Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Finding out about Kylie’s love of knitting (some of the things she’s created over time too), discussing pizza and monkey, and what happens when we’re not careful enough about system security! Cue a rescue mission at an unexpected time!
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So it’s been a busy few weeks here, which is why I haven’t really been putting up any articles. March/April is always a busy time for our family with stuff going on, and this year I decided not to push myself to get articles out, as otherwise I’d be running very low on sleep!
That being said, I’ve still had some great ideas about things that I’d like to share, and have been keeping a series of short notes for me to pick up. Today’s topic is one of them, which I think has been a major pain to anyone involved in canvas app development!
So, the back story to this is that we’re able to use Power Automate flows together with canvas apps. What I mean by this is that we’re able to directly trigger them from within the canvas app, rather than needing to do something like edit or create a record, and then have the Power Automate flow trigger from the record creation or modification.
There’s a specific Power Apps trigger that’s available within Power Automate exactly for this purpose:
When clicked, it gives us the trigger line in the steps as follows:
So what we’d do is within the canvas app, we would bind a button (or another control) that when selected, it would then go away & trigger the Power Automate flow. Great – so many different things that we can get to happen! One of the benefits of doing things like this is that we can then pass information from the Power Automate flow back to the canvas app directly:
This can then mean that the user can know, within the canvas app itself, that the Power Automate flow has run, and use data (or other things) that have come out of it.
OK – all good so far.
The main issue to date has been with deploying canvas apps together with Power Automate flows. See, as per best practise, we would create a solution, place the canvas app, flows, and anything else that’s necessary for it to work within it, and then deploy the solution to our target environment/s. And that’s where things just…didn’t go quite right.
Obviously within the development environment, the canvas app would be hooked up to the flows, and everything would work. Clicking the button would cause the flow to run, etc. User authentication would be in place (along with licenses of course!), and it was just fine.
But when deploying a solution containing canvas apps and associated flows between environments (regardless of whether it’s been manually deploying, or automated using a tool such as Azure DevOps), the connections to the flows would be broken. Ie, the canvas app would run, but the flows wouldn’t trigger. Looking at the connections in the canvas app within Studio would show something like the following:
All of the connections to Power Automate flows would show as ‘Not connected’. It’s not even possible to click the ellipse next to them and re-connect them – the only option available is to remove it from the canvas app!
So in order to get things working again, we’d need to do the following steps:
This, in a nutshell, has been a (major) headache. For example, I’ve been working with a solution that has over 30 Power Automate flows that can be triggered from the canvas app (lots of different functionality!). Each deployment has needed the above process to be carried out, which has usually added on at least an hour to the deployment process!
Now, this hasn’t been something that’s been unknown. In fact, the official Microsoft documentation noted the following:
So this is something that Microsoft has been well aware of, but it’s been a pain point that we’ve had to work with.
However, this has now ALL changed, which I (and MANY others) are really pleased about!
Microsoft has rolled out an update last month that means that canvas app connections to Power Automate flows will NOT break when they’re deployed across environments! This is such a massive time-saver, that I’m now trying to work out what to do with all of my free time! Only kidding…more project work will commence!
So what we can now do is take our solution, deploy it across the different environment/s that we need to get it out to (whether manually, or automated using tools such as Azure DevOps), publish the solution, and then everything works! Amazing!!
One small caveat though – to ensure that this work, you will need to go into the app, and re-publish it on the latest Power Apps version. This should of course be done in a development environment, and then can be exported and deployed as required.
Microsoft have also updated their documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/solutions-overview to remove the limitation text shown above. It’s a good place to keep an eye on changes that occur over time too.
This is definitely a welcome piece of development, and I know that we’ve been eagerly waiting for this for a while, and now it’s here!
Talking to Olena about different hobbies such as painting, and the challenges that can come with projects. However, also finding out about ways to overcome those challenges, and what actually can allow us to overcome challenges and succeed!
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Chatting to Ben about new hobbies that he’s started during lockdown, as well some items from way back in the day (anyone remember SharePoint DLL’s?)
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Finding out what Keegan has been learning during lockdown (awesome use of time!), challenges that raising children brings, and why it’s important to listen to your gut feelings.
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Well, it’s FINALLY here. And by finally, I guess I’m saying that I’ve been waiting for this for a while? The PL-600 exam is the new ‘Holy Grail’ for Dynamics 365/Power Platform people, being the Solution Architect (3 star) exam. Ten minutes after it went live, I booked to take it, and four hours after it went live I sat it! (I would have taken it sooner, but had to have supper first, get the kids to bed, etc…)
The first solution architect exam that Microsoft has done in this space has been the MB-600 (see my exam experience write-up on it at MB-600 Solution Architect Exam). However with the somewhat recent shift moving towards certifications for the wider Power Platform, it was inevitable that this exam would change as well.
Interestingly enough, the MB-600 now counts towards some of the Microsoft Partner qualifications. I’d expect that when it retires (currently planned for June 2021), the PL-600 will take the place of it in the required certifications to have.
So, how to discuss it? Well, the obvious first start is to link to the official Microsoft page for it, which is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/power-platform-solution-architect-expert/. According to the specification for it:
Microsoft Power Platform solution architects lead successful implementations and focus on how solutions address the broader business and technical needs of organizations.
A solution architect has functional and technical knowledge of the Power Platform, Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps, related Microsoft cloud solutions, and other third-party technologies. A solution architect applies knowledge and experience throughout an engagement. The solution architect performs proactive and preventative work to increase the value of the customer’s investment and promote organizational health. This role requires the ability to identify opportunities to solve business problems.
Solution architects have experience across functional and technical disciplines of the Power Platform. Solution architects should be able to facilitate design decisions across development, configuration, integration, infrastructure, security, availability, storage, and change management. This role balances a project’s business needs while meeting functional and non-functional requirements.
So not really changed that much from the MB-600, though obviously there’s now an expectation for solutions to bring in other parts of the Power Platform, as well as dip into Azure offerings as well. Pretty much par for the course, in my experience, with how recent projects that I’ve been on have been implemented.
At the time of writing, there are no official Microsoft Learning paths available to use to study. I do expect this to change in the near future, and will update this article when they’re out. However the objectives/sub-objectives are available to view from the main exam page, and I’d highly recommend going ahead & taking a good look at these.
Passing the exam (along with having either the PL-200 Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant or PL-400: Microsoft Power Platform Developer Exam qualifications as well) will result in a lovely (new) shiny badge. Oh, we do so love those three stars on it!
As in my previous exam posts, I’m going to stress that 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, I had 47 questions, which is around the usual amount that I’ve experienced in my exams over the last year or so. What was slightly unusual was that instead of two case studies, I got three of them! (note that your own experience may likely vary from mine).
Some of the naming conventions weren’t updated to the latest methods, which I would have expected. I still had a few references to ‘entities’ and ‘fields’ come up, though for the most part ‘tables’ and ‘columns’ were used. I guess it’s a matter of time to get everything up to speed with it.
Wow. It’s a lot of stuff. Not that I’m surprised by that, as essentially it’s the sort of thing that I was expecting (being familiar with the MB-600). I think that on a ‘day to day’ basis, I cover most of these items already, so didn’t have to do a massive amount of revision for items that I wasn’t familiar with.
From my experience in taking it, I’d say that around 30% of the questions seemed to be focused on Dynamics 365, with 70% being focused on Power Platform capabilities. It’s about what I thought it would be when the exam was first announced. Obviously some people are more Dynamics 365 focused, and others are more Power Platform focused, but the aim of the exam (& qualification) is to really understand the breadth of the offerings available.
I can’t tell you if I’ve passed it or not…YET!. Results aren’t going to be out for several months, based on previous experience with Beta exams, but I’ve got a good feeling about this.
So, if you’re aiming to take it – I wish you the very best of luck, and let me know your experience!
Speaking with Guro about her collection of dresses (can you guess how many she has?), travelling stories, and interesting things regarding hotels, suitcase collections, and much more!
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When going through a backlog of various items, I suddenly realised that although the App Profile Manager was released in September 2020, I hadn’t devoted any space to it! So I’ve therefore decided (finally) to do an article to cover it.
First of all, what exactly is the App Profile Manager? Well, it’s a (somewhat) new feature that never existed beforehand. Essentially, the Omnichannel Agent App window has a number of configurable items, such as tabs to load at start-up, etc. Trying to work out where the configuration for each item is can, at times, be slightly frustrating, and I (for one) can’t always remember it correctly! But there’s also more, as I’ll go into below…
So, enter the App Profile Manager. At the moment, it’s only able to be used for two specific standard apps. These are the Customer Service Workspace app, and the Omnichannel for Customer Service app. In the future this may open up some more, but we’re limited to these for the moment.
So what does it do? Well, it’s there to enable system administrators to add configurations to an app. Essentially, it’s focused on on giving users access to certain items & functionality within an app.
As Microsoft puts it, it ‘allows administrators to create targeted app experiences for agents and supervisors as an alternative to building and maintaining custom apps’. Wow – Marketing sure can come up with some interesting lines at times!
I can hear you asking ‘so why should we use it’? After all, customer support agents will just log into the app, for example, and see the interface. Why should we use this, when we can just use the Omnichannel Administration app to configure things.
There’s actually a really simple answer to this. See, if we’re carrying out the configuration just through the Omnichannel Administration app, this will be set company-wide. All users logging in will have the same experience. However, there are companies that, although it’s all based around customer service, will have different teams that handle different things, and want them to have different screen layouts. Perhaps they’re even a multi-national.
It’s exactly for this purpose that the App Profile Manager exists. See, using it we can set up different screen profiles, showing different tabs, having different notifications, etc. We then assign it users to it (unfortunately we can’t use a security group at this point in time). When the users log in, they’ll then be presented with whichever layout they’re associated with. We can create custom profiles as we need, to handle the business needs!
Right – enough of talking about the concept. How do we actually get to it? Well, we need to go to make.powerapps.com, click into the list of apps, and then select either the Customer Service Workspace app, or the Omnichannel for Customer Service app. Clicking the ellipse next to it will give us the option for the App Profile Manager at the bottom of the fly-out menu:
This will then launch the App Profile Manager homepage. Some nice information shown here, with even a link to a video that we can launch to see how to go about things.
On the left hand side, we can see the apps in place, along with the ability to launch directly into the different settings areas for them. This is all standard stuff.
The power of App Profile Manager really comes when we’re going into the App Profiles section. Here we can see all of the app profiles that exist in the system. The ones with padlocks next to them are default system ones, which we can’t modify. But the other ones we ARE able to change, as well as being able to set up new ones:
When we open up one that we’ve created, we can see how we can go about customising it. There’s even a handy little visual guide to help users understand what/where each section is:
We’re able to configure the following (per app profile):
Once we’re happy with the setup performed, we then need to assign users to the app profile itself. To do this, simply slick the ‘Assign users’ button on the menu bar:
This will open up the screen to add users to the app profile. We can easily select from existing users, and then associate them to the app profile:
And voila, we’re done!
Users will access the app in the normal way, either through launching it in the browser, or using their bookmarks. When they log in, they’ll be presented with the app profile that they’ve been associated with.
If a user doesn’t have an app profile associated with them, then the default system app profile will be assigned to them, and they’ll see that when they log in.
Note: Although the system doesn’t enforce it, you should ensure to only assign users to a single app profile!
So there you have it. A way to customise the customer service agent experience across a customer, to provide the best interface possible to them.
How could this help you with your own scenarios? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below to share.
Chatting to Samit about speaking at Ignite, his love of movies, and finding out interesting things around instruction manuals!
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Discovering how Luise decided to learn piano (she also loves bubble wrap!), and how her luggage decided to go on a different journey to her (along with the use of technology, of course!
If you’d like to come appear on the show, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2NqP5PV – I’d love to have you on it!
Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.