Company Blog Microsoft

Today, July 8, 2020, Microsoft released the Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 2 plan documentation with a list of all the features that will be made available in the Wave 2 timeframe which starts October 2020 until March 2021. Going through all of the features is almost impossible unless you want a few hundred pages of documentation.

In this post, I am going to review some of my favorite and anticipated features in the Power Platform, especially Power Apps Portals and Model Driven Apps.

As I was going through one of my solutions in the last few days, I noticed that there are a few changes that were made to the Solution experience, and wanted to share this with everyone. Usually we see a change appear here and there, but it seems like Microsoft is trying hard to simplify the experience and add the missing pieces that are available in classic and not yet available in the Modern experience.

Last Friday, while working with one of our clients on an integration issue between Dynamics and the Microsoft Exchange global address book, he asked me if there was a way for them to have automated creation of events (calendar items) in their Microsoft Outlook calendar where the source of the data was an Excel spreadsheet in OneDrive. This is a short post, but might help someone out who needs to implement this.

Since the announcement by Microsoft at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit last month, and even before, I’ve been eager to take a look at the new SQL Connection for the Common Data Service Endpoint. What this means is that we can not write and execute SQL queries against the entity data.

In order to get started, the first thing that has to be done is enabling the Endpoint, so that we can create a connection from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to our Dynamics/CDS environment. As of now, there are two ways to enable this endpoint.

When working with model driven apps, we have the ability to navigate through the flow of the record using the Business Process Flow. The BPF is a great way to navigate through the different stages of the record, but what if that is just not enough. What if in order to complete the record I have to go through 10 or maybe more stages.

In previous work that I did, we implement logic that allowed us to navigate by displaying a popup window on the form (using alert.js), and we called the logic inside an HTML eb resource. A lot of these options are being deprecated and we will be prevented from calling webapi calls using HTML web resources.

Over the past year, I played here and there with AI Builder, and particularly form processing, but have found that it was somewhat cumbersome for some of the forms that I wanted to build, especially when working a lot in the government space. Yesterday, May 4th, Microsoft announced some new changes to the AI Builder Form processing that allows recognition of undetected fields. I decided to test this out, and in order to implement this, used the IRS W-9 form, which is not such as easy form to implement.

In a recent blog I posted a few days ago, I posted how to use Azure Service Bus and a Listener application to integrate between the Common Data Service (Dynamics 365 or Power Apps Model Driven Application) and an On Premise SQL Service database. As mentioned that there are a few easier ways to implement this, I wanted to demonstrate how easy it would be to perform similar functionality using a Microsoft Power Automate Flow that connects to the On-Premise Data Gateway

In this blog post I will demonstrate how to use Azure Service Bus and a Listener application to integrate between the Common Data Service (Dynamics 365 or Power Apps Model Driven Application) and an On Premise SQL Service database.

It has been quite some time since Microsoft announced the use of oAuth to connect between Server environments, but many organizations are still using username and password to connect to Dynamics 365 or the Command Data Service (CDS).

I recently had to work on a migration project, and while this customer was using legacy credentials to authenticate, they had no problems doing so with all of their environments. After they provisioned a new environment, suddenly they started receiving authentication exceptions from their data migration tool (using Kingswaysoft and SSIS).