Create a technical design (10-15%) Validate requirements and design technical architecture design and validate the technical architecture for a solution design authentication and authorization strategy determine whether you can meet requirements with out-of-the-box functionality determine when to use Logic Apps versus Power Automate flows determine when to use serverless computing, plug-ins, or Power Automate determine when to build a virtual entity data source provider and when to use connectors Design solution components design a data model design Power Apps reusable components design custom connectors design server-side components Describe Microsoft Power Platform extensibility points describe Power Virtual Agents extensibility points including Bot Framework skills and Power Automate flows describe Power BI extensibility points including Power BI APIs, custom visuals, and embedding Power BI apps in websites and other applications describe Power Apps portal extensibility po...

Data is an essential part of the business process and has integrated various industries. Data allows companies to access the most useful information and knowledge about the company, its competitors, its customers, and more. Data and analytics can help a business predict consumer behavior, make decisions, improve market trends, and determine the ROI of its marketing efforts. In the data visualization, Power BI's name appears in the front row. It allows to use by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. It provides interactive visualization and business intelligence capabilities with an interface that Microsoft says is easy enough for end users to create reports and dashboards. It is part of the Microsoft Power Platform. According to Microsoft Doc: Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Whether your data is a s...

Alan Turning was the first mathematician who was given the idea about intelligent machine and Power Virtual Agent is one of them. PVA is a core component of the Power platform that provides a way for businesses to build a library of most easily answered questions and provides a user experience that allows customers to access information with fast and simple queries using bots. Bots are the New Apps : Satya Nadella  What is Bot ? A bot is a form of AI that simulates human interaction through a chat interface. Power Virtual Agents : Microsoft 365 Power Platform that provides a no-code interface to allow teams to build chatbots that can be deployed across multiple channels and web sites. It builds powerful bots using guided GUI and empowers the customer support staff. Advantages: Engage naturally : engage with customers and employees conversationally. Democratize AI:   Empower subject matter experts to easily create powerful bots using a guided, no-code graphical interface. Cont...

Data is playing an important role in the business world which encourages the use of software application. Nowadays, software is designed according to the needs of businesses, resulting in connectivity challenges between different types of software. Software connectors perform control and transfer of data between components. Connectors can also provide services, such as persistence, invocation, messaging, and transactions, that are largely independent of the functionality of the interacting components. Microsoft introduced Power Platform which provides a variety of features to the business world along with a low-code/no-code development platform and Connectors are one of them. These connectors cover a wide range of SaaS providers, including Dynamics 365, Office 365, Dropbox, Salesforce and more. A connector is a proxy or a wrapper around an API that allows the underlying service to talk to Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power Apps, and Azure Logic Apps. It provides a way for us...

Reusability is the core concept of any software application, as it allows performance optimization and reduces complexity and Power Platform in particular Power Apps is no exception. Reusability aims to save time and resources and reduce redundancy by taking advantage of already created components in some form within the Application  development process. Build once and reuse multiple times. While, canvas Apps provide control on each screen, it has the amazing feature of being a reusable component on the same. What is Components ? Components are the reusable building blocks for canvas apps. We can define a set of controls to be used inside an app. Components are useful in building large apps with similar control patterns. If you update a component definition inside the app, all instances of the app reflect your changes. Components also reduce duplication of efforts by eliminating the need to copy/paste controls and improve performance. Components help create collaborative developmen...

Although there are many search tools in Dynamics 365 CE, there is no match with Advanced Find. In fact, it works like a hawk's eye for business users. Advanced Find is a tool that allows us to build queries against Dataverse Tables. It allows us to select the fields we want to see in the results and filter the query with conditions. We may also use Advanced Find to prepare data for export to Office Excel so that you can analyze, summarize or aggregate the data, or create PivotTables to view your data from different perspectives. Sometimes, the business needs to create such scenarios to hide the particular column from Advance Find. While this is a tricky question, the reality is whether the column will be searchable or not. We configure during column creation. In the form editor, this option is available. Searchable : When a field is searchable it appears in Advanced Find and is available when customizing views. Use this when there are fields for the entity that you don’t use. Set...

In the era of digitization, data plays an important role in the market. Social media, e-commerce and many more companies are messing with the data and trying to understand the behavior and psychology of the customer. This means that data is playing an important role in the business world for strategy decisions and forecasting. The accuracy of decisions and predictions depends on the data model which basically determines the behavior and nature of the data. This means that the data model is an important part of every decision-making business application. Let's start with the question, what is a data model? By the definition of Wikipedia:  A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities.  Edgar Codd was created 12 Rules for Database and its relationships in 1980 and was composed of three components: 1) data structures, 2) operations on data structures, and 3) operations...

This article is the last part of the "Validated Requirements and Design Technical Architecture" section of the Technical Design in PL400 course curriculum and in this article, I will explain the last section of the above topic, i.e. "Determining when and when a virtual entity data source provider When to use connectors". Virtual entities and Connectors are integral parts of the Power Platform. Virtual Entity: A virtual entity is a definition of an entity in the Dynamics 365 platform metadata without the associated physical tables for entity instances created in the Dynamics 365 database. Instead during runtime, when an entity instance is required, its state is dynamically retrieved from the associated external system. Each virtual entity type is associated with a virtual entity data provider and (optionally) some configuration information from an associated virtual entity data source. Usage: Virtual Entity is part of previous version of Dynamics CRM, that means it i...

It was this wonderful study trip to write the previous article ( Determining When to Use Logic Apps vs. Power Automate Flow ). It has given a beautiful understanding of Logic Apps and Power Automate uses. Now I'm excited to learn about  the use of serverless computing, plugins or Power Automate. I would like to start with Power Automate, as the studies of the previous article are in memory. Let's start. Power Automate: Power Automate empowers the office worker or citizen developer. It offers Designer First Integration which can be availed by the citizen developer. It is workflow as a service and it works perfectly with Microsoft business line of products and simple integration between them. Plugins: The use of plugins in CRM is the preferred interview question. My early days in CRM always bugged me, so I've asked this question on stackoverflow and got the answer below. Regardless, one of the user considered this unqualified question and made it a useless question on stackov...

Of course, the bigger challenge is identifying the actual and optimal use of Logic Apps and Power Automate Flow. In my first exploration, I came across information about cloud status and subscription model. Whereas Logic App is PaaS and Power Automate Flow is SaaS and as per subscription model, Power Automate Flow is part of Office 365 subscription (Per-User License in Office 365) and Logic App is part of Azure subscription (Consumption-Based or Fixed Pricing Model).  These information could not help in ascertaining the actual use of both mechanism. However cost is an essential aspect. Most interestingly, the Power Automate flow is built on top of the Logic app. In other words, both are workflow as a service. Let's talk about the difference between the both environments that can lead me to determine the use of Logic Apps vs Power Automate Flow. Description                   Power Automate          ...

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE and Power Platform are flexible and powerful business applications, while D365 CE provides a complete customer relationship management experience through five different apps: Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation and Marketing,  At the same time, Power Platform is a low-code platform that spans Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and standalone applications.  Business applications comprise out-of-the-box (OOTB) tools and functionalities that enable enterprises to customize CRM systems according to the specific needs of their organization. As is well known, one size does not fit all, therefore, along with optimization and integration with other useful processes, entire work processes are automated for better profitability, increased ROI and increased customer service. All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. Galileo Galilei The main reason for the failure of the project is ...