About This Webinar

Microsoft’s Power Platform has the tools you need to turn ideas into reality. In this webinar, we showcase the virtually unlimited possibilities that come with connecting your most-used apps with Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agent. With a focus on bringing “the power to the people” end-users will benefit from simple productivity boosts once they understand what these tools can do for them. We provide demos, easy, moderate, and a bit more complicated.

Have you tried out any of the Power Platform tools yet? We’d love to help you bring your ideas to life, we have a Power Platform developer on staff and are excited to help you get started.

 

Adam Devereaux:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Worksighted NXT Webinar. It’s Adam Devereaux coming at you again. And I have Rebecca here with me once again in front of the camera.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Hi, everyone. Rebecca Zaagman. Thanks for making your way over here. Even tech people have tech issues.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, the site-

Adam Devereaux:

Who would have thought?

Rebecca Zaagman:

… that we typically use went down last minute. So, we are kind of in scramble mode, but I see there is quite a few people able to join us. So, thank you for making your way over.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. Sorry about that hassle. We will be, of course, recording this and post it online as well. And we’ll share that link to everyone who registered no matter what. So, we’re here today to talk about Power Platform, but don’t think of this as a formal webinar. Really, this is here so that we can interact with you guys and share some knowledge. There’s a lot of questions out there like, “What the heck is Power Platform?”

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. What is it?

Adam Devereaux:

And we’re here to hopefully answer those questions today. So, by the end of this, you’ll be able to tell other people and hopefully be able to use the Power Platform to solve some problems that you have.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, we really want to do is demystify it and kind of take away the fear from getting started. So, one of the things we’re going to be talking about is people like me. I’m a pretty ordinary, everyday user. I can get in and actually do stuff that’s going to impact my team’s workflow with the Power Platform. So, you’re going to have somebody like me, a pretty ordinary user. We’ve got somebody like Adam who can do a little bit more. He’s going to be making things with Power Platform that impact his team, maybe a little bit bigger than just his team, but he’s got some great knowledge of Excel that can help him really go pretty far in Power Platform, but we also have Michael Rolen, who’s going to be interacting in our chat today and he’s a Power Platform developer.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, assuming that probably nobody watching this is at that level. So, we’re happy to have Michael Rolen here. And as a next step to this webinar, I do want to point out here pretty early on is that we have a free one hour workshop that’s going to be happening next week. We’re going to limit it to only 10 people. If we do get 10 people, we’ll probably split into two groups even. So, we want it to be a really small group, really personal, you’re going to come with your ideas and we’re going to workshop then. So, maybe you have… From this webinar, you have an idea that comes out of like, “Maybe I could do this.” Well, bring that idea. We’re going to throw them around, we’re going to learn from each other, and hopefully at the end of that, you’ll have a next step to actually bringing that idea to life. So, I’m going to put a link in the chat to sign up for that. And I’ll remind you again at the end of the webinar.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, also make sure to use that chat and the Q&A. Like I said, Michael Rolen is here and also I think Richard from Disher who’s has quite a bit of experience with Power Platform at Disher is going to be in that chat as well able to answer any questions. If we aren’t making enough sense to you, feel free to ask right there. So, Adam, give us a little bit of background. What’s the history of Power Platform? How did we get here? Why is it so confusing? Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, it’s a good question. So, the way that I look at it as usual is somewhat bigger picture historically, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

That’s right.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah.

Rebecca Zaagman:

It’s surprising for you, Adam.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, I’ll drop kind of one of the classics here so that when we’re talking about Power Platform, it’s another part of the evolution of software and how it’s made. So, I like to think of software as the digital manifestation of business processes or organizational processes, right? It’s a way that we can take what was manual, human thought of, human operated, human managed on paper, and bring it into something that can automate, but also can create this whole software world that we’re used to now where we have interfaces that guide us through what we’re supposed to do, right? But the problem is, is that most organizations have a software ecosystem centered around several major… Like what I’d call boiler plate pieces of software, right? They have pretty fixed functionality. And that’s where those are often limited in how much you can customize those, right? So, they leave gaps between what they do and what your organization needs, right?

Adam Devereaux:

So, there’s kind of three main categories of software out there that your business might use. One would be custom applications that you have written for your needs. The second would be boiler plate pieces of software that you really buy off the shelf and they do what they do, right? And then the third one would be what certain platforms, software platforms are in the larger enterprise space where it’s very customizable, right? So SAP in four dynamics. They’re almost like a sandbox for an ERP system or business piece of software. And you have to work with experts to build some sort of application within that.

Adam Devereaux:

And most organizations, at least in the SMB space certainly, don’t have the luxury of either of the outer two options, right? Totally custom, complete software for suites, or working with these massive software systems that require multimillion dollar implementations in order to get good results out of them. So, you have these fairly fixed pieces of software, but yet you have lots of business processes and things that you need to do that don’t fit into those pieces of software. And historically, a lot of times this has been solved with Excel documents, right? Some of you may have experienced with access databases or have developed things on top of those or experienced with using some sort of custom software that was built on access. And I would argue that a lot of Excel documents out there are almost like little programs. Companies have built entire functionalities on top of Excel. You know that Excel doc that’s been around for eight years or seven years, and it’s got all of these sheets and formulas and macros and nobody quite knows how it works anymore.

Adam Devereaux:

So, this is like the evolution of that, right? It’s like citizen development that was a powerful platform because once you learn just enough about it, you can start doing things and the more you learn about it, the more powerful the solutions you can develop are. And that’s exactly what Power Platform is, right? There’s a suite of different products within it that Microsoft brands as the Power Platform and they all have power in their name, and they’re built on top of kind of a common set of services or ways that they can access things and they can interact with each other and the rest of the Microsoft 365 platform and the software packages that you already have in most cases.

Adam Devereaux:

So, that’s really the goal behind Power Platform is it’s like a cloud-based citizen development or a custom business process automation that augments your existing software ecosystem, helps to fill those gaps, enable new functionality for you to digitize like new business processes that you couldn’t before. So, we’ll give you some examples about that and some kind of practical details around what each one of those components are.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, for sure. To bring that down a little bit more to Earth… No offense, Adam. That was a lot to take in. What I love about the Power Platform is it can help me be more efficient in my day-to-day work. So, I worked with Michael Rolen actually to use Microsoft Automate to automate a process that we use every single day on the marketing team here at Worksighted. So, I get information on a form and then I was manually taking that information and putting it into Microsoft Planner and then also posting about it in Teams as well as sending an email out. So, all these different tasks that I can now use Automate to automate that process. So, somebody puts a request in, it shows up on our Planner automatically, it sends out a Teams’ message to the team and it’s been awesome. Our team is all kept in the loop even better. So, what’s cool about all of these different products as well. As they get more and more powerful, the more and more you have in Microsoft 365.

Adam Devereaux:

Right. Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, as Adam was mentioning, it relies on this common… I think it’s called Common Data Set.

Adam Devereaux:

Common Data Services is one place-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Data Services, yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

… things can live. Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

But even in Excel doc, stored in SharePoint in OneDrive, it kind of becomes more than what an Excel document on a network share on your desktop is because at that point it can be a data source, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right.

Adam Devereaux:

It can be both a place that data can be put into by these platforms or you can read that information, right. So, it can do a lot more aside from the auto-saving and simultaneous editing and all those things. The fact that it’s now accessible by these other cloud services is really an enabler.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

And can plug into way, way more than that, but we’ll get into those details.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, totally.

Adam Devereaux:

So, do you want to go back to that slide, Steve, of the three… Kind of showing the three… Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, the big three, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Big three. Yeah. First up was that Power BI. Talk to us about that.

Adam Devereaux:

Power BI. It’s business analytics, right? It says so right there.

Rebecca Zaagman:

There you go.

Adam Devereaux:

What that means is it’s a powerful business intelligence tool. That’s what BI stands for that lets you take a variety of information from different data sources, allows you to visualize, transform, process that information to create custom dashboards so that you can share those and people in your organization can see and act on the information you have, right? So, the basics of that are things like having an Excel and creating a simple pie chart in Excel, right? Excel has some powerful data visualization tools built into it. Power BI can extend far beyond just a static set of data that’s in an Excel document at a point in time and it can plug right into databases. It can plug right into different documents, web services, cloud services, and compile the information.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Hold it altogether. Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

Right. So, you can get much more accurate up-to-date dashboards that can help you understand the information of your-

Rebecca Zaagman:

It’s like supercharged Excel.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, some of it might even look similar to… If you’ve used Excel quite a bit when you get into BI, you say, “Oh, some of these icons look very similar.” So, it is definitely a different interface, but you can start to get into it if you’ve got some basic knowledge of Excel, but there’s a lot that goes into BI. So, I would say of the three, that one is probably the most hard to get into from an entry point. Would you agree?

Adam Devereaux:

I guess it depends on your familiarity with those concepts. If you’re completely have no experience with that type of stuff, then maybe so. Yeah.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Okay.

Adam Devereaux:

But it depends what you’re trying to do. Similar systems like Tableau, right. That’s another big BI platform that’s out there. Power BI has been around for a while. It actually started as SQL data visualization tool 10 plus years ago. And it’s evolved into this really powerful platform that Microsoft now has.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Awesome. And Power Apps.

Adam Devereaux:

So, what is Power Apps?

Rebecca Zaagman:

What is Power Apps? This one, I actually have a little bit of a hard time visualizing and figuring out because it’s one of those things that the options are endless. The opportunity in it like… I mean, go ahead, create your own app. Well, it’s important for that one to start with the “why”. What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve? Just out of the box, you can take a set of data and create an app from it. Okay, great. But then what?

Adam Devereaux:

Right.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, it’s a trickier one to figure out like, “What do you actually do with it?”

Adam Devereaux:

Well, starting from some fundamentals on it, right? What it means by an app in this case literally is like an app that can run on a smartphone, on a tablet, or can be embedded in Teams or accessed through the web. So, the way that it works quite practically is that you download the Power Apps app onto, let’s say, your iPhone. There will be the apps that are shared with you. Like your apps, you can tap on that. Go into the app and then do whatever the functionality is that you build within the app. There are different categories and common ways that it’s used that we’ll go into. So, we’ll dive deeper into each of these three major tools as we get into the demo section and kind of talk through that a little bit more.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep, absolutely. Yep. And then finally, we’ve got Power Automate. So, Power Automate, I’ve mentioned a little bit before, but this is going to automate and model your business processes, so you can connect things inside of the Microsoft suite, but also outside of the Microsoft suite. So, take data from one place and connect it to another place essentially.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. Think of it as like a cloud robot, right? It’s like an automaton that you can create lots of “if this, then” that type of things, right. So, some sort of trigger happens. There’s different types of flows as they used to be called. Again, part of branding, you may have heard of this-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Microsoft.

Adam Devereaux:

… as Microsoft Flow before. Now, it’s Power Automate. It can be manually triggered or it can be triggered by something like a file being placed into a directory or an email being received that meets certain qualifications or something being put into a list or into an Excel document. And then it can then trigger all sorts of other things from that, right. So, an example might be an email is received with a certain attachment and then it’s taken and it’s saved in a place or maybe some data is transformed on it and then it’s sent to somebody else or it’s sent for an approval. There’s lots of different options. And we’ll kind of get into some of those, but the sky’s the limit in a lot of cases, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

It really is.

Adam Devereaux:

Because you can tie in to so many other platforms that are out there, right? It doesn’t have to be just within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Rebecca Zaagman:

An example might be when somebody “@” mentions me on Twitter, I can add them to an email subscription list. Something as maybe trivial sounding as that, all the way to connecting Microsoft Planner. Like I said earlier, it’s been huge for us because we are in that every single day.

Adam Devereaux:

Just about anything that you do, you can automate it. The question is, does it make sense to automate it? And then if it’s something that’s reoccurring, right? Let’s say it’s even a matter of somebody gets some sort of request and then they have to reach out to somebody for approval. You can automate that so that approval request goes right to that person and they can click “Yes” and it kicks off the next step.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And all the way to desktop processes as well. Adam was showing me how you can say like, “Okay, every morning I get up and I look at this file and I take information from this row and this Excel document and I put it over.” You can actually automate that process on your desktop even.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. Power Automate Desktop is a newer capability. It’s something that was released just within the last six months, but it’s like other desktop automation systems where you can literally record what you do and then schedule that for playback at just about any time. And that is free for any Windows 10 user basically. So, it’s a pretty cool capability. There’s a few other little components as well that we can talk about ultimately, but there are-

Adam Devereaux:

… data connectors. Oh yeah. That’s another good one, but the Power Fx language is something that Microsoft announced recently. It’s kind of the formalization of the language that’s used inside of Power Apps and the other components that’s derived from Excel formulas, right? So, if you have experience with the way that you can interact with things inside of Excel, that same logic, that same expression system is what Power Fx is built on. And you’ll find that very familiar.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Cool. Yeah. I did want to make sure to point out this slide that we have here. I kind of mentioned this at the beginning, but what we want to talk a little bit about is that there’s different levels of users that are going to be able to interact in different ways of Power Platform. So, it’s a cheesy phrase, but I love this because I think Microsoft is bringing power to the people here. So, it’s bringing out these capabilities outside of the IT closet. It just used to be like, “Oh, you have to go to your IT person to get this done,” but now I’m able to go and automate my own process. So, someone like me, I’m on the marketing team, I don’t have a tech degree or anything like that. I’m going to be a general user. So, what I can do in BI, Automate and Apps is going to be on this lower level, the blue level. Someone like Adam, we kind of have him as a power user. So, he’s able to do different things, a more advanced level. And then we’ve got, like I said, Michael Rolen, who is a Power Platform developer, who’s going to be able to develop this orange level. So, we have those kind of… My level being able to do single person solutions all the way up to Michael Rolen, who can do organization wide solutions.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And what’s interesting is… Yeah, it sounds cheesy, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

But the reality is, this is about the democratization of…

Rebecca Zaagman:

Democratization.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes, exactly.

Rebecca Zaagman:

There we go.

Adam Devereaux:

Of software development, right. And one term Microsoft uses is fusion development. And the idea there is that you have people that are normally in the software world. You kind of have this world of the users and then you have a world of the developers and there’s a glass wall that goes up in between, right? So, that glass wall adds delays. And it also results in oftentimes software functionality that isn’t really ideal. So, by having a platform like this where the users can be more connected in, and even if you develop a more complicated approach where you have a larger or group of people within the org that are part of that process and building it out and even tapping experts, it’s about creating a system where you have faster updates and you get faster things happening for users, faster changes, the speed of business is changing, being able to update to those needs, and tweaking the functionality. It can really be a powerful thing for an organization.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. I mean, even with the shift to remote work too. Everything is kind of becoming decentralized. So, if we are able to put more into the hands of our users, that’s going to be a positive thing overall. So, we’re not here to give you a tutorial of every single app and how to use it, but we do want to give you a taste of how to get started in each one of these apps and show you a little bit of what’s possible in them. So, I think we’re ready to jump in.

Adam Devereaux:

I think so too.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

I will share my screen here too.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Great. And, again, make sure to use that Q&A note we’re talking about. It’s pretty high level, pretty heady, but we want this to be tangible for you and to help you figure out how to actually put this to use in your organization. So, make sure to drop any questions or comments in the chat or Q&A.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So, we’re going to start with each one of them with, how do we get there? So, first one we’re going to talk about is Power BI and I’m going to go to office.com on here to show the app launcher, right? So, for those of you that are using Office 365, Microsoft 365, the app launcher is this waffle thing up here in the corner.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Okay. You’re going to make me hungry.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. You can also click down here and click “all apps”. This is what your interface looks like, same thing here. All apps and then this is where you can get to Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate but I’m going to show you another quick way too, powerbi.microsoft.com because you don’t even really need to be an Office 365 subscriber to start with Power BI. You would try it, download it. So, it basically will launch the Microsoft Store, and I’m not going to go through the process because I already have it installed. I’m going to launch Power BI Desktop here, but that’s how you would get Power BI Desktop and going back to the all apps here, this is how you would get to Power BI on the cloud, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

And what’s the difference? Why is there two different options?

Adam Devereaux:

Good question. So, Power BI Desktop is really the main app that you would really build, import, kind of create the Power BI dashboards. You can do some of that within Power BI within web.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. And then that’s where you can also build out data sets that you want to tie into and you can create based on those data sets, right? But to really connect to more data sources, that’s where you want to use the Power BI Desktop.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Great.

Adam Devereaux:

So, I’ll kind of show you how it goes, right. So, I launch it here and I have this kind of start screen here and… I’m just going to close that so I can show you the general screen, right? So, with the… Most things you’re going to do, you want to start over here on the “get data” screen, right? And I’m going to use an Excel document, but you can see here that there’s a lot of other things that we can tie into. And if you go to “more”, there’s way, way more things that you can do even get tying into SAP databases. Stuff that’s on Amazon, all sorts of cloud, in Salesforce, Google Analytics-

Rebecca Zaagman:

But luckily, they keep it simple for us, right?

Adam Devereaux:

… blah, blah, blah.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Most of us are probably going to start from Excel, a SharePoint list maybe, or maybe even some sort of template, but typically, probably most people are going to be starting from an Excel document.

Adam Devereaux:

Excel doc CSV.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. So, I’m going to open this Excel document. And when you do, it’s going to analyze the information that’s in there and give you some options on what you bring in, right. So analyze this and it sees that here’s these different sheets that are within this Excel document and here’s these different tables. So I can say, “All right. I’d like to look at some of the sales order data, sales territory data, product data, and I can just hit “load” and it kind of shows you a preview of the information, but if I want to make a few changes, I can go into “transform data” and then it’s going to show me the query editor that allows me to do things like, say, maybe that this column, I want this to be a whole number. So, if I right-click on this, I can go to “change type” and you can see here it’s whole number. Maybe I want it to show decimal numbers and I can change that column type. And it shows me the steps over here that I’ve made as well. And if I want, I can just delete a step. I could rename a column like let’s say that I want this one to be sales order line. And then once I’m done, I just hit “close and apply”. And it’s going to apply those transformations.

Adam Devereaux:

Now, once those are loaded in, it pulls that into Power BI and very quickly I can start with different visualizations, right? So, I can open up the sales territory data here, if I expand this you can see there’s country group or on the customer data, let’s say, customer. So, I’m going to do a pie chart, click here, make this bigger. Right now, I just have the legend as customer. And then, let’s say, I want state as a value. Now, you can see this is pretty complex there, right? So, I can do lots of different transformations to the information from there if I want to. Let’s say that I want to put group in values here and now we can see kind of group by country, right? So, we can see we have one group for each of these other countries, but I’ve got five groups in the United States. You can see this is pretty basic, but I’ll show you as well a more complex dashboard that’s been built off from this data set to give you an idea of how much further it can go.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

All right. Once you have a dashboard built out, you can publish that and share that with people or embed it in a website or embed into a team, for example. And there are things that are… There are different license levels. I’ll just mention that it’s a little more complex than we want to get into now, but there are different license levels of Power BI Pro really being where you can unlock even more functionality, but these are interactive, right? So, when somebody is involved in this, they can click into these different visualizations and they can customize their view based on what they want to be looking at. I can drill down into the value added reseller line here and see information specific on that. I can, say, pick a specific fiscal year and the way that you would publish it is by going over here to “share”, “publish”. Let me save my changes. And it’s going to work on publishing that and I can pick my destination like what SharePoint site or what team I want to store that in.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And what’s kind of cool about it is you can start with something that’s really basic. And then as you get more ideas if the team comes like, “Hey, I’d really like to be able to show X, Y, Z.” You can add to it and you can change it and it can shift and move with your company, and you can do that yourself. So, I know we have quite a few different BI dashboards and some have become completely obsolete because others that are built that are better or more interesting are utilizing the data in a different way.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And I just want to show here the Power Platform documentation. Microsoft has a lot of great training on Microsoft Learn. A lot of great videos on the topic. There’s a lot of stuff on YouTube, a lot of great tutorials that are online as well to help you get started, but you do often have to start with some idea of what you’re wanting to accomplish. The way that it generally works is that you’ll get so far and then you’ll run into one problem and then you’ll do a bunch of research, and then finally you figure out what that little thing you need to do is and that can be frustrating, but it’s also kind of rewarding to learn these tool sets but that’s also kind of what we’re here for. We want to help you through those pain moments, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right. Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

If you are running into some sort of obstacle, we’re not going to tell you like, “You have to work with us in order to do anything.” That’s the whole point of this is that you can get started today and poke around and play with things. You’re not going to break anything.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Right. Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

All right. So, that’s Power Platform.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Whoo. That’s was a lot.

Adam Devereaux:

Oh, sorry. That’s Power BI.

Rebecca Zaagman:

That’s Power BI. You did a great job. I’m impressed.

Adam Devereaux:

Oh, thank you.

Rebecca Zaagman:

There’s a lot to each of these platforms. So, one of the things that we’ve worked hard on is trying to show them in a way that’s succinct and helpful gives you a little taste.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay. There we go.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. So, now here it is online. I have this dashboard and I can click “share”. I can share the report with specific people and do many more things like that. So, next up is Power Automate.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Power Automate. Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

Do you want to show your demo?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, let me get it pulled up really quick.

Adam Devereaux:

Let me stop my share.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, I did want to show… I mentioned it earlier was this flow that I created and I’m really proud of it, but I actually created a blog post with a step-by-step on it. So, if you’d like to see something interesting or be able to actually pull it off, I’ve got a step-by-step with screenshots.

Adam Devereaux:

We’re doing it live.

Rebecca Zaagman:

We’re doing it live. Oh, MFA.

Adam Devereaux:

You got MFA. Yeah, you got your phone?

Rebecca Zaagman:

I do. It’s down here though.

Adam Devereaux:

If you don’t have MFA, you should turn it on because it’s always going to prompt you when you’re in the middle of the webinar. So, one of the things with Power Automate too is that there are lots and lots of examples. And let me just share my screen again here a minute to show you again how to get to it, right.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. I can show it and then show some of the… Get started too-

Adam Devereaux:

So, again, office.com. There’s lots of different… Actually different typical Microsoft fashion there. Lots of different ways you can get into it like portal.office.com. It basically takes you to the same place depending on how your organization has that set up. Then we’re going to click on, again, the waffle and the reason I point this out is let’s say I’m in Word, I still have that up over here and I can get to that. So, “all apps”, and if you want, you can just search in here as well. So, if I just type “power”, it’s going to give me some shortcuts. So, I’m going to go to Power Automate. And, again, there are lots and lots of different templates and you can search those. Lots of examples of what you can do with it. So, here’s an example one. Save an Office 365 email attachment to OneDrive for business. Get a push notification then you receive an email from a specific thing, and you can see there all these different services. They show 475 that I can tie into, including Google, including Salesforce, including weather information, other applications that you have.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Every time it’s sunny, remind me to wear shorts.

Adam Devereaux:

Smartsheet. So these are things that you are using now, but you can also create custom connectors as well. So, let me know when yours is up.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, I think we’re good.

Adam Devereaux:

All right. I’ll stop mine.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Great.

Adam Devereaux:

Oh, and don’t forget to use the Q&A function. If you have any questions, just throw it in the chat.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right. So, I followed Adam’s directions, went to office.com and this is the Power Automate screen. You come into the home where he just was, and then I clicked on my flows over here on the left, but what I would like to say is you can also just start by playing around with one of these templates. That’s what I did. Kind of get used to the interface, and then you can go from there. So, this is a flow that I worked on over here. So, my flows. Kind of go into “shared with me”. So Michael Rolen and I worked on this one together. Had a couple hiccups that I ran into and he was able to help.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, this is my Microsoft Forms to Planner Process. So, I’m going to go into “edit” to show you exactly what we did. So, this one is triggered when a Microsoft forms response is submitted. So, for example, I have… It’s called a marketing request form. And so, people come in. They need something from our marketing team. So, they’re going to let us know exactly what they need on that form. So, what you do here is you go in and actually find your form ID. So, this one is pretty complicated, but there’s a dropdown menu and it pulls up all of your forms. There’s a couple of different ways to do that. And I explained that in the blog post, but you can just search and find your form there. So, every automate flow is going to need to have a trigger function. So, that’s what sets off the flow. So, for this one, it’s when a form is submitted, but it might be when a tweet is done or an email is received or a notification.

Adam Devereaux:

Sure.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So then what it does is it takes those response details and it creates an item and a SharePoint list. And this is just a quick note of something that Michael Rolen taught me was that it’s important that your information gets back to a list so that Microsoft can kind of organize, work with it and then be able to pull it into other things. So, at the basic, I kind of had the same SharePoint list quite a bit. That’s really a good spot to store your information so that it can be accessed across the Microsoft platform?

Adam Devereaux:

Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, it pulls it into SharePoint then it creates a task in Planner. That’s this function right here. And I told it exactly what group ID it goes into, the plan ID, and then there’s a little bit of a delay because it needs some time to make that task before it goes back in and update the details. So, the form is… I don’t know. 20 questions long. It’s a pretty long one. So, we want to make sure that that planner tab has all the information from the form. So, this is how it is laid out. So, in order to do this, you can go and press in here and then it’s asking if you want dynamic content, which in this case I do. It pulls up all the different fields that it can pull into and then you can format it how you’d like to actually see it when it comes through in Planner.

Adam Devereaux:

So, each one of those lines is kind of a step in the flow, right? In the automation and then you can click into each one and expand and have details.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I can…

Adam Devereaux:

So, this actually creates an entry in the list. It then creates a task. It then sends an email and it sends a message into a teams channel.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Correct? Yep.

Adam Devereaux:

So kind of you have no choice, but to know that you got that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Exactly. Yes.

Adam Devereaux:

That’s pretty cool.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Part of our point in this was that we needed our whole team to be connected on this and we need to be reminded when we have our weekly meetings like, “Hey, this is a request and our team needs to be able to work with that request.”

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And some other examples too of Automate and how it either can work standalone or can be integrated into other things like an example kind of generic process that we would often have in place would be that you have a Power App and it creates some sort of information and then at some point that needs to be compiled together, right? So, let’s say through the week, people are inputting something, it gets stored in a SharePoint list and then the finance team needs to take that and input that into the financial software system, right? And even in some cases that software might have a specific format that it could just import directly and not even need to have somebody manually do that or recreate the information. So, you can create an automate flow that will take that at a certain time, a scheduled time because time can be a trigger as well, right.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Okay.

Adam Devereaux:

So at a scheduled time, it takes that information, it compiles it into a specific format, saves it as an Excel document let’s say in somebody’s OneDrive, sends a notification to them, then they go and they take that and they upload it to the finance software.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Okay.

Adam Devereaux:

And it automatically generates invoice based on that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Wow.

Adam Devereaux:

So, that’s one of the things you can do with Automate is that kind of integration.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Amazing.

Adam Devereaux:

So, it’s pretty cool.

Rebecca Zaagman:

That is cool. All right. So, that is Power Automate. I think it’s the lowest barrier to entry because you can get in there and start making some flows.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. Almost everyone has something that they want to not keep having to do manually or if it could raise more information or knowledge to them, more awareness of what’s going on, that could be a really powerful thing. So, think creatively, but if you…

Rebecca Zaagman:

Can it remind me to, I don’t know, drink water, go for a walk?

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. I mean, technically, but I don’t know if it’s the best use, but sure.

Rebecca Zaagman:

The best use of it. All right.

Adam Devereaux:

So, that takes us to Power Apps, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Power Apps.

Adam Devereaux:

Which as you said is kind of probably one of the biggest and broadest in a way.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And you’re going to demo that one, right?

Adam Devereaux:

Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Great.

Adam Devereaux:

So, let me share my screen.

Rebecca Zaagman:

If there’s anybody on the call that has anything that you’ve already created with the Power Platform, maybe it’s a flow that you use every single day or a way that you’ve used Power BI to keep your company connected or an app that’s been created, I’d love it if you guys could put it in the chat. I think we can all have a lot to learn from each other.

Adam Devereaux:

So, I’m going to go here into Power Apps and I’m also going to show you guys lists as well a little bit. So, when you first go to it, it’s going to give you a little bit of… Here’s what it can do. So, I’m just going to skip out of that and build an app in minutes, right? And it’s right on the screen here too. It also will show you different interactive learning options that are links right within the page here. And you can see other apps that are in your organization. So, if I click here “apps”, and you can see there are no apps on here right now. So, I’m going to click create, and I’m just going to show you some of the templates that are available within here to give you some ideas. And there are certain categories that are pretty common that Microsoft also has kind of detailed out in their documentation.

Adam Devereaux:

So, if you look at the… Wrong page. So, if you look at the lists that are in here, we have a budget tracker, a site inspection. So, this is common in kind of the inspection category apps that you could use as field apps, certain people within your organization need a custom interface to document something that they do, right? Maybe they inspect something, QC inspection is a classic case of this. Now, oftentimes you’ll find that there are pieces of software out there that are dedicated to this kind of thing, right? So, I’m not going to tell you that Power Apps is always the answer versus using something that’s a lot more fully functional. An example of that is the My Expenses app. This can be pretty powerful, but obviously there are large expense app platforms that are out there.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Expensify.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, exactly.

Adam Devereaux:

But maybe you just have a smaller need or you have something that you want to kind of customize into an existing process in a way that you can’t with one of those platforms. So, I’m just going to select this. I’m going to hit “create”, and it’s going to create this Power App based on this template. Another way that you might end up getting to this point is, let’s say, you have created a SharePoint list. So, I get to list the same way if I go to my all apps and here’s lists here, and I’m going to create a new list and they have some template lists that are in here as well. So, let’s say a content schedule or a travel request, right. So, I’m going to use this travel request template. Store it in my lists, although it could be stored in a different SharePoint site. And so then here’s a list. And the list is a little bit like an Excel table. It’s essentially a table of columns and you can edit in grid view and directly enter, let’s say, trip to-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Jamaica.

Adam Devereaux:

Bermuda. Am I spelling Bermuda right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Bermuda. Yeah. Bermuda.

Adam Devereaux:

Reason for travel. For business.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Obviously.

Adam Devereaux:

Definitely.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Definitely for business.

Adam Devereaux:

And in here, let’s say Adele is doing this request. Destination. I’m not sure how well…

Rebecca Zaagman:

Bermuda Triangle. Perfect.

Adam Devereaux:

That’s in Chattanooga, but sure. And a start date, everything else, right? But let’s say that I want people to be able to interact with this in a cool way and that’s where if I go to “integrate” here, then there’s Power Apps and I can create an app right from this. Although, it’s going to be… This is a quick way to get started, right. But oftentimes once you get to more advanced functionality, Michael likes to remind you that you may often start from scratch in a different way, right? But this is an example of how you can get started very quickly from a list that you have. It will kind of automatically create a data entry power app that you can customize to a degree.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And with school and Microsoft likes to point out is that it is low to no code. So, just in minutes there, Adam has created an app. Is that ready and functional yet? Probably not. Quite there, but you can interact with it, you can share it, and it’s that easy to do that, but…

Adam Devereaux:

Yep. While that’s loading, I’m going to start a fresh app here.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Ooh, a fresh app.

Adam Devereaux:

And I get a choice. So, there are model apps versus canvas apps. That’s a little bit more in-depth than we want to get into here, but I’m going to start a canvas app in, let’s say, tablet layout. Let me check on this. Well, okay. So now this is loaded and it looks fairly intimidating at first. I think there’s a couple of things that I want to point out. One is over here on the left. Here’s the tree view of the different components that are in here and the different screens that can be created. So, there’s the detailed screen, the browse screen. I can also insert other types of, let’s say, a text input. I can tie it into other data, but I’m just going to play this here up on the right. You can see the play button looks just like a standard play button and you can click that and then kind of interact with this app now. So, I can hit “+”, and this is where I would put in… And so you can see when there’s an asterisk, that something that’s-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Required.

Adam Devereaux:

… required.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Oh, then it pulls in active directory.

Adam Devereaux:

It does. Yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Or can you choose what that list is based of?

Adam Devereaux:

Well, you can choose what it’s based off from, but it is by default working off from active directory. So, I’m going to say that I’m going for, let’s say, a week.

Rebecca Zaagman:

This is a little bit easier than-

Adam Devereaux:

I’m going to use Southwest.

Rebecca Zaagman:

… pulling up an Excel doc on your phone.

Adam Devereaux:

Estimated airfare is $890, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

So, what’s going to happen is now this entry is now in the list based on this information, right? So, you can see this is very basic. It’s just kind of a form, but it can get a lot more functional from here on out, right? Let’s say maybe you want it to document trips to other business locations and not just give them the ability to put in whatever location they want, but you could pick from a predefined list of here’s five places that I could be traveling to. Maybe this is part one screen that’s a part of a much larger application, but I can also embed this right inside of Microsoft Teams too in a team. So, it’s a tab in a team, you can go into that, select that tab, and it’s an easy way to train people on how to get to this functionality.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. You’re going to talk a little bit about the app that we built for one of our healthcare clients around COVID? I think that’s a kind of a cool example.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. An example one would be an app for testing, right? So, a lot of healthcare organizations are doing frequent testing of employees, right. And other people that are out there as well. And in this instance, they needed to track all of those tests, their results, and be able to submit those ultimately to somebody who needs to have all that information compiled together. But it also needed to be functional in a way that a form is not. So, form is very… You could just use a form, fill out the form, but the problem was is that it took a while for the test to process, right? It takes 15 minutes for the test to process. So, if we were using a form, you would be stuck on that form for those 15 minutes before you could put the results in and submit it.

Adam Devereaux:

And in this case, we were able to develop a power app that the person who was conducting the tests would test someone, save their information in, it would put them into kind of a separate screen of current tests that are happening, go on, test somebody else so they could kind of queue up multiple tests then once one was ready to read, they could pull that person back up again, read that, put that information in there and trigger different automated workflows. If somebody is positive, it could kickoff things, for example, at that point.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Which is a cool example of how the Power Platform tools can all work together.

Adam Devereaux:

Absolutely.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So for that example, it could use Power Automate to pull information about positive test scores or average temperature. I don’t know what it is, but pull that into a dashboard to kind of show how… Kind of like the health of your organization at a certain point in time.

Adam Devereaux:

Well, we did do that with Power BI.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

Essentially, all three were involved in this because Power BI was used to look at historical information. How many tests were done? Do you have any positives? What the percentage is, things like that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Probably based on location too.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, exactly. And then Power Automate was used to compile that information, take it, export it in a certain format for somebody to be able to use and go on from there. So, it kind of shows how all three together can work in concert to deliver a really powerful solution.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Powerful solution.

Adam Devereaux:

I didn’t even mean for that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right. Well, we just zoomed through a super high level intro demo to each Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps. We haven’t had any questions come through yet, but we do have a little bit of time. So, what questions do you guys have? How can we help get you into the Power Platform today?

Adam Devereaux:

So, while I’m here in Power Apps, I’ll just show to you how there are ways inside of Teams that you can create Power Apps and some examples within that that are pretty cool. So, I’m going to go to Teams on the web and let’s see if this works that way. So, I’m in a demo tenant right now as well. All right. So, a lot of you are probably familiar with Microsoft Teams. You’re used to these tabs over here on the left; activity, chat, teams, calendar, et cetera, et cetera, but you may not have clicked on the three little dots here much before. If you click on that, you can find additional apps, right? So, you can also search for things that are not showing right there and one of those is Power Apps. So, with Power Apps, you can create and the integration between Power Apps and Teams, you had mentioned Common Data Service, and that actually… There’s a new feature, new capabilities that were announced that you get a certain amount of CDS storage built into each team and you can create apps that are really built around Teams.

Adam Devereaux:

And they have some example ones that are pretty cool. So, employee ideas, inspection, issue reporting, bulletins, milestones. So, inspection is one that’s fairly powerful. It does take a little bit to deploy so I can show you in another instance where that’s already there, but I’ll start that. So, we’ll do the Inspection app. We’re going to add this app to the channel and what it ends up doing is it creates a couple of different apps. One is to manage it. And one is to be able to give to the people who are going to be doing the inspections.

Rebecca Zaagman:

We did just have a question come through.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Ready for it. Great. Bill asked, are there integration opportunities between the Power Platform and Teams’ voice?

Adam Devereaux:

There are. I mean, you can do things like use Power BI to visualize information and there are ways that you can use Teams’ voice in Power Automate as well to kind of trigger things. So you start getting into more advanced functionality but we haven’t really gotten into that too much yet, but I can see why there’d be some pretty cool options available in that regard.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. Maybe taking your voicemail and sending it to something or a voicemail can be the trigger for a flow.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. And that actually kind of gets us into where there’s even more powerful capabilities. On the slide that you had, we talked about virtual agents, right?

Adam Devereaux:

So, that allows you to create chatbots, for example. So, that is fairly complicated or it sounds fairly complicated and there is some depth to it, but it’s actually fairly easy to get started with power virtual agents. And that’s where you can work, create a customized chatbot. We’ve all worked with chatbots at one point or another, right? You go to a website, it pops up, “Hey, I’m chatbot. How can I help you?” And sometimes that’s actually pretty helpful. When you start to get into your own custom bots, it doesn’t have to be external only. All right. So, this is something that it can be a chatbot just for internal use. And we start to get into where the realm of Power BI, the Power Platform, and even Microsoft 365 is also about bringing access to AI technologies to everyday people, right?

Adam Devereaux:

And that’s where chatbots allow you to do things like create a bot that’s tied to some sort of knowledge base that you have, and that it uses natural language processing to read through this knowledge base, and you can literally interact in natural language with this bot and it will point you to different company resources, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yesterday, I needed some information about a 401(k). And so, I went right to our HR person, but if she’s got 600 people that are asking her the same question, it really empowers her to work a little smarter than that.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Hey, you know where to go. I also like how the term natural language is. It just seems funny, right? It can actually talk to us. It can understand how we speak and be able to… You don’t have to ask the exact right question.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Pretty cool.

Adam Devereaux:

I can show you one that I haven’t here as well that I was playing around with. That’s kind of a Worksighted support bot.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Oh, MFA.

Adam Devereaux:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rebecca Zaagman:

Hey, we practice what we teach around here.

Adam Devereaux:

Exactly. Those of you who don’t have this, basically, the Authenticator app sends me a push notification. It uses face ID to confirm and now I’m in here. So, this is just a really basic demo chatbot, test bot that I had here that will allow you in theory to open a support request, right. And kind of interact with you in natural language and in fact, even within our Teams instance, right? So, let’s say I want to test it here. I can say, “Hello.” And it’s going to come back with a custom greeting that you create and I’m just going to say, “My computer is broken.”

Rebecca Zaagman:

Uh-oh. I hate when that happens.

Adam Devereaux:

Right. Sounds like you’re having an issue. It needs to open a ticket. Yes. I do want to open a ticket. Is there a good time? Again, natural language processing. I can say, “Tomorrow at 11:00.” And it’s going to ask me, “Do you mean 11:00 AM or 11:00 PM?” Pick 11:00 AM. And then it’s going to ask for my phone number, “What’s the best number to call you?” And I’m just going to punch my number in there. And now it’s scheduled an appointment.

Rebecca Zaagman:

That was quick.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So this really took me maybe 30 minutes to set up. And there’s a lot of great content that Microsoft has about that as well. So, power virtual agents. And then when we get into the AI Builder, this is where you can create AI models around data sets that you have. Let’s say that you want to scan some sort of information in and then have it extract information from there, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Okay.

Adam Devereaux:

So, doing entity extraction, object detection in images, doing prediction, business card reading. Here’s kind of some examples. Invoice processing. So, it will automatically process the invoice. It will save invoice data. So, let’s say your invoice is literally a paper invoice, right. And you scan it or take a photo of it. And there are certain properties in there that you want to pull out and then embed that into your process, your flow, or whatever the case may be like the invoice number,-

Rebecca Zaagman:

Number, yep.

Adam Devereaux:

… the amount, the customer name, the date, all those kinds of things. So, there’s some really powerful things that ultimately can be with this as well. And when you get into the concept of robotic process automation, that really goes beyond just kind of a basic flow or automate, but where you start getting into a much more significant solutions. And Microsoft also has this process advisor that I haven’t played with much.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, I’ve never even heard of this. This is fresh.

Adam Devereaux:

Process Advisor allows you to basically create, to document a process, a business process that you have. So, think of it more in the business analysis space, right? So, you can record a process and then share it. So, let’s say…

Rebecca Zaagman:

Does it have some overlap then with Power Automate?

Adam Devereaux:

This is more for you to identify opportunities to improve your processes.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Adam Devereaux:

And I did mention… So, the Power Automate Desktop. So, this is where you record a process that you do within Power Automate Desktop and it can literally do even a screen recording. So, if you say… Okay, whoever this person is within your organization that does something and you’re like, “I want you to do that thing, but I’m going to record you doing that thing so that we can extract the recorded actions that you’re doing.” So, you literally just use the desktop recorder, record as you’re going through, and you click, and you go here, and you open this file.

Rebecca Zaagman:

It’s kind of like an SOP, but on a digital version?

Adam Devereaux:

Kind of. Yeah. And you can actually play that stuff back again. So, if you want it to do the same thing that you just did, you can do that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Wow.

Adam Devereaux:

Which starts to get into some pretty interesting territory, right? How much of some things are just a matter of clicking in the right places over and over again.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah.

Adam Devereaux:

Now, most people’s jobs are a lot more complicated than that.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Hopefully. I know.

Adam Devereaux:

Don’t get me wrong.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I’m I about to be replaced here?

Adam Devereaux:

I don’t think so. The AI can’t get in front of camera and do this, right?

Rebecca Zaagman:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Devereaux:

So, yeah. There’s my test process, for example, and my recording that’s in there. You can share it and analyze the process.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Bill just asked, do the actions have to happen within the Microsoft 365 environment? The answer is no.

Adam Devereaux:

No, actually Power Automate Desktop can interact with anything on your desktop. So, it literally can recreate clicks. I’m sounding a little bit like Gordon Ramsey now. Literally.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Literally. So, it can record actions within custom programs.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yes.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah. So, that’s a lot of stuff. I think we’re kind of hammering you guys here.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Whoo, yeah. That was a lot in a little bit of time.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, exactly.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So, I do… Go ahead.

Adam Devereaux:

No, I was… Go ahead.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah. do you want to plug once again? We really want to make this as practical as possible for you. So, like I said, we are doing a one hour free workshop next week with Michael Rolen, myself, and possibly Adam, if we can fit it into his schedule to take your ideas and help you figure out what is the next right step in them. So, we’re not going to build it for you in that one hour, but what we want to do is help you identify the next right step and getting those to be a reality for you at your organization. So, you’re going to stop sharing your screen, Adam.

Adam Devereaux:

Yep.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Awesome. Yeah. There’s Michael Rolen. He actually is in Oklahoma. So, we have a couple employees all over the country now. So, we’re excited about that. He’s bringing a ton to our team, but thank you again everyone for joining. Sign up. I’ll post the link to that workshop one more time. And it will be in the follow-up along with the recording of this webinar. So, we’re excited to see how that goes. Kind of a new thing for us.

Adam Devereaux:

Yeah, absolutely. So, again, play around with it, try it out, feel free to come to us with any questions that you might have. And if you have something you’re already working on, you want to take to the workshop, or you just want to brainstorm, bring whatever problem or challenge or questions that you might have. So, again, thanks for joining. Sorry again about the technical challenges and persevering through that. We really appreciate your time and hopefully this was interesting and you learned something because that’s really what we’re trying to do here.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Devereaux:

Great.

Rebecca Zaagman:

And we’ll be back with another awesome topic next month. If you have any other ideas about things you’d like us to cover, feel free to respond. You can send me an email rebecca@worksighted.com and yeah, we’ll keep on sharing awesome information with you. Have a great day, everyone.

Adam Devereaux:

We’ll see you then. Bye, everyone.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Bye.

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