Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Chatting with Yash on a multiple of topics, including #cryptocurrency, #blockchain, and the importance of having a good network in place!
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It’s been a while since I’ve taken an exam. Admittedly, this is for two reason. Firstly, the renewal process for exams now (as updated last year) is not to take it again, but rather to re-qualify through Microsoft Learn. The second reason is that I’ve been waiting for some new exams to come out (OK – there’s the DA-100, which is still on my list of things to do…).
Well, there’s a new exam on the block. In fact, it’s a different type of exam – this is a ‘Speciality’ exam, rather than focusing on a specific type of application. It’s the first of its kind, though there are likely to be more to follow in the future.
It’s the MB-260, which is all around Customer Data. That’s right – it’s not about how to do sales, or customer service, or something else. It’s about taking the (holistic) approach to ALL of the data that we can hold on customers, and do something with it.
The official page for it is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-260https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-260. The specification for it is:
Candidates for this exam implement solutions that provide insights into customer profiles and that track engagement activities to help improve customer experiences and increase customer retention.
Candidates should have firsthand experience with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and one or more additional Dynamics 365 apps, Power Query, Microsoft Dataverse, Common Data Model, and Microsoft Power Platform. They should also have direct experience with practices related to privacy, compliance, consent, security, responsible AI, and data retention policy.
Candidates need experience with processes related to KPIs, data retention, validation, visualization, preparation, matching, fragmentation, segmentation, and enhancement. They should have a general understanding of Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.
Note that there’s quite a bit of Azure in there – it’s not just about Power Platform, Dataverse, or Dynamics 365. People who handle reporting on customer data should have various Azure skills as well.
There’s also a new type of badge that will be available:
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.
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 51 questions, which was towards the higher number of questions that I’ve experienced in my exams over the last year or so. There was only a single case study though.
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. It’s definitely an exam that if you’re not already currently hands-on with the skills needed, I’d highly recommend you get a decent amount of experience with it before taking the exam!
I can’t tell you if I’ve passed it or not…YET!. Results aren’t going to be out for several months, and to be honest, I’m not quite sure how well I’ve actually done.
So, if you’re aiming to take it – I wish you the very best of luck, and let me know your experience!
Speaking to Antti around whiskey collecting (something that a lot of the #community seems to enjoy?), and the importance of PROPER requirements gathering during projects (especially around ‘low code’!)
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Over the holiday period, I’ve been playing around with solution deployments. OK – don’t judge me too much…I also took the necessary time off to relax & get time off work!
But with some spare time in the evenings, I decided to look a bit deeper into the world of DevOps (more specifically, Azure DevOps), and how it works. I’ll admit that I did have some ulterior motives around it (for a project that I’m working on), but it was good to be able to get some time to do this.
So why am I writing this post? Well, there’s a variety of great material out there already around DevOps, such as https://benediktbergmann.eu/ by Benedikt (check out his Twitter here), who’s really great at this. I chat to him from time to time around DevOps, to be able to understand it better.
However, I ran into some quite interesting behaviour (which I STILL have no idea why it’s the case, but more on this later), and thought that I would document it.
Right – let’s start off with manual deployments. As we know, manual deployments are done through the user interface. A user (with necessary permissions) would do the following:
Pretty simple, right?
Now, from an DevOps point of view, the process is similar, though not quite the same. Let’s see how it works:
All of that runs (usually) quite smoothly, which is great.
Now, let’s talk for a minute about managed solutions. I’m not going to get into the (heated) discussion around managed vs unmanaged solutions. There’s enough that’s been written, said, and debated on around the topic to date, and I’m sure it will continue. Obviously we all know that the Microsoft Best Practise approach is to use managed solutions in all non-DEV environments..
Anyway – why am I bringing this up? Well, there’s one key different in behaviour when deploying a managed solution vs an unmanaged solution (for a newer solution version), and this is to do with removing functionality from the solution in the DEV environment:
Now most of us know this already, which is great. It’s a very useful way to handle matters, and can assist with handling a variety of scenarios.
So, let’s go back to my first question – why am I writing this post? Well..it’s because of the different behaviour in manual vs automated deployment, which I discovered. Let’s look at this.
When deploying manually, we get the following options:
The default behaviour (outlined above) is to UPGRADE the solution. This will apply the solution with both additive & detractive behaviour. This is what we’re generally used to, and essentially the behaviour that we’d expect with a managed solution.
Now, when running a release pipeline from Azure DevOps, we’d expect this to work in the same way. After all, systems should be build to all work in the same way, right?
Well, no, that’s not actually what happens. See, when an Azure DevOps release pipeline runs, the default behaviour is NOT to import the solution (we’re talking managed solutions here) as an upgrade. Instead (by default), it imports it as an UPDATE!!!
This is what was really confusing me. I had removed functionality in DEV, ran the build pipeline, then ran the release pipeline. However the functionality (which I had removed from DEV) was still present in UAT! It took me a while to find out what was actually happening underneath…
So how can we handle this? Well, apart from suggesting to Microsoft that they should (perhaps) make everything work in the SAME way, there’s a way to handle it within the release pipeline. For this, it’s necessary to do two things:
Firstly, on the ‘Import Solution’ task, we need to set it to import as a holding solution.
Secondly, we then need to use the ‘Apply Solution Upgrade’ task in the release pipeline
What this will do is then upgrade the existing solution in the target environment with the holding solution that’s just been deployed.
Note: You will need to change the solution version to a higher solution number, in order for this to work properly. I’m going to write more about this another time, but it is important to know!
So in my view, this is a bit annoying, and perhaps Microsoft will change the default behaviour within DevOps at some point. But for the moment, it’s necessary to do.
Has this (or something similar) tripped you up in the past? How did you figure it out? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Starting off #2022 by talking with the AMAZING Azure. Delving into her #couponing habit, & her history of cars ‘not working’…
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Finishing up 2021 by chatting to ‘Chief Technical Penguin’ Aaron Ralls about his love of Cajun-inspired cooking (delicious!), & the importance of setting ourselves up for financial security (not just ‘the moment’).
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Talking with Clifton about his love of travel, the importance of community with both technical & non-technical matters, and just how vital it is to understand Digital Transformation. Without the correct mindset for this, it’s going to be difficult to succeed!
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Don’t you find it absolutely frustrating when there’s a canvas app that you want to get access to, or give other users access to, but can’t see it? It’s REALLY annoying, but it’s sort of the way that Microsoft has designed the platform (at least at this point in time).
See, when a user creates a canvas app, only the creator is able to see & launch it. If other users want to get access to it, the creator needs to share it. This can be done by sharing the app directly with another user, or by sharing it with an AAD Security Group (which is sort of best practise).
Now, of course there’s the Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence solution, which includes a very handy app to assign permissions for canvas apps. After all, if a user is on holiday, sick leave, or has left the company, there needs to be some way of assigning permissions for other users to gain access to it. It’s really helpful, but of course needs the CoE solution installed.
Let’s think of another scenario. What about if we have some canvas apps as part of a solution, that’s deployed through (proper) ALM – such as using Azure DevOps with automated pipelines. Best practise for this is to use service principals (ie non-interactive user logins). This is great, but then the canvas app/s will be owned by this user. So without the use of the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app, we’re sort of stuck, as we can’t gain access to the app.
Or can we…..?
So this is a scenario that I’ve been dealing with recently, and I’ve found a really cool workaround that doesn’t need the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app to be able to handle the situation.
The example below (amusingly, in my opinion) is actually using the Microsoft CoE solution as an example, but this works with any canvas apps that are held within a solution (against, this heavily supports using solutions for ALL development items!).
So, this is what the actual installed apps look like in this environment:
As we can see, there are a lot of them! But what happens if I’m logged in as my regular user? What do I see if I go to the list of apps? Well, I’ll see the following:
Now, as we can see, I’m able to see the model-driven app (as these aren’t hidden at all). But I’m not able to see ANY of the canvas app! So how can I get access to it, or share it with other users?
Well, if I take a look at the solution itself, I can see the following when browsing to the list of apps (I’m really loving the new Solution Explorer layout, I’ll freely admit!):
I can try to play the canvas app (in this case, the ‘Set App Permissions’ app) directly from the solution. But when I try to do this, I’ll get the following error message:
Now, this is of course happening because I’m not the owner of the app, & the app hasn’t been shared with me at all. So really I was expecting this error to happen.
However, if I take a look at the menu options displayed for me, I can see that the ‘Share’ option isn’t greyed out. I wonder what happens if I click it…
Now this is EXCITING! When clicking the ‘Share’ option on the menu, I’m given the regular sharing screen, where I’m able to set app permissions. So it looks like I’m able to do something here. OK – let’s go ahead & try to share the app with my own user:
So I’ve looked up my own user, and then clicked ‘Share’. This is what happens next…
Waiting with bated breath, and then…
It’s worked! The app sharing has been successful with my user.
Note: The example that I’m using here is with my own user account. However it doesn’t need to be – I can select any user account or AAD Security Group, and share accordingly.
Going to my list of apps, I can now see that the app is showing up for me:
Clicking the app to launch it presents me with the permissions dialogue, and having confirmed permissions, then launches it properly:
So this is indeed a way in which it’s possible to share canvas apps with users and/or AAD security groups, even when a user isn’t the owner of the canvas app.
It is important to note that the user carrying this out does need to have one of the following permissions in the environment:
Without having one of these roles, it’s not going to be possible to carry out the above (mostly because it’s not possible to see solutions & dig down into them).
This is a handy little trick that hopefully will help clear up one of the headaches when trying to share canvas apps! Of course it’s possible to use the Microsoft CoE tool to set app permissions, but if a customer doesn’t have it installed, then this would be another way to approach things.
Have you ever had this issue? How did you go about solving it? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below…
Discovering Patrick’s love of classics (you’ll never guess how he got into it to begin with), what he does for light reading, and what happens when system security might not be kept quite up to scratch.
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Finding out from Elaiza how she decided to start a side-line in veggie gardening at home, the wonderful produce that she’s grown so far, and her vision for expanding on it!. Also covering personal & professional lifestyles, tips & tricks for starting a new position in a different country, and professional development advice.
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.