Power Platform Fundamentals PL-900 Exam Cram by Carl Cookson and Joe Griffin

so morning everyone or good afternoon or wherever you are in the world so yeah so thanks for coming along today to our exam cram uh session for the pl 900 power platform fundamentals exam uh so just for awareness this session is being recorded it will be made available on youtube afterwards and obviously the usual sort of um you know by attending today you can send to your video being recorded and all that good stuff so assuming you're fine with that if not feel free to turn off your camera now um okay next slide please carl okay so we've got quite a sort of um a big agenda for this morning uh with a lot of content to get through so we're not going to really sort of beat around the bush too much um so we're going to look at um first of all giving a bit of an introduction to the power platform um getting you equipped so that you can actually set up a trial because a lot of what you need to learn as part of the power platform you only really do when you've got that hands-on sort of experience we'll look at the business value of the power platform what it can deliver for organizations if we're using it effectively the core components within that so things like microsoft dataverse ai builder things like that then we're going to jump into after a small break some of the core applications so power bi how we can use power bi to create sort of these really quite um amazing business intelligence tools power apps for our low code business applications power automate so we can automate our important steps as a business uh power virtual agent when we need sort of virtual chat bots that again is fully automated without the human involved and then we'll finish off with a bit of a q a um at the end in case anyone has got any questions um and as i say two breaks we can hopefully try and just squeeze in just to just basically just get um you know rehydrated comfort and all that sort of stuff okay next slide please call so um yeah so your session leads for today so hi my name is stuart griffin i am a um director and principal consultant of a small microsoft gold partner here in the uk solar cloud solutions um i get involved quite a lot on the technical side of the power platform and also um things such as dynamics 365 and azure and things like that uh blog quite a bit about exams more generally um quite a big badge hoarder as you can see on there it's quite addictive actually once you get started um that's what i find anyway and i'm more than happy to sort of connect with any of you uh on twitter and linkedin after the day just feel free to reach out to me i can uh give you any helps or tips so you can make the most success out of your p o 900 learning so to you carl hi uh yeah and i'm kyle cookson so i'm probably at the opposite scale about organizations i work for amanda who's one of the larger microsoft partners across the world um i used to be a developer and i pride myself that i'm not a developer anymore but i do quite a lot of blogging on uh subjects xrm toolbox mainly and other things of interest to me um definitely not i don't really mind what food i eat as long as you can see by my waistline um and don't have as many badges as as joe either but when i was doing this slide i realized i do have quite a lot um and like um joe was saying is very addictive um you can again reach out to me about this or any other subject that you want to talk to me on linkedin or twitter those are the handles there so we are there's a few things that we we've got to remember today um don't forget um all these exams that we're going to do we can't give you um direct access to the content of the exams no one is going to give you that know what even if they say they're going to give you that it's not nowhere near that than they and if they are they're breaking ndas um that they are going to be going to be very short-lived those exam dumps and etc don't ask us about those we're not going to get anywhere uh on that today um if we're not going to respond even to those questions today um we are um we are going to be just you know if you want to discuss questions about the exam we have to do it in a very neutral and very non-specific way rather than actual exams that are going to be questions from the exam and do remember that all your exams are random as well so um it's it's making sure that you're you've got enough uh of a tool set to go into these exams with the confidence um like i was saying these questions that you'll get will be random and we are providing the content from our experience from um our microsoft certified training information that is available and any other things that we're going along our way that we think is covered by the skills outline and this is the key to for you today to make sure that you understand and if you saw from the agenda those those levels of the skills outline are what are what each of the core topics are going to be today um please be kind and courteous and considerate in the chat but please ask us questions so raise your hand or ask a question in chat and one of us whoever is not presenting will be monitoring that um and use that skills outline like i've already said make sure that you you're really addressing your um whole um whole experience of these exams and and learning around that skills outline because those are the things that are gonna really drive what's in those exam and they change so they've got a recent update in march 2021 and a lot of that is terminology with that database change with the tables entities to tables etcetera um but there will be content changes so make sure you're well well averse on those what's in that latest skills outline before you take the exam um but it's just to start us off and to make sure that we're all over able to um crack on and put this into practice and to learn and to get hands dirty in in these things we're going to step through setting up a power platform trial and the essential reason for this is these exams are meant to show that you have a experience and practice in doing this the concepts that they're testing so you can create a power app you can create a model driven app you can create a virtual agent or whatever else it is and you know where these things are in the applications you know the urls to go to you know the considerations you have to take um so it's essential that you get your hands dirty here and what we're saying is is practice does make perfect joe and i have been doing this for quite a few years but to start your journey you need to make sure you take the time and consideration and get your hands dirty and in an environment that you can play with um because you want to just like jordan here you know he doesn't get as good as he was with just practicing half an hour every every month he he practices and practices and practices all the time and making sure that he gets it right and this is what we're saying to you to make sure that you're um and you're getting the right sort of hands-on experience in these things and this last one i love and the there is a link this the quote is from henry ford um so you are going to make mistakes um so make sure that you're learning from those mistakes but do it in an environment that is not your works production environment is in an environment that doesn't really matter and that's why trials are are great they give you a separation from that work account so whichever company you work for the trial will be nothing to do with them which means that you have more freedom more um and certainly less restrictions that you would have if you're in your work tenant rightly so so if you want to post all your uh work information to twitter i'm hoping that your work account wouldn't allow you to do that but your trial will um so you can get hands dirty on those things if you want to be able to make sure that you're um you've got all the bells and whistles like with power virtual agents etcetera and you're not worried about the cost um then get a trial and have a play with it and and use it for that month that you get and you can add email and teams to these accounts to allow you to experiment and understand those environments as well um but to start all this and i'm going to go through through it now we just start with it with an incognito or in private mode um and i'm just going to drag over a window so um the other thing that is is a good idea and it's great i'm using edge here but you've got the multiple profiles so what i tend to do and you'll see that i've got quite a few i've got my work accounts i've got my mvp accounts i've got my blogging accounts etc they're all different um profiles so what i'm going to do is just add a new one and this is basically blank this is a new environment for me and it's the same as if you did an incognito or in private but it allows me to save my password it allows me to do lots of different things with it and all i'm going to do is work walk through the process so all i'm going to go to is the trials.dynamics.com and down here there's this little uh sign up here link um and we're going to use that one we're not going to bother with any of these bits because we we're we're we're a bit better than that um i know then we're going to do the no continue signing up because we we're not uh a partner or a microsoft employee um but i do need to give them a proper email address this is my personal email address and you can see that he says that i've already got an account um but um and do i want to use that one and i i don't because that's already been bombarded with demos and trials and etcetera so i'm going to use set up my account and i'm gonna give myself a name um and give myself a phone number please don't spam me um and i need to do the clock call for uh no he doesn't oh why is that not working joe um do you do four four one two three six g there as well four four zero try that shouldn't need it no it's not letting me now yeah but that's the first turtle isn't this is working this thing when i did it changed it overnight isn't it what's the case do i try my number i get spamming my home the minute no that's not even worse let me just change the uh that's what i did wrong ah yeah try now okay yeah this company name is used as a label so if you you don't have to have your real company name at this point you can just have in anything so i'm just gonna do that so and we've only got one employee in this and i need to put a last name in um and then it's gonna basically send asked me to send me make sure that i know who i am so it's gonna send me a little text which you'll i'll hopefully get my signal is not so there you go nine three very fine and then this is where we we are starting to get um into some personalization so we can start [Music] um um personalizing it and this is what we're going to log in as this this is but it starts with things the bits that you need to remember so i've started to create this a new environment that's got this pre the postfix of on microsoft.com um but this is the label that we're going to use and carry on with and then i'm just going to create the admin account so these definitely are the bits that you need to remember um you know use a um an email uh etc that you need to log it right down and a password that you can lock right down and then we just hit sign up so say we've got to a point now where we've got a customized environment for me um it's allowing me to get to that point where i've got um an environment it's going to sign me in and because i'm using the profiles i can save that password now so i don't have to remember it even and i've now got um my um username i'm just going to copy that in case i forget it um but then it gets started now and we're going into the power platform admin center so this is one of the urls that you'll use quite a lot at in.powerplatform.com but on this right hand side it's now prompted me for a new environment so i'm going to create a new one and i'm going to keep it on that and we can then create a database in that so we need to basically create a trial and then we choose url you can see the prefix here this will be different depending on which region you're in but the uk region is 11. i can um add um change the currency here and i can just deploy sample apps and data if i want to um but i'm not really i don't really need to do that if you just want to start from scratch it depends on what your well if you're learning you might just want to deploy everything but freeze et cetera now we can just do that um with with nothing so we get the out of the box experience the security group here as well if you if you are linking it to your work environment you can restrict the users of a security group within the active domain area to to access this environment so that you can have a new environment that only certain people can see you might have a finance environment versus a sales environment et cetera or your internal i.t environments etc so useful there but not nearly needed for us today um and that's about it really on this i'm preparing my instance now so now i've got a a dataverse environment that i can then go and use the full capabilities of uh powerapps power automate virtual agents etc um and readily use that throughout um your truck testing and trialing it only lasts 30 days so if you do want to um continue with your trials you have to take out a new one you can get that extended but typically it doesn't really need it i would suggest that you learn on an environment and decide which bits of that environment you want to take with you and create solutions etc to bringing those which will will stand you in good stead for for moving forward in your developments anyway but it allows you to swap between environments um and it gives you that um knowledge and understanding of solutioning and building up those those things because it's an essential skill when you're building those things up so now i'm ready i'm ready i'm ready to go i've got my sir sapd i'm 12. i've got that wrong actually 21. um and you can see that um if i now go to another key url powerapps.com i should be logged in um i'm just going to skip the ads the other part of this that is essential is that you choose the right environment this default one did never use never put anything in there and that goes for anything you're doing it's used for sharepoint apps and bits and pieces but um if you're starting from scratch then just use the one that you created because there isn't going to be a database against this it's going to be very difficult to move things in and out of so i'm going to swap to the cert saturday 12 you can tell i've got a little warning that i've got 29 days left but you can then see that on the tables i've got lots of tables which is the default data model for a power apps a database environment and then i can then go and create or add new tables etc and we'll go through that when we're going through dataverse okay so that is your your 30 day trial it's not linked to anything i've done before so all of this is going to be um no data is found so there's no active i can change we can go we'll go from this all that all later but there's no data in this environment there's nothing so nice and empty nice and clean nice and fresh start for you to do whatever you want to do in it and you've got no restrictions i can go and create chat box and ai builders etc and we'll go through that as we're progressing today but we should now all be at a point where we've got that trial environment and it is essential to get to that place where you're hands on with the environment and making sure that you're um i need to get back to my slides um making sure that you you've got um essentially um enough information to to drive your training and your testing there is another small um what i do here um there's a community plan um if you wish you can sign up for and i'll find the link and stick it in um which is um it is a database environment and it is meant to be for um people learning and involving themselves within um the learning etc the things there are more restrictions on those like there's those things that still will have a trial on them like pva etc um but it is a never-ending trial um the only caveat to that is that you can't get things in and out of that one as easy so you need to you know you're only on your own in that environment you can't it can't invite a friend in this trials.dynamics.com you've got 25 licenses so you could invite all your work colleagues in to have a look etc and test it etc you can set up those all those configurations you can to go further with both of those to give yourself set up an e5 or an e3 microsoft office trial so you can have email and teams and create trials for all of those things and trials.dynamics.com is your source for all of that um right so joe over to you i think um which is describing the business value yep thank you very much carl yep so just give me a second while i get get sharing there's a question in the chat just while i'm doing oh okay i'm not sure i understand that one um let me find my environment again i think it's when you set up the trials there's a few different options isn't the car yeah sorry um let me find it which um when you go to uh you'll get this little prompt here yeah so on that screen there uh soraya um let me go through it again there's a link down here which is sign up here are you signing up on behalf of a customer or using for trial or development purposes sign up here because all of these other ones are pre-built pre-defined experiences if you just want something to look around with there's a little link further down from your picture which is sign up here and then we skip this one by doing no continue signing up because we're not a partner or employee um there are uh links um chris huntington has done a good video of going through this and i'll put that i'll find those and put them in the chat as well um i think there has been several um different version versions ryan yeah chris's videos um i think it's still broadly the same in terms of the steps yeah but yeah the the the consideration is nowadays you're getting into this after you've configured and done that first page this page and and gone through this process you get thrown into this area which is creating your new environment and you can set you can either try do the bull dynamics 365 which is that trial subscription box which is dynamics 365 sales service field service etc or if you just want a trial um then you can select that little trial one as well which will be a cleaner environment effectively okay um but the session is also being recorded as well so um just watch out on youtube after the fact then obviously you'll be able to watch carl back doing the steps and any any problems from there feel free to give us a shout we can help you help you through it if you need it okay so we're going to move on now and we'll look at basically the first area of the exam so the exam is always structured around what we sort of term these skills measured and these basically are just the topics which you need to demonstrate sort of knowledge of in order to be uh hopefully get a passing grade on the exam so the first topic contains quite a few different skills that microsoft looking to validate your knowledge on first of all we just want to make sure microsoft want to make sure that um you're able to effectively describe the value of using the various different power platform services and that can be demonstrated by sort of doing some of the core tasks on here in terms of you know creating the flowing power automate which we'll see later on building solutions um things like that um you then need to also demonstrate okay how can you actually extend out an ex you know an existing business solution by using the power platform so it could be organizations using things like dynamics 365 um using you know microsoft teams microsoft azure and things like that so you need to be able to sort of describe at a high level how you can sort of incorporate the power platform alongside those because really what we want to be doing you know the power platform is really great at being able to build us these business solutions but sometimes we need to borrow from other areas on the sort of the microsoft stack and this is one of the um the areas that potentially you can do quite a lot potentially with you know it's not just a case you have to stick solely in power platform use what you've got in the wider stack to be able to help you along and then finally you need to have a good awareness in terms of okay from an administration security standpoint okay how does the power platform actually work so you know as an example how do we um you know um implement effective security you know how do we log in as users you know how do environments work how do we manage our apps and users how do we make sure that we avoid the situation the car referenced earlier where you may accidentally tweet out your entire client list to twitter by accident um using data loss prevention policies we can hopefully mitigate against that against that and ultimately as well making sure that we're building a platform that supports privacy and and most importantly as well building solutions on top of it which are ultimately accessible accessibility is really a key thing that we need to be driving towards with these solutions making sure that as many um that we're catering to you know as many different users as possible um and using the tools that we've got in the power platform to get us there so these are some of the things we're going to look at so i've got some slides to get through first then we'll jump into the makeup also look at some of these concepts a bit more detail so the power platform then so um what is it okay we've we've talked about um so far hopefully some of you may already have a bit of awareness of what it is but it's worth just restating it in very sort of clear terms you know um and effectively what we've got here is a sort of a low code business application platform that we can use um to build out various different solutions targeting different areas or different functions of our business you know so whether we want to have um you know a really nice beautiful dashboard for our users um that can sort of show up um you know core business data and allow us to unlock insights with our data you know we've got tools there within power bi to have that really sort of effective business analytics tool you know we can have reports we can have dashboards we can share that out to other users we can track important metrics for our business all of that and more is what we've got within power bi now the power bi dashboard is only going to be effective if you've got good data going into there and ideally we need a mechanism for people to actually enter data and to sort of work with the our core business data um you know each day this is where power apps come into the it comes into the equation so you can sort of think of them maybe as sort of like a uh sort of like a next generation you know cloud first sort of replacement for things like access for example um you know they're really sort of designed to be able to build those sort of rapid applications um which can even sit on top of microsoft dataverse which will go into a bit more detail in a little while or indeed connect to any other data source that your business may be working with you know so if it is the case that you're working with um you know um other microsoft tools maybe sharepoint maybe sql server it could be that you're working with the party products such as salesforce you're working with sap or oracle powerapps can support that and you can effectively bring the data in and have your core application system in powerapps instead um and really in terms of um from a development standpoint um it's sort of um it's sort of often touted as being sort of equivalent sort of building a sort of a powerpoint slide deck i mean when you get into it this you know you can potentially do some quite simple but quite um um sort of amazing things really uh but ultimately what you've got around this is a formula language which you refer to as um powerfx which allows you to build out these sort of you know formulas that can do things in your app and they're very similar to excel based formulas so you know if you are a bit handy at the moment you know working with excel you built a really good spreadsheet with lots of different formulas in there there's a really good chance that if you look at powerapps you'll be able to hopefully translate some of that across in an easy way now moving on now so a key concern for any business is obviously automation where we can you know we don't want people to be sort of spending time on you know processes that take that you know on you know really sort of um step-by-step processes that take hours each time to sort of complete if from a system standpoint we can automate that we can hopefully free people's time up to do um to do better things with the time in simple terms so to help us in that objective we've got power automate to be able to allow us to create these sort of workflows between our different systems so ever we need to have a an approval workflow whether we need to trigger specific actions in other systems based on when a record is updated or created in let's say data versus an example you know power automate is going to allow you to sort of do that um and using power automate you can build these sort of um cloud-based flows that can sort of execute your logic um and the recent addition as well there's something called um power power automate desktop which lets you build what um robotic process automation or rpa flows so this is where you sit down at a computer and you you sort of record your steps one by one you know so go into this application copy this value on here email this person you can record all of that and then either sort of run that in a sort of an attended mode or even unattended so again hopefully taking what may be a particularly complicated process and fully automating that so the people's time of freedom for more um important and useful things hopefully um now moving on now so when um you're probably all familiar with experience when you go into a website you typically have let's say a chat bot on there um or you know like a little thing at the bottom where you can maybe speak to a support agent or get some help with a particular product you know these are really great tools that we can use um you know to hopefully drive that engagement with our customers but sometimes it can be um you know possible to have somebody sat there 24 7 monitoring that you know sometimes we might want to um you know automate steps of that maybe we want to provide it so that um you know only if you know we can't get a um you know a bot to sort of resolve it for us that'll you know that's when we then pass it across to somebody who can then look at it and take it forward so really power virtual agents helps sort of meet this requirement by giving us these intelligent chat bots that we can very easily incorporate as part of our existing website or within our um within our internal systems such as microsoft teams as well so you know it allows us to build out these workflows as sort of a drag and drop interface that we can use to sort of build that out uh really sort of uh reduces the complexity around building out these sort of tools and you can then incorporate it very neatly across the across the power platform now underpinning all of these tools are three things which all of them sort of use to sort of some extent uh more so than others in some cases the first is data connectors and we've already touched upon this already in terms of you know all of these tools in here uh not just power apps but you know power bi power automate and power virtual agents as well they all support the type of connectivity that we already spoke about so whether you're working with first party microsoft applications or indeed third-party systems there's a really good chance there's going to be connectors available there that can help you sort of bridge the gap there and if you can't necessarily do that then you've got the ability you know as potentially as a developer to go in there and extend that out yourself bring your own connectors into the platform so so that you know realistically you can connect to any potential system that you want to work with um but moving on now um so for situations where you need to have sort of um you want to use sort of off the shelf ai models to sort of achieve common tasks so a good example could be okay you want um an ai to basically process um documents invoices that are coming into your business you want to scan those um each time extract out the core details and then save that into your dataverse database um you've got models of an ai build that you can consume very easily to be able to sort of meet those core requirements and there's a whole range of different models that are available that you can sort of experiment with further you can sort of train it against your own data to make sure that you're getting the the results that you sort of hope as part of that um and ultimately again around that try and maybe take out some of the manual uh steps that may be involved um you know when doing you know tasks such as you know processing invoices and things like that um and then you know okay so and finally then so if um if indeed that you've not got an existing database um that you're working with and you want to actually bring your data you know fully into the power platform then the final thing that we can use is something called microsoft dataverse um so this was previously um known as common data service and may still be referred to that both in terms of documentation and perhaps even for the exam itself just keep that in mind but the database is basically just a managed database in the power platform that we can use to model out our business data so we can create our various different you know business objects our data the data tables that we're storing in there we can add on our different columns we can create views for our data um you know we can add on business rules to sort of make sure that data is being entered correctly we can there's a whole host of features that we can sort of use there and really again we don't necessarily need to um need to sort of uh get a proper sort of database developer involved in order to basically build that out and so pranav's got a great question in the chat so what is a database so a database is what we generally describe as something that can um you know hold data so um typically there's many different types of databases available um the most typical one um that you will probably come across is what we call a a sql database and that is where you have sort of defined um tables of data within there so an example that carl showed earlier we saw in his instance he's got tables in there called account contact etc things like that so these are basically tables are in effect sort of our business objects that we work with you know they describe a particular category of data that we're most interested in capturing and ultimately we can use a database to be able to bring this the data that we want to store together into a sort of a managed fashion so that we're not using excel spreadsheets as an example to record record and store that data and then around that we can bolt on whatever logic that we want uh to be able to um work with our data you know on it on a day-to-day basis incorporate it into other applications such as powerapps or power automate um and things like that so that's answered your question there okay let's so we've touched upon some of this already uh but let's let's dive in and look at a little bit more detail around the different um solutions in the power platform so powerapps so this is all about building these bespoke business applications that we can consume not only from our web browser but also from our mobile and tablet apps as well so when we're building power apps we can we typically uh are focused on um building two kinds of power apps the first is what we call sort of a canvas app and these are for situations where we've got these sort of very sort of task focused based um applications that we need to do you know so maybe we need to have an app so that agents can go out into the field you know and as part of home visits they can record different data points about that and then feed that back into the into the office that'll be a really great candidate for a canvas powerapp um the other kind of power-up that you've got available is something called model driven powerapps uh and these are for um more for situations where you've got these data driven um applications that integrate very uh closely alongside microsoft dataverse so it could be in the scenario that i mentioned a few minutes ago you could have a canvas app for the field agents to go out into the field and then for the back office staff back at the home base they could have a model driven app that lets them view that data and manage it in a much more formal way effectively the canvas app typically has a a more extended development cycle in terms of um and you've got a lot more control over the look and feel of the application so you can see in this example down here we can add on pictures we can do titles we can change colors a canvas that will let us do all that model driven apps by comparison have a much more um structure around them there's generally a a general um look and feel that you can modify to a certain extent but they generally fit within a um a defined structure that we can sort of tailor around to a limited extent um and ultimately through both of these application types our model driven apps our canvas apps we can consume these across both web and mobile um so even model driven apps can be worked with from the mobile if you wanted to we can embed these alongside other applications in within the power platform or indeed other systems as well so regardless of the type of application that we want to build out we've hopefully got something here um you know with powerapps that we can hopefully um leverage so power automate then um so as we mentioned already this is all around automation integration getting your business processes mapped out fully uh within the power platform so that you're not having to you know do things manually um you know when you do things manually as we mentioned already it takes time you know it's tedious um and you know um the thing i like to say is that you know um machines are perfect in their very nature um humans are imperfect um you know we're all they're always going to be prone to sort of human error as part of doing any sort of process so if we can map that out correctly get a machine to do that then hopefully we can reduce the risk of maybe something going wrong perhaps so regardless of the type of automations that you want to perform whether it's a simple okay just send me an email when i get a new lead into my business so i can obviously follow that up as a customer or if you've got really sort of advanced scenarios that maybe you know traditionally you might need to you know write out using code using c sharp or python or something like that then potentially power ultimate can meet that requirement so you've got various constructs in the tool that you can use to help you build out the these um excuse me these advanced scenarios so branches loops and things like that we can trigger our flows based on specific actions so in this case we can see on the screenshot when we get a brand new email through that'll be what triggers that out we can change this to different types so when a new record's created in a system when any you know um you know we can change it so that um it runs on a schedule so you know once at midnight run this year batch process for us um and ultimately we can loop in as part loop in the um the mobile application that we've got for power automate so that we can um streamline our approval flow so effectively you know when a flow runs we can get a notification through to a phone here and this will then let me approve it straight on there and then we can then process process additional logic from there so regardless of the type of existing automation tools that you've got in place it could be using something like maybe biz talk or something like that or you know or if you're just starting out for the first time you can ultimately use power automate um to hopefully help you on your way um and via the tools and the capabilities that we've got on there you don't necessarily have to restrict yourself to cloud-based systems as well so if you've got legacy on-premise business systems that you want to use and leverage then you can potentially take advantage of those as well and bring them into power automate so power bi so this is all around as i mentioned already business intelligence getting the core insights from your data and again regardless of where your data is coming from you can bring it together into a consolidated view and just get that single you know we talk a lot about having you know a single customer view as a business and this is what power bi will let us sort of do so regardless of what type of view or what type of insights we're looking to generate for our business hopefully we can use power bi to support that objective so if we're looking for more sort of ad hoc analysis whether we want to have sort of natural language um you know a capability so we can literally just type out the data that we want to see power bi is going to support that and we get these really nice looking interactive reports and dashboards that we can consume across both web and mobile to get us to what we need you know and it all looks really nice it's all really quite intuitive um and ultimately if we wanted to bring in um you know power apps as part of this as well we can embed a power apps into our dashboard you know literally as people are working with the app the data will just sort of update behind the scenes um and ultimately you know embed it across other applications in the microsoft stack so maybe have it so that we've got a dashboard or report in our model driven powerapp have a report that's embedded in microsoft teams we've got various options on there that we can use to bring that together power bi is always a really great tool and obviously and generates quite a lot of excitement when people use it which is always um really nice to see so chat bots then so yeah so we talked already about the scenario where you may want to consider using these so this is around um you know taking away the dependence on a subject matter expert um and um you're bringing it into the sort of the power platform a bit more um so really um what you want to try and do here again is reduce that reliance on let's say an individual somebody sitting at the other end of a website answering questions from a customer if we can try and automate some of this process you know get customers the information they need but also um make sure we're delivering a great experience as part of that you know you know all the better really and ultimately you know as as when working with the power platform we can do this without needing to rely on data scientists or developers and have to go through an extended development cycle to bring that out so we enable the virtual agent we can integrate that across different services across our website add it into our internal systems if we want to and as people are sort of working through the various different questions that we define on there we can then trigger logic based on specific answers that are um that um that are sort of been um provided by our customers and ultimately as well we've got tools within this to be able to sort of just you know keep an eye on this because you know we want to just make sure that okay people aren't getting frustrated by the bots we want to make sure that people are getting ultimately the information that they need so we've got some really great metrics and analytics within the tool that we can use to be able to understand all of that and get to a really good um get to a really good point with um you know with our chat bots and things so dataverse then so yeah this is all about having this managed database as i mentioned already really just allowing us to jump start our development so instead of you know as i say getting a developer involved to build out a database from scratch and defining all the business logic and models and things like that we can take away that dependency and give us a framework that allows us to very easily and quickly extend this out if we needed to so really you can extend very easily we can pull data into as part of a model driven app integrate this across different apps and services you know we can use data first with systems if we wanted to um you know just have that as our managed database there and then just connect to it via you know apis and things like that and then also alongside that we've got these the seamless integration across the um across the sort of um wider microsoft stack so you so you'll often hear about uh dynamics 365 um being discussed in the context of of uh microsoft database so just sort of explain that effectively dynamics 365 uses microsoft dataverse underneath the hud to store the data so when you're using uh dynamics 365 sales customer service and stuff like that you're essentially using the power platform dataverse database underneath the hud as well uh you know typically from a dynamics 365 standpoint the power platform will be our first port of call when we're looking at custom extensions or things or things like that um they want to work outside the system so we've got a question in the chat from paul is dataverse a database or a connector to databases it is a database it is a it is a managed database that microsoft provided to you effectively from a technical standpoint behind the scenes is a sql database it's a sql server database but effectively microsoft has given us the the framework and um the capability to basically just build our tables build our columns on top of that so that we don't have to write a bunch of codes you know sql scripts to basically create that each time i hope that answers your question paul so i mentioned already about the data connectors um so these allow us to connect to multiple different services and things like that um we can use these across powerapps and power automate if we are using some aspects of um azure as part of our solution then we can also um we can also leverage logic apps as well um those are more for enterprise type scenarios where we want to um where maybe we've got an existing power to make flow that we want to formalize and we want to extend out even further out into azure and as we've mentioned already um if we find that we've not got a custom connector available that sort of does the job then we can get potentially a developer involved to build out a custom api that we can use um this will allow us to you know extend out to publicly available apis custom apis if we wanted to um so can you spare me two seconds please so joe's away um try and describe dataverse we are going to go into this a bit later um the idea of dataverse is extrapolating and taking away all the administrative and um costly um infrastructure that you would need to create your own sql database that could be expandable and connectable from across the world so you imagine if you had a a a database that is um can be connected to from any region and from any part of the globe and you need to make ensure that it's got the right level of interaction and security and all those good things that you would need to do microsoft is packaging all that up for you and provided you an interface to allow you to do that easily and create your own applications without worrying about any of that um yeah and it does cost a little bit more than than it would do long term but you know there's no initial cost and you're just paying for whatever you use and the licensing around that so it is a very much a um a starter platform and an enterprise platform and anything in between um which has you know we use it i use it every day across a lots of enterprise large banks and large charities etc thousands and thousands of users and it just doesn't worry about it and microsoft worries about it rather than you thanks for covering that off car apologies for that just have to go talk some out um that was fun okay um yeah so we talked about custom connectors yes so um as i said already if you if you find that there's a particular system that the power platform can't work with then it's very easy for us to build these custom connectors you know we typically we may want to get a developer involved to help with that um so i'm just going to mute uh just uh because getting some feedback then yeah thanks carl um so yeah so typically you may want to use custom connectors um to sort of achieve that and you would typically maybe get a developer involved um but we can actually go into the uh into the application we can build out our custom connectors ourself or if we've got an existing definition or postman collection that we want to use um then we can sort of leverage that instead so typically there will be two different types of connectors available to us the first will be sort of our tabular data connectors this is where we're connecting to let's say microsoft dataverse we're connecting to sql server uh we're connecting to maybe sharepoint things like that so this is where the data will be structured as a sort of table in terms it will have sort of fixed different columns and things like that that we can sort of refer to um so and when we return that back uh generally the format of that will always be the same it will be in that structured sort of format the second type is sort of function based data this is where one's where we maybe we use functions to interact with the data source so maybe we need to do a post we need to do a get request sort of you know retrieve and update data from a system so typically we may not be able to bring in these type of connectors into our let's say power up for example because there's no way in which we can sort of represent that data in a tabular format um so generally as i say just keep in mind the different types of connectors and the different scenarios that they're more more sort of catered for really now connector effectively just describes a system that we want to connect to but ultimately we need in most cases we need to provide um authentication details into that we need to make sure that we have established a connection to that we've secured that and then from that we can then typically have two different types operations that we can use from that connector trigger as you mentioned already that will be what effectively kicks off let's say a power to make flow as an example so when a record is created when it's updated when it's deleted you know these are sort of typical types of trigger actions that you may want to perform uh depending on the system type it could be there could be others as well and then the next type you have from there are actions so that's where you've got specific um steps that you want to do in that target system you know based off a trigger action or based off from a subsequent action as well and these will almost always involve some kind of interaction with data in the source system um you know as part of that so um i think just keeping uh in most cases you'll generally find that most of the standard connectors that are available always have at least one trigger or um and you know multiple actions around that it really does vary on a connected by connected basis um and obviously with any restrictions that system has got around that so pranav yeah so a trigger is um effectively a prompt so it says when something that will then tell a flow to basically start um so as an example if we were using the dataverse connector i could have a trigger when a record is created that will then start off the flow the flow will effectively listen for that event to happen and then it will start off and execute its logic when it happens action will be a specific step that we want to perform into that system um so that will be create a record update record things like that i hope that answers your question there uh and then finally you know in terms of the options we've got a very high sort of level um we've got the ability to be able to do um you know manage our compliance and our privacy so data loss prevention policies we can use to really make sure that um you know we're not putting the business at risk you know because you can do quite a lot with a lot of these tools they're all about unlocking innovation and hopefully getting the organization working a bit smarter but ultimately we do need to balance that with some you know with some level um level-headed thinking you know we want to avoid situations where we're potentially embarrassing ourselves or you know potentially causing a risk to our customers so data's prevention policies allow us to implement a um you know provide a framework to you know stop stop it so that you know a certain connector is being used um you know we can make sure that ultimately we're crafting sensible uh policies that we can um destroy that right balance as i mentioned already and use and we can we'll take a quick look at data loss prevention policies and environments in a few minutes just to see what you can do there um so microsoft as an organization um has commitments to customers around uh compliance and data privacy um you know our probably all of the cloud vendors they're probably um you know very much a leader in terms of the the various different regulatory compliance conformances standards that they sort of work to data protection is a key aspect of that um and also um if you're working in um in europe as well gdpr compliance as well and so the platform is very much built with these considerations in mind and very much baked in as part of the um the core functionality that we've got available to us you know so hopefully we can reduce some headaches there by being sort of assured from the outset that you know we're not going to be caught out at all as i mentioned already accessibility you know is key and one of the major benefits that we've got as part of the power platform you know so we really want to be driving that inclusivity in terms of the solutions that we build out using the tools that we've got around um in the power platform to help us with that so you know if for example you know we've got um you know individuals in our organizations who maybe have you know vision or hearing impairments things like that we can use um you know a canvas app to basically help make that more accessible to them you know we can provide you know accessibility labels to that which will support screen readers um you know and we can also get recommendations as well so as we're building out our app as well you know microsoft will sort of you know review that and give us suggestions on how we can improve our app to make it more accessible to users you know so again all this together we've hopefully got you know a really expansive platform that can help us along uh in quite a lot of ways so at this point then just want to give you just a quick demo on um environments working with environments working with the admin center specifically and also on how we can use data loss prevention policies as well so just going to minimize my slides for a second um so you can see hopefully see on here that i'm in the power platform admin center so if you recall from earlier kyle set up the trial and then from there he set up his environment on here so ultimately in the power platform we can have multiple different environments these will typically be tag a microsoft database database but we don't have to necessarily um you know adhere to that um environments effectively just provide us um that separation so you know if we're moving from you know development into testing into production we can ultimately make sure that we're not sort of mixing the water there and we've got some sort of structure as we're deploying things out in our particular in our particular environment and things like that from a management standpoint there's various different tasks that we can perform at the environment level i can just go into settings and i can see i've got a whole range of different options that will appear around being able to customize um you know email settings integrations enabling sort of feature level types things on there um because this is a database environment i've got the ability being able to install additional applications i can take backups i can copy and reset my instance at any particular point i've got i've got all of the tools that i would um reasonably expect to have to make sure i can manage this environment in an effective way moving on from here on the left we can see we've got the ability to be able to view various different analytics data for our particular environment so i can see down here that under data verse i can i can actually some interesting statistics about who's actually using this particular environment um we can see that okay what entities are being used the most for this particular environment i can maybe change the filter so maybe just want to switch it to my pl 100 environment over here and we can see we get different data that's sort of shown shown over there which is really great we've also got different reports that cover power automate and power apps as well so again this is all around um making sure that we're monitoring our compliance making sure things are working ultimately um and particularly from a usage standpoint as well for some of these tools we need to just make sure that um we're not potentially going to be um caught out by any overage or things like that you know we can go in here we can view different details and stuff if i just change the filter on this one to pr 900 we should see some flows in here yep so we can see a couple of different flows that are set up in here and some data and then finally got the same for powerapps as well capacity is an important consideration for any sort of environment so it we can go in and view our total capacity across different environments so typically this will be an important consideration if you're working with microsoft dataverse ultimately we have set capacity around our size of our database the size of the files that we store in there and any log data that's associated to that so we can see at the tenant level in this case you can see i'm consuming around 8.47 gigabytes of my total storage across there and i can use this page on here to be able to manage that i can get a bit more of a specific view across my different environments if i wanted to i can see how microsoft teams is impacting our capacity as well and also on whether people are actually using trial environments to sort of consume capacity as well data integration down here gives us some options around um the different sort of uh tools that we can connect into so we can sort of if we're working with um things such as data flows and things like that we can sort of see some detail down there and then data policies is where we would go to actually set up our dlp policies so let's just go through now and just set up just a very basic dlp policy so i'll just call this pl 900 test uh so after giving it a name we can then sort of define in terms of the all the various different connectors that we want to uh potentially work with so we can define what our business non-business and block connectors um so effectively if i want if i as an organization wants to decide okay well maybe i don't want people as an example um using twitter at all across the organization i can just mark this as blocked across the organization we can see it goes across into here i can click on the next button i can set the exclusion policy so all environments multiple environments or indeed just a specific environment and in this case i just want to block it for a particular pr 900 environment that we that we want to um that we want to use on there so add that onto there give it a quick review and now what i've effectively done there is blocked that out completely from the tendon so if i was to try and search for it and use that in our power to make flows and we can sort of test that a little bit later on today when we look at that uh we'll get a message toners that it's been blocked on there so it's it's really worthwhile spending some time familiarizing yourself with the admin center the various different components that are in there just in terms of just clicking around just seeing the different types of information that that you can get in there and most importantly just understanding the impact of your dlp policies as well because based on the skills measures that is something that you will be assessed on in the exam okay so just going to return to the slides just for a final one so hopefully what we've been able to demonstrate um here is just the amount of value that the power platform can really bring into the equation you know so regardless of the type of um scenario you're working with um you know there's going to be a tool there which will which will hopefully meet your needs to a certain extent um you know so whether you need a custom application whether you're looking for that process automation whether you just want to understand your data a bit more whether you want to have these chat bots ultimately or ultimately whether you want to have this base these course set of features that can be really useful for you you've hopefully got the tools there to be able to help you along so at that point this point then i'm going to hand over back to carl and he's going to take us through the core components of the power platform carl over to you there you go yeah that's okay anymore um thank you very much joe um yeah so the next bit on the skills outline and we're just going to spend half an hour this and then we'll we'll jump to a break so um get some refreshments etc is the the core components um and um there's quite a few different parts of that but the first one is just describing the microsoft dataverse and you can see here the list of things so we're going to go through how we manage that how we create tables and columns and relationships we're going to look at solutions briefly go into business rules describe what you get out the box which is the common data model um and understand why you should be reusing these things rather than creating your own so joe's already gone through this um but the the core bit for this this half an hour is those three bottom um areas here it's database ai builder and data connectors and we're briefly going to go into each of those areas um and this these are the fundamentals and the building blocks for all the rest of the applications all the nice wysiwyg look and feel and and virtual agents and all that great stuff relies on that bottom layer either using the the dataverse database that microsoft provides you to store your data and read your data or connect to an external system using the data connectors to go to your salesforce environment or whatever else your sharepoint etc and then use this ai builder which is an essentially the the the extension of uh using the ai automatic or ai configuration intelligence that microsoft provides either on your data or a standard components okay so rather than go through more slides and i'm going to jump in and demonstrate and i'm going to demonstrate on that environment we created uh just a minute ago so this is the environment that we've created um and on this list i'm in make.powerups.com and like i was saying earlier with and joe reinforces really the idea of an environment is is essential here um so i'm making sure that i'm on this sat 12 and made a mistake like i said um and effectively this is where you start and this is your launch point for creating all your applications or your um ai interactions your chat bots even flows from here there is another url you can get directly to flows power automate flows and put we can get to everything from here and we can basically start from creating a canvas app model driven network portal from here i can start connecting to my data from here or i can start with some very simple um templates where microsoft have done some pre-canned um business applications to allow us to start these things that when you can bring those into your environment tweak them and make them specific to you and then deploy them to you to whatever environment and the and these templates are also a great way of understanding how these things hang together so you can have a look at them and dig deep into them but we're talking about dataverse now so we're talking about data and the fundamental thing for data is on this left hand side is tables now tables um are effectively like an excel worksheet that you have got a a tables with rows of data and columns of information and this is the same in the dataverse in its most simplistic form and effectively it is a grid to allow you to enter things into so if you take that to to an extreme sort of an analogy each tab on your excel spreadsheet would be a table so we would have an account tab which would hold account or company or customer information and we would then be able to amend it add columns and uh to it so we could define different properties that we want to um adhere to and then we go from there to expanding and understa and store our data but because it's a bit more than excel we then have the principles of security we then have the principles of speeding these things up with indexing and all these good things that microsoft worry about and we don't have to um so that is the fundamental for a table it is a store of information so in the and these are the the standard ones you get with the the standard dataverse environment account being like i said um a customer or company um we're talking about um uh tesco or um abbey national or any of those things there will be accounts and it depends and it would be the people or the organizations that your company sells to you can see we've also got other ones here we've got contact which is which is another which is the individuals at those companies that you sell things to and your organization might not deal with um companies it might just be a direct business to customer um environment so we can just use contacts directly but you can see that here that microsoft are providing a lot of the common structures that allow you to form up your data principles so in terms of of using account if i've got a business requirement that does arrange around it being a logical grouping of a company or customer information i would reuse the account table and that means that i get all the good stuff that microsoft have already done and i can quickly get to the point where i can get to what i need to change for my environment and that's one of the essential tools that is part of that um profile in the exam is is reusing the out of the box the standard environment tables that are provided um and it doesn't mean that i can't change it if i want to call mine companies ring for example i can change it company and companies and i'm done so once i hit save table that will whenever i see the company table will have changed the name to companies so that is personalizing it to my business requirements and my business needs um but but there's always going to be the case where your business needs are um different to everybody else's and this is not the fact that nobody has done it before it's just that it's not one of those standard tables so what we can do back in tables is that we can create a new one and let's just step through that process so i've decided that i'm going to call myself this table called fault you'll see that it's already given me a plural name and because i've been naughty i'm not using solutions i'm using the default publisher everything gets this prefix and this is basically making sure that um when we move this table around in in different environments we know it's unique so it's always going to be displayed as fault and false but in the back end the sql table that gets generated is going to be that cr8 a d underscore fault and it's not something you tend to need to worry about or concerned with but it is um just essential that you understand that it is unique to you we put in the primary column name column here so this is basically deciding on when i select a fault what gets displayed in there and i can simply leave that as the disabled display name on this right hand side there's a couple of more options and more settings and these are more complicated as you're going through but just to show you briefly this is doing exactly what it is it enables this fault table to have attachments i can bring in multiple attachments and i can include multiple notes to this record and we'll see that in a timeline and there's even more settings down here we can have a description just a free format text we can have a standard versus an activity table so there is a concept of activity which is usually email fax meeting all those things you do in in in outlook typically um and your table might be one of those but generally it wouldn't be it would just be a standard table but if you've got a new type of activity might be um a um an appointment for a fault or a resource booking or something similar then you can use it as an activity table ownership is an interesting one and that's going back to security um when you've got a user or team ownership you're basically defining um whether that record can be seen by other people within the organization and your security and your security roles which um we'll briefly touch on but is not really um essential for our understanding or define who gets to see that or we can basically say this table can be seen by everybody in my organization so i don't care who can see it and that's good for tables like products or effectively metadata about things like service types or or so or things like that of that nature where you don't really need to know who no one takes ownership of them and everyone can see them collaboration so these are another few extra bits and pieces that are coming from the dynamics 365 world but are available to you as power platform developers um each one of these will enable a feature and and allow you to add things to your forms um we can be able to to send an email to the table so that we will be able to enable this for sending two emails to and from we can enable sharepoint management we can enable cues so that we can have these in a list of things to do so cases for example would have a set of queues and a set of teams to be able to select from and choose between um and then we finally i've got a few things here um down in the crate and update settings um quick create forms are used in model driven apps to quickly create and they are cut down versions of full form to allow you to quickly generate the record duplicate detection so there is a set of rules that you can establish to prevent duplicates being created normally for contacts it would be the email address that you would establish as a duplicate so if you if someone does try to create a new contact with the same email email address on it you would probably want to restrict that because you want to have that single view of that contact you want to know all the activities rather than having sir or joe smith or or joe griffin's around you want to make sure that you understand um what interaction that person is having with everyone around there um change tracking goes back to ordering your system and enabling um your system for or for who's made changes to records etc um and goes into that auditing that's a bit more over and above what we're doing here today but it's just nice to know it's there and finally the offline so you can make this application available offline and in the mobile application and within dynamics 36 at the outlook which effectively allows you to create an application once and deploy it wherever your power apps can be offline and once you become online again it will synchronize that data so that's just enabling that for you again well above the 900 level but it's an understanding of the complexities and it may appear as what can you do in the exam so i'm ready to create my table i'm just going to hit create um it's just saying here that there's a few of these options with with where once you create it you can't take it away and that's just giving me that warning so you can't unenable it for um notes etc in this case if you do want to do that you would have to drop the table and start again i'm just going to hit okay there so you now you see that it's provisioning your table in the background so we've not all we've done is a few clicks here and we've got a table we've now got a nice new table and you can see here is giving me a lot of the um out of the box fields so who created it this fault who created the fault and who who was it done when it was done who last modified it and when it and and when um the owner the these owner fields here we just briefly talked about and all these other things that we've got available to us all out of the box standard stuff that we want to be able to do the next step we've created our fault table now we need to create our a new column within that table so that's you know if we're going back to that excel month uh we've created the the worksheet now we need to create and we've created some some of the columns along the way some of them we will use some of them we won't but we want to start thinking about what else we need to create against this fault table so what i want to do is give it a name i'm going to what i'm going to do is give the the ability to create what's happened with this fault so what is the the problem um and so i'll give it a name again we can change the um physical name on the table on the sql database that it gets generated again with the prefix but we've got an option to create lots and lots of different data types column types so each of these will give you different functionality will give you different controls on your forms etc and will give you an awful lot of insight into how you use that and how you report it on so text is pretty simple all these are pretty self-explanatory author number is one where if you're creating a case id that you want to give to your customer you can create um different numbers for them to see numbers um whether it's whole numbers they're without any decimal place paintings or we've got decimal numbers down here with floating points etcetera we've got time zones that we can establish different time zones or languages date and time fields choice and choices are basically lists of um uh of items that the users can select from so like service category would be a good idea for a choice and if you if you if that is um applicable to more than one choice we would then use choices so the user can select more than one currency um is uh just directly linking back to the to the currencies if we're using a a numeric field to represent a currency value dollars etcetera but in the back end it is trying to the system will have a base currency so if you choose a different currency for your user it will translate that and do a conversion you have to manage the conversion but it will do conversion for you customer is a special field that allows you to link to both a contact and an account out the box it's not something you can change there will always be a contact or a course a contact or an account um but it allows you to link to both of those for so for example again on the case in in our case of our fault you may want to link it to an organization or an individual at that organization but in both situations you choose it from one field numbers we talked about file is is a is a newish one that allows you to attach directly to a record a file and it's this is goes on above what the the the secondary of attachments is but it allows you to have an individual file you can add an image as well you can only have one but if you see on model driven apps there is like a logo like the little logo here that's the images file that we can add in there lookups we'll start talking about when we get to relationships but that allows you to link records together um to allow to show you the parent and child relationships or whatever else we've got going on so you can create that here multi-line text is basically what i want to do here which is basically that block of text yes no being the final one there is just as it says it's basically a boolean value between a yes or no or a true and a false or whatever else you you choose you can choose the labels but basically is a zero one within the database but i'm just going to choose a multi-line text and hit done and we're ready and we can save a table so now we've got um my description field i've got my fault and i've got a name field and i can quickly go and look at some data no record files let's add a record so this is all done for you out of the box and i'm not done a few clicks i'm ready to go i can give it a name and i can hit save and close and i've created my first record i don't want to do that why is that happening and now i can see that i've now created my first record so that's basically showing me um quite easily and quickly that i can create records there is other options along here that i can can import edit the data in excel i can import data export data etc i can start doing fancy things with x data lakes and ai builders etc um but essentially that's what the table is there for and we've looked at the columns um the other principle within a dataverse environment is um and i'm just going to go back to the slides here is relationships so we've already talked about accounts and contacts and effectively saying that the account will have many contacts so if you think that i am a contact for your you as a customer my account would be avanade because that's who i work for and therefore there will be other people at avenart that you may want to contact and get introduced to so each account will have many contacts and that's what we describe as a one-to-many relationship one account will have many contacts but conversely many contacts will be linked to one account many contacts may be linked to um a different activity they may be linked to a single a case um a different or um any such things that are like that and there's also um if we look at um this in terms of our our faults um we have a many one customer will have many faults so and one account whatever you want to label that or a contact will have many faults over the lifetime of a a contact they will be associated with many bolts and they will record many faults with you so you can see that here that one customer will have many faults each of these tables will have their own information on them um describing what it's going to be you can see that we've got a type and a description etc but each of these will then drive through through to a relationship and these lines are what we call the relationships so depending on which way you're looking at this fault and customer you many faults will be linked to one customer or one customer will be linked to many faults um but there is a another type of relationship which is a many-to-many relationship and that allows you to say that to resolve this fault i all need lots of different parts and this is i don't know why i've got that click to add text in the middle that's just a bit random and that's me not checking my slides so the many-to-many relationship allows you to do that where you you've got one thing related to many so each fault will be linked to a part i need this part to resolve this fault but and a second fault will might be linked to the same part and therefore you have a many-to-many relationship so let me go back to our table and look at the relationships here which is going along this this top top line um you can see out the box i haven't created anything but you can see that we've got a few that are created for me so the relationship between a fault and whoever created it so me as a an uh user i would create a fault and therefore it would be me who i created it and the same was modified by and i can quickly add a relationship so my fault is going to be related to contact he says so that one contact will have many faults which is what we described earlier and then we have a lookup column display name which is what one of the columns that we saw earlier so that we can put in the the user id the the guide to link those two things up together so that's unique identifier of the contact record will be stored on the fault table if you imagine each of those rows that each of those rows within the excel you would have a number on the left hand side but because we're talking about large numbers of records we have a unique identifier which is what we call the the good or the record identifier for each of those tables each of those restaurants excuse me so therefore we're creating this many-to-one relationship between contact and fault the other way around fault and contact and there's a few other options here we can add a description there's a few advanced options talking about whether if we delete a contact what do we do with the faults do we delete them as well do we just remove them etc so there's a few other things there that you can tweak but i'm quite happy to create that and save a table and now i've got that relationships together and sorted so the key for relationships is really making sure that you're not um creating extra data for yourselves you can really restrict the amount of data entry so if you've got a fault that you know it's been logged by myself at my organization rather than taking down my phone number and entering that every time i would just link it to an existing contact and therefore we can then see that information in various places and we can also see that single customer view as well okay now the next topic along the line and then we are going to be really struggling for time here joe um is talking about solutions um and all the common data model was the other thing that i needed to show you we've already showed you um parts of the common data model but that effectively defines if we look at tables this is the common data model anything apart from fault which i've just added in terms of the data versus basically saying that these are the standard features of any organization and it allows you to have that common language when you're talking to other external vendors so salesforce has the idea of an account and it matches pretty much with the dynamics version of account or the sap version of account and therefore we have that interoperability between those organizations so it helps when we're doing integrations it helps when we're doing power bi et cetera so we know roughly what an account is and what we should expect on that table and this is microsoft stability and this is what microsoft provides you out of the box as your your core data model um so like i said you know industry standards of common things like opportunity in order as well as account and contacts and case and all those sort of good things um across the top as well um if i go into my uh faults screen we have got business rules if i add quickly add a business rule you can basically say that business rules allows you to add a form or a table level to configure auto generation of data or restricting people's access to certain bits of information so we can hide and show fields for example on the model driven form so basically here we can basically say with a rule we can say that if a the name equals um red just for simplicity and for speed um apply then we can add a new uh set the value for something else on their um status equals to active so basically setting up a business rule so we're doing quick business logic that allows us to to run these conditions and this logic and up here on this right hand side we have a scope and you'll see that they haven't changed the label of this so if you'll see that entities and attributes are used into into mixed in with tables and columns and that's the old terminology for this sort of thing but your exam should be in the new tables and columns so if we have it on all forms if we have it on the entity we can then when a record gets created when a record gets updated we can fire these conditions and these conditions have to be met but you are limited to things that are not visual so you're you can't hide a field for example on an entity level you can only do that at the forms level and this only applies to model driven forms which we'll show later so um like like this is here is you know just defining simple table logic and levels of logic here and solutions so um a core concept of sharing your applications and having a application lifecycle management is solutions so we basically embed into solutions the bits that you want to share you can then put that in from your dev environment your test environment to your production environment very simply and allow you to develop separate to where you're going to get the people to test and then certainly separate to your production environment where your your really your end users will be and solutions allow you to package all that together and ship them around those environments um and there's two types of solutions there's a managed and a non-managed so manage you have control about what properties the next environment can can do and lock it down but it also allows you to remove that new table that you created and everything to do with it by removing the solution if you have unmanaged once you promote it to the next environment you can't take it out without money removing those things um and with manage you also get this this solution layering that that goes on it's well advanced for us but just just the idea of why we would have managed versus unmanaged and i'll quickly just want to show you that down here and on the solutions here you'll see that in my brand new environment i've got an awful lot i've just put in the portals which i wanted to show you later there's an awful lot of things that are going on here there are all the solutions that are part of the out of the box experience that microsoft is is working it provides you um excuse me um but if i create a new solution uh i can then create either use the default publisher or i can create a publisher so you can if you if you're working for an organization you would you'd tend you would come to an agreement about what that publisher would be so that you would know your components and everything would be labeled um with that prefix that we saw earlier um to um with that name and everything will be given that tag i'll just use the default one for now and then we'd hit create so now i've got a nice blank solution nothing in it but what i can do here is add an existing so i had my table that i had earlier which is default and i can either include everything or i can include just the metadata and i'll just include everything for now and that's basically added in my fault table and everything associated with it so that when i export i can move that fault table and everything i do on it to the next environment and we should always be using solutions at this point because it allows us to have that life cycle management going on and okay i've still got connectors to you can end there ai we're going to really struggle to um yeah you might have to just um consolidate just go at speed on some stuff but yeah so um connectors um so connectors are how we get data in and out and we joe briefly described them earlier we've got the idea that we've got sharepoint connectors we've got salesforce connectors we've got all the things that microsoft provide for us as well as the connections to dataverse etc and they're used across all the applications whether it's power automate power ups or logic apps within the azure space and various other things and it just allows us to connect to the either a database um environment or elsewhere you've got email connected you've got office connected etc or we can create our own um and what we mean by that is that we can create our own api we can create um it against our own infrastructure we can have an on-premise api et cetera and we can create our own to allow as more complexity and more scale to our upper campus applications um this is just showing you that within within our power apps you've got these connections on the left hand side and we'll go through this um joe will go through this i'll go through this when we're going into powerapps but just the idea is that you've got the dataverse connector which will show you connect due to the accounts and the contacts that you've got within your database environment whatever table you create or we can go through to dynamics onedrive or emails etc and we can connect all those things together but there's also a differentiation there there is the the tabular data which is your database and similarly with your sharepoint where you've got some structured data where you you're going to get data or you're going to have a connector that is basically doing something for you so you could you can twitter for example has that function based connector where you can send a tweet so you're providing some information it's going to do something for you and you're expecting a response back so that's all in within connectors um and sorry um so and there's also a trigger and an action for each of these so each of these connectors can have a trigger which is basically starting the flow within power automate and allowing you to subscribe to that trigger and take an action once once that hits so for example you can have a trigger against a dataverse connector so when a account is corrected you do certain things within your power automate and joe will go into that this later there's also actions so in that scenario where you've got a trigger of an account created you may want to create viral an email to the sales director and allow him to know that a new account was created and he may have to take an action or do a a an approval to make sure that all these bits and pieces are stuck together um moving on quickly i'm afraid um so um let me just quickly show you ai builder so ai builder here on this left hand side is split into two two things um you have got um two areas here you've got the the the the the models that you need to train which are using your data to train you may have a list of objects that you want to detect and your objects are specific to you your brand of cola for example and the dev variations in between and therefore you want to train the ai model um on that or you've got these pre-can pre-defined list of applications that you can quickly and easily get started on reading business cards or whether the the text that you've got in there from an email is positive or negative you know if it's a negative you might want to do something and these are all the ai models and these models effectively allow you to quickly and easily get information out of your data and use that for the next stage going on so you may have a process which takes in a a form and you've got a picture there of your form and you want to use that for order processing um and rather than generating and and easily and quickly you can take information that form and pass it on to your next process rather than having a human being reading that form and entering data and all the inequalities that come with that so ai really is there to allow you to speed up that process and get to your and improve that user experience when you're dealing with people and humans and doing their jobs and allowing that your end users to be spending more time thinking about what they're doing rather than doing those mundane tasks so it's very much is quite easy for you to create a model sentiment analysis and we can then start using it within a flow or using in an application to trigger these things so it's quite an easy um easy thing to do it basically shows you here what um whether it's a positive negative or or neutral sentiment but this is the information that we're going to basically um if by tweaking this and changing this we can obviously change the sentiment that it will be bringing back but more importantly we can use this within our applications to trigger um if we're having a negative sentiment we may need to trigger something else in our workflow we may need to walk create a case with a different priority for example and it's just doing it's just making intelligent decisions on your data and being able to use them within your flows or within your applications to speed up that process and i think um that we've been through this and and pre-built versus custom we've been through this as well um we can use pre-built straight away we don't have to train it and business cards are are a good one there where you can easily do that um and what customer is is working on your data so you would have to do um enter the extraction and keywords that you're interested in that is has been a very rushed 40 minutes i apologize for that but i do think we need a quick 10 minute break so suggest that we come back at 10 50 which is now a 10 42 so eight minutes from now and then we can get cracking on uh however yes yes unless there's any questions i don't see any yeah i think we've had to merge them in the chat hopefully thank you so yeah we convene in 10 minutes too thank you very much all i'm just going to take the screen from you carl cool give it a minute and then yeah lots to get through lots to cram so we weren't lying with the session title okay so let's uh make a start then so we're going to take a look now at power bi look at what we can actually do with this business analytics tool so from an exam standpoint a couple of things that you just need to be aware of you need to be able to sort of identify what are the sort of the main components for um four different um power bi things uh julian's got his hand raised dude do you want to stop us sorry yeah i saw that i just messaged him so okay we'll carry on okay so you need to be able to identify some of the core components from power bi what they are and what their uses cases are you need to understand how you can connect to and consume data and ultimately you need to know how to build a very basic dashboard using power bi so let's just dive in and look at this in a bit more detail so we've already discussed what power bi is there's probably no need to really sort of repeat apart from just saying that it is a business intelligence tool that you can use to bring in various different data so you can have that interactive and scalable um reports built out for your organization there's various different concepts that you need to get your head around when it comes to power bi first of all we've got this concept of capacities and so typically you'll have either sort of a shared or dedicated capacity that will be consumed as you're deploying out and using your power bi reports this will ultimately have a have a bearing on cost workspaces is effectively the sort of the container that you use to bring together your power bi content you've got two kinds of workspaces your own personal workspace that every user has and then shared workspaces which are for when you need to have your reports shared or you need to have some element of collaboration around that data sets are your data you bring those into your workspaces you connect your reports to them uh shared data sets will typically be um for where somebody has gone off and sort of maybe prepared an existing data set so maybe they've done some work on the underlying model they've optimized the data made sure it's accurate and then effectively they're providing that out for use across the organization reports are um sort of pages of a particular the container set of visualizations they are completely different from a dashboard a dashboard effectively brings together content from one or more different reports into an easy to view easy to monitor type sort of experience so i think really in terms of the workspaces datasets reports and dashboards you really do need to sort of familiarize yourself with those core terms and make sure that you can differentiate between them when it comes down to it to help you along with power bi you've got the ability of being able to install various different template applications so if you have got working with an existing application system such as dynamics 365 there may be a template app you can install you just put in your connection details and then from there you can connect to that and work with that at your own measure you can get data from a variety of different sources so as we've seen already many of the connectors that we've spoken about will also be available as polar power bis whether your data's in excel it's in a sql database out in dynamics 365 if it's in other competitor products such as salesforce or google analytics or facebook or things like that we can connect up very easily either through a dedicated app that that company may provide or just by using power bi desktop or power bi service to bring that data in now the main way in which you would work with your power bi reports you build them out for the first time is the power bi desktop application which we're going to take a quick look at in a few minutes it basically just provides you the ability to be able to build out your reports um which you can then sort of work with locally you can consume locally if that's indeed what you want to do or you would then typically then deploy it out to the power bi service so that other people can sort of work with and interact with that and really this is the sort of the ecosystem that we've got here which gives us that really flexible approach when we're consuming our power bi content you know we can get it out onto the online service so that people and maybe non non power bi experience users can sort of consume and work with that ultimately we can also get that out into the mobile application as well so that on the go we can work with and and interact with these reports and ultimately based on the experience that we're using um you know we can ultimately get an ex um everything will be can be sort of customized and tailored to sort of suit that you know so for example for a mobile for the mobile device we can make sure that the uh the visuals are sort of loaded in a compact manner as we can see down here so instead of getting you know trying to fit all of that onto a single view we get a nice sort of streamline view that we can just sort of scroll down and scroll through which is really great now modeling will be where you perhaps spend most your time from a power bi standpoint um so you primarily as i say use the power bi desktop application to assist you in this regard um you would use the ribbon as your main tool to be able to bring data in the canvas or report view will be where you're dragging your various different visuals you can then add on different pages at the bottom you've got a whole range of different um visualizations standard ones but also ones that you can bring in so if you've created you can either install custom isps from microsoft appsource that maybe certain companies are made available or indeed as a developer we can go and actually build our own visualizations we can use r we can use python we can use typescript to be able to build out custom visuals that then sit on top of our report and then finally fields that will be where you drag and drop in your various different data points that you want to analyze further into your visualizations so these are the five areas from the desktop application standpoint you need to really familiarize yourself with and then as i've mentioned already we've got all of these different visualization types listed on here so most these will cover probably most of your common requirements as you're working with the tool and as i've mentioned already you've got the ability to be able to bring in your custom visuals uh either sort of approved ones that have gone through the microsoft certification process and are available on appsource or ones that you have sort of developed yourself so a lot of flexibility there which is really great now a report will typically be most useful when we can actually give people the ability to be able to change the data on there dynamically and this is where slicers come into the equation it gives us the ability to be able to allow users to sort of select different data points and and and change the whole look and appearance of the report based on the slicer values that we provide and effectively using slices we can filter content at the report level we can filter at a page level we can even just have us a visual you know a slicer for a specific visual and then finally around that we can provide drill through capability so you know we may you know from a from a map visual level from a pie chart level we may start at a sort of um country level view using drill through or drill down capability we can sort of drill through right down into even sort of postcode area or into city area you know based on particular needs now transforming data is a key component as you're building out your your reports you would typically use the power query editor to build this out so you bring your data in use the power query editor to sort of transform it maybe remove columns that we're not interested in add on new ones bringing other data sources typically this is where you need to devote some time to make sure that you understand how you go about um transforming the data using the query editor and that you're comfortable in terms of working with the interface within that we'll take a look at that in a few minutes so typical tasks may include cleaning your data so it might be what you want to remove maybe columns that have you know rubbish data in it might be you want to transpose data swap rows to basically format the data better and we've also got the ability of various different formatting options so we can maybe you know put data to uppercase change the format of dates and things like that um you know there's a whole variety of different things that we could that we can do then once we've brought in our models into the report we can then uh perform various different out-of-the-box aggregations on our data so we don't have to actually go off and do this ourselves so if for example we want to have a sum or an average and things like that then typically we can just drag the particular field that we're interested in into our visual and the application will do that for us automatically which is a big help okay so security so you would typically access the power bi online service using the same login details that you've got for microsoft 365 and for your other services in the power platform um at that level you can sort of enforce different privileges over what particular users can do you've got various different tenant level settings that you can enable and disable so you can actually make sure that okay i want users let's say to be able to use data sets across workspaces but i don't want them to create new workspaces as an example as a tenant administrator we've got a lot of capability there to help us fine-grain that and obviously just make sure that we're giving the appropriate level of access that we feel for the power bi service and typically around that as an admin tasks that we may do from a administrative point of view is okay looking at our governance policies okay so making sure that people are not you know accidentally sharing reports out to external users that contain all of our core financial data monitoring our users making sure that we've got the appropriate licenses assigned if we're working with power bi premium or embedded within our solution then we also need to monitor the capacity that's been assigned to that and ultimately just make sure that we've got the right capacity allocated based on usage and ultimately people are not having a bad experience because uh we've mis we've we've not estimated the capacity correctly so data you connect to within the power bi desktop application um you can work with it using the tab on there we'll take a quick look at how that works in a few seconds and then it could be that after you've worked with the data in power query there's maybe some additional steps that you want to do so we can use what's called we can use a programming language called dax to be able to create new calculated columns we can even create calculated tables based on that we can remove columns that we don't need anymore there's no point presenting data to users if there's going to be no potential benefits in sort of showing that you know keep things simple you know keep it simple stupid it's a good acronym to remember um and then finally um we can sort of work with our various different queries we can maybe consolidate those down into maybe just a single query or maybe just only the queries that we that we care about and we can model out our data using the relationship tab just to see okay you know what are how does our data fit together based on the various different links um yeah so this is again just repeating about the visualization so we can just sort of drag and drop those onto there now dashboards so as i mentioned already it's important not to get confused between reports and dashboard reports are what we typically build out in either power bi desktop or the service um they've got the multiple pages on they've got the various different visuals that we add on a dashboard is created only within the online power bi service okay and it's it could provide it gives you the ability of being able to consolidate content from multiple different reports into a single view so what we can very easily do is basically just pin on different visuals from our reports we can rearrange it onto here drag and drag it around we can bring in other content so we can actually bring in maybe add an image onto our dashboard we can bring in streaming data sets um so literally you know as we're on the dashboard we can see maybe from an iot device we can see sort of you know devices the graph sort of updating automatically which is really quite um nice and interesting um so really just make sure you're clear in terms of the differences between that um and the best thing that to remember is that you know dashboards are an online only component and they are designed to bring you that consolidated view from multiple different areas in power bi now typically um you want to share your reports out and collaborate with colleagues on them um if you're using the power bi free then you've got access to a personal workspace where you can basically host your content in there with some restrictions you won't be able to sort of um share out various different um content within there to other users because it's in your own personal workspace in that scenario you'll need to just check your licensing to make sure that you can do that if though that you've shared your content to a shared workspace then other colleagues will be able to um be involved as part of that and sort of um work with that um so mala's got a question about can we bring in youtube analytics um i don't think there's a connector per se for that i'm going to assume that google probably does have an api for that and you may be able to bring it in and i think karl have you found a pre-built app that they've got already for that based on the chat sorry i'm new car okay i think carl's found something yeah sorry um there is a pre-built app um and frederick's done the same as well there is there is connectors there so must be possible yeah you have to do some research and some digging on that but yeah but effectively um if there's not a connector available in power bi um then you have got the ability of being able to connect to sort of just http or web apis so provided that it's a restful api or to no data api there's a really good chance that you can work with it and then bring and then bring it into your report if you needed to okay so let's jump in now and let's have a bit of a demo of it all so um i'm in now into the power bi online portal app.powerbi.com and we can see when we first land on here we get a view in terms of um you know just favorites and things like that that we can work with and we can see that at the moment i've got some content that i've deployed out into my personal workspace down here so i'm just going to click on to pr 900 demo down here so what i've got here is a very sort of basic report that i built out using data that's been pulled in from microsoft dataverse we can see this is a fully interactive report that we can just sort of click into as i click around the different visuals i can see that this graph actually updates based on the data i'm selecting so i can get a really quick and easy snapshot around the data that's in there i can apply filters to my data on the right hand side so if i wanted to maybe just say okay all i care about is alpine ski house i can see i can adjust that view very quickly and we get the data updating automatically on there i've got various options at the top so i can sort of save a copy of the report i can download it i can maybe you know add a comment onto it subscribe to updates i can even also edit the report in the online portal you know so if i wanted to bring in some additional data so maybe i wasn't too happy with um maybe with the visual types that are on here i can maybe just bring in some additional ones uh sort of based on that and ultimately i can see all of my data fields are on the right hand side here that i've sort of used to build out and to basically build out this report i've used power bi desktop to help me achieve this so this is the same report that we've just seen on the online service in the um in the desktop application all i've done is just clicked on get data at the top up here clicked on dataverse um i've entered the name of the environment that i wanted to put in which i can't remember the top of my head but if i go to recent sources up here i should be able to see um the same source that i connected to yesterday for this report what it's going to do now is going to go off and query all of the data that's in my dataverse instance my database and then return a full list of it down here as we can sort of see so maybe if i wanted to bring in let's say the account data i can just click on that down at the top up there i get a preview of the data that's going to be loaded in i can then bring the data in it will be loaded in down here for me automatically and if i wanted to i can actually do some transformation of this data by clicking the button up here this is going to take us into the power query editor which you can see on here so this data has just been brought in pretty much as is there's been no modifications to it as you can see there's quite a lot of different data that is in there if i wanted to sort of say okay well maybe i don't care about this created by field on here i just want to remove it get rid of it completely it's not a concern of me uh created on okay well the name of that is a bit rubbish so maybe let's just rename that something like this perhaps to make it a bit better um maybe this um i want to do some stuff i may be adding a new custom column maybe maybe a flag field or something like that i can do all of that at the top i've got a few different options as you can see and as i'm building out my report i can see on the right hand side that all of the steps that we're applying are sort of done as applied steps so at any point i can sort of return to the previous state that i was in by just sort of clicking on the appropriate step so this is really great because it gives me that history i can revert back and see okay what exactly has been applied to this query to get it into its current state or indeed if i said okay well i don't actually want to want to go forward with any of these changes i can just click on the delete button and we can see straight away i revert back to how it was before we started fiddling about with it so it's worth spending some time in the power query editor mode familiarizing yourself with the type of things that you can do in here and just sort of you know using that to build out your first sort of report on the left hand side down here we can see our data model that's been that's been brought out so we can see for this buildings table i've got five records that i think that i've created in there i've got a few more in this about 215 rows in my visit data then by clicking the relationships view down here i can actually get a graphical view of how our data is looking including all relationships that are between it in this case the power bi desktop application figured out automatically what relationships to add on based on what existed within dataverse so i didn't have to do any work here to sort of define the relationships i can add on additional relationships if i wanted to by clicking manage relationships at the top up here i can edit existing ones just by double clicking down here as we can see this is a many to one relationship so in most cases if you're working with a microsoft dataverse or indeed any sql based data source than it then power bi will generally do a good job at being able to figure out um the relationships and get it added onto the model automatically when the report is ready to go and ready to sort of consume in the power online service it's literally just a case just clicking publish on there it will take a few moments to upload that onto the service and then as we can see on here this is how the report will look when it's all done now the final thing just to have a quick look at is our dashboards okay so i've got a here's one i made earlier in true um is that art attack or blue peter car can't remember here's what i made earlier i could never remember um but yeah we can see on here uh blue pizza but yeah give me a nudge next time i can find a meatball yeah um okay so yeah so we can see on here that i've got content that i've pulled in from a specific report that we've been working with um i can sort of fiddle about with this to my sort of heart's content maybe i'm not interested in having this on my particular dashboard anymore i can just delete it i can then go down to my report down here any visual that i can see on here we've got a pin icon at the top that we can just hover over i can sort of click on that and it'll then give me the option to pin that onto an existing dashboard now that's been pinned if i go back to my griffin campus management dashboard we can see i've got my pie chart on here i can then drag that around like so i can then drag that up there maybe i want to bring in some additional content maybe i want to maybe uh add a tile as you can see i can bring in an image web content a text box so maybe just do like a really rubbish text box as an example maybe just do you know pl pl 900 cramming like so maybe just do that in bold you just do like a crazy font on it or whatever apply yeah there we go so we can just then maybe put that over there like so so it's really nice and easy for us to be able to sort of fiddle about with this to our heart's content what we've also got as well is natural language capabilities so if i wanted to find out specific information about visits so i can just you know maybe just click on the button up here i can then start typing in um different sort of questions for my data it give me some suggestion down there so maybe i can just do okay i want to sort visit visitors by name or by bc building name as an example and what it does is it returns me a table view of that particular data sorted by a particular name and then i can just sort of adjust that query based on what um what i've typed in if this was a particularly useful view that i want to then bring it to my dashboard again i can very easily do that by just clicking on the pin at the top pin to existing dashboard click on that and we can see there we go there's our nice dashboard up there it's a pretty cool stuff and it looks really nice as well you could spend all day with power bi i think yeah as you see i'm filling them see i'm just feeling about with this now and i've completely forgotten what i'm doing as a consequence anyway so um final thing to have a quick look at is the admin settings at the top so i'm just going to click on admin portal let's just have a quick look at some of these settings on here because you won't need to have an awareness of this so similar to the power platform admin center we get some nice statistics on here about the various different ways in which we're consuming power bi content across the tenant get that nice really quick and easy view um user management and everything else is done by the microsoft 365 admin center so you typically go into there that would also be the place where you would then also license users for either power bi pro or power bi premium whatever it may be premium per user is a fairly new license licensing offering that's come out the exam doesn't cover licensing specifically i don't think um but being aware into a higher level in terms of the various ways in which you can work with power bi or hold you in good stead audit logs will be consumed via microsoft 365 sensor and then down here we can see the various different options that we can sort of enable or disable for our organization so maybe you know maybe you know we're working in sales based organization maybe a bit worried about our sales people just doing a dump of our prospect lists from power bi and taking that with them on the memory way so we can just disable that you know either across the entire board or we can sort of say okay well maybe there's certain security groups that we set up in microsoft 365 that we want to apply that to instead so we've got a few options there pretty much all of the major features that we've got as part of power bi we can customize down here and we can sort of enable and disable to our hearts ledger we can also manage the various different workspaces that we've got set up on our tenant over here so we can see down here this one's got a few different ones across the board so we've got all the various different personal workspaces that maybe people have got set up for themselves we typically won't be able to delete those because every user must have at least one per have have their own personal workspace we can't change that at all but you know if maybe somebody's gone in there and set up a workspace that we don't think is particularly very useful anymore we can maybe go in and maybe just edit its details uh or we can maybe then just go and have a conversation with that particular user just to say okay do you want to do you want to keep this or do you want to delete this perhaps because this can shoot because it's making it's making things look a bit messy on our tenant so power bi it's quite a big subject um it's even got its own exam for what it's worth for the purposes of pl900 it's really just understanding the concepts at a high level and understanding some of the common tasks that you can do so i'd encourage you after today to maybe just go in connect up to dataverse bring some data in uh create maybe a basic report off the basis of that and then just deploy that out to the service and set up a dashboard for yourself and from there you should hopefully be fairly familiar or have enough sort of confidence then from the from the exam standpoint so at this point then i'm going to hand back across to carl who's going to do this through powerapps well talking about uh a lot of content this next section is a lot of content and again get your hands dirty um get doing it um to show yourself the understandings and the capabilities but i'm gonna go through and try and describe all the bits that are in the exam outline and show you around power apps um so the first point part of this is what are the different power apps um canvas model and portal um reusable components and we'll have a quick look at formulas as well so what can power apps do for you so we all we've been through this quite a few times but it's a loco no code platform for building apps it's working with your data wherever it lies that we don't care whether it's in dataverse sharepoint salesforce i think i would care if it was an excel spreadsheet but in essence um anywhere your data lives that's where it stays and you don't have to worry about it in terms of governance etc but it allows you to show that app on a mobile environment on a on your mobile phone in the web etc and share that so you can create business applications quickly and easily and you can also expand that to to externally facing websites so we can get out that data external to your organization for customer facing websites and lastly they're talking about the ai models that we briefly discussed earlier and be able to use ai be able to to generate insight on that information okay so without further ado uh i've got the wrong screen up i just got joe's big face now where is it where's it gone that's a long screen again my environment gone there it is so going to make.powerapps.com this is the environment that we've we've been using i'm just going to change it to the right one to make sure that we've got the right one um and in the left-hand side we've got the idea of apps and you can see if i've got i've already added the portal because that takes a while to to run up and we can go into that a bit later but all i'm going to do is create a new app and at this point i get three options cameras model driven and portal so let's step through the the first one with canvas and you can see right yeah i don't care whatever you can see um here we start looking at what our data is so we've got the option either to connect straight away to data and define it from there or we can start with the blank application um so for instance if we were going against our common data service let's just go into phone layout and create that one here so common data service is the old term for the database and you can see that because we're connected to our environment this defaults table that we created earlier is available um it's you can go to any of these tables but the one that i'm going to use in our scenario is false and we do connect so straight away what that's done is going to create a connection to my application and generate for me three screens um we have got a browse screen we've got a detailed screen and then we've got an edit screen just i don't know and if i just saved and published this and then opened it on my mobile phone i've suddenly got an app that i can use without anything me doing very little apart from a few clicks and that's the power of this cameras apps and these are um fully um fully editable and customizable but it also gives you a very quick interface into from deploying a cameras app if you want to quickly gather information you can really easily do it um but we can connect to more data so on this left-hand side we've got um more data we've got all the tables that within our common data service environment and but we've also got other connectors so i can connect straight away to my office 365 users and sharepoint but i can go and look at all connectors so i can go and get my data from um basecamp for example um so if we've got a connection now i can go and get it straight away and that is the only with the out-of-the-box connections that microsoft provides on top of that you could do those custom connectors that we talked about earlier to really expand your capabilities and leave that data where it should be in that base application um so on this left-hand side as well i'll just get my notes um we can look at we've got different screens here like we were saying so on this on this brow screen we've got a what is called a grid view um we can insert a different one if we didn't like this one let's get rid of that one and create a new one insert a new uh gallery and we've got different options here depending on what you want to see and these are great for using you know lists of data um vertical horizontal um or etc that we need to do so let's put that one back in and then we can link it to our data set we're going to link it to false again and then it's just taking a few key fields but we can do more than that we can edit the field up here this is the properties panel over on the right behind my dog while she marks the postman and i can choose which fields are connected to the tables and i can also drag in if i wanted to a new label let me just and add a new label and at this point i can connect to a different field so that description field that we added straight away it's taken it's putting that in as well and this is all within the confines of this little panel so if i had more records it would list them in individual items along this list so that's a um gallery and you've got different ways of looking at that gallery depending on what your user case is so lists of records we would use gallery um on this we've also got forms so these detail screens these are these are forms um and again we can add fields we can add extra fields here to to show you that description field that we had um and we can basically add as we go along those fields and i need to change this formula because i broke it earlier um so the idea is that the forms give you the the the the view and the um editing of data so this is a view form but there's also because it's on that detail screen there's also an edit screen where i can actually quickly and easily input the information and create a record or data record um so this is all very easy and very quick and easy to generate and to create um so we're getting to a point now where we can tweak it and play with it so that's forms um but we're not limited to just relying on um the out of the box configuration or the out of the box formatting if we don't like the layout and we want to be more specific and very anal about the location the branding etc we can choose and do our own versions of these input controls so we've got a whole list of input controls that we can do we can have a drop down and which allows us to do a selection list we've got um several parts of this that will allow us to define who what options are available we've got other input controls even making use of the functionality of a mobile phone like a pen input so you could use a pen input to select and enter data and scroller signature etc so using those capabilities of the application there's another ones here for um uh under uh the media we can use the the camera to scan barcodes or use the microphone of audio of the the phone or the device so you can see that they're building these applications around the use case and the use cases is for this the either on a mobile phone on the application or a mobile phone on on the web browser or um even desktop so depending on which way around you have this you can create start codes in the desktop app if you want people to be working in the office doing it and anything in between really it is very much up to you um we briefly looked at formulas earlier and um well we didn't the idea is that we can quite easily um define um properties and formulas so on this right hand side we've got the properties window which has most of the properties available to you and it's available in a more clickable interface but it doesn't stop you defining this value because you'll see all of these options here are listed in this drop down for your formula bar so we can really start to get into nitty gritty about what the the values are so let me just do that with a simple label let's add a label in and this label here i want the text to be not just text but um saturday or let me just do something like um user which is the local user's name and it's got and i can then put in full name so um when that renders and i need a space in there obviously because i missed it when that renders um you can see that it's um it's working it out on the fly and it's demonstrating and it shows that you can use formulas to um create content and you can use formulas to action things as well so this little icon here has got an on select which is an action for that button so when people click it it fires this event and we can do more than that we can then go and do navigate for example so we want to select parent and we want to um we put a colon at the end and then we want to navigate and this will be taking me to a different screen so we want to go to the detail screen at that point um so that so those two actions will happen if i just hit play now um it will won't be working because i broke it but anyway um i get this little hover because it knows it's got a select event on it and if i hit play we go to that false detail screen um i did break it earlier but um it allows you to quickly play with the application and this hint it it shows you the first time so get rid of it but it is showing you a good message is that if you use the alt key you can basically work in the application as if if you are playing the application so it allows you to quickly go in and and try something out that you've done so properties on the right hand side advanced gives you the full understanding of what those properties are but that is also repeated up here on the on the on the left-hand side so you can whichever way you want to work and you need to be aware um not for the pl 100 but as you go through there's an awful lot of properties that you you would want to be aware of and use to customize your application as much as as possible um there's a few other things here as well that that you should be aware of and can understand we can quickly and easily change the theme um to uh our environment if you want if you're happy with the the themes that they make available to you you can be as complicated in these things as you want to and there are some tools around creating your own themes but it doesn't stop you branding this to your own particular knees as well so the idea of generating your own standard set of controls is a thing as well which is either via which which allows you to do that branding within an organization so it's not only a color branding but with a functionality branding and sharing components between different developers or business analysts whoever is creating these applications to allow you to expand the functionality if we go into the insert menu for example we have a list of custom controls here so either i can create a new component here which will take me to a new screen for allow me to create a component that may have certain properties and combine things to give me something that i can reuse or i can import a component which allows me to bring in somebody else's work and then it's in my application so it allows you to build up a library and we'll show you that in a second of components that i can drag and drop into this and configure to get you that um reusability and to prevent people re reinventing the wheel each time um we talked about ai builder earlier but here is where we can start looking at the different ai builder tools the outer box ones that are available to you you can call your own tools as well um if you've configured your own um via the the connectors and even more so because of really utilizing that that the audio the mobile experience you can start looking this in mixed reality so if you've got a uh your product and you've got a 3d rendering of that product you can use that and overlay that into somebody else's workspace so you can you really utilize these applications to imagine how your your store would look with that new kit in there so it's but it's bringing all these tools into a non-developer's hands and into everybody's capability to do and it's very very powerful there's a lot more along this top part so that i can insert we can put in a power bi tool which links back into what joe was talking to us earlier um but we're um very much um looking at the data that's available to us and making sure that these applications can easily and quickly be into people's hands right so i'm done now i've done my little screen i know it's not very complicated um and complex but obviously you can create more and more complexity and navigate between screens here and maybe have a menu system and build up your functionality as you go but once you're happy with it you need to save it give it a nice pretty icon and save away and more importantly you need to publish it so once you do the first share you're publishing that version um but if we do uh i didn't want to do that sorry um we um we then need to be able to publish a version and sending out to people for testing or maybe we're working in production which you never should but the idea of then starting to use that application in in it's where it's meant to be and then we can share that app with an individual or we can share with everyone but do remember that they do also need permission on the underlying data source so it's no good creating an app that connects off to to salesforce if they haven't got your permissions to get those those applications um the other side to that is that every time you save you're updating a version but only the the published version is the only the ones that get um into uh the production environment so everyone will be able to see uh the current version until you publish a new version which allows you to do a little bit of life cycle management to make sure that you've got everything fixed before you publish that new version okay so that is a very quick overview of canvas out bear in mind that um i would certainly start from a um application and make sure that you've at least gone through the steps of creating your first canvas out and understand these things that are going on and to get an idea of what's happening in these scenarios we're not asking for a lot of detail in pl 900 but it is certainly essential that you understand the data sources and how to get those things in there there's an awful lot there's um in this canvas apps on the learn websites and plenty of youtube videos depending on which way you're going to go okay the next um um oh okay sorry what i did miss we did talk about components earlier um but in the power app studio um there is this components libraries which is um allowing you to create a component and share it with others but not starting an application so you can start building up those component libraries um which allows you to be more complex and more thoughtful on your branding and how your things are positioned on top of all of that is the the powerapps component framework a set of applications where you can build using html and typescript and and css all those great things um tied back to uh and create your own components that are even more complex than the ones that microsoft provide us um and allow isvs and all those people to create their own versions and maybe do something really snazzy and there is a website um i can't remember the website name but they have a host of of these controls that you can bring in um that's certainly for um that's certainly for another day and more into a developer exam but just for the pl 900 you need to know about them and um what i'm trying to get to here is that we've got um the default components that microsoft gives us down at this bottom level which are simple to use that they're free apart from your license fee obviously and then you get into custom components where you get a bit more complexity you get combining things and and taking away some of that um expanding on the logic that they provided and then you've got this more expensive as in you need a developer and what i can be very complex powerapps component framework which is where most of the um if you need a custom thing to do something that's very very bespoke to you that's where you need to go and just expands that capability from just using standard components to opening up the whole world to you okay we've done all of that i think yeah and so this this is just highlighting the idea that when you share you can share to users or groups but you've got to consider the the permissions so make sure that you've got access to the data versus if that's what you're using um but also any of the other connectors you're using they've got to have access to that as well okay next is powerapps portals so these are uh external facing websites and what i mean by that is is a website that anyone can get to um wherever you are in the world you don't need to have power apps installed on your phone you don't have to be an end user of your organization you can be um someone you know the the standard scenario is back to that fault i want to log a fault with my freezer i want to log on to to to uh the website logofall and someone will get back to me and plan when they're gonna fix it or i want to look at my bill or i want to look at um my account history all those sort of things that people use and there's there's plenty of portals around for various incarnations and that but what powerapps portals allows us to do is to quickly and easily create supports or for those user cases that i directly can link back to our dataverse environment and i'll just quickly run through how to do that within powerapps we saw earlier it's down here on the portal um now it does take a while so when i created this environment i started that process and i'm not sure whether it's ready yet let me just go and have a look it was giving me an error message earlier um yeah it's not quite ready yet but it you can see um it's quite an easy thing to do uh leave that one where's the outcome so all you would do is create a new portal you give it a name you give it an id i can't create any more because i already got one but this is where that url you can create a url of your own and you set a language if i go into my one that i created an hour ago and do browse you can go to you can see that i've now got a publicly facing website with all these things that are available to me and it's showing me a few of the key features but i can then go and edit that and quite easily and quickly add new pages or select from the time template etc to generate content for this externally facing website um and it's not only just um it can be both externally facing as you're not logged in but you may put behind certain actions um you need to be logged in so we can need to authenticate you so the idea is that you're either authenticated directly within the power platform the the dataverse environment so you've got a user record and a username and password stored against your contact record or we use something like azure active directory or facebook or one of the other authenticated authentication providers to do that login for us so we know who it is and we can present them with data that's specific to them so i showed you here we can do a new page we can then do look at the pages that are already available and we can quite easily do changes here and be specific about the font size and we can be more um and is it very much what you see is what you get variation of uh the this content and we can change the font color we can do the alignment etcetera and it's a very simple and easy click and connect way of doing these things if we want to get more in depth we can look at the html code and get into more developer side of these things and really see what's going on with this with these things and and be more specific and more stylized or we can just rely on being able to add components so maybe i want to add within this section and a new image so now it's added this image i can then select an image from whatever i've got available to me and i can change the formatting to make sure it's only like 10 because it's massive um and and that sort of thing so that we're getting into very much clicking um um they can configure part of the powerapps portal there is also other components that we've got down here forms so we can ask for data we can enter data we can display data we can display data from uh records that we've got against database we can list records again against database and you can see that we can do power bi um so all of those things that are available to you um as in a clickable easy interface to do that we've also got the idea of some basic theming and we can either edit the css which means you're getting into the nitty-gritty about the the style sheets and the themes that are available to you but you get get you very much into your own brand brand and a lot of brands will have these css files ready to go and using standard properties for titles etc or you can enable the basic theme and say that i want to i like this dark yellow this product power bi look i feel so again it's applying that logic straight and easily to you or you can go in between and there's nothing stopping you there right so um but once i um saved it and i've synced the configuration hopefully when i browse the website it's now that yellow fullers that i've chosen and you can see that this is a public facing website i've not signed in so this is available to everyone if you went to that url now you'll be able to get there too um once i sign in um it's asking me for a username and password um and we can go from there or maybe we've got some more information on the back of that now if you um i'm just going to go back to if you go back to your apps here and go to the right environment powerapps portals comes with a portal management app a model driven portal management app and this is because all this information that you're doing um to generate this is actually data in tables rows and tables to do with the different configurations if you go to that app in here and press play you will then start to edit that data about your website so the history of barracks portals it was bought from a an independent solution provider um and it's it's evolved to what we've got today but ineffectively we've got this model-driven app which we'll create in a second basically defining all our page templates all our uh brandings and bindings and sites that things all these things are just data within that database that database environment so this is this and this particular area is where you get into the more nitty gritty about how to display your information and takes you away from that and click and configure information into a full-blown suite of available to you for instance you've got content snippets which allows you to do um change properties on it on a page without going into the detail it may it will just be these little snippets that allows you to get into this this information there's the email header for example the footer and header of websites is is defined here um so it's repeated on all these websites but these are all your content snippers we get into web pages and we get into that same web page we were looking at earlier um and the localized content because you can have localized versions of the application and you can see this is the not very whizzy wig but it is what we were looking at earlier this is that broken image that i didn't it doesn't look like it's worked properly but this is what we were looking at earlier um it doesn't look as pretty it doesn't give you the the same look and feel it's not quite point and click but it gives you more complexity and more customization functionality in it and one of the key ones here is your website links which is your navigation so we can then establish um the the pages that appear across the portal etc and define those within that website links so it allows you really to customize where you're going with this website that's the old one isn't it because that's not the one i need you to there it is but it's the same here this this will show you exactly where you're going and link pages together right um okay so the third type of application and we are really running through this and let me get back to powerapps is a model driven app and a model driven app is effectively starting from your data um and rather than being um starting from the interface which is what canvas apps you know you've got a blank canvas that's where that term comes from um again we just want to create a new model driven app um we can start to use it from an existing solution and we can try and have a welcome page etc and do a few tweaks but we're good to go um and what model driven app is trying to do is trying to formulate a business application and restrict the information that's displayed to a user that to that that they actually care about so don't show them everything that's available within dataverse just show them the tables that they should be dealing with they should be dealing with contacts and accounts they should be dealing with opportunities but they don't care about cases for example if you're looking for a sales focused application so what we need to do here is is a few things um we need to define a sitemap which defines what is shown to them when they open the application and then we need to define the restrictions on the tables and which views and which forms that we need to do so let's first of all go into the site map and do do edit and this is the default so we can we can change change this um to the different groups and i'll show you how this looks in a second but in this new sub-area which is is what we want to add in we want to select an entity again you're looking at the old terminology i i am just want to look at contacts and i want to add a new sub area there and i also want to look at fault um and do and maybe we just want that third one in there let's just put in accounts as well uh did i call it customer comfortably i called it do note yourself to have to remember what you're calling it you have got other options here you can have dashboards you can have web uh resources which are web pages or you can go link to a url so you can fire them off to news news.ppc or wherever you want to go at that point um but for the 900 exam you just need to know that this is what you need to do so in this also you've got privileges you can basically restrict the visibility of this depending on whether they've got access to the table etcetera if i just do save and close now you can now because i chose those three tables here they've been brought in but you can also see that under that company table for example at the moment i can see all the forms that are available to me in the database environment these are all the out-of-the-box versions of the account form but if i just want to show one form and not given the option to choose the rest of them i can do that here so i'm now tweaking the application and also can do the same review so if i just want all accounts and my accounts i can restrict that here same applies with dashboards and charts same applies for business processes um if i don't do that because i'll show you the difference between that when we're ready to contacts and unfold it will just bring everything in and give you access to everything i can also restrict the dashboards that get shown across the board here as well there is also business process flows um so business process flows are a way of stepping you through a process and are used heavily within uh model driven apps to you know the case may have to go through some sort of configuration and then go step through these processes so we can restrict that there as well so i'm just going to do save and do publish i'll hit play and well that's so you now got this nice little contacts group that i created within my site app and i've got all the views that are available to me because i didn't restrict it but i can then go and create um this is my contact that i created so i can go and create a new contact um i can choose a different form if i need to that is where i'm not restricted and go and create that contact the same was apply with companies but because i restricted it i've only got those two views and i've only got one form as well i can't change the form here so i'm now restricting that application view and this this left hand side is very minimal and really restricts my user to stuff that they care about um if i go into views within the um back into the into the model driven out i can actually tweak these views from this interface so i can go to all accounts i can then add a new uh column on the primary entity and i say well i actually i'm interested in the address one field come on drag in there you go and then i can change the width if i wanted to and do save on that as well so i've now changed that view so i can edit it here i can publish that and close it always takes give give it a kick and i can also do the same with the forms if my account form i want to edit that we're now now into that model driven um editor of application of the form so we've now got this default form that we're using um but we can add new fields to this form we can add new fields to the entity and maybe show that um we can add fields from um a table that we've got the columns from the table and say we're interested in the city in here and i can stick that in there and then suddenly we've got this ability to formalize data this model driven form is very much data oriented but it's using the um it's using the legacy the dynamics 365 application so you've got this activities timeline in the center which allows you to to associate emails and meetings and notes and attachments into you've also got um the the standard controls for secondary grids and everything else that's going in and around that so it's a very much a data focused environment but as you can see we can quickly and easily add fields we can drag and drop them but we're more structured and that's the point here that we're more structured than the canvas app we can't have that complexity we can't connect directly to a different data source we're stuck in the dataverse world um we can do a lot more to this model driven out and it's it's probably out of scope for our pl 900 discussion but you can have secondary grids you can have uh child accounts etc is here as a secondary grid so you can add them as you as you go along and you have this tabbed interface as well to show you that we talked briefly about owner on tables as well here so that you can see that we've got an owner against a record um right we're probably overrunning like normal um we briefly talked about portals but the idea of portals and security i'm jumping around there because i missed it i apologize for that um but the idea is that um a logged in user or a page a page can be restricted to a logged in user or it may be to a certain security group so there is once we're into that model driven configuration of a power platform uh powerapps portal we can define where that security lies let me show why um we talked about authentication um we can set up configuration to authenticate not only against azure active directory but some other person's active directory so if we've got a business to customer environment we can configure it to use their environment or one of the other common ones facebook and linkedin etc um and then we can share this portal with other people internal or external users and we can then move to model driven apps here is a great picture of a model driven app that people are creating where we've got this dashboard with charts on it that's been created for you we can use a power bi chart at this point as well to really define your your business requirements and understanding of that model driven application um briefly go what we've we've shown the model driven apps are built on that data that we've already established those tables and columns and relationships it's got that application interface to restrict the what tables and and views etc are shown but we've also got that business process flows that we looked at we've got workflows which is the older version of power automate which is really getting into the nitty-gritty of we probably don't use it anymore we've got actions that we can take on that data and we can generate those business rules and then we can use power automate um which joe's about to go into um the visualizations we looked at briefly with the charts and the dashboards but we can expand that to an embed with power bi so model driven apps really are a for desktop users typically but can be expanded to be used on a mobile phone etc uh i don't know what you want to do now joe because we should have a break for the next section we've got an hour left um i don't know unless anyone's got anything in the chat sort of strong views either way i mean i'm just happy just to power on through i guess no pun intended given we're moving on to power automate of course no no strong views crack on let's crack on why lessons learned lessons learned that we don't do this in four hours we need more than that yeah i think it's i don't know i think if you do this um as an official course i think it's like one or two days i think so yeah but there is there is a lot to consume so i think don't i think the key takeaway is don't be overwhelmed ultimately by what we're discussing today because yeah um you know you're not expected to go really deep into the detail for this exam at all so right it would help if i share screens give me a moment power bi row levels um let me just read that out properly for the recording i can answer that one uh yes umar's asking um how do you use power bi roll level security in power apps portal um so effectively when you configure row level security at the power bi level when you then bring it across into the powerapps portal um i think provided that the report is being um authenticated with the same user um that's logged into the portal it's using the microsoft 365 login then it should enforce that for any other scenario then i believe it won't work at all because it needs the um needs logged in users details to be able to enforce that oh sorry paul sorry you're overwhelmed right uh let me share my screen let me know let's come through cart yeah it's fine good stuff so let's take a look now at um power automate uh in a bit more detail and what the capabilities have got on offer there so for the purposes of um the um exam um actually it helps if i'm at the right slide doesn't it there we go so for the purposes of the exam uh what you need to know is you need to be able to identify common components similar to what we spoke about with power bi it's all about describing a high level what the various different functionality points are and some of these we have touched upon already you need to understand how to build a basic flow understand the options that you've got there how you can then interact and work with that flow run it and also then modify it after the fact and that's pretty much it really so this one's not too bad in terms of understanding so let's just dive in and just um see if we can understand this in a bit more detail so we've touched upon this um already in terms of the value but it's worth just re-emphasizing in terms of what um situations we can use or leverage power automate so you know it's really for those situations where we've got those really boring repetitive tasks that we just want to um you know really sort of uh not have to worry about too much um if we're in situations where maybe we want to guide users through specific um processes then they're a good candidate as well if we've got that external integration point um then again that's another great candidate and as we touched upon as well you know if we've got these desktop-based processes that we can easily record and then get a bot to play through then again power automate will sort of solve this as well you know and you know as a common scenario as well it's integration across the different aspects of the power platform is another that you can bring into the equation so we can see in this example flow on here based on a trigger from a powerapps a canvas power up that we've created we can then feed through values to then basically get the manager of a particular user and then we can kick off an approval flow based on that so hopefully that gives you some ideas in terms of how you can um leverage power automate um in terms of how you can do it in a sort of efficient way uh there's a couple of options that you've got available to help us with help you with that microsoft make available various different pre-built templates that you can just sort of take off the shelf uh give it a quick dust off and start using so these are will cover common scenarios and common automations that maybe microsoft have identified or indeed other users of the platform have submitted and microsoft have basically made available as well um from a connector standpoint then we've got a dizzying array of different connectors over 300 plus i think that's even higher now uh in terms of connectors available that you can use to connect to different apps and services so you know you can be reasonably satisfied that in most situations you're going to find the connector off the shelf to be able to do that and you know the worst case scenario from there is that you will um is that you will um need to get a developer involved just to basically build out a connector but hopefully those that's you know that covers five percent of the scenarios as opposed to you know 95 or indeed all of them integration is a key thing so it's going to be reasonably um well with the broader microsoft ecosystem um and indeed the other third-party vendors as well and you've got the ability of having that on-premise integration so what you can do in a nutshell is install a gateway onto your local network from there you can then interact with your local databases your local files and things as if they were available in the cloud effectively it just creates a secure tunnel between the power platform and your local environment so that really opens up quite a lot of integration scenarios and you know for organizations maybe who um are still lagging behind in terms of their cloud adoption or cloud migration then it provides a really nice and easy shortcut for you to get into uh to get working with the power platform um um you know um straight away so touch upon this already in terms of an approval flow but as a as a broad example which we discussed already um you know user can start the process they go into their app create the request that then kicks off the flow we can then query the microsoft 365 or the graph api to get details about that user's manager just by giving the email address of the user and then we can then trigger off an approval flow that then gets sent out as an email or indeed gets received for the through the um the power automates app even on the cloud or the desktop the user can then just press a button on or it can provide further details on sort of approve it so really just streamlining um you know what could be otherwise a very complex approval process so effectively to continue this flow onwards so it lands with the manager they then get the approval through we can then evaluate the result of that particular approval and then based on that we can then kick off additional logic so okay if they've not approved it then we can just email a rejection back to the user to basically sort of say okay or can you fix these issues on it please or you know we could have additional sublogic over that so you know maybe our manager you know is um you know needs to sort of get even more senior approval when the purchase is over a certain value so that being the case we can then sort of kick off a second approval flow that goes to our vice president or you know senior director in our business to then sort of approve that for us and all being well but the back end of it the user may get an approval an email back saying that everything's been approved and hunky-dory starts spending so you know potentially as i say a scenario which otherwise might be very difficult to map out uh power ultimate gives us that capability to do that and you know for a few different steps which is really nice so we've got three types of flows that sit within um power automate we've got our event driven flows so those are the ones that we've touched upon already that have a trigger action um that run on a schedule uh those are the ones that will typically um fit into that category uh you may also hear them referred to as cloudflows um as a sort of uh from a terminology standpoint business process flows which car was touched upon already um they are a type of flow they are categorized as a flow um and you can use them as part of your model driven apps and again those are the situations where you need to uh we've got a very well defined business process that you want to be able to sort of mirror out into the application and then finally the desktop flows again we've touched upon this already but these are our rpa our robotic process automation flows that we can record on the desktop and then sort of run in attended or unattended mode the great thing is that you know because we've got the ai builder capabilities sitting underneath the hood then we can bring these into power automate really straightforwardly so whether we want to do sort of some form processing as an action step so take text from an image from our invoice save that back into database whether you want to do object detection so maybe we want to you know detect whether a um you know a particular picture is is as a sort of a unicorn or not a unicorn you know you can sort of do that and the ai will sort of build that and detect that up prediction um so it's all about building sort of prediction models around maybe your um your record quality maybe lead scoring and things like that and then finally text classification so a good scenario for this is could be um you know maybe uh you're receiving customer feedback back obviously you have the you have the typical model where where people um give a score based on the service and then maybe give some notes at the end of it that might not always tell the full story about what's going on so maybe you want to run a text classification around the what the customers actually typed in you know and if they're using particularly um strong language either in a positive or negative sense then you can maybe um tag that and flag that for attention and obviously if the customer is um is you know really quite upset then you can then route that particular seaside or particular complaint through to the to the uh to the appropriate organization or the person in the organization i should say so these are the ar models that you can very easily start using with power automate flows to mention already you can create flows from a template there's lots of different templates available so you can se you can basically um you know have one as you can see on there so you send yourself a reminder every in 10 minutes about something um you know record form responses from sharepoint lots of different flows and examples on there um all you need to do is just select one put in the appropriate connection details for the service that you're working with and then it should all go off and you can start working with it so a couple of important concepts to keep in mind um so again with some of these we touch upon already so so make sure you're aware of the differences between triggers and actions so triggers again are those things that kick off the flow either in terms of an action from an external system or schedule as an example actions are the bits within the flow that does stuff the bits that do stuff here let's go with that one um so you can have one or more actions within your particular flow uh it could be you know could be as complex as you like in that we get ridic in that regard but ultimately your flow can only have one trigger one trigger that kicks it off okay and it's a starting action for that um and then the actions will typically cover things such as um you know create a record in a system or do things like that we've got other actions as well um which aren't tied to a particular service so as an example you've got the ability of being able to do loops so loop through um until a condition is met a set of actions until the condition is met you can implement your sort of you know um other common programming constructs such as switch statements so do a specific set of actions based on whether a value equals this do until um again loop through and just do that apply to each so let's say you've returned a you know 10 records from microsoft dataverse you want to do a specific action against each of those um and then finally you've got a very powerful expression-based language that sits underneath this that you can use to make your flows even more dynamic the expression language is based off something called the workflow definition language or wdl and you've got common functions available there to be able to do things such as you know concatenate convert to different um convert data into different objects you know all sorts of really good stuff on there again and don't worry too much about literally you know knowing detailed um wdl functions for the exam again just concern yourself with the higher level concepts and things like that so a question from pranav in the chat is power to make for automation yes you know it's designed as an automation tool so being able to you know as carl says automate your workflows uh just make things easier you know save yourself from doing tedious things day in day out um yeah so triggers there's a mention we touch upon already a few different types uh the first two we've we've focused on so i'm not going to really uh concern ourselves too much at this point you know when so when an action something changes on a schedule a final option is that the ability of being able to schedule based on a button press so this is um will allow you effectively to um trigger the flow in a few different ways so you can actually go in through the power to make portal and press the button that way to trigger the flow you can do it within your mobile application to do it you've even got the ability of being able to integrate with um a third-party service uh which is called flick uh so and and obviously over other services as well so basically if somebody presses a button that will then kick off the flow so you know you could maybe have it so that okay you've got a button maybe you know in for your you know when back to normal when people get into the office they press a button maybe when they check in or something like that and then boom that kicks off a flow and then maybe tells um you know the building manager perhaps that maybe okay we've got um somebody new who's coming to the building um you know maybe we need to you know review our social distancing measures because there's still a risk of covid or things like that there's a few options on there with the button press option as well and this will be more for when you're working with a mobile app or when you're working with desktop to trigger it but you can also specify certain parameters that go in as well so you can so as well as pressing the button i can supply let's say maybe a yes or no i can put some text in i can give a date or a number and then again when the flow is executed i can read those values and i can customize that based on based on specific sorts of requirements that i need to have so button press is quite a good option potentially and you know useful for quite a few different scenarios so when we're scheduling our flows uh we've got some really quite uh extensive options for how we can run it so we can literally have it run on specific days of the week we could have one running every every minute of every hour of every day if we wanted to but um you'll probably get your administrator or your the person who pays for your licensing probably get a little bit annoyed over time at that um you can just run it on a specific date um so in the future so maybe you've got some batch process that you just want to run for one time as i say quite a few different options on there and we can see through this um through this experience we can just sort of define the options then we get a human readable um description of when it's going to run there so we can just so again just making sure that you know we it's doing what we think was going to do button flows um so yeah again not really much more to mention around this again this is an example of how the power automates um app looks and how the approvals will sort of look as you come through um so not really much else to comment on that um and then you in the portal is where you then go to basically manage and sort of you know see your the approvals that you received and also the ones that um have been sent out as well from there you can also export the flow if you wanted to so again touched upon this already but business process flows again it's got these defined steps that you want people to sort of go through when you're working with model driven apps or data on top of the data first that's the key bit ultimately business process flows are very very much bound towards database and model driven apps and so you won't necessarily be able to use them with your external data sources as part of that just keep that in mind with your business process flows okay so at this point then let's do a quick demo and just see what power to make flows are all about so i'm just going to come out of that um and i'm in the maker portal i'm in a solution again here's what i made earlier um that we can use to sort of extend out further we can see i've got a couple of cloud flows in here already that we'll sort of go go for and have a quick look at but let's just create one from scratch on here so i'm just going to go to cloudflow click on new card for it's going to take me into the power automate portal i'm working in the context of my solution on here because i'm trying to follow best practice approaches i want to potentially move this out to other environments this is why this is how we sort of do it and effectively when we create a flow for the first time we get a a screen that's similar to here where we basically are asked to provide our trigger action for our particular flow so in this case we're just going to do a manually triggered flow and we can see that we've got some additional options that we can sort of provide at this particular point um so maybe we can sort of do something like okay email input you know we can maybe put some details into there um you know enter an email address or something like that a few different data options on there we're not going to worry too much about doing that for today and then on new step we can see some of the various options that come out on there we've got a search bar at the top up here that we can use so if i was maybe interested in connecting to salesforce i could maybe type that in there and then bam i get all of my particular actions that i can use with that you'll see that certain actions are basically flagged as premium um as premium connectors premium connectors will typically always almost always require you to have a license assigned a paid license assigned or capacity license assigned to be able to use them so we can see in the case of the common data service current environment one that is a premium license uh sharepoint um is not a premium connector as we can sort of see down there so again just keep that in mind that there may be certain licensing constraints based on the connected type that you're working with we can see in terms of the action steps that we've got available we've got ones that connect to service we can see we've got a condition based one up here so we can actually set up a conditional flow based on that add in our appropriate action steps and we've got other ones as well so we can do things such as let's say maybe terminate so we can maybe end our flow prematurely we can click on control on here to see all the different options so we've got switches we can do have a do and turn and apply to each scope is quite useful in the sense of if you've got a set of actions that maybe are interrelated so all need to succeed or need to sort of fail um sort of in tandem then you can use scope to basically control that you know and then um based on whether certain action steps sort of complete or not we've got the ability of being able to um determine whether the next action sort of um succeeds or fails so i'm just going to show you a quick example of that so if i just choose um i'm just going to add on any any any old step on here so i'm just going to list out all my accounts i'm going to add an additional step down here where maybe i want to send out an email as an example what we can do um is we can go back onto here or go back on to here more specifically we can actually do configure run after and we can set so that okay we only want to send an email if the previous step has sort of failed and what we can see then the line there goes red to sort of just make it clear in terms of um in terms of um you know this is what's gonna happen when it fails or alternatively we can add on a um a parallel a parallel branch uh which maybe i don't know does something different maybe we just want to list some more rows if we get the first set of rows through so again i'm just going to select any old um anything in there as an example and it seems to be doing something funky let's give it another go there we go um so again we just then need to just make sure that we've got our configuring after configured so it's cleared it for that one so i'm just going to do is failed on that one and then for this one on here we're going to do a configure run after if it's successful only so again we can make sure we've got you know um we're handling our errors effectively using power automate flow uh and using configure one after we've got those capabilities baked in which is really nice but for now let's just show you an example of a approval flow and how that sort of works so i'm just going to create i'm just going to do start and wait for approvals first of all um i'll do approval reject first response as our approval type i'll just do this rpl 900 for the purpose of this i'm just going to assign this approval to me yep so it's found my user account on there there won't be some additional details down there there's additional things that you can add on to be able to do it but for the purpose of this i'm just going to save the flow i want to make sure that i'm giving it a name so approval test at the top hit save on that one let's give that a second okay uh run this approval flow to okay it's not been installed so just give me a warning i just need to run it for the first time um so effectively when the flow's been created is ready to go um i can then test the flow at any point just by hitting the button up there and i can just perform a manual test of it by clicking save and test so i'm just going to click on continue run the flow and then that's probably just gonna take a minute while it's installing it in the background so for now we'll just let that run and then we'll come back to this in a few minutes but let's just take a look at some other example flows that we can sort of build out that um are very much tied towards the um microsoft database so this one on here this is for sort of a campus sort of security sweep system so what this flow does is that it basically just runs every 15 minutes we go off to query microsoft dataverse we've got a table that we built out there called visits that records when people come onto the campus and then what we do is we we filter out the results of that to basically return all active visits where um people haven't actually left yet within the uh or where the schedule then is greater than 15 minutes away okay so we've got some additional options on here that we can maybe leverage as well so we can maybe sort our data we can return a row count things like that but effectively on here we're just returning a filtered list of our visit data from dataverse then what we can do based on the results that we get back all of the records we then get the details about the building and the visitor in this case the contact that this relates to and then we can send out an email notification to them and basically just informing us that okay yep so and so has overstayed their welcome so maybe we need to go off and investigate that so again a pretty straightforward flow on there but potentially quite powerful in terms of the functionality we're doing on that let's take a look at this other one on here visit notification so this one is is based off a trigger point within the dataverse so when a new visit is created we then get the details about that newly created record and we want to send an email out to them just to confirm that they um are scheduled in to visit our campus at this start date and this end date and we also give them a security code as well that they can use on site so we can make the whole email dynamic um you know both in terms of the contents of the email itself but also the person we're sending it to so that's really quite powerful there right let's have a look at this on here right it's still running whilst we're waiting and i'm just conscious of time as well um it's worth familiarizing yourself on with the flow sort of setting page that we can see on here so every flow will have this on here it gives you a bit of a summary in terms of okay what the flow is who who created it when it was last modified what connections is it using so in this case this flow here is using the common data service and mail connect mail connectors a good thing is that we've got the ability to be able to view the full history of the particular flow so you can see that i've last ran this um yesterday evening i can go in and as a as a flow designer and i can actually see what actually happened at each specific action step so you know from a debugging standpoint and from a um you know from a um just you know checking just to make sure things are working correctly then it will effectively let you sort of do that and work that so yeah for history so the key thing to remember is that um yeah i've just i'm just seeing that now so i think if it's installed the solution call i go to approvals up here this is still installing the solution yeah you usually done that beforehand it takes a little while yeah it helps if you actually run through the steps that you hope to demo on the day doesn't it that would be a really good idea the approval solutions that he's importing ninja take a little while to get there and so uh anyway is what it is but yeah effectively this is where you would go so if i did have the approval through i get the view into here i can also see approvals that have been sent and i get a full history as well so hopefully at some point um within the next um maybe before the end if we're lucky i'll get that through we can go from there um so just to finish off our discussion on this screen on here so we've got options of being able to share the flow out we can save a copy of it we can delete send a copy of it to someone else we can export it out into a package or or into sort of um i used to be able to do it into logic accounts but i think they've removed that now um we can view analytics for the flow so i can click on here and i get a nice little view in terms of okay who's who's actually doing what with this flow is it doing what we hope it to do or you know is it being used a bit too much maybe from a usage and from a license standpoint in this case there's only one once so we're all good on that one and then finally we can also turn off our flows as well so if we don't want it to run for a particular um um for a particular period we can just go in and just preemptively just turn it off and then turn it back on again when we're ready to go final thing just to show you quickly um connectors down here will list all of the various different connectors that you can work with power automate in terms of the details about the connections themselves to those services this will be down here in data connections so we can see down here we've got connections on here for the approvals one two for the common data service and one for mail down there and then finally i can access my various different templates from up here i can search for them um find one that i'm particularly interested in just click on it like so it's going to give me a bit more detail i then just need to give the connection details that will go off and create that for me okay so um just to answer the question that's come off in the chat for him back to carl so question from uh nicosia pronounced that rightly uh what is the flowchecker used for so the flowchecker is um it's used to sort of tell you when there's a potential blocking issue with your flow that could stop it from working as intended so if we click on this one here we can see that i've got no errors and no warnings on this particular one a few minutes ago when we had that overflow that wasn't quite um for the approvals wasn't quite working how we wanted to i think we did get an error on there wonders about the solution not working seems to have gone now but effectively if there's a breaking um issue with your flow it will show up on here so that will mean that your flow cannot run at all until you've addressed that warnings will be okay maybe um there's a there's something that you just need to check on it um to fix which may have a maybe a performance impact or something like that that you need to that you need to look at okay approval's not come first that's fine um so pranav's question what is an approval so an approval is where um we want somebody to basically just approve or reject something um you know based on you know a common business process so maybe you want to approve an expense you want to approve you know somebody's time off leave requests there's various different scenarios where that would work um and then final question from emad before we move on uh how do i have central login where i can see overflows and can trigger them again also can we configure a flow to retry a number of times um so you would use um probably the solutions or the power platform center to get that bird eye view would you say yeah um and then configuring the flow to retry um i think you can do that based on i think you'd have to have a child flow with your car and then just keep trying that again use the do until and then eventually you just fail it after let's say three or four attempts a couple of ways you could do it maybe yeah you've got looping controls in there so you can easily do a do until um which would try but it would be a child flow rather than anything else depending on what your solution is certainly a problem beyond 900 i'm had yeah i would definitely really it's um just how do i create a flow uh and also focus uh specifically on this on how the approvals work as well um that's really important so so apologies weren't able to show that today um but no over to car now the final piece of the puzzle we've done uh power bi uh powerapps uh flow powersmith and now he's the power virtual agents um so virtual agents are chat bots they are those little things that pop up when you go on any website nowadays and go hey can i help um and it allows you to interact with your users in a natural language scenario where they can ask you questions and you can respond back and you can go through as certain steps to gaining more information or answer their question maybe driving them to a different site etc um so the idea around a virtual agent is just that it's a low code approach to creating these chat bots whereas if you're in a a proper development world could be very costly in terms of um ensuring that they're they're working correctly um so without further ado let's just get into it um we're back in our environment and unlike joe again virtual agents takes a little while to warm up the first time so i did go and create one um before uh this um but it would just be in chat box on this left-hand side make sure you're in the right environment and basically create one um and um you just create a bot name etc so um and in language and make sure you've got the right environment not the default one and we go and create um and it gives you this little bitty picture of building a bot so so and you can just see on this left hand side what we're going to talk about now so topics being those conversation starters they're basically saying what are the key phrases when someone interacts with my bot to trigger this whole thing that we're going to do and you can have multiple topics per bot so in our scenario um we are basically going to to start building our own bot and working through those things so if i look at the topics that are available to me these are all the out-of-the-box ones and some of these are just to get you starting and discussion but there's also other ones here that are system ones which are basically um if you go into you know hello how are you doing et cetera and these are defined by microsoft you can't do anything with these um you can uh tailor the authoring and what what's going to happen and you can change the message that gets responded to etc um but these are the standard ones you can't get rid of so if i do say hello down this left-hand side we should get a response and you can see that it's responding to me um and at this point normally you would you would ask them a question or or do something maybe get them to choose one of the other topics let me just go back to the topic screen there and let's create a topic so the idea is that this is to do with certification um and we want a bot to guide us through that process and maybe give us some helpful hints along the way so i'm going to create a new topic i'm going to give it um called its certification um these are all optional yeah sorry i just i've got a question here from pranav how do you get the bot to respond the way you want to your question this is what i'm going to go through now enough so these trigger phrases will then um give us a response so as soon as we start these trigger phases and we've got those in and we will then go further and work out how we're going to respond to the user but maybe just bear with me a little a little while so like i was saying the trigger phrases are these one-liners about what we expect the user to enter um and what microsoft does is is um amalgamates these and ensures that it's taking the key points out of these so you don't have to write every single variation but enough variations that the it can use its own ai model to help out so i'm just going to copy and paste from my list here of these certifications uh so we've got these trigger phrases [Music] and it's affecting five phrases and you can give it more than one you don't need to do any and what five at all for your demonstration but the more you give it the better it's likely to be able to trigger um and once we've done that we can then save the topic and save that and then go to the authoring canvas and the author on canvas is basically once i start with those trigger phrases and you can see all five listed there what does the bot do so the user is as given a um giving us the ability to as asked as this question and what we're going to do and we've got a few options here the first one being a message and and any old random thing and we can include there um and then we can add to that so we can ask a question we can call an action which is calling over to parallels mate which we'll go into a little bit later we can show a message which is the same as this box here we can jump to another topic so we can have series of topics so one might be about certification there might be something about what levels have i got what are my current um account details what what um what is the status of my fault all those sort of things and you build it up you build up these topics for your bot you have one bot with many topics um so you you may want to drive to a different topic so you can have parent and child topics and and keep them separate um and so you can build up that complicate complexity and also you can end with conversation and we are talking about um reducing the time that our agents are taking speaking to our end users so the idea is that if you've got this info on your website and you've given them enough information they don't have to spend time on the phone waiting for an agent to be available which reduces the obviously the the it's improves the customer experiences experience maybe reduces the number of agents you need and all those sort of things so we're really establishing a different way of users communicating with you and improving their customer satisfaction and also the bots run 24 7. so we're really getting to a point where we're filling their question whatever time they want it fielded rather than relying on opening times so let's just ask a question and and our questions um is going to be what topic do you you want to learn so we can identify this and what this is basically meaning is what what is the response meant to be are we expecting a multiple choice whether that's like azure power platform in our case whether we want uh a user's uh entire response and doing exactly what they write maybe to do with age and and or yes no response or cities these are all inbuilt entities so these are all the ones that microsoft provides for you so there's there's time down here date and time speed stakes etc so it's really building up you know giving you the tools that you need without re rewriting those that logic yourself and you like i say these are entities and these entities you can define your own so if you've got a specific set of products um then you can define that and reuse that entities list across all your topics so that you don't have to keep redoing that and it will be available here on this right hand side but let's keep it simple for now and let's just do azure power platform and office and you can see here now that it's basically created those three responses as a split so depending on which response the user takes it will go down one of these three paths so on um so say we're going to this power platform path and we can then respond to them basically saying uh share message is a great set of resources available on docs i don't like software anyway um so we're prompting them with the information you require and this is a very simple situation just to show you it but the idea is that you could probably be prompting them to your website you could be prompted into their faqs you could be um getting them to maybe a service center or send them all this information around all the stuff that you want to provide them without taking up an agent's time so let's just save that and give it a try so on this left-hand side you have this test panel and this is basically allowing you to test your pot out so and we saw this earlier so how do i get any search um and hopefully yes we're in so um it's responded to with me what i wanted to do and it's giving me those three options so the user can either type here or um because i didn't finish it it's it's fallen over um because i chose the wrong one or you can select it let me just start that again okay just to raise the question that pranav's put the chat carl um do you have to put everything here so that the bot knows everything i'm assuming that's is that the options that you're referring to pranav or there are the the trigger phrases don't have to be every way that person will say it they will be augmented with the microsoft um experience and extrapolation like plurals etcetera so using natural language to define that it doesn't have to be 100 um the options are basically how you're going to define that that process and that way through so yeah so you do need to tell it all the options but there is a special one uh um which is um other um where you can extrapolate that but i can show you that in a little bit later so if i then choose power platform um hopefully it will go through this condition and give you that link and you can see it's been formatted into a website for me so i can go and drive off to this misspelled web address but maybe more than that we can do we can be more specific and more customization so let's add in another node here so i can add in another question um i want to know their name so there is a name field i think yeah person name um and basically he's expecting a response from that and what you should be doing is changing the name of the variable because at the moment it's called var1 so if i do edit there i can see i can change that to name and i can define how what the scope of that variable is whether it's just within this uh area here or it can be provided to all the topics within the bot so once we transfer between topics we can keep that name as a variable we don't have to ask them their name again very powerful to allow us to do that and also we can change use that variable um in our our responses to the customer so i can insert that here and be more um be more customizable more friendly with them they know that they've asked i've given this information so i'm going to use it um so let's just save that and give that a little another little quick test hopefully that'll um kick in that wasn't one of the phrases by the way but it's managed to think that i do want to talk about this so let me your name know my name and then you can see that now i've got a personalized response and and that's that data entry and using that data but even more so that let's let's go to um do something about calling an action and um we can create a flow at this point so we can go over to flow which um joe's just been through um and it's one of the triggers so there is a special trigger called power virtual agents and you can ask for an input and my first input will be name and our second input will be the uh uh course that will be our power apps or azure etc and uh we're just gonna respond with you know we've got everything under the sun that um joe's always disgusting we can we can go and call external systems we can go and get data we can go and call the weather api if we wanted to we can we've got the world is our roadster at this point but i'm just gonna respond with uh a cheap and quick response just to prove that it works and i'm not cheating etcetera and whilst that's saving away um like i was saying the world is your oyster we've basically got um the ability then to do whatever we want so when we go back into here now under office call an action we should see fingers crossed yeah this is our new flow because i didn't change the name so another thing changing names when you're doing it and as you can see it's taken those two input variables and i can link those to the variables that i've already got i didn't rename my variable here for the course i can then pass in the course and then the response i can then use that as a message and let's just put that in as a as the response message so hopefully once that's saved we can try again it was to kick in yeah let's do office because that's the leg i established it on it's gone over to palm automate and that and that was the output that i said in that in that flow so you can see where we're interacting with power automated we're we're we've got that all that world that opens up to us and we're then starting to build into all that uh automation of things um a few other bits here um these connectors um you can move them around so you can join them up so depending on which one you're you're doing etc you might have the same choice coming through it you know if you've only got it don't really care about the result um you can do um lots of other interesting things with it but it is very much i'm just gonna delete that so it doesn't fall over on me very much your your canvas to start building this complex logic and you can ask questions and you can respond etc and giving that very natural feel so um i'm done i've established my bot i'm ready um what do i need to do next is i need to publish it and i then this is basically says i'm happy with what i've got and we have got versionings on this so you can go and play with the the bot in dev before you publish it to allow you to um go ahead and create these things but the other thing that it talks to you about within um the pl 900 exam is is what do you do with that bot and we've already established that you can put it on it on your website or you can do it on lots of different channels through microsoft teams which is a great one so you've got this spot on the side that you can ask be asking questions for and maybe for hr or or some other processes that you could do that sort of interaction with the demo website is just that it's just a demo website and it allows you to show it off to people um i usually doesn't take that long um or you can you can embed it in an iframe effectively with this little um little um code and you go and give that to your local developer of your website and throw it in so that you've got that frame within your own website and there is some branding that you can do at that point um but there's lots of other options facebook's another good one if you want to interact with your customers um just to show you a few of the bits here there is automating a series of actions with the topics but that is is a bit more than 900 at the moment we've got the ai capabilities which is improvements are coming but the other one that's really quite interesting and you've got analytics so you've got this power bi report showing you um how your bot is performing over time and you can look at the most people that are using certain topics and maybe you want to start fleshing that out you can see the ones that which topics have dropped through to an agent and which really helps with you sort of understanding where your weaknesses are and your strengths so it's a great tool to to make available um whether how many have gone through to that agent again how many are just they just stop you they they tried to get a response and they didn't that sort of thing so it's all very good and it allows you to do that very quickly and easily and and the final thing here is that we did discuss it but this is where you create your own custom list and be able to have a specific list of things that are specific to your product or your environment your your your um business process okay um that was very quick on power virtual agents um it is um there's not a lot to virtual agents but it's very powerful when you start getting into um you know people like the idea of virtual agents that can do things and and it certainly helps with driving um business value in these things quite easily and quickly is there anything on virtual agents in the chat no i think we've covered there was a question just in terms of how you would get the portal so if you have it on a portal you want to get logged in user how you would sort of feed that through into the virtual agent i think you would just feel if it was a parameter with you or something you'd be able to get it from the page and then pass it yeah there is there is um there is an authentic authentication action um but it needs to be configured so you can authenticate at that point to go and get an authentic authentication and whether it's an aad or or whatever else it is that's what you know to know who you are cool that's it in terms of questions unless anyone else just wants to put anything in um but yeah i think we probably need to start thinking about wrapping up do we look at the time yeah um so just i'll hand back to me then um the approvals finally come through you'll be pleased to hear so i'll show you that very quickly and then we'll um go into the wrap-up so does that come through okay uh yeah i can see you joe good stuff so the approval will land in here we can see if we go back on to the flow uh it will still be without it open you would still have the flow in a running state but the moment when i receive it through it looks something similar to this i can sort of add on my prove or rejection action based on that i can also add a comment i could even reassign the flow as well to somebody else on the tenant but if i was to just sort of just do rejected as an example click on confirm that's then going to go off and um sort of complete that flow we can just confirm that by going back in onto here um and rather and rather nicely because i'm using teams as well i've actually got a notification for in teams as well just now that it's been rejected so it's quite a prize for that nice um approval experience that works with the tools of each day and we can see down here that it's been rejected i'd typically have some more actions off the back of this that i'd want to trigger um but yeah approvals is one of those great things that you can do some quite powerful things with quite quickly and definitely something that for this exam you need to familiarize yourself with okie dokie so we're going to start wrapping up unfortunately so we just want to leave you with just some additional things i think as you um kind of appreciate we've covered a lot of covered a lot of content today um probably could have done um you know justice in you know across the whole topics really and so just wanted to leave you with some stuff that you can sort of um take away and obviously um you know prepare yourself if you do indeed plan to sit the exam so for the exam itself um it's useful sometimes you know what to expect um so it's so when you set it it's going to be a 60 minute exam it's not the same length as the other exams that microsoft offer out so as a consequence there will be less questions that you that you face as part of that uh you'll more than likely take that via a pearson view um which you can do via a test center in normal times but these days probably more likely to be at home that you would sort of do that it's worth just familiarizing yourself with how that checking process works because there's nothing worse on you already if you're like me you're already stressing out already on the exam day because you're trying to revise all that sort of stuff last thing you want is to have problems checking in so make sure that you familiarize yourself how that process works do the system test make sure that it all works try and avoid a corporate device if you can because sometimes you can have issues with firewalls or restrictions and things like that and just make sure that you're not having it not gonna have any last-minute problems on the day itself and it says the different types of questions that you've got in there um there's all sorts of different formats and things like that again we can't discuss specific questions but microsoft have published a list of the different formats of questions that they um you can expect on exam so again if you just if you're just a little bit unsure it's your first exam you don't know what to expect then definitely would recommend that you read that through just so you can understand that so we keep mentioning this in terms of general tips but it really is worth emphasizing practice makes perfect you know this exam is testing your knowledge on core concepts and really the best way of getting familiar with that is by just sort of using it so um make sure you've got your trial environment set up uh experiment with the functionality we've discussed today hopefully we've given you some useful points of the things that to go to to look at sort of immediately and make sure that you've got a good grasp of the terms and the concepts because that's what you're going to be assessed on understanding knowing the difference between a dashboard and a report knowing that the various different power virtual automate um concepts knowing that the best users case for power apps in different scenarios all of this stuff and more will be tested any other tips you'd like to add on to that one carl no um i think you called it all though really um it is um it is just a matter of making sure you you go for the exam slowly and methodically there is a button top left which is um uh usually i can't remember what it's called but there's basically to allow you to um review later so what my my approach normally is is that i will tick for every question and uh do the questions once and then come back if i've got time because um you you learn things along the exam as well so things that you're not quite too sure on you'll get clarity on so use that if you if you want to and make sure it's there great thanks carl so to sort of help you along um after today um a couple of things to sort of recommend uh definitely do check out the uh the official learning path that microsoft has made available um on the on the website it's basically just a um you sort of a self learning tool that you can use it's going to go through pretty much most of the most if not all of the stuff that we think that we've gone through today it also includes knowledge regular knowledge checks throughout um there's also a couple of exercises organized available as well so you can really test your knowledge so you know with with your trial environment and with your um learning path you're hopefully going to have all everything at your disposal to do well in the exam all being well and then finally um something to check out microsoft virtual training days so this will vary based on the geography that you're in um but microsoft do run these fairly regularly across different technology areas so it's not just power platform but also azure as well dynamics 365 and things like that and effectively they're designed to give you um uh similar to what we've done today an overview of the different topics and things like that um and um it's the best thing with them as well is that you um can potentially get a free exam voucher as part of doing it doing it um microsoft will typically offer this out for free um so you know don't miss the opportunity there are upcoming events being run in the uk um for this specifically 27th of may uh but do check your local microsoft sound really corporate now please check your your local microsoft affiliate for details um yeah i imagine there will be ones run in america in you know in europe and things like that so do check that out so or it leaves us if you've got any questions now is really a great time to unmute or put them in the chat if not thank you very much appreciate your time today and hope this has been useful

Channel: Julian Sharp

Views: 6,782

Keywords: Certification, Exam Prep, Fundamentals, Power Platform, PL-900

Id: -pTOl9n9pvY

Length: 239min 20sec (14360 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021