Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
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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Well, the last week has been quite busy, on many fronts! One of those is having a few new exams come out in Beta. I’ve already taken the PL-400 (see PL-400: Microsoft Power Platform Developer Exam for my review of it). Last Friday, the new PL-200 exam was released as well, so I scheduled it in for as soon as I could sit it.
Now the PL-200 is scheduled to be replacing the MB-200 exam at the end of this year (2020), assuming it comes out of beta by then of course. I remember sitting my MB-200, though I didn’t write up about it at the time. Compared to some of the other exams I’ve taken, it was hefty. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t pass on first go of it – it took me 3 tries to gain it! People will be required to take this as a pre-requisite for attaining the Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Functional Consultant Associate badge.
So I’ve been expecting this new PL-200 to be quite similar, but with more of a Power Platform focus. It’s still heavy on Dynamics 365, and I wasn’t expecting that part to change. The existing MB-2xx series are also staying in place (for the moment, anyhow).
According to the official description for the exam:
Candidates for this exam perform discovery, capture requirements, engage subject matter experts and stakeholders, translate requirements, and configure Power Platform solutions and apps. They create application enhancements, custom user experiences, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.
Candidates implement the design provided by and in collaboration with a solution architect and the standards, branding, and artifacts established by User Experience Designers. They design integrations to provide seamless integration with third party applications and services.
Candidates actively collaborate with quality assurance team members to ensure that solutions meet functional and non-functional requirements. They identify, generate, and deliver artifacts for packaging and deployment to DevOps engineers, and provide operations and maintenance training to Power Platform administrators.
The official Microsoft Learn page for the exam is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/pl-200, and I’d highly recommend people to go check it out. I didn’t use it that much, but felt that I was on reasonable grounds with existing knowledge. It’s mostly there, but (at least in my exam) there were some sneaky extras that I was NOT really expecting. Hopefully I managed to get them (mostly) accurate!
Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). The experience went without issues for once – sign in was fine, no issues with my headset during check-in, exam loaded & worked without problems at all.
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.
The main surprise for me was mostly around the UI flows, and the various questions I had on them. I’ve not played around with them (yet!), but they are really cool!
If you’re going to take this, I’d love to hear how your experience of it went. Drop a comment below for me to see!
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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As a starter for 10, this wasn’t actually the blog post that I was going to write today. In fact, the subject of the post wasn’t even going to be about Power Automate! However, there was some really amazing news that dropped today from Microsoft, which I just couldn’t pass up being able to talk about.
You’ve guessed it – it’s about Power Automate! Well, I suppose that the post title was somewhat of a giveaway, wasn’t it…ah well. So let’s go ahead and find out what this is all about then!
To date, we’ve been able to put Power Automate flows into a solution. Well, it wasn’t there exactly at the beginning of things, but it happened somewhere along the way. This was very convenient, as we didn’t then need to deploy each one individually to different environments. Some solutions can contain dozens & dozens of flows, and we really do love to package them all up together for ease of movement.
So that was good. But there was still a (major) ‘bugbear’ (as I like to refer to them as). This is the fact that after we deploy a Power Automate flow, we then need to go into it & (re)authenticate it. This is due to the fact that the connector/s that it uses contains what is referred to as a ‘secret’, and these can’t be moved across environments. As a result, we need to essentially recreate the ‘secret’ in the connector (ie authentication details) every time we move it. This is an annoyance (if you have one or two flows), and an absolute bloody nightmare if you have lots.
For the technical minded – every action in a flow is bound to a specific instance of a connection that it will use to “execute” that action. This is why when moving flows across environments, users are required to rebind every operation to a connection.
For example, I’ve been working with COVID-19 triage solutions. These contain lots of flows within them, connecting to multiple different sources, and doing different things. Every time we’ve performed a release (even if it’s just a simple update), we’ve needed to manually go through each flow, (re)authenticate them, and turn them on. If you forgot one, then everything can come crashing down & not work! But there’s been no other way to do it. To represent this visually, we have the following diagram
For each & every Power Automate, the connection line gets ‘broken’ when it’s deployed, and needs to be re-made.
Until now, that is. For today, Microsoft has announced the Public Preview for ‘Connection References’. Now when something is put into Preview, I usually caveat the usage of it with saying things like ‘it might go away, or not be released for a while’. But I’m going to be quietly confident about this particular piece of functionality, as I really don’t think it’s going to be pulled!
So what exactly are these? Well, in (mostly) simple terms, Connection References provide an ‘in-between’ or ‘abstraction’ layer for the connections that use them. Let’s show this visually as well
We still need to re-authenticate the Connection Reference once we deploy things. But let’s now see how we can save ourselves a massive headache, and LOTS of time:
Oooo…now this is looking better. Instead of having to update three Power Automate flows, we only have to update the SINGLE Connection Reference that’s sitting in the middle. Now multiple that by however many flows you have (eg sending emails out, etc), and start calculating how much time you’ll now be able to spend on coffee breaks, rather than doing this manually one at a time…
We can create Connection References directly from within the solution:
We then give it a name & description, choose which connector we’re going to be using, and either select an existing connection or set a new one up:
Once we’re finished, we click ‘Create’ at the bottom. Voila – we can now see it within our solution!
Note: Interestingly enough I couldn’t actually see this within the solution after I created it, even with the component selector set to show ‘All’. How I actually got them to display was changing the component selector to ‘Connection Reference’, and they then showed up. I’m thinking that this is due to it being new today/in the process of rolling out, and am expecting it to display without any issues in the near future
Let’s take a look at a Power Automate flow itself now to see how it’s referenced. When we open an item with a connector, we can now see the following:
We’re able to select the Connection Reference that we’re wanting to use. Simple, yet so powerful.
When importing a solution containing a Connection Reference, we will be prompted during the import process to set the actual connection that should be used with it:
If you don’t have any connections set up already in the environment, you’ll be able to create a new one from the dropdown.
Some things to note around this:
In summary – this is an awesome step forward with Power Automate functionality. I’m already tasking some of the developers on the team to re-do existing solutions to use it for ease of use. How do you think it’ll best benefit you? Drop a comment below!
I’ve recently been spending time looking at, and talking about, how we can handle company hours within Omnichannel. This has covered both how to use them within chat (Handling Company Hours) as well as being able to change the chat widget functionality (Handling ‘Out of Hours’).
Imaging my surprise therefore when someone asked me ‘how do we go setting them up properly?’. When I originally looked at how to use them within chat, I used the Quick Create functionality. I had meant to come back to looking at it in more detail, but that somehow fell by the wayside. So, I’m now going to make up for it!
As a quick recap – Operating Hours are what we set to show when the company is ‘open’ (or for our purposes, active). This doesn’t need to reflect the actual store hours that might exist – customer support could well start before/end after the normal store times. It’s also the case that we usually can’t just set blanket times – we’ll need to handle holidays, seasonal occasions, etc. This is where Operating Hours really comes into its own.
So to start off, it’s simple to enter operating hours. Really simple. We go to the navigation area, select, it, and click ‘New’:
We’ll create a new record, and click Save:
Once we do that, the magic starts to happen – we get to see the ‘Working Hours’ tab. Clicking on it will give us the following screen (which I can only describe as absolutely amazing!):
I don’t know about you, but I’m loving being able to see the hours for each day in a calendar-style view. It’s so much easier than needing to scroll down a list of records, trying to find a specific date. It’s also much simpler for the eye to follow/see.
At the top, we can navigate between dates, change the view to switch between a specific day, week or month, and enter new information:
There are two options for inputting new settings here:
For working hours, we can input the times, whether it repeats or not, and whether it’s a full day event or not:
We can also edit an existing Working Hours entry simply by clicking on it to change it. When we do this, we get the option as to whether to modify the single item that we’ve selected, or the entire series:
It’s important to note that we’re not limited to entering just a single range per day. We can enter multiple records for a single date, or a date range, to fit what we’re actually trying to do.
For Holidays, we don’t need as many options. We assume that by setting holiday, the company is closed. We’re therefore prompted just for a date (range) to then set this:
So what we then do is build up our calendar. This will result in (hopefully!) a full overview of our company, that we can then use.
What’s important to remember is that we could have different dimensions to our company though. We may allow Sales to be open 20 hours, but Customer Service to be open only for 12 hours.
We’d therefore create multiple Operating Hour entries for each requirement, and point each channel towards to the applicable record. If we only have a single scenario that we need to handle, we can point multiple channels towards the same operating hours record – that’s not a problem at all.
So with this, we can really tweak operating hours as we need to, for each possible usage. It’s really powerful, so easy to set up, and gives us full control over things.
Have you ever struggled with something like this? How did you overcome it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
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!
We’ve all been there. We’re in the middle of a chat session with a support agent, or talking to a salesperson, etc. Suddenly things go wrong – our browser hangs, the internet loses connection, or something else…
Alternatively, I do know of situations where kids have pulled out the internet cables during ‘playtime’ – it really does happen!
Immediately we’re frustrated. Not only have we not finished what we were trying to achieve, but we’re going to need to start all over again. Perhaps the agent took notes & logged them against our contact record, but the likelihood is that it hasn’t happened. It’s going to take time to get through to an agent again, then we have to explain the whole situation from the absolute beginning. It’s heartrending, and can cause our day to absolutely go down the tubes!
Well, what if we could just re-connect to the chat session with all our data saved? Better still, what if we could go back and continue chatting with the specific agent that we had been communicating with? Sounds amazing, but wishful, right?
Well, we now have this ability within Omnichannel, to be able to enable our customers even further. There are even two ways in which we can offer this:
Let’s take a look at it, and how it works.
In the Omnichannel Administration Centre, we need to go to the specific Chat record that we’re wanting to set this up for. We open the record, and are now presented with the following (we do need to scroll down the screen a bit):
Note that this is in Preview currently, so just be a bit careful with it!
There are several options available. We don’t need to use each one, but let’s understand what each one does:
Note: The ‘Reconnect Time Limit’ value is auto-set by the system to the value specified in the work-stream that’s associated with the chat widget. It’s not possible to manually change this in the chat widget itself. Instead, the work-stream ‘Auto-close after inactivity’ value would need to be changed. This is shown below:
Note: It’s also important that the customer hasn’t closed THEIR chat window! All of this relies on the customer chat still being there. If the customer has closed their window/browser, they won’t be offered this option.
Have you ever needed to offer customer capability along these lines? How did you go about it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Discussing the joys of camping in different countries, FinOps Consulting, and what exactly compromises standard functionality or not when pitching to clients!
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.