Ever struggled with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates? These JSON files are essential for setting up your resources on Azure. Powerful? Absolutely. But let’s be honest, they can be a bit tough to read and manage. Azure Bicep to the rescue! Created by Microsoft, this domain-specific language (DSL) refines ARM templates to be more user-friendly. Here’s our agenda for today: A brief intro to Azure Bicep. Bicep vs. ARM templates: Spotting the differences. Advantages of Azure Bicep. A hands-on guide: Deploying an Azure resource with Bicep. Why Should You Care About Azure Bicep? Designed f ..read more

Empowering users to collaborate while adhering to compliance standards is a pivotal aspect of modern communication. Microsoft Teams introduces a streamlined approach to ensure secure mobile meetings by integrating sensitivity labels into the Teams calendar. Label Selection in Meeting Creation: Users can seamlessly align with compliance standards during meetings on their mobile devices by selecting sensitivity labels within the Teams calendar. Admin-applied default labels are automatically visible to users. Clicking on the Sensitivity label field in the meeting creation form provides users with ..read more

In the realm of low-code web development, Power Pages has emerged as a powerful tool for creating quite compelling and interactive websites that are easy to build and manage. Bringing the UX dreamers, the design specialists and the pro-devs under a single, fusion umbrella. I still remember that super cool demo in the Microsoft Power Platform Conference earlier this year where a T-Mobile branded website was created within a matter of seconds. I still remember that super cool demo in the Microsoft Power Platform Conference earlier in October. A T-Mobile branded website was created within a matt ..read more

Hello friends, here’s your one-stop summary of the new features for the Microsoft Power Platform introduced in February 2024. Power Apps Copilot is getting a new job description as a grammar editor for canvas apps. Draft with Copilot is a new premium feature releasing in Preview for the US region very soon. It enables an app user to use Copilot to assist them in text input. This is (initially) only available in English, but Microsoft touts that it will be especially useful for app users not working with an app in their native language. You can see a sneak peek here. Model-driven apps are ..read more

One of the features currently in preview that I am #superexcited about is Dataverse low-code plug-ins. What are Dataverse low-code plug-ins? They allow you to build server-side business logic specifically for Dataverse. Plug-ins are not new technology. In the early versions of Dynamics (version 3 and before), there was the concept of call-outs, which allowed you to build C# or VB.net code that could be configured to run on backend operations to update data. This evolved to plug-ins in Dynamics CRM v4.0 which currently exist today as a key pro-coder tool extend Microsoft Dataver ..read more

I’m done with Outlook yet I still need to create Teams meetings, can I somehow generate the meeting url, e.g. with Power Automate flow? Recently, I met a few people unhappy with Microsoft Outlook application wanting to switch to another tool. Sadly, they realised that the other email clients won’t allow them to create Teams meetings, still needed for their work. No direct integration, no plugin to install, nothing… But with all the Microsoft tools there must be some way to get a Teams meeting link! Note: this solution uses premium actions, therefore, it needs premium license. Run a flow f ..read more

The introduction of the DAX query view (official blogpost) and the new INFO DAX functions (official blogpost) gives us some very possibilities to update our measures without using the formula bar. We can for instance create a query that shows all the measures that has an error message like this EVALUATE VAR _X =INFO.MEASURES() RETURN FILTER(_X, [ErrorMessage]<>"") This will extract all my measures in the open power bi file that contains an error message. In this case I have a measure that contains an error message telling me that I can’t use a True/False expression to ..read more

This blog did not go to plan, I hate Teams Dataverse, it’s a bad idea and badly implemented, but lets start at the beginning… So I had this idea, wouldn’t it be cool if I could dynamically update the trigger phrases in my chatbot, it would go something like this: As everything is built in Dataverse my thought was I just need to update the topic row in the relevant table. I had the following challenges/learning opportunities: PVA Dataverse Tables Update Field/Key for Trigger phrases Find Topic Quick call out, in case you haven’t guessed this in Teams Dataverse, not full PVA, the licence cost ..read more

As many of you already know, the stripe payment option has been integrated into Power Pages. This feature is currently in preview. See additional info in this link Introducing online payments in Power Pages (Preview)| Microsoft Power Page However, this article is about adding a PayPal payment option on a Power Pages page and updating the invoice status using portal web API. The first step is to sign up with the PayPal Developer portal (https://developer.paypal.com/). Go to PayPal Developer Dashboard. Set up a client ID and a secret. PayPal Developer Dashboard On the DataVerse table entity form ..read more

A few months ago I wrote an article about a new preview feature for Copilot Studio called ‘Plugin Actions’. (You can read the article here if you haven’t read it yet.) If you’re not familiar with Plugin actions, they are used by copilot to respond to users automatically and you can call them from within a topic! In my previous article I showed you how to use an existing power platform connector to create a plugin action, and I showed how to call the action from a topic, and boy, does this cut down on the work that goes into creating topics! There are other ways to create plugin actio ..read more