definitely expect there to be even more heated debates ahead on the possibilities, limitations and roles of no-code, low-code and pro code!

Licensing confusion

This second theme is in part related to the growing pains of how the Power Platform tools are turning into self-sustained products rather than just an extension method for Office 365 and Dynamics 365. Yes, they are still very much the toolkit for how you customize applications in the aforementioned suites. However, building extensive custom apps with the full low-code platform capabilities is no longer something that “comes with Office” when looking at the latest licensing terms. Citizen developers can still easily get started with the “seeded” plans in Office 365 for their personal productivity explorations, but for the organization wide deployment of low-code solutions, customers should prepare to purchase dedicated Power Apps and/or Power Automate licenses.

In 2019, removing the earlier included rights from Office 365 seeded plans to use custom connectors, HTTP custom actions, on-prem gateway, Azure SQL was understandably something that irritated those early adopters who had dived deep into building Power Apps and utilizing flows on a wider scale in their organization. While I bet many had suspected there would eventually be limitations designed to drive customers towards the paid plans, it might have been a surprise that minimum price point for the required Power Apps user license was kept at $40/month. From the Office 365 point of view, this can sure look like quite a “cliff” for taking app development further.

Another big surprise was the way how Microsoft introduced a new $10 per app pricing model as an option for basically any custom apps built on top of Power Platform. With rights to full feature set of CDS, Model-driven apps and pretty much everything that you’d need for running an app that looks like the native Dynamics 365 apps, it seemed almost too good to be true – if you’re coming from the Dynamics side of traditional CRM style business applications where the enterprise apps cost $95. A great example of the two different realities clashing, when Power Platform can simultaneously be seen as crazy expensive or dirt cheap, depending on the frame of reference.

The policy of licensing the low-code Power tools from Microsoft via primarily a per-user model with upfront payment requirement is sometimes challenging when talking about the business cases for an application platform that would be gradually adopted for more and more app scenarios. There’s no pay-as-you-go option like with raw Azure resources, because Power Platform is a value-added abstraction layer that should remove any direct dependencies to those resources. However, in 2019 we saw MS take things towards capacity based licensing, with the introduction of explicit Power Platform API request limits per user license type, plus the option to purchase additional capacity if needed. Although MS has stated that normal users should be well within the included API quota, there have been many concerns raised from developers on how custom apps and integrations will be impacted. The fact that these new consumption based limits were announced before any metrics were made visible to customers for evaluating their existing scenarios didn’t exactly help in alleviating concerns.

I’ve never spent as much time investigating the details of Microsoft licensing as I did in 2019, and honestly I hope that 2020 would be at least a bit lighter on the licensing changes side. Seeing the rate at which the product portfolio of Microsoft Business Applications is growing, though, I’m not sure if it’s realistic to hope for the size of the licensing guides to shrink anytime soon. We’re also still waiting for some of the October 2019 licensing announcement details to be finalized, like the promised API usage metrics in Power Platform Admin Center, or the updated list of restricted entities requiring Dynamics 365 license. Oh, and I bet in 2020 we’ll see the launch of technical enforcement for the types of apps that each license holder is able to use (1st party, custom, Team Member etc.).

From the customer and partner perspective, the licensing of Power Platform is often perceived as its most complex part, based on feedback from various community members. Although many of the recent changes have been undoubtedly necessary to align the very different Power Apps and Dynamics 365 licensing models into a coherent and future proof platform licensing model, unfortunately the continuous adjustments on what these services actually cost to run has clearly eroded the customers’ trust on being able to predict the operating costs of their solutions built on top of Microsoft’s cloud. After shaking things up on the licensing front in 2019, let’s hope that 2020 would see less drama. Who knows, Microsoft might actually study their own data on how the latest licensing and pricing decisions have impacted service consumption and calibrate the model on those areas that could be better balanced to drive greater adoption of the platform and the apps.

Data story evolved

Basing business decision on larger and larger pools of data, gathered from an exponentially growing number of sources, processed closer and closer to real time is the Digital Feedback Loop story that Microsoft has been preaching in basically every Business Applications themed event for the past couple of years. The underlying message is that you must have applications so well integrated with one another that you can establish such a loop in real life – which of course the products in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform portfolios promise to deliver.

Back in 2018 we saw the birth of many “AI for X” products that have since then been rebranded as “[something] Insights”. I called this out as the start of the business AI journey in last year’s summary blog post, since we hadn’t yet seen much of these new intelligent features find their way into actual customer environments. Based on my observations today, it’s still fairly rare to find these premium Dynamics 365 licenses for Sales Insights or Customer Service Insights deployed in real life scenarios (let alone Market Insights that’s still a bit of a mystery product in its preview state). So, it appears that at least these core CRM processes didn’t just magically get transformed by adding some AI frosting on top. A big practical blocker seems to be lurking in the availability of clean enough data in large enough quantities that these packaged AI features could show concrete results to business decision makers in customer organizations.

What 2019 did deliver is a set of new products that are aiming to leverage business data in a way not previously covered by Microsoft’s business apps offering. In the second half of 2019, the headline Dynamics 365 product demonstrated in all MS events was Customer Insights. Built as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), its purpose is to enable marketing users to combine customer and transaction data from numerous different sources, to form a 360 degree profile of that customer and use it in better segmenting offers and providing personalized service. Pouring data into Azure Data Lake & CosmosDB is designed to be effortless from any source, be it Microsoft’s or other vendors’ solutions, with intelligent matching algorithms generating “keys where keys don’t exist”. While it can be used with Dynamics 365 apps, there’s no requirement for the customer to have a specific CRM system in place. It’s also not a black box like some of the earlier Insights products, since the built-in templates like churn prediction can be replaced with custom Azure ML models to take advantage of machine learning models built and trained by your own data scientists.

Another similar data intensive new product launched as preview in 2019 was Dynamics 365 Product Insights. The origins of this application lay in Microsoft’s own telemetry data management systems, where services like Xbox, Skype, Bing and Office have been sending up to 25 million events per second to be processed by the same technology that’s now offered as a Dynamics 365 SaaS product to customers. Yes, you could use Azure Event Hub to push all that product telemetry data into the PI service, but there’s a Signals SDK for Java, Objective-C or Python, too, if and when the whole product architecture of the customer organization isn’t based on MS technology. Insights derived from processing the signal data could be consumed via Power BI or embedded inside Dynamics 365.

These kind of new services that are aimed at exposing business users to data that previously used to exist outside the reach of the Digital Feedback Loop sound a lot more transformative than the earlier “AI for X” products. Sure, there’s also value in bringing predictive opportunity scoring into the traditional sales funnel management in CRM. However, those kind of features will likely become the new norm for the type of smart business apps that users will expect to be interacting with everywhere. The customer specific implementation of solutions based on Customer Insights or Product Insights, on the other hand, have the potential to be a source of true differentiation if organizations can learn unique ways to use their data for proactively serving their customers. It also aligns with the ambitions that Satya Nadella has on how organizations can break traditional data processing barriers with the help of Azure:

We are building Azure as the only cloud with limitless data and analytics capabilities across our customers’ entire data estate, bringing hyperscale capabilities to our relational database services.
Satya Nadella, September 2019 post on LinkedIn

New services like Azure Synapse will naturally be the toolkit for creating highly specific, cutting edge analytics solutions on the MS data platform, but I can imagine the SaaS style Dynamics 365 products to follow pretty close by when it comes to covering repeatable business scenarios for big data – with the same underlying Azure tech, of course. In 2019 we already saw CDS data export to Azure Data Lake becoming available both via Dataflows as well as through a standard feature (preview). The traditional relational world of business application data is intermingling with the less structured analytical data systems at a rapid pace, with Microsoft building these services that blur the lines of what specific type of data is being used in which business scenario. Is 2020 going to be the year when Dynamics 365 professionals must step out of their comfort zone of having everything in one database and start connecting to all these strange new services, to deliver those much sought after actionable insights to their business user audience? We’ll know that in approximately 365 days!
December 27, 2019
End of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Online

I always prefer to use precise terminology when talking about the technologies that are part of my trade. Some might consider me a pedantic guy who’s always correcting some insignificant details in documents or presentations that cover Microsoft technologies but aren’t using their correct names. Yeah, the customers reading them probably wouldn’t notice the difference, but if you let go of your standards then sooner or later the lazy writing will lead to unnecessary confusion. Since I don’t write any actual computer code for a living, I guess this is my way of “debugging” the deliverables that I actually ship.

Like with actual coding, sometimes there are breaking changes introduced into the concepts that are used in technical writing, too. This happens when the product branding gets updated by Microsoft as part of their evolving commercial offering, or when existing technologies are realigned to be used in a new context. You could think of it as a new API version that MS product marketing releases, which means you need to perform updates to your “code” to keep its API references compatible with the surrounding reality. A slide deck created by Microsoft in 2016 for the Dynamics product offering would hardly pass the code validation today – yet you still see some partners out there just happily using these legacy materials in customer dialogue. Yes, I cringe a lot when seeing those.

The actual topic of this post is about what the title says: Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is now officially gone from the Microsoft cloud. That is all. Thanks for coming, have a save ride home!

Wait, WHAT?

Oh, alright then. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the what, starting with a look back at what has happened in our earlier episodes of Microsoft business applications branding.

In the beginning there was CRM…

…And then suddenly there wasn’t. Yes, you’ll still find the term “CRM” all over my blog. I’ve had trouble deciding on what comes after it – and sticks around for longer than a year or two. Anyway, in 2016 Microsoft decided to let go of the Dynamics CRM brand and replace it with Dynamics 365 instead. There was a popular article written on LinkedIn at that time about it:

Deprecating the term “CRM” was probably a good move, but replacing it with something that didn’t specify if the technology underneath was ex-CRM or ex-AX (the enterprise ERP product) caused a bit of a mess. From that mess, the term Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement rose from the ashes of Dynamics CRM in the first half of 2017, to reference the platform that was XRM under the hood but wasn’t allowed to be called that.

A year went by and it was time to reimagine things again, with the merging of PowerApps and XRM. The platform was given the name Common Data Service, which had actually already been given to a completely different platform a bit earlier in the pre-merger world of PowerApps. Since in the cloud there are no version numbers, let’s not refer to “v1” or “v2” here either then. There can only be one CDS!

(Well, actually there were 2 after this merger still: “CDS for Apps” and “CDS for Analytics”, in short “CDS-T” and “CDS-A”, but then…) OH SHUT UP ALREADY you pedantic geek!

Summer 2018 saw the Power Platform brand emerge, and we’ve been hearing quite a lot from it since. You could say it’s been stealing the show from the previous business applications primary brand that was Dynamics 365. It would be foolish to think that we’re anywhere near the end of this Power wave that’s sweeping across the MS cloud offering.

Dynamics 365 CE Online vs. On-premises: the game is over

As part of the October 2019 updates coming in the form of Release Wave 2, there have been some subtle changes to product branding for Microsoft Business Applications. For starters, MS is dropping “for” from the product names, so what used to be “Dynamics 365 for Sales” is now just “Dynamics 365 Sales”. Certification and exam names have already changed, next we’ll wait and see when the official SKU names in MS price lists will reflect this.

Another visual change you’ll see when visiting the documentation site for Dynamics 365 is that many of the apps received shiny new icons. Woo-hoo!

Then when we scroll down the page, there’s this small section with no bold graphics, dedicated to the on-premises products:

Let’s click on it, if only for old times sake. Hey, hold on! There’s actually something interesting here right on the Overview page for on-prem:

Effective October 2019, the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement SKU/license plan is no longer available for “online” customers. More information: Dynamics 365 Licensing Update
With this change for online customers, we are no longer using the term “Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps” to refer to the collection of following apps and its related services:
* Dynamics 365 Sales
* Dynamics 365 Customer Service
* Dynamics 365 Marketing
* Dynamics 365 Field Service
* Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation

For online customers, these apps are model-driven apps running on Common Data Service. You can build model-driven apps using PowerApps. More information: What are model-driven apps?
For on-premises customers, “Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises)” is the official name of the product that provides sales, service, and marketing features. Customer Engagement (on-premises) shares many features in common with Common Data Service and PowerApps.

That’s it then. Customer Engagement is now exclusively the name of the old legacy product that you can deploy on the server infrastructure you manage. If you use anything called Dynamics 365 that’s coming from the actively developed Microsoft Cloud, then it’s not CE anymore. It’s “[Insert Dynamics 365 app name] running on Common Data Service”.

Why?

Even though some of you might feel that Microsoft keeps renaming things simply because that’s what they always do, there is a justification for the axing of the Customer Engagement brand. For those of you that work with configuring and developing solutions for the platform, you will have noticed that the cloud version resembles the old server product less and less every day. Environment administration tasks have been moving over to Power Platform Admin Center, the solution configuration work is done under make.powerapps.com, the new editors for forms, views and everything new is being introduced only to the Power side.

None of these new investments into admin and customizer tools are such that you could easily port them over to the on-premises world. There isn’t a Power Platform you could install locally, so the gap between these 2 worlds cannot ever be bridged. From a training and documentation perspective you can’t claim that “it’s all just CE, don’t worry about the small things” when the architecture of one platform no longer physically aligns with the other. CDS, PowerApps, Flow, Connectors etc. aren’t just extra pieces in the cloud, they’re an altogether different puzzle that requires new skills and fresh thinking.
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November 2, 2019
Licensing is NOT a security mechanism

Licensing remains a topic that no one claims to like yet everyone keeps on talking about. October 2019 saw what was undoubtedly the biggest number of changes to Microsoft Business Applications SKUs (i.e. items that MS sells), with the end of Dynamics 365 Plan licenses and new models for licensing PowerApps & Flow. Not to mention the new structure that ties licenses closely to API call limits. Oh, and we’re still waiting for the new restricted entities definition that should have gone along with October 1st licensing terms.

We’re not even past the month of October and there’s already a new licensing discussion heating up in the MS customer and partner community. The announcement of Self-service purchase capabilities for Power Platform products, made via Microsoft 365 Messaging Center (only visible to admins), seems to have pretty much angered everyone who saw it.

I gotta say, you simply could not find a worse channel to announce something like this, because it’s aimed squarely at getting around a problem that IT administration (and sometimes consultants like me) are a part of. But like we’ve seen so many times before, communication isn’t exactly the strongest part of Microsoft’s software licensing management efforts, so let’s just move on and start analyzing what is happening here, why it is happening and what possible outcomes there might be from it.

Empowering every individual to acquire applications

To get an overview of what exactly is going on, you can read the article from Mary Jo Foley: “Microsoft to enable end users to buy Power Platform licenses without administrative approval”. In short, starting in November 2019 (in the US), any user that has an account in your organization’s Azure AD tenant will be able to go and buy Power BI licenses directly from MS. Later this will expand to PowerApps & Flow, and other regions. Essentially this will be an “insert your credit card here to unlock Power Platform functionality” type of experience.

How is this different from any of the popular SaaS products from other vendors then? It isn’t. That’s the model that every consumer app and most business apps support, since it represents the lowest barrier to entering a commercial relationship. Usually you would start with a free trial period to try out the capabilities of the SaaS product. If it’s a good fit for the problem you’re trying to solve, the next problem you face is the procurement of the app. Buying things for personal use is easy, whereas the bigger the organization you’re working in is, the longer you can expect this purchasing stage to be. During it you’re basically standing behind the store window, staring at the product you know you’d really need, yet the door to the store is being kept shut. Often there’s even no opening hours sign to give you any clue on how long this will take (or if you’ll ever get what you wanted).

In such a scenario, it’s not uncommon for problems to get solved with a credit card and an expense claim. The ease of taking this route is how Shadow IT came to be, and I bet we’re just going to see more & more of this Bring Your Own App (BYOA) activity in organizations as the information workers become more savvy about what’s actually out there in the cloud. If one store is closed, there are tens of other options with 24H service.

But they can’t do this! They’re MICROSOFT!!!

It’s one thing being an enterprise software startup and trying to get onto the radar of potential customers via the Bring Your Own App strategy. When you’re Microsoft, though, the expectation is that things work in a completely different way. Since pretty much every bigger company is a MSFT customer, the licensing game has been a process of long negotiations and complex agreements. This is the procurement norm of how Microsoft software finds its way into the hands of the end users. Well, it sometimes does, and other times it doesn’t, because the needs of individual users may get lost in the big corporate IT machine that’s trying their best to keep things under control, with the growing amount of regulations, systems and requirements.

What’s Microsoft on about here with self-service purchases, specifically with this chosen set of products? Imagine you’re the world’s most valuable company, you happen to be producing software & you’ve recently discovered a huge new market in the Low-code Application Platform space. You’ve built up a strong community of advocates (or addicts even) and your target is to empower the next 10 million application developers to digitally transform their organizations with the help of your global cloud infrastructure and AI driven insights. You’ve got all these key buzzwords lined up, there’s a seemingly endless sea of citizen developer opportunity ahead of you. The only thing standing in the way of your success is this nasty thing that looks like Niagara Falls, sucking in many of the smaller boats that the poor citizens attempt to use to sail to this promised land of Power Platform. That thing has a name and it’s called Enterprise Software Licensing Models. So much for the “no cliffs” experience then – hope you packed a life vest on this journey!

To avoid this vortex that Microsoft themselves have largely caused over the past decades with the swirls of their enterprise software sales strategies, it makes perfect business sense to open up new, alternative routes for those power users who seek to merely use the software tools – instead of catering only to those who are tasked with managing the whole lifecycle of IT tools in the organization.

There’s only so much you can do with the PowerApps and Flow features bundled into Office 365 subscriptions, after which you’ll need a premium plan. Why on earth would Microsoft willingly push the users to look for alternative tools like Zapier or IFTTT to automate processes that connect to data sources that are outside Office 365? Why shouldn’t it be possible to enter the very same credit card details into a form provided by MS, to keep the tools within the same MS cloud that’s already used by the organization? Isn’t this actually a way to reduce the problems resulting from Shadow IT? Keep the rogue users closer to the official IT world and you’ll have a better chance of converting the tools into non-shadow status at some point.

Rogue citizens

Obviously there are some valid concerns with a model that might encourage users to acquire MS software via an alternative channel than the officially sanctioned one. The self-service shop won’t give the same negotiated prices for licenses as the company wide agreements. Handling the expenses from various different sources will be an overhead. The boundaries between supported and unsupported IT will become blurry. Even with the promised central visibility into who’s bought what licenses in the tenant, initially it will all just look like more work to those persons who have traditionally managed Microsoft licenses in the organization. There’s an FAQ document from MS for this self-service purchase model that attempts to address some of these concerns, but with a change like this there’s bound to be far more Q’s than A’s at this point.

There shouldn’t be a need for the self-service purchase channel to exist, but in reality there is. If you have only spent time working in roles that represent the centrally planned deployment of IT systems, you may not realize the challenges that can stand in the way of you and the software license you would need for getting your job done in a larger organization. Sure, there might be a theoretical process in place for how the needs of business users are identified and then eventually turned into a working piece of software that everyone happily uses. In reality a fair share of the people on the business side who live in the world of needs may not be seeing such processes in action. They may well be unaware of any development initiatives on the IT side, nor have contacts with those professionals that could help them navigate these processes. If IT systems can be complex, then the inner workings of an enterprise organization can represent a whole new dimension of complexity. No one is at fault, yet everyone pays the price.
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October 28, 2019
Sharing Apps Is Caring

A while ago there was an announcement made on the PowerApps team blog about “Share canvas apps with guests in your organization”. Launched in public preview, this feature makes it (almost) as simple to share apps with a guest user as it is with internal users from your company. Basically all you need to do is invite them as guests into your tenant, by leveraging the Azure AD B2B collaboration:

Once they’re in, providing access in the PowerApps Canvas app sharing menu works the way you should already be familiar with. Guests will appear as users that appear in the search and you can do all the usual stuff, apart from making guests co-owners of your app.

The fact that you can Bring Your Own Identity in this app sharing scenario is already a big benefit. Forget about trying to create user accounts for your partners & customers, let alone manage password renewals, people leaving the partner company and all that tedious admin work. When there are no separate credentials for the different applications, you can focus your efforts on configuring the appropriate security model on your side and then automating as many steps in the Azure AD driven process as you can via group memberships etc.

(Side note: Technically BYOI probably refers only to scenarios where you log into Azure AD with something completely external like a Google account, instead of just an identity from a neighboring tenant. )

Providing application access to third parties via Azure AD B2B Collaboration has been possible for Model-driven apps for a while now, or Dynamics 365 CE like it is more commonly referenced. If you have partners that are performing telemarketing or support services that link closely to your core customer data, providing them access to your CRM directly is usually far more efficient than shipping data via Excels or handling task assignments via email.

Licensing a shared app

The one negative side about this external user scenario has been that you will always need to purchase a license for these guests before they can access your apps. It doesn’t matter if they’ve got Dynamics 365 licenses back at their home tenant, since that can’t grant them access to another tenant’s environment. Boo! No one likes to pay twice for the same service, but sometimes the costs can of course be absorbed while keeping the business case valid. Especially now when there’s the $10 Per App Plan for PowerApps.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. With the nearing GA of Canvas apps sharing across different organizations, there is now the possibility to “Bring Your Own License” (BYOL). Have a look at what the documentation says about the prerequisites for Canvas apps sharing with guests:

The guest user must have a PowerApps license assigned through one of the following tenants:
* The tenant hosting the app being shared.
* The home tenant of the guest user.

This is awesome! What this essentially means that any user that has either PowerApps or applicable Dynamics 365 licenses assigned to them in their own organization can use the powers granted by that license to operate apps in any other tenant in which he or she has been granted the rights via the respective security model of the app.

Let’s try this out. I’ve got a user account with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan license (R.I.P.) assigned to it in my production tenant. What I will do in a test tenant that represents a partner organization in this demo is to 1) provision a CDS environment, 2) install sample account data into it, 3) generate a quick Canvas app from data to work with these account entity records, 4) invite my production user as a guest into the demo tenant, and finally 5) share the Canvas app from the demo to my production user.

Steps 1-2 are just the configuration work familiar to any Dynamics 365 professional, so we can skip talking about those. Also step 3 is a matter of selecting “create new app, Canvas” and then going with the Common Data Service option with the account entity as the target table.

After saving the app, we need to make sure that our guest user is found in the Azure AD user list, pretty much like an actual local user of the tenant would:

Back in PowerApps, the sharing menu should now show us the guest user as a possible share target. Since this Canvas app is using CDS as the data source, we’re also presented with the options to set the security roles for the guest.

Click “Share” and the guest will have an invite email in a few seconds, with a link to the Canvas app:

Click the link & off we go! By the power invested in me via a Dynamics 365 license purchase by a completely different organization, I’m now fully capable to work with the CDS data via a PowerApp offered to me by a partner in their tenant.

App strategies for the Power Platform era

To an outsider this whole app sharing thing might seem a bit underwhelming. “What’s the big deal? Isn’t that exactly how it should work?” YES. It should, but it hasn’t – until now. Being originally born into the internal networks of organizations, the business user software from Microsoft has suffered from the boundaries set by an invisible firewall that no longer physically exists in the era of public cloud applications. While the application platforms from MS have gradually acquired better skills to work with the outside world, the licensing model hasn’t been all too friendly for many cross-tenant scenarios.

For now, when you purchase the Per User license to Microsoft’s low-code application platform, you get a “1:N pass” for one user to access an unlimited number of PowerApps Canvas or Model-driven applications within the home tenant:

The more business scenarios you can cover with PowerApps, the cheaper the relative price you pay for the platform capabilities. The result within an organization that goes all-in on Power Platform to digitally transform themselves can be quite a high number of apps already. Now, imagine that it wouldn’t be limited just to the types of digital processes that operate within your organization’s firewall. What if there was a multi-tenant model where the Per User license could unlock collaboration scenarios with your partners or customers? This network effect could grow the number of apps even faster, as it represents a “1:N:N pass”:

Pretty exciting, don’t you think? We’re not quite yet on the level where B2C app scenarios would be within the scope of PowerApps, but this expansion into B2B collaboration area is surely a part of the strategy how Microsoft plans to grow their Power Platform business. The ability to use Canvas apps without a license in the app’s home tenant directly is an important variable to consider when planning your app strategy in the MS Cloud.

One thing to keep in mind here is that Canvas app sharing doesn’t replace the use of PowerApps Portals for external audiences, as those have different pros and cons from a feature and cost perspective. Also the usage of Model-driven apps for collaborating with external parties in complex business processes will probably still have a place in the greater Power Platform puzzle, even if this new license portability doesn’t cover them (at least not yet).

October 24, 2019
Licensing by consumption: pricing model of Power Platform online services

On the topic of Dynamics 365 and PowerApps licensing changes coming in October 2019, I earlier wrote about the biggest change in how Microsoft is separating the first party applications and the underlying platform in the new Per App pricing model. There’s another aspect in the coming licensing updates that has also caused a lot of concern among partners and customers: the API call limits. While the existence of limits on how much load one can place on the online service are not an entirely new construct, it’s the first time that the amount of API calls available is directly tied to the type of licenses bought.

In their August 29 blog post, Microsoft stated the following:

“A single, integrated approach for daily capacity limits will be implemented to help maintain a consistent quality of service for customers with PowerApps and Flow plans. These capacity limits should not impact standard or reasonable usage of PowerApps or Flow. Organizations that require additional capacity for heavy usage scenarios will be able to purchase add-on capacity and assign it to specific users or processes.”
Updates to Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, PowerApps and Flow Licensing

The finer details of the new model are outlined in the PowerApps and Microsoft Flow licensing FAQs for October 2019 as well as the Requests limits and allocations pages over on docs.microsoft.com. You should keep an eye on these documentation pages, since further information will be made available, based on the incoming questions from customers. There have already been a lot of blog posts around this topic and I’m not expecting the debate to die out anytime soon. Rather than speculating about what the exact policies will be, I will instead try to set this new consumption based licensing into context with what’s happening in the Microsoft Cloud.

Users aren’t the only thing that matters

USL, user subscription license, has been the dominant model for pricing applications from Microsoft in the online services era. Of course they’ve been a key component ever since the personal computing revolution started with PCs running DOS, then Windows and many productivity applications like those found in the Office suite. The networked computing era extended the pricing models to server software that wasn’t always purely a per-user play, as the complexity and robustness of your back-end services determined how expensive that side was. In the initial wave of SaaS business applications, we saw a return to the simplicity of just paying a fixed fee like $50 per user and getting all of that server stuff covered for you. Oh bliss! Isn’t this exactly the way the cloud should be sold?

Those first SaaS services also were in themselves quite simple. A replica of the server software you could have either in your own closet or the data center run by companies like Amazon and MS. You just offloaded the complexity involved in managing hardware redundancy, backups, storage etc. and instead payed for all that in the USL. This is all fine and dandy as long as the value from the applications can be closely linked to the number of licensed users accessing it. Using CRM as a simple tool to improve sales person productivity might map into this type of cost-value structure. But how about when you take a step further on the digital transformation path and start to actually replace those tasks carried out by human employees with something that is almost fully automated? Hmm, perhaps the PC business model isn’t optimal for a future that looks like this.

Let’s look at some of the new services in the Dynamics 365 cloud. The commercial launch of Dynamics 365 for Marketing in Spring 2018 was a bit of a shock for anyone who always though these applications are licensed per user. Instead, Microsoft chose the model that HubSpot any many other vendors in the marketing automation space apply, by setting the pricing per contact. Yes, initially they were way off with this thinking by applying the pricing logic to the entire contents of the CRM database, but based on market feedback the model was adjusted to now count only for marketing contacts actually used by the specific application (i.e. where business value should be generated). Also, you actually don’t need any Dynamics 365 user license for those marketing people who build the customer journeys and analyze the results, since free user licenses are available to unlock the door into the system. Licensing is done on the environment level, after all.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a CDP (Customer Data Platform, for those not keeping up with the latest acronyms) that allows customers to bring in customer related data from various different sources and unify them into a “customer 360” profile that links all those activity entries into a single view of the customer. You can then leverage big data processing features of a CDP to generate target segments like customers most likely to churn, select them to be a target group in Dynamics 365 for Marketing customer journeys and preserve your revenue streams by holding on to these customers identified by the intelligent machine in the cloud. How is this service priced? Per number of profiles: starting at 100k profiles for $1.5k, so 1.5 cents USD per profile. Any user in the tenant can be simply authorized to access the application, since the dedicated UI doesn’t have any dependency to the USL construct found on the Model-driven application side.

Forms Pro is a professional version of the personal/team productivity app found in the Office 365 suite, storing its data into CDS entities for process automation and data analysis. Do you need a USL for the Pro features? Nope. The pricing is based on the number of responses to surveys, at $100 per 2k, making it $0.05 per response. If you want to listen to your customers and improve business outcomes as a result of that, it’s not about how many people you have looking at the data but rather how smart and how automated your feedback management processes are.

AI Builder will go GA in October 2019. Guess how that’s going to be priced? That’s right: not per user. You buy a capacity license at $500/month for 1M “service credits”. When it comes to machine learning models as a service, with no pre-packaged Dynamics 365 app on top of them, there isn’t even any concept like contact or survey response that would tie the pricing to the physical world. You literally extract value directly from the data you put in there, with the help of apps and automation that builds on top of and integrates with your unique business processes.

The consumption pricing model is already here. Future products in the Business Applications portfolio are more likely to gravitate towards that, rather than finding a user to attach a price tag on.

Sandcastles in the sky and how to draw the lines

In the cloud era, Microsoft can see everything. No, they don’t have employees looking at any customer’s private data or anything like that. What I mean is they have telemetry data on everything that happens on the service, because they are hosting all the moving parts involved. This gives them the opportunity to be very data driven in analyzing how products are adopted, what people actually do with them. It is essentially their own implementation of the digital feedback loop that you see James Phillips preaching to Microsoft’s customers and partners in every keynote he does. There’s the “transform products” part that is all about aligning product features to meet customer needs, but you can be sure MSFT also want to “optimize operations” when it comes to the logistics of delivering the cloud services and how to price them appropriately.

Dynamics 365 is claimed to be the biggest service running on Azure today. Now, even though at Microsoft they both fall under the Cloud & AI that Scott Guthrie runs, there’s not a single bucket where all the costs would be thrown. The more Business Applications products are built that consume data storage and compute capacity, the higher the bill from Azure will be. The term COGS (cost of goods sold) is being used frequently when talking about the resources needed to keep cloud services up and running on these platforms like Azure. Power Platform is a platform on top of another, and while it often uses higher levels of abstraction that its raw Azure counterpart, API calls from the citizen developer PowerApps do turn into API calls against Azure services. Whatever product is generating this consumption must also front the bill.

The vast majority of Dynamics 365 business today is still done based on user licenses, regardless of what our AI & big data driven future may look like. These are sold as SaaS apps you can just sign up and start using, rather than a complex solution that needs a technical architect to build the blueprint for. As such, the message Microsoft wants to get out there (but isn’t always so good in phrasing) is that the app user license should cover all normal usage for real human beings interacting with Dynamics 365 CE. Yes, anytime a user opens a contact form on a Model-driven app there are around 10 API calls made, which count against the quota for that particular user account. All CRUD operations theoretically count, but for an end user you shouldn’t need to count them. This is not the intention of MS.

What is the idea behind setting the API call limits then? Well, the situation is this: the platform has evolved from the early days of being a simple CRM database for sales user productivity improvement into something that can connect OoB to a vast number of external (non-CDS) data sources and run complex automation on this data without anyone sitting in front of their PC and opening those contact record forms. When sold as Power Platform, there will be a massive amount of this non-CRM style consumption of computing resources running on the platform (unless MS completely fails with capturing this new business potential). Building all of this abstraction on top of the underlying Azure services and then giving it a way with essentially a per-identity flat monthly fee just wouldn’t be a sensible business model.
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September 12, 2019
Canvas Apps for the Model-driven mind: how to make that leap

Business applications come in all shapes and sizes. In the Microsoft ecosystem, we now have a broader set of tools to choose from, compared to the past strategies of Build vs. Buy, i.e. writing code to develop a custom application vs. using an application platform to configure the desired functionality. The birth of Power Platform and especially PowerApps as the underlying platform technology for creating business apps brought together two very different methods of configuration: Canvas Apps and Model-driven Apps.

It’s safe to say that hardly anyone in the world is currently a master of both application types. If you’ve been introduced into world of business applications via Dynamics CRM, XRM and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, then you will by default solve the customers’ problems with a Model-driven approach. For those that have been working with tools like SharePoint, InfoPath and the Office 365 suite of information worker productivity apps, the solution is very likely to be envisioned as a Canvas App. Persons with less professional history from either of these MS clouds will probably gravitate towards the mobile-first experience of Canvas Apps when getting to know the capabilities of PowerApps today.

There is very real value in being able to identify the logical objects involved in the functionalities required from a business app and turning that into a sensible, scalable data model. This is the XRM mindset of starting from the back end data and processes when designing solutions. If you have been developing these skills in the classic CRM style projects for several years, then you possess superpowers that few Citizen Developers could ever match. Congratulations! However, now you need to start practicing the exact opposite approach for how to solve problems: forget the data and start from the user experience.

You may already be aware of how massively Microsoft is investing in the new business models that Power Platform unlocks. Hopefully this has lead you to at least experiment with creating Canvas Apps based on existing data sources like CDS (if you still call it Dynamics [something], then hey: that’s perfectly alright!). While exploring these tools, perhaps you’ve also noticed how parts of the old XRM admin and customization features have started appearing in the PowerApps (and Flow) maker experiences. This level of awareness is a great start, but it’s not taking you very far yet in the process of changing how you think about solving business problems. You need to go much deeper, to unlearn the limits our model based world and embrace the possibilities of a modern Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform.

At 365 Saturday Kyiv and more recently at Power Platform Saturday Oslo I’ve done sessions on this transformation process, aimed at the XRM professionals. These include setting the scene on how & why the different app types are merging together, what are the key differences in solution design process for Canvas vs. Model, and how to get started in being part of this new #PowerAddicts movement. The slide deck includes a “Top 10 tips for starting Canvas App development on top of CDS” section, which should hopefully make the journey a bit easier than it has been for me, back when I started on it around one year ago. See below for the presentation or go directly to ~~SlideShare~~ my Slides archive to enjoy it in full fidelity.

Now the question is: have YOU already started your journey into the UX driven Canvas App world? If yes, what have been the biggest revelations or obstacles that you have encountered? If not, what are some of the roadblocks that have kept you from making that leap from the familiar Model-driven business applications into the expanding opportunities that PowerApps Canvas apps have to offer? Please do share your experiences in the blog comments, as I’m quite sure this an area where many professionals are searching for guidance and peer support.

August 30, 2019
Application/Platform Separation in New PowerApps Licensing Model

Ever since Spring 2018 when the XRM and PowerApps platforms merged on a commercial level, I’ve found myself spending an ever increasing number of hours per week involved in licensing discussions and scenario planning. My initial exploration of the platform licensing back then came to the conclusion that many of the crucial details for actually determining what you can & can’t do with PowerApps licenses vs. Dynamics 365 CE licenses were simply not available at the time. Obviously this was not an ideal starting point for Microsoft to start pushing their Power Platform into new business areas that should see it capture the next 10 million developers from outside the traditional CRM field. But still, it is the legacy that came with the underlying platform that was designed to be sold as Sales, Service, Marketing etc. solutions delivered via traditional enterprise projects via partners that mostly had started back in the Microsoft Business Solution (MBS) days. What can you do about that, huh?

This year at the Inspire 2019 partner conference, Satya Nadella framed the role of Business Applications and Power Platform in particular with the following numbers:

(Click here to watch this segment of his Inspire 2019 Corenote.)

If there are indeed 500 million new apps that will be created in the coming five years, then those sure ain’t gonna emerge from the MBS style business model and development methodology. Today the world is full of both cloud service providers that offer low-code/no-code tools for building your own apps very rapidly, as well as savvy power users who are interested in seeing if they could take their Excel workbook desktop wizardry to the next level with these cool new tools that promise to deliver modern apps for this smartphone era. Since MS has obviously identified this new business potential that Power Platform can unlock for them, are they going to let the prior licensing model of Dynamics 365 stand in their way? Probably not.

It just so happens that Inspire 2019 was also the place where the upcoming licensing changes for both Dynamics 365 and Power Platform were introduced to the partner audience. Since Inspire is a public conference that anyone can attend, it also meant that any customers paying attention to the Microsoft ecosystem are already aware of the changes announced to take effect on October 1st, 2019. The slide decks for both sessions are available for download on the Inspire website for a more detailed look. On the PowerApps blog there is also a summary of these changes, which is nice. What’s really nice is that the comments section is open, which often isn’t the case for corporate announcements related to licensing (is it even a “blog” if there is no reader interaction opportunity given?). The product team has been responding to a lot of the feedback around the topic, which makes me optimistic about the possible fine tuning of the licensing model to align with what the outside world thinks about it.

Pay per App

As with licensing always, there’s far too many details in the Inspire 2019 news to cover in one blog post. Maybe I’ll eventually do a revised version of my “Demystifying Dynamics 365 & Power Platform Licensing” session from January, but right now I want to focus on one aspect: the price of an App. This is something the new PowerApps licensing model highlights in particular:

In short, what Microsoft will do in October is to retire the earlier PowerApps P1 and P2 plans and introduce new “Per App” and “Per User” plans. Nothing (major) is going to change with how the rights bundled into Office 365 and Dynamics 365 licenses work. The “Per User” plan will be the same price ($40) and mostly the same capabilities as the earlier P2, whereas the earlier “lite edition” of PowerApps P1 at $7 will be discontinued completely.

“What?!? How can they just take away the $7 plan and push everyone to buy a license that’s almost six times the price of that?” Yes, this is the hardest part about the changes, no doubt. I was a bit surprised to see this as the direction where Power Platform is heading, given how the citizen developers who’ve been playing around with the seeded Office 365 PowerApps license should rather be pushed into learning more about CDS, solutions and all those “real” application development tools that P1 previously offered. Nevertheless, after letting the new model sink in for a few days, I believe that this pricing mechanism makes a lot more sense than the earlier version.

A fundamental problem with the current P1/P2 divide was that it attempted to draw the line on app complexity. There were limitations like the inability to attach real-time custom business logic (workflows, plugins) on entities that were used by PowerApps P1 license holders. This was particularly problematic when operating within CDS environments that also serve as the Dynamics 365 CE app database (yes, they’re all CDS now): any developer or 3rd party app registering a plugin step on an entity like account would instantly have put all P1 users attempting to access it out of compliance with the license terms. Also the rights on “complex entities” and “restricted entities” differed between P1 & P2. Sounds complex? Yup. I had to write a blog post for demystifying these PowerApps “starter” plan capabilities just to get my head around on where the lines were drawn.

Something that would have eventually become a big problem with the old P1 definition was that it only allowed the users to run Canvas apps. Sure, those pixel-perfect mobile-first applications are what most people think PowerApps is made of, but that is a view of the world that needs to be deprecated. Model-driven apps are just as important area of what Power Platform represents (on CDS in particular), but that capability was reserved for P2 license holders only. Given that Microsoft is aiming to remove all of these artificial limitations between app types and eventually get all PowerApps customers to Run One UI, keeping P1 users locked from this future app convergence simply wasn’t a viable option anymore.
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August 12, 2019
4 directions for Power Platform business growth

It’s now roughly one year since Microsoft launched the concept of Power Platform. It’s been extremely interesting in the past 12 months to watch how this new platform strategy starts to play out in the world outside Redmond, as the pieces of this grand puzzle begin to become visible here and there. Having worked in the MS ecosystem on customer & partner side for 14 years now and coming from the Dynamics CRM side originally, this is the biggest single shift I have witnessed in their product strategy to date.

Putting all the puzzle pieces together is surely not easy for anyone who isn’t devoting a sizable share of their time on consuming information from the various events, announcements, blog posts and documentation released by Microsoft. The thing that really makes it tricky is that this Power Platform thing isn’t confined inside a single bucket. It’s not Dynamics 365, it’s not Office 365, it’s not Azure. It’s all of them and yet none of them. Every MS partner and every customer decision maker will increasingly run into the product messaging, but they’ll hear it presented in a different way – and most likely interpret it uniquely based on what their background is.

The only reason Microsoft would be investing so heavily in building and promoting the Power Platform is that they see a massive new business opportunity in it. As Steven Guggenheimer wrote in his recent blog post:

“The Business Applications Total Addressable Market (TAM) is predicted to be at $125B by 2022, and 57 percent of this will be driven by ISVs. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform are an important area of investment for the company, and represent a significant growth opportunity for partners in this market.”
Accelerating opportunities for ISVs with new programs and technology – Steven Guggenheimer

Big numbers, but that’s what they always are in these grandiose statements about global market potential. What I need to understand when talking with customers, partners and internal stakeholders at our company about the strategic direction of Power Platform is from where specifically might this growth come from? To help these discussions I ended up drawing the following diagram about the four different dimensions where I see this Microsoft application platform strategy creating new business:

The way I see it, the growth will happen both A) inside Microsoft’s product offering and B) the outside world of customers and partners, within 1) the traditional business process management scenarios as well as 2) those processes that you wouldn’t have tried solving with any CRM style application/platform in the past. Let’s dive into each of these areas and I’ll explain what the impact of Power Platform might be in generating new business to run on top of this new Microsoft aPaaS (Application Platform as a Service) foundation.

1. Dynamics products

Let’s start from the most familiar ground. The place where the most concrete changes resulting from the Power Platform strategy have been felt during the past year must be Dynamics 365, and the Customer Engagement apps specifically. The platform formerly known as XRM is in the process of being replaced by what is sometimes referred to as “PowerApps platform”, although that may not be any official term that would stick. Regardless of the marketing lingo, the customizers and developers of Dynamics 365 CE solutions are right now facing a lot of pressure to adopt brand new concepts and tools that will replace those ~10 year old building blocks that XRM solutions were made out of. Compared to the earlier transition from on-premises to Online products, that may well have been a much easier shift to adjust to than this new Power Platform whirlwind that’s moving everything around on its path, from licensing to UI to SDK.

From the perspective of the internal Microsoft world, the Dynamics product teams have previously been somewhat captive of the CRM legacy that came along with the XRM platform. As a commercial software product, it wasn’t originally built to be a pure platform, rather the design choices and customer requirements drove it more towards being an extendable CRM application first and platform second. In the process of migrating Dynamics 365 CE Online to run on Azure services, the platform and the applications were separated from one another. To balance things off, there’s also been a huge unification process initiated with the client side technologies, where the target is to remove the barriers between Model-driven and Canvas apps, to Run One UI. The platform tools like PowerApps Component Framework (PCF) now give also the internal product teams a far more agile path forward in deciding what kind of features and experiences the specific apps like Sales or Customer Service should contain. What this means is that the stagnation period where everyone had to just wait for the new platform capabilities to become available may be coming to an end and in the next release waves we can expect a significant growth in new app functionality being shipped to Dynamics 365 customers. In other words, a growth in application depth.

Alongside this internal platform development, another huge benefit that Dynamics 365 as a business has gotten from the new direction at Microsoft is the closer connection with the Azure teams. A few years ago there was still the MBS silo to keep up the walls between CRM & ERP business and the mainstream MS product business, which explained a lot why we didn’t see so much of the Azure innovation trickling down to the business applications built by the same corporation. Now the tables have truly turned as we’ve witnessed all of the new applications like Dynamics 365 for Marketing betting heavily on the very latest Azure services. AI is getting infused into every product at Microsoft, but it also gives birth to brand new products like Sales Insights or Virtual Agent for Customer Service. To link all this with the Power Platform story, it’s important to understand that this platform side is what eventually allows customers and partners to customize these new apps and services to meet their real life business requirements. The growth potential in this Dynamics products segment is being amplified by the fact that PowerApps, Flow, Power BI and CDS give it the extension points needed for going beyond packaged SaaS apps. The growth in Dynamics 365 app portfolio width is therefore driven by the Power Platform connectivity with Azure.

2. Other Microsoft products

While the merger of Dynamics 365 CE and PowerApps platforms is a great boost for the Dynamics products, that’s not the only area within Microsoft that is touched by the Power Platform strategy. Office 365 has of course been the biggest product display window for PowerApps and Flow, due to how services like SharePoint and OneDrive have been deeply integrated with these tools. There is a Microsoft 365 Business Applications partner program that interestingly enough doesn’t seem to align with the “actual” Microsoft Business Applications group’s activities at this moment, as it sits within a different organizational box, the Modern Workplace solution area. When you think about the origins of how the previous generation apps for information workers were often built on top of the ubiquitous SharePoint Server, this arrangement does make sense, but I wouldn’t expect these separate boxes to remain forever in place. After all, what’s been happening to PowerApps recently in terms of commercial success is “like SharePoint all over again” (according to Charles Lamanna), so all roads here lead to the Power Platform being the growth engine for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 to reach further into the customers’ information management needs.
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July 16, 2019
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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June 21, 2019
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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June 10, 2019