Microsoft has recently worked on promoting their power platform and has implied the existence of “internal makers community”. All their COE ideas come from their community discussion as fusion teams make sense there. This community is made to bring ease to citizen developers work. If you want to set it up then you need to:

• Go to Admin Panel and make sure you are visible as an advisor

• Next, in the maker portal open Power Platform Settings
• Join Advisory Program

Once in, you can ask Virtual Agent questions; you may need to use a different account as it is difficult to seek help being “yourself”; and most importantly once a Virtual Agent hits a roadblock it can increase your problems.

Or, alternatively, Virtual Agent could display a link to a Teams group if that one were configured in the admin center:

The result is good or bad is irrelevant here. It is basically another feature that can be useful. I have not been able to find any organization so far which has introduced its internal community to each other to benefit from Power Platform. This is actually disappointing because it is such a powerful feature of Microsoft that everybody should benefit from. If you want to surface advisor contacts you can email anyone anytime. Users can go to teams and post a question and anyone can assume the role of an advisor to answer.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us anytime.

Many people wonder what they should avoid while building provision solution in Microsoft Dynamics 365. In the said provision there are both good and bad things; sometimes it is easier said than done. We have written a detailed blog on things you should avoid; let’s see what they are:

1. Technology Your Organization Cannot Support

This is one of the most important issues that companies face while providing solutions for collaborative workspaces in Microsoft 365. If you are using Microsoft Patterns and Practices Provision Engine and anyone in your team cannot understand how it works of develops? Always be mindful of the technical capabilities of your team and never make them work on solutions you cannot provide.

2. Always Ask Reasons of Getting a Specific Provision

 Whenever you are enabling or building a provision solution make sure that it has a specific reason. For instance if you need to block creation for anyone there is sometimes no need for straightaway technical implementation there are easy ways out. Tell you clients that just because they can do not mean they should.

3. Avoid adding Non-IT Stakeholders in your Planning

This is yet again very important because If you add stakeholders outside IT you will always face problems in communication. To ensure you always have IT stakeholders do IT testing. While piloting the solution, use feedback surveys, focus groups, and meetings to talk to the users about the solution to hear what they like and don’t like.

4. Avoid Static Approach and Accept Change

Microsoft is an ever-evolving system which is introducing change every minute of the day. In this regard provisioning of solutions is always prone to new changes in the said system. You need to be mindful of this and keep your team and system open to new configurations.

Microsoft teams are the modern solution for virtual collaboration worldwide. Where on one hand it can be used to enhance the performance of your organization; there on the other it can also create problems for it. It is because Microsoft team poses an array of risks and challenges to many organizations specifically those who work on a large scale. The most common problem organizations face is your threat to their organization data during collaboration. We have compiled a list of tips which you can use for good governance using Microsoft Teams.

1. Plan Before you Create Your Team

Team creation is one of the trickiest part in Microsoft it is because it comes with an array of responsibilities and risks. Before creating your need you need to be mindful of your organization requirements and check if it has a specific naming convention. Secondly, you should also be mindful of the restrictions that you would like to pose on your guests. Moreover, you should also see you can create teams and who cannot.

2. Manage External User and their Access from the Beginning

This is something very difficult especially if you are opening yourself to collaboration however you should always be ready to manage external users and their access from the start to avoid any risks and threats to your organizational data. There are a few things you can keep a check on including:

• Who can bring new guests to the team?
• What guests can have access to?
• How guests can make use of organization’s resources?
• Can guests make any changes to company’s data?

3. Avoid Making Ownerless Teams

Team owners play a vital role in managing the safety of your organizations. They have access to remove or add any guest and can easily identify if someone is trying to misuse your organizational resources. If you want to have a risk free collaboration make sure to manage teams who have your company approved owners only.

Whenever someone logs in to a portal, they are usually greeted by a bot asking very basic questions like ‘What Do You Want?’ or ‘Do You Need Any Help?’ this is followed by almost all the log ins. These are basic automatic questions intended to help the user without knowing their identity. Since the information in question is generic the bot does not require any specific identity. However, when a user gets into conversation with the bot and seeks specific information, there always follow the process of identification. In order to yield some specific information, the bot needs to make sure that the person to whom the information is to be given is the relevant person. Sometimes the process of identification starts with the requirement for logging in.

It simply means that a bot will only need specific personal information when the information required from the bot is specific. For basic, generic information, it does not need any information. Specific questions like the information about the leave balance o a particular person, location of a parcel or the status of an issue rose with customer care; the bot will require personal information for identifying the person seeking the information. These scenarios can be controlled through various ways. The bot can be restricted to a specific group of users, followed by authentication in bot implementation coming in the form of a picture. The users do not need to be issued any license. People having the link of the bot can simply access it provided that it is authenticated.

The process of authentication can be controlled or customized by using Manage – Security. Some of the options that can be used are given below.

• No Authentication – Anybody who has the link of the bot can access the bot
• Only for Teams- this bot is available for access only through the Microsoft Teams app
• Manual (For any channel including Teams)-supports AAD or Auth2 identity provider

The checkbox requiring the user to immediately log in as soon as they interact with the bot can also be added. Once only the Teams is enabled/allowed to be given access to a particular bot, only Teams users will be able to do so.

A visual representation of the steps is given below:

Next The Following Steps will take place:

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us anytime!

To allow customers more agency with their PAT scope Microsoft has introduced a big change, recently a new initiative by the Azure DevOps team has been taken which supports granular personal access token PAT scope. The change is a part of their ongoing investments in security this initiative was taken to decrease the risks linked to leaks of PAT credentials. This initiative has drastically changed Azure DevOps as it links all Azure DevOps REST APIs to PAT; which at times led customers to consume these APIs using full-scoped PATs. This broad permissions of full-scoped PAT in the hands of someone dangerous poses a serious threat as the potential of security threat has been increased due to increased access to source codes, valuable assets and production infrastructure.

If you are a current user of Full-scoped PAT then consider migrating to PAT with limited scope to avoid any security breach. This can be done by taking a few simple steps as the supported granular PAT scope(s) for a given REST API can be found in the security -> Scopes section of the REST API document pages:

This allowance by PAT to take full-scope of specific allowance is beneficial for customers as it enables them to corresponding control plane policy. Microsoft has promised a full range of improvements to ensure the smooth run of their operations which will help customers secure a DevOps environment. If you have any questions regarding the new DevOps environment you can contact us any time.

Many people struggling with the Sort Function in Microsoft. You should be surprised to know that the said function can be used to Sort Arrays in Power Automate. The new approach is far easier than the traditional Three Step Approach. However, there are a few things you should know about before sorting array by dates.

Using Sort Function to sort Dates:

The first approach is to sort dates in Power Automate like the example below:

STEP 1

STEP 2

Here you can see that some dates have been generated for example get items in SharePoint. Moreover, all dates are nicely formatted for the sake of automation processes.

Caution

If we have a bad date format it can be problematic as it can be returned by API. See the example below:

STEP 1

STEP 2

In the examples above you can see that dates have been sorted by month rather than day. This is not of any use to anyone. If such cases appear, you shouldn’t be worried because there are easy ways which can be used to fix them.

Fixing the Date:

To fix this problem all you need to do it to Select Action which will allow you to convert the Date Format in the US. The expressions below can be used to achieve it:

formatDateTime( item(), ‘yyyy-MM-dd’)

For sorting you can use this one-liner command:

sort(body(‘Select’),’Date’)

Voila! Everything is sorted out.

Final Word

It is time to bid farewell to the old Three Step Approach and welcome the new approach which is way easier to deploy and easy to learn the best thing is it does not matter how many times you may need to use it because it is done in a few minutes.

Multiple rows or records can be retrieved in Microsoft Dataverse using List Rows. You just need to introduce a structured query using either Fetch XML or OData queries. You should know that all columns are by default retrieved in List Rows if you do not mention the columns you want to retrieve explicitly.

Moreover, if the flows return all the columns then the performance of the flow is affected. In this regard, it is better to practice and perform tweak to mention the columns directly in the list rows action Select Columns field.

We have shown you an example so you can see how Select Column contains name and amount field only for the sake of Loan Entity. It only retrieves the record with only two columns and other columns are not retrieved in the output.

Be careful!!

You should remember that if you are mentioning column list in Select Columns then you need to use those columns which are actually mentioned in the list in next actions steps of the Power automate. Here, you cannot use other columns which are not retrieved. For this you should need to add other columns as needed.

We hope this read was helpful for you, if you have any questions you can contact us.

If you want to learn how to use lookup function in the canvas power apps then you are at the right place. You should know that Lookup function is used to find record which matches criteria from the source which is table in the app. We have exemplified a scenario for you to understand it better.

Example:

If you have a gallery control which is loaded with account data from Dataverse; then you will have Textbox (Text Input) through which you can pull up a field from a record in the Dataverse which actually matches a certain criteria.

• How to Look up in Microsoft Canvas Apps
• Here, we will show you how you can Lookup in a Canvas app using the example above:
• Begin by typing “Lookup”; you will be able to see valid function in the list
• Remember that the first thing in the parameter is opening the bracket source
• You will be able to see suggestions in the list below. Here you have the select the Table/Entity from where you want to fetch the record

• Here you will see Accounts; you need to select it and Press Comma (,).
• Next you will be asked the Condition
• Here you need to mention the record you want to retrieve based on your decided criteria

• Here find the Account you want to retrieve in (Account Name) and it should be equal to <value>
• I have exemplified showing the account we are trying to fetch; Account record whose ‘Account Name‘ field has value “Coffee House”

Once you have a condition identified that the condition is satisfied; next step is to identified what field you want to retrieve as it needs to be shown in Text Input box which you have inserted.

In the example; we are trying to retrieve “Main Phone Field”

Here, the formula is complete, you can simply bring it to a close with “closing bracket”. As you can see the example below “Main phone” from matching criteria has shown up.

Final Word:

We hope the reading was helpful for you to understand how Lookup function can be used to pick a record’s value using specific criteria.

In this blog you will learn how to use form capture option to integrate external form which have been created from an outside source to Microsoft Dynamics 365. In order for you to understand this easily, we have designed a simple example below:

In order to export an external form you need to:

• Navigate to Outbound Marketing
• Then move to Internet Marketing
• Find Marketing Forms
• In the command bar Select the option of Capture Form

Once done, simply enter URL of the page having forms in it

For the process of verification in order to be successful:

Copy the form capture code and export it to the webpage

You can find the capture code in the marketing website record

In the next step you will be able to see that script has been checked; if that option is not found you will be an option to use existing script. You can also generate a new script to copy to the webpage.

Once you have entered the script you will get a message saying “tracking script is valid on re-running the verification”

From here, you can identify available forms on the webpage and select your desired form.

Next map the fields in the form with Dynamics 365 Field, and click on Save and Close

You can see that the field mapping details on the website in the marketing form record option of Rescan and Go Live

Let us Go live with the form.

Let us refresh our page which has the form, and submit the details.

You can submit the values and pending family in in the Submissions tab of the marketing form.

Later you can see the insights in the Submission as well.

In the Insights, later we can see the form submissions

Feel free to contact us anytime for more details

Data consumption plays an important role in Power Virtual Agent PVA licensing. It is important to keep a check on the data storage requirement of PVA implementations. You should know how the data is calculated because PA has special storage requirements for all of its conversations with usual configurations. You just need to keep a check of conversations of the chatbot and any other attachments which are uploaded in the conversation.

Moreover, you should also be familiar with the tables which store conversation transcripts. All the conversations are saved in the PVA bot which has conversationtranscripttable. It is for forecasting data storage that you need to be mindful of the conversation and expected conversation. However, it all depends on the complexity of the conversation.

You can refer to any existing implementation on the table and check its size; once assumed you need to validate it during the operations. Generally, a forecast is done for sizing and licensing costs of one year. It is multiplied above size per conversation with the total number of conversations which are expected in a year. Once you have the number you can calculate the forecasted size of the dataverse that you need for implementation.

In addition to the conversation transcript, you need to check the requirement in which you are expecting users to upload attachments. You also should keep a check of plugin trace logs, audit logs and data consumption. While calculating the size, you should also consider that the data retention policy is an important requirement. There is one bulk deletion job which runs every day and deletes conversations every day too. This is helpful because it optimizes storage requirements.