(air whooshes) - Coming up, we're joined
by Power Platform CVP, Charles Lamanna to take a
look at the latest updates to the Power Platform that
allow you to build intelligent, low-code, cross-platform
apps and see them in action. So Charles, thanks so much for joining us from your home today in Seattle. - Thanks. It's great to
be back on Mechanics. Thank you for having me. - Thank you. So before we get started,
just a quick primer for those that are new to Power Platform. It's a single low-code platform that makes it possible to
analyze you data with Power BI, automate workflows and
communications with Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents,
and then act on it by building new experiences
around your data and processes using Power Apps. Now it integrates seamlessly with the broader Microsoft 365 cloud and has hundreds of connectors for you to bring in your
own apps and services. So Charles, last time you were on, you introduced everyone to
the Power Platform family and really how it can help
build enterprise great apps. But what's new this time around? - Lots of new stuff, but three things I'm particularly excited about. The first is the new robotic
process automation capabilities inside of Power Automate. We have a bunch of big updates since we last were on
the show last November to really make it easier than ever to go record mouse
clicks, keyboard inputs, and Win32 application experiences and then play them back in the background. That way you can automate
tasks, even if there's no API and all you can go use
is a Legacy application or Legacy experience. We also announced the
acquisition of Softomotive, which brings an additional set of RPA capabilities to Power Automate. The second one is Power Virtual Agent. That's the newest addition
to the Power Platform. We've gone and really
improved a whole bunch of different experiences there, things like additional channel support, so you can work inside
of Teams and WhatsApp, as well as making it easier
than ever to go integrate with Azure Bot Framework or
Azure Bot Framework Composer to bring in additional codefirst skills inside the Power Virtual
Agent design surface area. And lastly, we've really
been focused about how do we go make the
Power Platform respond to our new remote work reality, which I'm sure if
top-of-mind for everybody and it's the reason I'm at home right now. And we did that kind of in two big items. The first is making it so that we have much better Teams integration
because people are spending so much more time inside of Teams. So Power Apps now has
responsive app templates that work on mobile, as well as desktops, and better understanding of the context that's hosting the application. Additionally, we brought brand new mixed reality capabilities,
so Power Apps Mobile can go visualize 3D assets in space, all without having to be an expert in MR. - So lots of really great updates. I know you're not one to shy away from some hands-on demonstrations, so can you walk us through a few examples of some of this tech in action? - Of course, and as you
know, I like to always show the demos in the context of
a real customer use case. In this case, it's a mobile
application built by GSK, which is a global healthcare company, and what this is application is focused on is something called zero
accident promotion or ZAPs. And what ZAPs do, is they make it so that the workers at GSK
can record workplace hazards, workplace safety risks,
and get them pushed back to corporate, as well
as to go take actions in response them. So if I say click through and look at all the different ZAPs in my area, I get an incredibly
different map experience. And what this map experience lets me do is visualize all the ZAPs
that are in the facilities around where I physically
am located right now. As I go click through all
these different items, we can see that geo-spacial awareness is incredibly powerful, but
I also have the standard list or gallery on the bottom
for all the different ZAPs. If I click through into one of these ZAPs, we can then see I get information about what that workplace hazard is. In this case, it's a
slippery area in a hallway where someone can fall if it's wet. I then can go rate each
of these individual ZAPs based on a risk score,
based on its severity, as well as its likelihood of happening. If you look at that risk
score, pay attention to it because it comes back later in
the demo as really important. Additionally, within GSK, the last item is that you should
always be taking actions to mitigate risks and
hazards in the workplace. And that's kind of something really core to the culture of GSK. If you see something, do something. And in this case, we can
see I've updated in action that I've taken to go
mitigate this particular risk and maybe I want to go put a
cone or something like that to prevent people from
falling when it's wet. But what's great is I
can go use the brand new mixed reality capabilities so
that I can actually visualize in 3D space things like the cone. So if I can say drag and
drop this cone around and actually decide
where I want to place it, I can do that inside of the Power App just using a completely native control without having to be an MR expert. And if I go pin it right there, I can even go record that
location in the future, so when people can go
scan and pan and see it. You can see inside my kitchen. It's slippery in front of my fridge, because maybe some ice cubes fell. So that's the mobile experience. Now let me show you what that
looks like inside of Teams. So what I can do is I can go
right into the Teams desktop application experience and I can say, "I want to manage my tasks." And this is an easy way to have
a conversational experience on top of that same back end,
behind the mobile application using Power Virtual Agent. It then comes back with a series
of ZAPs that I can manage. I can just go choose
whatever ZAP that I want to go take an action on and
actually interact with it entirely via conversations,
so I'll just choose 120. Based on that, I can
then go take an action to say, do something
like resolve, reassign, or escalate that item very
easily, all inside of Teams. And beyond Teams, Power BI
can also be used to visualize all that data being
generated from the chatbot, as well as the mobile application. In this case, I use a
decomposition tree control inside of Power BI, so I
can start to slice and dice to understand what are the main
drivers of risk and hazards in all the different locations across GSK's factory footprint. And additionally, it's not
just about viewing the data. It's also down here in the bottom right. I can take action on this data, so I can go mitigate
and resolve these issues even from corporate or from
the reporting experience. And that's what's so special
about the Power Platform. Across Power Virtual Agents,
Power BI, and Power Apps, it's all wired up into a
single low-code platform to build solutions incredibly quickly. - This is great. I loved the Power App. I love the integration with
the bot inside of Teams, but can you walk us through
how you built all of this? - Yeah, so right over here, I'm
inside of Power Apps Studio, which if it looks like
PowerPoint and Excel combined, that's on purpose. So we can see I have a
great visual experience. I can see the same mobile application I was just running on my iPhone
right inside of my browser. I also am able to go use a formula bar to go enter additional
complex expressions. Very easily integrated. And now, if I go, want to add
in additional capabilities, I'll just drill through
to that ZAP screen, and we can see the map control is missing that I was showing on
my mobile phone demo. And so, I can see all the
same data in the gallery and that type of thing. So now if I go over and
want to add a control on the left hand side, I
go to the code components or custom section that I will
go drag on the map control. And the map control combined to data, just like everything else
inside of Power Apps. In my case, I have Azure SQL databases to go connect to and that's
where the active ZAP list is actually coming from. I can wire up and connect to that directly inside the Power Apps canvas. And now, I just choose
the active ZAPs collection I've already pre-built, and we can see it binds automatically and gives me a view of all that data coming from Azure SQL in
real time on this map control without having to go worry about tons of different
types of integrations. And all of this is
filtered based on the ZAPs that are most relevant to me and where I actually
am physically located. - You talked about augmented reality. We saw the cone in your kitchen
in front of your fridge. How did you get all of
that stuff wired up? - So inside Power Apps Studio,
we have a brand new control, just easily drop on that will
allow you to mix reality. It's called the View in MR control right over here on the left-hand side. And I can just drag and drop
that right onto the form inside the mobile experience. I'll unlock the data card real quick. And this lets me go
visualize on my mobile device whatever 3D asset I want to. And what's great is I can very easily bind any type of 3D object to this object. So if I go up here and
say "Enter the data type," I'm going to go choose the
output from the gallery on this card to choose between
a cone or a chevron or a box or that type of thing. And I just have to write a
simple little expression up here to take the selected object from that, and what will happen is when
I run this on the phone now, whatever I select in that gallery, will be what actually gets
displayed in 3D space. All wired up, very
naturally and very easily inside that Power Apps mobile player. - You also mentioned this
concept of a risk score and that it's tied to a Legacy app, and that you're actually
entering data into that app. How does that work? - Yeah, in the background
behind that mobile application, there's an app that looks just like this, something that hasn't been
updated in 15, 20 years, doesn't have any APIs, doesn't make it easy to integrate with. And this type of application
is a perfect use case for the UI flows or robotic
process automation capabilities inside of Power Automate. So here inside the Power
Automate visual designer, we now can see that I have a trigger that will fire whenever a ZAP is created that has a risk score greater than eight. This is listening to the same SQL database that sits behind that Power
Apps mobile application. And this is what is used to go fire off all of my automation in the background, so when people to use a phone, they're actually going
to go trigger an event to run on a server against that old UI. And the way I've done
that is with a UI flow. You can see this UI
flow took all the inputs from the SQL database record, so I can go flow that all the way down to the UI automation. And this is how I can
easily go stitch together between API or databased eventing all the way through UI flows. So if I go drop into the entity, I can click through here and you can see all the steps that I recorded before. These are the UI
visualizations of left clicks, keyboard inputs, different texts, and I'm able to go have
these all stitched together seamlessly as part of a UI automation. And this can run unattended
on a server in the background, which is something new that we
shipped a couple months ago. And this is what makes it so
powerful to go bridge the gap between all of your new experiences and all those Legacy
applications that you have. And one of my favorite parts around this entire experience is what can happen if
something goes wrong. Debugging, troubleshooting. So if I look over here,
I'm in the debug view for Power Automate and
I can actually expand one of those runs that failed in the past. And what's great is, I
can see exactly which step is ultimately what failed, as
well as to go drill through and see the GIF of the
step that didn't work out. And what's great about this GIF is that I'm able to
visualize in my browser exactly what went wrong, and
if I open this thing up here and look at it, I can
see it as the text fields are being entered, as the keyboard inputs are being run through. I can see which text
field or which text box was responsible for the failure. And this troubleshooting
capability is what makes it easy to have tens, hundreds, or thousands of different bots running
in an unattended mode, but still be able to understand
exactly what went wrong if you have an error or a failure. And all of this tied together
across AI, API automation, and UI automation is what makes
Power Automate so special. No matter where your data is
or what your systems look like, you can go automate it
using Power Automate. - You also showed a bot that
was running in Teams earlier. How are we able to build that out? - So I built out that chatbot
using Power Virtual Agent, which is the newest addition
to the Power Platform. And we can see Power Virtual
Agent has a low code experience just like everything else. And I can also go down
here in the bottom left and use something called tracing. So when I enter text inputs, I can actually see how the chatbot's brain is responding to the inputs from the user. And this makes it very easy
to iterate, tune, and improve my chatbot over time. I can just drag and drop up around, understand exactly
which boxes were firing, and this is what makes the
Power Virtual Agent so fast and so quick to build a
chat-based experience. But it's not just about
that chat-based experience. You of course want to also bring
Power Apps inside of Teams. So we have a new capability
so it's a one-click, easy experience to go bring all your apps from inside of Power Apps to Teams. So if I just go look at
my app list I have here inside of the Power Apps maker portal, I can click on it, click on add to Teams, and get a great simple
dialogue which generates a completely filled-out app manifest, which I can just turn around
and upload inside of Teams. And this'll be converted to
be completely API-native, so you won't even have
to upload the manifest in just a month from now. And all of this is wired up
so that I can then turn around and use this application
across both a desktop Teams experience as well
as on a mobile experience. So here we can see that Power
App for crisis communication to go respond to COVID-19
crisis inside of our company. I can drag and expand the resolution or the size of my Teams desktop client and it just reflows in real time. It's been one of the top
requests from our customers for Power Apps inside of Teams. But it's not just about what you can do on the desktop, of course. Like I said, you can also go
do this on a mobile device. So if I go over to my mobile player, we can see that we have a
great little experience, where I can have basically
crisis communications application there as well, and I can drill in and see all the great functionality and a complete responsive
reflow-based view on my mobile device. So now you can build Power Apps that target Teams as a destination, just like you would've done
for web or mobile in the past. And it just works and feels very native inside that remote work environment. - These are going to be
really excellent updates, especially for delivering feature-rich, intelligent low code, cross-platform apps. Now, if someone watching at home is new to the Power Platform, where can they go to get
started and learn more? - So personally, I like to learn by doing, so what I recommend is
roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. And just by signing up in the morning, you could have your first
application in the afternoon, so there's two places to go learn more. The first is go aka.ms/lowcode. That's a great place to go
sign up and get started. And the second is check out
the Power Platform community. There's over a million members
who are incredibly engaged, incredibly supportive and
can help you on your journey. And you can get there by going to aka.ms/power-users. Go to those two URLs, check it out. Build your first app. It shouldn't take very long. - Good stuff. Thanks for joining us
today from home, Charles. And of course, we're going
to keep following the updates to the Power Platform. And by the way, if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe
to Microsoft Mechanics. That's all the time we have for this show. Thanks for watching. We'll see ya next time. (air whooshes) (electronic music)
