Jukka Niiranen

Tag: roadmap

  • Something to look forward to in 2023 Release Wave 1

    Something to look forward to in 2023 Release Wave 1

    Last time when the 2022 Release Wave 2 was announced, I wrote about why you should not pay too much attention to these bi-annual release plans. Instead I was encouraging everyone to start using the Release Planner website that listing all the planned and recently launched features as a roadmap site with no artificial boundaries between “waves”.

    Now when the 2023 Release Wave 1 materials were launched today, Microsoft defaulted to pointing people to this Release Planner site (here’s the Power Platform 2023 RW1 link). Of course the challenge with that approach is that all the hot new stuff is just behind one small “release wave” filter in the list:

    There are still some usability challenges with the Release Planner site that have kept me browsing through the Microsoft Docs Learn when looking for release item information. So, here’s the “switch to classic” bookmark that will take you to the MS Learn edition of the same release wave information: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/release-plan/2023wave1/

    There was now a nice higlights video made on the Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1 launched on the very same day as the release plans were published. The challenge with this kind of material is that you can’t really show realistic demos about features that might be launched half a year from now, so keep that in mind when watching the video.

    As always, there’s a lot to digest in the plan and you might therefore be interested in reading the hand picked top items by some trusted folks in the Power Platform community. As a purely subjective opinion, here are the top 5 items in 2023 RW1 that I was initially most excited about when reading through the plan.

    Fluent UI everywhere

    We’ve seen the concepts and components from Microsoft’s Fluent Design System introduced here and there when it comes to Power Apps and Dynamics 365 app UIs. The Power Platform Creator Kit has brought Fluent UI controls available to canvas apps built by advanced makers. Demos of the future model-driven app UI have included features like dark mode that are familiar from the more modern product UIs on the Microsoft 365 side. Now with 2023 RW1 there should finally be a wider roll-out of these modern controls for the MS low-code application platform, too.

    You may remember that small tweaks to the model-driven UI have been taking place in pretty much every release wave. This update should be a lot more impactful than the previous ones – which is why it will be rolled out behind an opt-in switch initially. You can expect some things to break in the process, so it may take a while before MS will dare to push it out to all users by default.

    Canvas apps, on the other hand, have been living in a split reality for a long time already. Dataverse for Teams based Power Apps have used the Fluent UI controls since forever, causing friction for app development across Teams vs. full Power Platform environments. Hopefully this coming update will now bridge the gap and get us closer to the dream of “Run One UI”.

    Responsive canvas pages design experience

    The one place where model-driven apps have felt clearly superior to canvas apps in their UI capabilities has been the responsiveness of the screen layout. Their many constraints on adjusting how the menus and forms can (or rather can’t) be configured have in turn made it amazingly simple to adjust to different screen sizes. The platform handles it out of the box, the maker doesn’t have to worry about it much at all.

    Building responsive canvas apps has been technically possible, yet something that feels quite tedious. I’ve mostly had to deal with responsiveness in apps built in Dataverse for Teams, where worrying about which fields, columns and buttons fit onto the screen when surrounded by the Teams UI chrome has been one of the unavoidable everyday frustrations.

    2023 RW1 release plan gives us a glimmer of hope by showing a screenshot of the coming responsive layouts and spacer tools in the canvas studio. The ability to resize controls and spacing directly in the authoring canvas could greatly reduce the effort needed in achieving sufficient levels of app UI responsiveness. Not on the same level as model-driven for sure, yet it could offer a decent compromise between precise control positioning and responsive reflow of controls on the page.

    Control system administrator role assignment

    No matter how granular the security model in Dataverse is, this granularity has vanished when you go up to the admin roles. Every Global Admin or Power Platform Admin will automatically be granted the sysadmin role for every Power Platform environment in the tenant. While it makes sense that people with powerful roles get wide access, it is often not desirable that such user accounts would by default see all data, be it via UI or API. After all, usually the admin roles need the power to change settings and work on the metadata – not the actual business data managed in Dataverse.

    Now MS is promising that customers will be able to manually assign the System Administrator role to appropriate users in the environment. This is a very welcome feature to have control over the auto assignment, even though we don’t yet know now exactly what process will be built around this. Also keep in mind that certain governance features like this might get bundled into the Managed Environments capability, which would limit its available to premium licensed users only. Let’s see how it goes.

    Personal environments with Dataverse

    It has already been possible for users to sign up for the Power Apps developer plan – as long as they are aware such a thing exists and find the right path to acquire it. Now MS is going to promote these type of environments to Power Platform makers much more prominently within the product. They will be called “personal environments” and the idea is to lower the barrier for all makers to experience premium capabilities like Dataverse.

    Unlike trials, personal environments won’t expire. Unlike sandboxes, the makers won’t need help from the Power Platform admins of the tenant to get a personal environment provisioned. There will be new governance capabilities introduced that give admins the possibility to disable this feature if required, yet hopefully most organizations wouldn’t need to introduce such a limit. Personal environments don’t consume tenant level capacity, so as long as there’s a solid governance plan in place to apply DLP policies, the risks should be fairly low with these personal environments.

    Check out this Power CAT Live video for more details about the developer plan and its enhancements (YouTube embedding disabled by Microsoft): https://youtu.be/yXRSnN2AWTs

    Paginated reports editing on the web

    Back in 2006 when I got introduced to the technology that later became Power Platform, the one area that struck to me as incredibly difficult was report creation. SQL Server Reporting Services had just replaced Crystal Reports with a native Microsoft technology in the stack. While there was plenty of advanced features available for summarizing data, the number of hoops you had to jump through to get any of the business data from the relational database onto a PDF output made sure that only the bare minimum number of reports were ever created.

    The age of Power BI unlocked this precious data from the enterprise reporting tools and allowed basically anyone to slice & dice it to their heart’s content. Yet the paginated report design tools didn’t seem to evolve quite as rapidly. Neither was there much (well, any) progress made on the Word mail merge side for making it easier to produce documents with dynamic data. Recently many Makers have gone ahead with Power Automate and used HTML as the intermediate format on the road toa PDF output. None of these methods have really been very citizen friendly.

    Is this about to change now? In 2023 RW 1 Microsoft is going to allow you to create and share paginated reports on the web, through a WYSIWYG design experience. “Create invoices, financial statements, and other operational reports with low code, drag-and-drop experiences on the web. You can share these in a variety of formats or just print them out!” That sure sounds like something most customers would prefer over the existing options for using dynamic data in documents. Let’s see how far this first iteration of the new editor in Power BI will get us once it arrives in the summer.

    What’s missing from the plan?

    To better understand the direction of Microsoft products, you should not just get excited about the features MS actively advertises. You should also search for things that are not mentioned. This will help in seeing behind the product marketing hype and making smarter decisions on your own investments of time and other resources.

    Microsoft Teams doesn’t get much love in the Power Platform release plan. On the Power BI side there is the new teams meetings integration and enhancements to multi-tasking in the Power BI app for Teams. Power Automate touches on Teams in the sequential approvals feature. And that’s pretty much it. No word whatsoever on whether MS plans to keep investing in Dataverse for Teams, for example, which seems to have been largely abandoned after the initial launch 2 years ago.

    If we ignore AI Builder, there aren’t too many mentions of products delivering shiny new features with the help of AI. Given how much talk there has been about Microsoft investing billions of dollars more into OpenAI and bringing ChatGPT features into their existing products, this could surprise the reader. Now, it’s important to understand that these release plans for the release waves are hardly ever the place where big splashy announcements like that are made. They are more about the incremental improvement of existing products.

    Remember: new things will appear into the release wave between now and September 2023 (end of the wave). Similarly, we can expect a certain percentage of items in the release plan get delayed, postponed to a future release wave or cancelled entirely. Remember to keep an eye on those changes on a regular basis, instead of just studying the Power Platform roadmap twice a year.

    Of the things that were added to the plan during the 2022 release wave 2, Cards for Power Apps does not exist at all in the new release plan. Does that mean it’s “done and ready”? No, it’s just sitting in the release plan from the previous round with no GA date and still a lot of things to be improved before being ready for real life use.

    Looking at much higher profile initiatives on the same area, Microsoft Loop still doesn’t seem to be a thing either. ContextIQ is mentioned on the Dynamics 365 Business Central release plan, though. It’s kinda amazing that BC will now be the first Dynamics 365 product to actually deliver on the “no additional license required when working in Teams” promise from 1.5 years ago.

    Header photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash

  • Forget static plans, use the Release Planner for Power Platform roadmap info

    Forget static plans, use the Release Planner for Power Platform roadmap info

    It’s that time of the year again when Microsoft have published their plans for the upcoming 2022 Release Wave 2 for Power Platform and Dynamics 365. “How exciting! New PDF documents with hundreds of pages to read!”

    I’m sure many of you have learned to skip the static PDF files by now and instead add bookmarks to quickly get to the online version of these plans. Like these:

    That’s much better, but it isn’t really optimal either. I don’t know about you, but personally I’ve had a hard time getting very excited about the new Release Plan drops for a couple of years now. There’s just something not quite right with this “wave” model.

    Everything changes, always

    Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that the Power Platform community members are curating their own top lists from these Release Plans twice a year. There’s plenty of value in seeing what items people are actually excited about, not just reading MS corporate style “excitement” on everything included in the Plan.

    Yet the reality is this: the contents of these Releases Plans is likely to reflect less than 50% of what will actually be delivered into the products over the course of the wave. If you need proof, then check out the most important page of the online Release Plans: change history.

    At any given time, Microsoft product teams are working on several new features and enhancements that they are not yet ready to disclose. They’ll get added to release plan later (or sometimes launched without it). As a very recent example, Managed Environments was announced as a preview feature on the same day as the 2022 wave 2 plans came out. The feature is not yet in either wave 1 or wave 2 documentation. It’s very natural that the product marketing’s need for making feature specific big announcements is a higher priority. After all, diligently maintaining the long list of similar release items won’t bring that much attention to any single feature.

    Then there’s the inevitable reality of planning / estimating in software development. Things can get delayed due to too optimistic estimates, dependencies to other items/products, changes in MS product strategy, acquisitions, and so on. Ultimately the Release Plans are just a publicly visible backlog of what the team is working to deliver. It’s better not to get too excited about any specific feature on the list – often those will be the ones that get eventually postponed / removed…

    While it’s kinda nice that we have a steady rhythm of 2 release waves per year that can be easily communicated to customers, the reality is more messy. These waves are forcing an artificial structure onto the ongoing product development work. Remember: the “wave” is not any actual release in itself. October 2022 will deliver a tiny fraction of the items listed in the 2022 wave 2 plan, as the wave lasts for 6 months.

    While the waves themselves are sequential, Microsoft’s communication model has overlap for the waves. The fact that the wave 2 plans are first announced when there’s still 3 months worth of wave 1 to go (until end of September) can make it complex to keep track of items. You can’t tell whether a feature is in the product roadmap just by looking at the latest plan since it might be in the previous pipeline still. Here’s one example:

    If only we had a more dynamic view into the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 product backlog, without these artificial “waves” to confuse us…

    Say hello to the Release Planner website!

    Although it’s still a preview in itself, the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release planner is already a very worthy rival to the familiar Release Plans. If you’re familiar with the Microsoft 365 roadmap, then this a similar website that provides the current state of what features are being planned, rolling out or recently delivered.

    The data on release items is largely identical to what the official release plans already offer. However, it’s not wrapped within the wave concept, meaning everything can be found under a single site.

    There have been recent enhancements made to the Release Planner (listed here). Searching the release plan items with keywords is now possible. There’s a change history to reflect updates made to delivery milestones (i.e. delays in early access / preview / GA dates). Finally, filters and sorting options have been introduced, so you can view only the latest additions (7/30 days) or updated items across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

    Since the Release Planner is a Power Apps Portal Power Pages website instead of a Microsoft Docs site, it is much easier to implement such features that are intended for working with a list of records. Docs is great for documentation of course, as well as version control through its GitHub back end.

    One really neat feature in Release Planner is the personalization option. When I log into the site, I have the ability to pick items into “my release plan”. Essentially its a way to create a list of favorite items to follow. Because let’s face it: we all focus on some corner of Power Platform or Dynamics 365, not the entire MS BizApps cloud. Creating a personal release plan also provides an option to copy a public share link for it:

    Using a short URL service, I can now create an easy to remember link that will always take me to the list of Power Platform release plan items I’ve flagged for myself to follow. You can of course have a look at it, too:

    https://ff.tips/releaseplan

    With this link, I can now spend less energy on A) remembering if an item has been in wave 1 or 2, and B) stop hunting through the change history page for status updates. Oh, and it also works fairly well on a mobile device, whereas trying to navigate the legacy release plans on MS Docs seems to be impossible (at the moment at least, on Android/Chrome).

    Of course any dynamic website is only as good as the underlying data that is used for rendering it. At the time of viewing, there seem to be tens of release plan items from 2022 wave 1 that have not yet been updated to reflect the current status. The Release Planner site says they should be available/GA when in reality they’ve been delayed, postponed or even cancelled. This is something that technology in itself won’t fix. I hope as Microsoft’s release planning process matures beyond thinking about “waves” we’ll see more up to date information in the Release Planner site, too.

    Did you know?

    This Release Planner isn’t the first step for Microsoft to use the Power Platform to manage the product development of the very same platform. Already back in 2019 the process and tools used by the BizApps team for release planning was published in a blog post. There’s a sample app on GitHub that contains a solution with the tables, forms, plugins, PCF controls, cloud flows etc. for deploying your own copy of the release management tools.

    This process was designed to dynamically produce outputs from the release items data managed in Dataverse. Both the release plan document as a Word output as well as the Docs pages as markdown files on GitHub were generated with Power Automate cloud flows:

    Since the solution was built on top of a solid platform designed for managing business process data, there were of course other opportunities to leverage it. As was pointed out in the comments section of the 2019 blog post, by a certain ex-MVP (now at MSFT) with a long history on Portals in the form of Adxstudio:

    Which brings me back to an even more ancient blog post of mine, from 2015, called XRM Strikes Back. Inspired by Microsoft’s acquisition of Adxstudio, I argued why in the long term it would be a more successful strategy for MS to bet on the platform, rather than trying to integrate SaaS products from outside the ecosystem into the Business Applications portfolio.

    Success doesn’t happen overnight either way. Looking at the XRM based acquisitions, Adxstudio is now the 5th product in the Power Platform family, with the new name Power Pages. FieldOne Sky turned into Dynamics 365 Field Service that has quite a solid position in the market (from what I know). Mojo Surveys evolved into Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, which may not have an extensive roadmap right now, yet it’s still widely used by the customers we are working with at least.

    Back in 2011 when Dynamics CRM Online itself was used for managing the Dynamics CRM Online launch website, backed by (Windows) Azure, so might have considered that a crazy thing to do with a business application platform like XRM. Well, who’s laughing now?!?😁

    The journey up to this point has been long, but that’s exactly what such low-code application platform journeys are for customers, too. Microsoft is now in the process of also migrating their third party Ideas sites for product feedback into the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community portal template (meaning Power Pages). The Power Automate Ideas site is moving there next week. Dynamics 365 Ideas already lives on this platform, so I’d imagine other products will soon follow. Another piece of the digital feedback loop coming together, through the power of the platform.

  • There never was a “Microsoft Dataflex”

    There never was a “Microsoft Dataflex”

    There are a lot of benefits in taking long enough holidays during the summer, like many people here in the Nordics do. Going offline for a while is a great way to reset your brain and force-close all those open browser tabs of the mind, to free up memory capacity for properly engaging in brand new tasks.

    If you were lucky enough to set your vacation time between July 21st and August 11th, you managed to dodge an unfortunate episode in software product launches from Redmond. Here are the key dates:

    • July 21st (first day of MS Inspire conference): a new brand name “Dataflex” is announced, with Common Data Service renamed as “Dataflex Pro” and a new subscription tier “Dataflex” promised for all Microsoft Teams customers. (My blog post about it is still here.)
    • July 29th: the name “Dataflex for Teams” is used for the first time to reference the previous “Dataflex” tier that’s bunlded with Teams, in an effort to make this product connection more clear.
    • August 11th: all references to “Dataflex” in all Microsoft websites are taken down. The announcement blog posts are brought back online with the terms “Dataflex” and “Dataflex for Teams” replaced with “Project Oakdale”, and “Dataflex Pro” now reverted back to “Common Data Service”.

    What happened? The answer is: litigation from the owner of the trademark “Dataflex”.

    There already was an established software product with the name “Dataflex” out there – in fact it had been around for 4 decades already. Immediately upon the launch day of July 21st several community members were quick to point this out, as indeed it was in practice impossible to miss this brand name overlap when using a search engine. Why Microsoft decided to proceed with their plans on renaming CDS into something like this is something we’ll never know for sure. Some had initially speculated that perhaps there was a preliminary agreement in place with Data Access Worldwide to transfer the ownership of the trademark, but based on the immediate legal action that the company understandably took to defend their rights, nothing like this was likely ever discussed. Our conclusion must therefore be that Microsoft knowingly and intentionally attempted to change the name of its existing technology (Common Data Service) into something that was already in use within the same domain by another software company (Dataflex) without considering the consequences.

    The end results is almost like a story taken from The Onion. Even if we are living in 2020 right now and the world appears to go mad every few days, it’s still an utterly bizarre episode in software business. I can’t recall seeing anything killed this fast after it’s announcement, which in the case of Microsoft Dataflex was only 21 days. Neither can I think of an example where something with such a clear potential for software product naming conflict would have been attempted. It is indeed similar to as if MS would have launched “PlayStation 6”.

    It’s of course not unusual for Microsoft to pull a product name between its announcement and the planned GA. Remember Dynamics 365 Business Edition, for example? Just because we see something presented on slide decks aimed at MS Partners as guidance for building their business around it, that doesn’t guarantee it will ever see the light of day. Shift happens, plans change and a lot of the partners have already become accustomed to this risk as simply the cost of doing business in this ecosystem. This time the product itself is not pulled, though. The need for coming up with a new brand will most likely delay the commercial roll-out of CDS features for Microsoft Teams based apps, but it’s important to keep in mind that this is all still happening. CDS will most likely become a mainstream data platform to replace use cases where SharePoint Lists have previously been used.

    SkyDrive is another example of a Microsoft product brand that suffered from the conflict with an existing trademark and had to be renamed OneDrive as a result. BSkyB as a media broadcaster and digital services provider wasn’t entirely in the same business as Microsoft with it’s personal cloud storage that was following in the footsteps of Dropbox, yet the end result of that case showed that at least between large enterprises such near misses with strong brands can become costly. Even features of a product like the “Metro UI” with Windows 8’s modern user experience had to be avoided due to objections from German reltailer Metro AG. Both of these are examples where it wasn’t obvious to an outsider if a trademark was actually violated, though. With Dataflex the evidence was in plain sight for everyone.

    Lucky for us, MS had not yet made any public preview or a commercial subscription of the new Dataflex branded services available by the time they had to call the whole thing off. It was only the early adopters in the partner field and the passionate community members a.k.a. #PowerAddicts that lost some of their work hours due to the branding incident. Yeah, I had to go back and edit a number of web pages, rewrite presentation decks, revert our service documents etc. to recover from the erraneous information that had been published on July 21st. The majority of people out there in the MS ecosystem probably didn’t yet even get a chance to understand what Dataflex meant or how it was different from CDS, so they will have dodged the bullet when it comes to loss in productivity.

    There is, however, a much greater loss here than the “Find and Replace” activities needed for changing product names. It is the loss of credibility that Microsoft’s Business Applications specifically suffered from this very unfortunate product naming incident. The worst thing is that there has not been any explanation presented to the genereal audience on what’s going on, rather we’ve just seen the word “Dataflex” disappear and get replaced with “Project Oakdale” or CDS. Microsoft at this point is facing legal action from the owner of the Dataflex trademark, which we all know from the many Hollywood movies we’ve watched that “anything they say can and will be used againts them in a court of law”. It is at moments like these where it would be crucial for companies to have a voice, to be able to reach out to their most important audience (customers) and explain what happened & what are they going to do about it.

    I can tell you that it would honestly be a full time job keeping up with A) product naming and B) product licensing of Microsoft Business Applications. It’s not full time for me (luckily), but since I also do it as a hobby / community activity, I can say I’m pretty well educated on what the “right” answers in this area would be at any given time. For anyone who actually IS covering the actions of Microsoft full time in a professional manner, Business Applications is an area they usually openly admit to struggle in.

    At the end of the day, what matters to each and every one of us the most in this MS ecosystem is how the end customers react to what they see & hear. While the marketing machine at Redmond surely is capable of capturing the attention of IT professionals worldwide with their news and campaigns, what it does not seem to be very good at is explaining “what does this really mean to you”. As the cloud platforms grow and become an ever larger pool of individual apps that form a spider web of integrations underneath the user interface, the need for someone to cut through the marketing speak and explain the customers what’s really happening here seems to be growing exponentially. What we all could do with the Power Platform is simply magical, yet the understanding of A) through which products, B) based on what technology, with C) what levels of effort and D) for what license cost – this level of understanding is lacking pretty much anywhere I look. I’m not talking about the “how to” instructions of building apps but rather the higher level discussion of where business decisions get made. It is here where the damage from confusing messaging is, in my opinion, holding this ecosystem back.

    To close things off for now, as we wait for the new product names that Microsoft has said they will be giving to the technology briefly known as Dataflex, let’s recap where we are right now. “Project Oakdale” is the codename that is for the time being used to refer to the “Lite” version of CDS that will be made available to all Microsoft Teams customers at no charge. Common Data Service is what we will continue to use as the term (for now) when talking about the full capabilities of data management, entities, solutions, Model-driven apps and many other advanced features in Power Platform. This post on the Power Apps blog (originally from July 29th) is still valid in every other aspect, apart from that one “D” term that got removed on August 11th.

    It’ll all work out in the end, I’m sure. This time next year there will probably be a whole number of other product names that we’ll be using when discussing the latest turn of events in the crazy & exciting world of Microsoft Business Applications. Dataflex and Oakdale will live on as one of those trick questions in the pub quizzes run by the community. No one died as a result of this episode.

    In a way, us #PowerAddicts simply got a taste of what the BizApps whirwind must at times feel like for the end customer who isn’t involved with this technology of ours, all day, every day.

  • First impressions on Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2

    First impressions on Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2

    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:

    1. The Release Plan is not a static document, rather it’s an evolving backlog of planned features.
    2. 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.

    To gain something new means you often must let go of something old, in this case the legacy web client. Transition to Unified Interface has been delayed a bit due to COVID-19, but it is definitely happening. While it will bring a more stict licensing enforcement on app module level, the benefits from features like improved global search experience and improved app header, sitemap and app switching should make it easier for anyone familiar with Microsoft tools to be productive when using CRM “Model-driven apps in Dynamics 365”.

    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.

  • 2 become 1 UI: PowerApps Roadmap from MBAS

    2 become 1 UI: PowerApps Roadmap from MBAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Catching the Wave 2 for 2019 Power Platform Updates

    Catching the Wave 2 for 2019 Power Platform Updates

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

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

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

    Release Terminology

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

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

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

    AI Comes to Power Platform

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

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

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

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

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  • What’s Coming in April 2019? Start from PowerApps & Flow

    What’s Coming in April 2019? Start from PowerApps & Flow

    As promised, Microsoft published the release notes for the April 2019 release wave on January 21st. Instead of just a high level blog post, there’s a huge list of items in 16 top level categories at the docs.microsoft.com site. If you want to consume the content in an offline mode, there’s a PDF version available of the same content, with 315 pages of April 2019 release notes.

    315 pages? Ain’t nobody got time for that!

    Yeah, I know. Whether you’re working with Dynamics 365, PowerApps or Power BI, you probably aren’t just sitting around, waiting for some work to come your way. These are all high demand technologies that pull in pretty much all of the available consulting resources into actual project work with the tools. To make things worse, the communities around them grow larger every day and flood our social streams with blog posts, podcasts, videos, webinars, conferences full of “can’t miss this” information.

    The problem is, though, that you haven’t got all that much time to get into grips with April 2019. It may sound far away, but the preview availability of many of these features (but not all) will start already on February 1st – 10 days from now at the time of writing. What’s even more important is that this time the features will be rolled out immediately to all customers, once Microsoft thinks they are ready. There’s also a date available for this particular moment and that is April 5th. You’ve got around 2 months from preview to GA.

    How should an ex-XRM pro / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement specialist then optimize the available time to learn the important parts about April 2019 release? I’ve got one tip for you, which may sound unintuitive at first, if you spend your working days mostly with things that say “Dynamics”. Here goes: Start reading the release notes from where it says “PowerApps”:

    For real? Yes. We no longer live in a world where PowerApps would refer to the quickly generated mobile apps that you’d connect with SharePoint lists. It is the platform on top of which much of the “Dynamics 365 for X” products listed at the beginning of the release notes now live. Whereas each of these 1st party apps touches just those environments that happen to be using them, PowerApps and Flow are relevant for everyone. Common Data Service for Apps a.k.a. CDS is bundled within those two topics. If you’re operating in Dynamics 365 Online environments, you are working with CDS.

    In the PowerApps section you’ll find platform and customization features like:

    • New form and view designers GA
    • Canvas app embed in model-driven apps GA
    • PowerApps Control Framework (PCF) preview
    • Unified Interface as the default UI
    • Offline data access
    • Azure AD Groups for security roles & record sharing
    • New tooling for plug-ins and solution packaging

    Those are examples of the traditional XRM side of the house being extended under the new PowerApps brand. Microsoft Flow is equally important for any Dynamics 365 CE system customizer going forward, due to enhancements like:

    • Parity with CDS (XRM) asynchronous workflows
    • Calling XRM workflow actions from Flow
    • Batch operations for CDS records
    • Transaction support via change set scopes
    • Calling child Flows
    • Multiple trigger events
    • Flow parameters inside solutions

    Sure, there are great new features and improvements listed for each of the Dynamics 365 apps, too. Also a wealth of opportunities for further expanding our Dynamics pro footprint in business application development on the Office 365 side (thanks to PowerApps, Flow). Not to mention the growing data integration capabilities via CDM, or the whole world of BI and big data. Still, we know that there’s probably not enough time to try and absorb these things right away. Which is why my recommendation is to start by looking at what the common business application platform is forming into. Then once the preview is available, update your sandbox into the latest bits and start experimenting with these things in practice (and possibly hunting down those features that actually shipped in the preview version).

    OK, I have to admit it: even I didn’t dive straight into PowerApps myself, instead spent a bit of time with the full release notes document. If you want to know which items caught my eye, then you’ll find them in this Twitter Moment collection.

  • Ignite 2018 & The Power of Microsoft’s Platform

    Ignite 2018 & The Power of Microsoft’s Platform

    Just like last year, I was fortunate to be able to escape the chilly Finnish autumn weather to sunny and warm Orlando this September, to attend the Microsoft Ignite 2018 conference. This time my visit to Florida did not contain a whole lot of sunlight, though, as my stay in that region was focused strictly on the days of the event, which meant I was mostly wandering back and forth the endless corridors of Orange County Convention Center. With 1600+ sessions crammed into 5+1 days, you’re always going to have a packed agenda at a conference like Ignite where 30,000 fellow Microsoft geeks are swarming around to gather the latest announcements and demos from their favorite technologies and evangelists.

    I’ve written a summary over on LinkedIn of what were the main themes I picked up from Ignite this year. In short, Power Platform was front and center in the story of how Microsoft is further helping organizations to digitally transform their business processes. Not just from the traditional CRM and ERP scope of Dynamics 365 but on a much broader scope that speaks to the audiences that might not have otherwise ended up exploring how PowerApps, Flow, Power BI and CDS can connect their existing Office tools into a more automated flow of data through predefined pipes – as opposed to the more free-form processes that information workers previously had to agree on, to efficiently collaborate with their colleagues.

    On the one end we saw a lot of praise for the unlikely heroes that have managed to pick up a toolkit like PowerApps without any developer background or formal position in IT, and build applications that their organizations have adopted into their day to day routines. Even though these citizen developer scenarios may not seem all that complex for professional software people, the key lesson is that these manual processes would have been unlikely to get digitalized with off-the-shelf or custom built software anytime soon. Making the tools for digital problem solving accessible to the people who intimately know the problem is what’s really shortening the time to value, which in turn drives the growth of the community around the Power Platform. It’s not capped by the number of companies looking for a CRM deployment project, rather it’s fueled by the amount of data and cloud based services that make this data available to the platform via connectors.

    At the other end of the spectrum there was the true enterprise scale where this data needs to be harnessed with advanced tools and technologies to remain competitive in today’s global business. AI is the kind of buzzword that cloud was in the beginning of this decade, but in the same way as cloud computing became an everyday commodity, we’re bound to see if not artificial intelligence (AI) but at least machine learning (ML) algorithms find their way into everyday tools in the very near future. All of the major apps in the Dynamics 365 CE suite recently received their AI extensions that aim to bring intelligence built into the packaged applications, not just via Cognitive Services from Azure that developers and data scientists must plug into the business applications. Another example of the enterprise application providers’ focus on squeezing more value out of data was the Open Data Initiative by Microsoft, SAP and Adobe that took the center stage in the opening keynote were the three CEO’s explained why it’s in their best interest to help customers “deliver unparalleled business insight from their behavioral, transactional, financial, and operational data.” It’s really interesting to see that the Common Data Model (CDM) may be evolving into something that actually connects applications across big tech vendors.

    Among all these tech giants, there was also a 20 minute slot where an ordinary Dynamics 365 guy like me got a chance to tell a bit about what we’re building in this small country of ours. My session was called “Onboarding customers to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales via PowerApps” and you can catch the YouTube recording of the session or just check out the slides if you’re interested in knowing how we at Elisa aim to make use of the Power Platform as part of our product offering. It was the first time for me to be a speaker at an event the scale of Ignite, so a big thanks to Microsoft for providing me this exciting opportunity!

    Even though Ignite wasn’t really a Dynamics 365 themed event like the Business Applications Summit a couple of months earlier, there were a lot of interesting demos about the brand new functionality rolling out as a part of the October 2018 release shortly. I compiled some of the highlights tweeted out on the #MSIgnite hashtag during the event onto this Wakelet collection for you to check out if you missed the live event excitement.

    Just like in previous Microsoft conferences, the learning doesn’t stop with the closing of the venue doors. The Ignite on demand sessions provide a library of videos and slides that you definitely should be browsing through to keep up with the latest news around what’s coming to Microsoft Business Applications and the many connected products. Now, if you just happen to be located in Helsinki next week, then I have to promote the brand new Finland Dynamics User Group (#FDUG) and our very first Meetup event on October 18th where I’ll be doing a “whole Ignite in 30 minutes” summary of what I found most interesting in the various Power Platform related sessions I attended. See you there!

  • Unified Experiences in October 2018 Release

    Unified Experiences in October 2018 Release

    The October ’18 of Microsoft Business Applications is going to bring a whole bunch of exciting features, spread across the huge stack of products and apps that either make up or operate on the Power Platform. Much of them will be specific to an area that only some of the users or developers work with in their specific customer scenarios, but there are also going to be updates that will be visible to practically everyone. Here are some of those new experiences that we can expect to see within the next few months as the features are gradually released.

    App Navigation

    On the Model-driven App client side, there will be some changes to the navigation features in Unified Interface. Here’s what October ’18 update is going to look like for the end user:

    The product team has communicated the following changes:

    • Sitemap will now be expanded by default, so users don’t need to remember what icon stands for what entity/feature.
    • Recent and Pinned items will be more prominently displayed at the top. MRU (most recently used items) will now be a single list instead of the earlier entity specific MRU list.
    • Sitemap areas will be displayed at the bottom, with a more visible icon and area switcher feature instead of the tabbed area list on top in current version.
    • Command Bar icons will have more color and hover effects to highlight their interactive nature.
    • Both Sitemap and Command Bar color scheme will be changed to dark text on light grey background.

    These are great enhancements that are aimed at making the Unified Interface work more smoothly on the desktop browser specifically. They will not affect the mobile or Mail app, but only the screens that will have a width of 480 or more pixels. It’s awesome to see that even though the clients share the same infrastructure, not everything is forced to work exactly the same way on a big monitor vs. small phone screen.

    Hybrid Experiences on Unified Interface

    For existing Dynamics 365 CE customers who are working in the “classic” web client, the question of “can we do this in Unified Interface?” is a critical factor in deciding on the strategy of how to migrate users to the latest experiences available in the cloud. There’s a list of capabilities not yet on Unified Interface over on docs.microsoft.com that should serve as the starting point for any such planning. For a more forward looking list, the Unified Interface roadmap presented at MS Business Applications Summit 2018 is currently the best summary of what to expect:

    While there will be more and more entities and features natively supported on UCI, not everything from good ol’ Dynamics CRM is going to be rebuilt for the new client infrastructure – at least not yet. When you look at what’s happening on the broader Power Platform side, this prioritization makes a lot of sense, as porting over old UI controls as-is probably doesn’t fit with the long term platform vision. Still, you can’t just pretend that a few missing features like Advanced Find would NOT be critical to business users who’ve built their work processes around these core capabilities of Dynamics 365 CE.

    The short term solution will be to offer a “hybrid UI”, in which the controls not yet ported to UCI will be opened up in windows that render the classic web client UI. So, things like merge dialogs, personal settings, SSRS reports and Advanced Find will be accessible to users from within Unified Interface, with the existing feature set that they’ve come to expect in earlier versions. Of course they won’t be mobile friendly like the responsive UCI controls, but desktop users aren’t probably going to care all that much about this anyway.

    As we can see in the roadmap presentation, Microsoft aims to make Unified Interface the default experience first for new customers and shortly also to existing environments. There’s no need to panic over this change, though, as the plan is to introduce a “Side by Side” (SxS) option for administrators to define whether the classic web client is visible to users or not. If you have a good reason to not yet push everyone over to Unified Interface, you don’t have to – at least not with the Oct ’18 release.

    Power Platform Admin Center

    While the aforementioned changes are mostly relevant to customers who have bought Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and are using it for either traditional CRM scenarios or more XRM style applications, it’s good to keep in mind that all these investments are actually done in the context of the greater platform. Starting from the July 2018 announcements, Power Platform is now an actual thing that Microsoft sells. To the developers and administrators it has seemed like a collection of separate product boxes of different shapes, but that experience is also about to get unified as the new Power Platform Admin Center is introduced:

    You can already access this UI from either the short URL admin.dynamics.com or the longer (official) version admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com. Today you don’t yet see too many actual admin screens of individual applications within the Power Platform Admin Center, as the menu items will mostly redirect you to existing admin centers for PowerApps, Flow, Power BI and Dynamics 365 CE. Things are going to change soon, though, as a brand new admin UI will reveal the various Dynamics 365 CE settings that you’ve earlier been able to only access from the classic web client:

    These images are taken from another Business Applications Summit presentation, “Key features coming to Microsoft PowerApps and Dynamics 365 admins”. Just like in the UCI session, there’s a great roadmap slide included that shows the stages via which the new features are planned to be rolled out:

    Now, you may not want to look at the detailed dates, since both roadmaps are already ancient history from over a month ago and things aren’t necessarily quite where the initial targets were set. Nevertheless, these are the features and experiences that will soon be out there. If you compare this to the traditional Dynamics CRM world in which many current on-prem customers with their v8.2 (at best) environments are operating in, then it’s in many ways like a whole new application platform to work with. MVP Scott Durow has drawn a great diagram of the new admin experiences in Power Platform that also helps in illustrating the huge shift that is taking place here. We’ve seen architecture diagrams like the one below for a long time now, but once the actual user experience for solution designers also starts to reflect this, I believe that will have a “powerful” impact indeed!

  • The End Is Near for Dynamics 365 (Customer Driven) Updates

    The End Is Near for Dynamics 365 (Customer Driven) Updates

    Have you been administering organizations running on the online version of Dynamics CRM / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for a while now? If so, you will be familiar with this screen:

    That is essentially CDU in flesh. CDU of course stands for Customer Driven Update, the process through which Microsoft has allowed online customers to decide when their instances are updated to the latest available version of Dynamics 365 CE. While it hasn’t been a completely open schedule of “pick whichever date you want”, the availability of update slots for a period of up to six months has formed the backbone of how many organizations plan the dates on their business application development roadmaps.

    This is all about to change very soon, as CDU will be going away. The plan was laid out on a post in the beginning of July already, but I suspect not everyone has yet quite grasped the practical impact of what “Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365” truly means. Admins of online tenants with v8.2 orgs will have been receiving the following notifications into their mailbox recently:

    Those who have reacted to this request to schedule their V9 updates will have seen a fairly familiar calendar with update time slots all the way up until January 2019. The thing you should keep in mind is that this is the last time you will ever see that CDU calendar. You cannot freely schedule your Dynamics 365 CE online updates ever again, once you’re on V9+. Enjoy your final Customer Driven Update, folks!

    “What’s going on here?!? Is Microsoft giving up on maintaining their Dynamics 365 CE cloud? Will we no longer get updates for this product?”

    It’s exactly the opposite, in fact. Microsoft is so determined to get all of their online customers to run the latest & greatest bits that they’re transforming their update delivery model into continuous deployment. From February 2019 onward, everyone will (in theory) be running the exact same version and no org will be left behind – or be allowed to. Then shortly after, it’s time for the next major release, V10, coming in April 2019:

    Alright, so there is no way of opting out from major releases and waiting for the dust to settle for a while before rolling it into your own instances. This just means you better be ready for the changes as they take place, so preparation and thorough understanding of the releases notes for the coming versions is going to be crucial. And how will we be able to test the new version in advance, you might ask. The answer is you can’t do that just yet, but before V10 rolls out there will be a new mechanism in place for a First Release instance:

    As we can see from the Release Stations diagram above, the updates will be rolled out to different “rings” over a period of several weeks. Not even Microsoft wants to deploy the updates to every single environment at the click of one button, so they start from the smaller geos like Japan and Canada, gather telemetry on the update process and then gradually move to the largest geos of North America and Europe.

    Telemetry will also play a key role in how Microsoft plans to deal with the inevitable need to deprecate and remove older functionality from the platform. Although the new Dynamics 365 update policy aims to preserve backward compatibility and present new features as “off by default”, there are going to be scenarios where it’s not just a matter of adding more and more stuff onto the ever expanding cloud platform. Since MS hosts all of the online instances, they can also measure how much each product feature or platform component is utilized by the customers. Decisions on how to deal with deprecation will therefore be much more data driven than it could have been in the past.

    Just because the product is moving into an ever more “cloud native” delivery model doesn’t mean that there’s no need to test your customizations, extensions and integrations. While the process aims to reduce the chances of breaking changes interfering with the day-to-day use of Dynamics 365, there will of course be some changes that break stuff in reality. While the First Release environment will only give you a few weeks notice for performing your own changes in preparation of the version update, the Insider programs for Dynamics 365 will be your best hope to have earlier access to the information on what’s coming & how it may impact you.

    To fully grasp the how, why and when of this new update policy for Dynamics 365, I highly recommend you to watch the session from Business Applications Summit 2018 on Dynamics 365 and Update Cadence. I’m hoping that Microsoft will make this information available in more convenient formats than live recordings in the future, so that this bold “one version for all” vision can be better understood by partners and customers. After all, we’re only in the process of digesting the October ’18 releases notes highlights, but in reality the V10 update isn’t that far away in the horizon anymore.

    For all of us who are used to thinking about Dynamics 365 version updates as projects, it’s time to start shifting our thought process to the continuous delivery mode. Many of the “born in the cloud” products like Dynamics 365 Business Central or PowerApps are already now operating according to this one version principle, so it makes perfect sense to try and align the Common Data Service for Apps platform and the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications with this new reality. Not just from a technical standpoint, but also the adoption of new product features that can be enabled when needed is going to be quite different from the traditional way of features arriving at the very moment a version update is deployed.