Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Chatting to Matt about how he got into poker to begin with in his university days (some decent studying of the theory!), & actually going to Vegas, as well as getting married there. Also touching on printing out lots of documents, and duplicate merging
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One of my recent decisions has been to explore the Azure space. There are several reasons behind this. CDS, as we (hopefully!) know sits on top of Azure, and it’s useful to know the broader digital estate available on the platform.
I’ve also been looking into some of the Cognitive Services functions that are available within Power Platform. These all live in Azure, and are surfaced into Power Apps etc. It’s therefore good to know what can be done outside of the ‘Power Platform bubble’, and the options there.
Incidentally, a year ago I even built a canvas app that allowed you to take a picture of a motorbike tyre. Using AI Builder functionality, it then analysed if the tyre tread was legal or not! That was a really cool proof of concept.
So a good place to start, I thought, would be with the AI-900. This covers the fundamentals of the AI offerings that are in Azure. I had forgotten though that with fundamental exams, there’s only 60 minutes available! Seeing the timer ticking down from that give me a little surprise, though I managed to get through it (& pass!) in good time.
The official description of the exam is
Candidates for this exam should have foundational knowledge of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) concepts and related Microsoft Azure services.
This exam is an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of common ML and AI workloads and how to implement them on Azure.
This exam is intended for candidates with both technical and non-technical backgrounds. Data science and software engineering experience are not required; however, some general programming knowledge or experience would be beneficial.
The official page for the exam is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/ai-900, where it gives quite a good overview of things. Go take a look at it, and also take a look at the associated learning paths.
Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). Honestly I think that my experience this time has probably been the best so far. I went through the usual system checks for signing in. The proctor came alone, and within 30 seconds they had released the exam!
So, as before, it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else!). I’ve tried to group things together as best as possible for the different subject areas.
Overall, it was quite good. The Microsoft AI Principles were new to me, and I had to guess at those (I went to look them up afterwards!). Other than that, some bits I breezed through, other parts I took careful stock of.
This is definitely an area that I’m going to continue exploring, and will be writing up further exams that I take in it. I’m curious what your experience of it has been – please drop a comment below to let me know!
Finding out what the ‘D’ in her Twitter handle actually stands for, how she started in IT, and what happens when you don’t believe in hypnotism! Also including advice as to why it’s so important to keep an open mind with life & projects
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Working out Igor’s retirement plan to be based around his love of hiking (which came from the military). Also discussing how coffee, amongst other important things, is key to rapid-speed enterprise-scale project deployments!
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Discussing mutual interests of motorsport, racing motorbikes, seeing races, & having amazing adrenaline rushes! Also covering thoughts in our heads that we might have said out loud by mistake, and some quite interesting comments around dress codes at clients.
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Finding out how exactly Beth took up golf, how that then progressed over time into relationships, and what exactly can happen when you’re too honest with people!
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Let’s face it – we can be quite spoiled at times. As a customer, we can sometimes expect that companies be available 24/7 to service our requests, needs, issues, etc. That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it! Imagine that you have a mobile phone issue at 2am – you could call up your provider, and have it handled (or a new handset sent out) immediately. That would be quite nice!
Unfortunately the real world doesn’t (always) quite work like that. Of course there are companies that operate on a multi-national or even global scale, and there’s always customer service available (Amazon – I’m thinking of you right now!).
Previously I’ve gone into how we can set operating hours for a company, so that the ability to contact a customer support agent is only shown during these times. Take a look at Handling Company Hours for a refresher on this.
But sometimes not showing the ability to contact support could potentially be counter-productive. Customers may think that our website isn’t working properly, and possibly attempt to try to reach us through other means. This could quite well frustrate them.
Due to this, we have a nice little piece of functionality that’s now come out in Omnichannel. It’s small, simple, but yet quite brilliant in my humble opinion. This is the ability to have a chat widget available, but let customers know that that it’s currently out of company hours.
To activate this, we need to open the Chat record in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, and go to the Design tab:
Quite helpfully, the section is labelled ‘Offline’! How much better could we get.
We do need to understand that (at the time of writing this post) it’s currently in Preview, with all of the usual caveats around how that works.
We have several items available here:
So what does this then look like? Well, let’s take a look:
Personally I think that being able to set a theme colour for offline access gives it that little edge. Customers will become aware of this (subconsciously) when visiting the website, and come to the point of not even trying to start a chat when they see that it’s out of hours.
One MAJOR thing to bear in mind. We’re only going to be given the option to set this when we have a value set for Operating Hours. Without this being set, we won’t be shown this option. Go try it for yourself and see!
There’s not really much else to this, to be honest. But I’m liking it. I know that from a personal perspective I’ve been on various websites, and have no idea if the support chat is actually working or not. With this in place, I’m able to see that it is available for use at the correct time, and not have to wonder about it.
Have you ever thought about implementing something like this? Have you actually done so? I’d be really interested to hear from you about how you went about it – please drop a comment below!
Discussing the joys of camping in different countries, FinOps Consulting, and what exactly compromises standard functionality or not when pitching to clients!
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I’ll freely admit that the title for this post is a bit of a mouthful! I’ll also admit that I used the British spelling of ‘centre’, rather than what it actually is. You’ll have to excuse my grammar 😉
This post is about something that we all knew was coming. The old Admin Centre is no longer – and we shall miss it! It was inevitable that it would be moved over to the new Power Platform interface, as so many other things have already. Therefore I thought it would be good to do a quick article about where it is now, how to access it, etc.
After all, it is vitally important when needing to carry out the initial configuration for Omnichannel, or to check for upgrades to the Omnichannel installed solution!
Let us, however, cast our mind back to the very familiar layout shown below. We’ve spent so many years here that it seems quite sudden. But though you may be gone, you will not be forgotten!
Right – now onto the new version of it! So this actually took me a few minutes of digging around as to how to find it & get to it.
The first thing I tried was looking in the environment settings, but alas, I didn’t find it there. So I continued digging around.
Wishing you spare you the exact itinerary of everywhere that I looked into, I’ve decided just to show you it! I can hear the sighs of relief at this point…
What we need to do is navigate to the Power Platform Admin Centre, at https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/. Once there, we expand Resources on the left hand side, and select ‘Dynamics 365 apps’. Note that you do NOT have to select a specific environment first to be able to do this./
Now we can see a list of all apps installed. Nicely we’re able to scroll, which we couldn’t do in the old interface! That’s actually really helpful, and avoids needing to navigate to a different page. If we scroll down, we can see the entry for Omnichannel:
Click on ‘Manage’, and we get the following lovely popup:
Click OK to this, and we get taken to the (familiar) interface for configuring the initial items for Omnichannel:
Here we can go about the usual items, such as checking each environment to see if there are any updates available, or configure the main channels.
Nicely, Microsoft has actually updated (some of) their documentation, which is obviously very good. I’m now going to have to go and check through previous articles of mine, and update as necessary!
This is an interesting post, for several reasons. Firstly, it’s the first one in 3 weeks – I was off on holiday, and decided to take an (almost) absolute break from all things digital, which included this blog. It was actually quite refreshing, though now coming back & starting to write again does seem a bit daunting, I’ll admit!
Thankfully, whilst wondering what exactly to start with, a scenario came up that I was working on. It seemed quite simple at first, but then actually got someone complicated. I therefore thought it would be helpful to others if I wrote about it, so here it is.
The scenario was as follows. We had records being auto-created in the system, and needed to create child records for them. This, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is really quite simple to do with Power Automate. We also needed to set lookup values on the child record, that were already populated on the parent record (for reference purposes).
So for example, the parent record has a lookup to Country (being a separate entity), and the child record also has a lookup to Country. These need to be the same.
Being both lookup fields, I figured that I’d be able to take the value from the parent record, and simply plop it into the corresponding field on the child record in Power Automate:
So I did that – and immediately hit an error. Not just any error, but the fabled ‘Resource not found for the segment’ error!
Obviously, I did what anyone would do at first – I put it into Google & Twitter, and took a look at what came up.
The ‘problem’ was coming from using the ‘CDS Current Environment’ connector, which is the latest version available (the old one is no longer available to use). It’s really great for a lot of things, but unfortunately not so great in a few areas. See, in the old CDS Connector, you could just drop the lookup field value into the field you were wanting to populate. Power Automate had no issues with that, & it would run just fine.
However in the ‘new’ CDS Connector, you can’t just do that. Instead, you need to use an OData reference (which I haven’t done much of before, to tell the truth). So based on the blogs I had come across, I went to work to try to get this working.
Part of the challenge was that there didn’t seem to be a unified consensus in how to do it. I came across the following variations:
Somewhat confusing, as I’m sure you’d agree. Nevertheless, I ploughed through all of the different possibilities. But nothing was working – every single time, I still got the ‘segment not found’ error message. This, as you can image, was extremely frustrating!
Thankfully, one of my good friends was around & able to help out. Namely, Tricia Sinclair came to the rescue!
We took a look at the code I was using, and she took a look at some of her own use cases (where it had worked for her). I was starting to think down the path of needing a capital letter in the entity name (some systems can be REALLY finicky around things like that), but thankfully it wasn’t.
Instead, it was the following. See, this was a custom entity. It turns out that for a custom entity (& heck, for all I know system entities as well) the syntax needed is ‘publisherprefix_pluralentityname(lookupfieldvalue)’. Now that’s not something that I had come across ANYWHERE at all!
Looking at it, I guess it makes sense. After all it would technically be possible to have multiple entities with the same name, though with different publishers. As a result, the system needs to know WHICH exact entity is being needed for the Power Automate, so uses this. Somewhat complicated (and hey – it worked without all of this in the OLD CDS Connector), but we got it to work!
Testing it out, everything worked smoothly. The Power Automates fired off without any issues, the data got created & populated, and everyone was happy.
So there you go. Another interesting little twist in syntax needed, which hopefully will NOT change in the (near) future!
Have you come across anything like this? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below around it!