In the last show, Paul was in Copenhagen – and this week Steve is in Copenhagen. Join us as we globetrot again, before we finally manage to be in the same place for CommsVerse next week, June 29th & 30th 2022.

A Plethora of New Power Platform Features

First up on this week’s show we discuss three new features for the Power Platform. First up, the new Windows client has launched – yes, there was one before but this new version may be of particular interest with support for native Dataverse access, AI Builder, Geo-Location, Barcode Scanning, and Offline modes built-in.

Power Apps portals evolve into a new offering, called Power Pages. What could be thought of as similar to Wix or similar SaaS-based website builders, Power Pages is a website builder that allows you to leverage data stored in Microsoft Cloud services (and platform with connectors).

Powerful New Power Platform Features, New Viva Module & More: Practical 365 Podcast S3 Ep. 5
Power Pages Preview (Image Credit: Microsoft)

If you use Dynamics solutions like Business Central, CRM, and others – this could be especially useful for providing customer-centric solutions that build off that information.

We discuss a few potential use-cases, such as smaller organizations who have chosen to standardize upon the Microsoft stack using this, rather than a third-party small business website builder; or a corporate micro-site that could be used alongside Dynamics contact center functionality to allow real-time interaction alongside phone calls, for purposes like providing real-time feedback from customers. It could, for example, be the place you create your follow-up surveys – potentially driven by sentiment analysis to focus survey questions based on the inferred experience the customer has to dig into specific issues.

And finally – AI-powered express design could shortcut the application UI design experience for building Power Apps. You can either – as a design professional use Figma design files, use paper, and PDF forms – or even draw the UI on paper by hand and then use the express design functionality to automatically create application front-ends in Power Apps.

Powerful New Power Platform Features, New Viva Module & More: Practical 365 Podcast S3 Ep. 5
Bring in various graphics-based artifacts into Power Apps and use new tooling to convert them into apps. (Image Credit: Microsoft)

As Paul works with teams that use Figma, he discussed how this will be useful, and we also discuss how this might make it easier for folks who are currently working on paper with customers to design UI interfaces and then build those by hand in Power Apps today, and how that will improve their workflow too. We’ll be testing this out in a real-life setting to see exactly how great it is.

Cybersecurity Risk Management for Active Directory

Discover how to prevent and recover from AD attacks through these Cybersecurity Risk Management Solutions.

Improving the Employee Experience for your Sales People in Viva

So far, Viva apps have been focused on employees from all backgrounds in a business – but the first role-specific Viva app arrives in the form of Viva Sales.

Viva Sales is designed to work with not just Dynamics CRM but other systems too, and bring together CRM information and information stored in Microsoft 365 & Teams so that a salesperson has a complete picture of their relationship with a prospective customer to hand. We would expect Microsoft will enable their own sellers to use this, so if you find yourself drawn to buy even more licenses – something will be working correctly. We will be monitoring this one closely.

Always have someone to chat with in Teams

As Tony Redmond blogged about last week over on Office 365 for IT Pros, Microsoft has released the new Microsoft Teams Chat with self feature. This allows you to… chat with yourself. Paul and I are both on the fence with this one – sure, we’ve sent ourselves emails with a reminder once or twice – who hasn’t? But is this the right way to use Microsoft Teams, or is it using a tool for the wrong purpose? We discuss.

Internet Explorer is finally dead

Last up on the show this week, we remind you that Internet Explorer 11 is finally out of support. On June 15, 2022, it finally retired – and whilst it’s obviously not the end of IE11 being on computers around the world, it’s a good sign. We suspect IE11 won’t be a product people look back too fondly on and suggest you check your elderly relatives’ PCs to make sure their “internet button” is using Microsoft Edge instead. In all seriousness though we do discuss the effects on corporate PCs and what you need to do.

About the Author

Steve Goodman

Technology Writer and Chief Editor for AV Content at Practical 365, focused on Microsoft 365. A 12-time Microsoft MVP, author of several technology books and regular Microsoft conference speaker. Steve works at Advania in the UK as Field Chief Technology Officer, advising business and IT on the best way to get the most from Microsoft Cloud technology.

Comments

  1. sTim

    I was surprised to hear the hosts so skeptical of the chat to self and “reminder” idea in Teams. As a concurrent user of both Slack and Teams, this is one area where Slack has a huge lead and it’s the #1 feature I wanted to see come to Teams. I use this constantly, specifically because I’m already in Slack/Teams all the time. In Slack, the ability to just type “/remind me tomorrow to do X” from anywhere is super quick and easy!

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