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Copilot Studio, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Citizen Development Is Dead. Building Just Became Personal.

By Ben den Blanken

We spent a good part of a decade turning citizen development into a program: portals for makers, office hours, Center of Excellence kits, and a polite line between business and IT. The Power Platform Community Conference blew a hole in that line. In Microsoft’s official “Build with Copilot” announcement, creation moved into the same canvas where people already work: Microsoft 365 Copilot. Building is no longer a destination. It is now embedded in your workspace, always within reach as part of your normal workflow.

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Copilot Studio, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

My Top Power Platform Features of the New Release Wave

By Ben den Blanken

Another year, another release wave! Once again I dive into the documents and highlight my favorite features coming to the platform. Last time I did not do it and I have to say, I missed doing this. Diving into the release wave is something I do anyways. Making a blog post about it forces me to think a bit deeper about them as well. Another benefit is that I am sharing this with you, who hopefully enjoys reading my ramblings.

Features are rolled out to the Power Platform constantly now so the release waves mean less and less. However it is good practices to identify what’s coming, what’s relevant to you and what direction the platform is taking. For instance, this release wave mentions quite a bit about how Dataverse is preparing to scale what’s coming with agentification with everything build for Copilot Studio.

You can find the release plan on Microsoft Learn where you can also download the PDF or you can use the Release Planner. Often times features are already in preview and just finalized in this wave. In this article I will point towards the official documentation if available, else I will point to the Release Planner

Bigger features are also not announced through the release wave. They deserver their own bigger podium. However the Power App learn pages do mention 3 key investments. These investments definitely tickle my interest as one is quite new to me and the others are going to be incredibly powerful!

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Copilot Studio, Power Automate Flow

Let AI Builder figure out the user’s meaning!

By Ben den Blanken

Continuing on with my series about building a HR Copilot with Copilot Studio. Previously I’ve been advocating of making a multiple choice option with prefilled options to steer the answer in the right directions. But with the rise of Generative AI we can look different at how we program our apps. We can now do things significantly different. In my last post we changed our manually authored topic to an action. We lost the ability to steer the user in the right direction by presenting a multiple choice option set. And instead of trying to fix this, I want to show you a different way. Let Generative AI figure out the meaning of the provided answer by the user. No complex (Azure) Open AI connections needed, we can use AI Builder for this!

Now before I dive deep how to set this up, I want to talk a little bit about the future of programming. More and more I see examples of how Generative AI can solve tasks which in the future would require a lot of programming. Tasks such as find the nearest shop based on your location. Previously this would be a tedious programming exercise. Now we can ask ChatGPT to do this for us, if we provide it with enough information. The challenge for me is, to think about solutions like the previous and my upcoming example. As my default still is to program it out in (low) code. But being creative with specific instructions to a large language model can often be a better fit.

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Copilot Studio, Power Automate Flow

Rich Media Response says more then a 1000 words

By Ben den Blanken

When building out topics manually for Power Virtual Agents we have all the control in the world. This means we can also present information in a way that makes sense and is appealing. In this blogpost I will continue on with my example topic of requesting days off. We will start by talking about how to make the request to our external system. After I’ll will utilize the ability to add rich media to our response to wish someone a happy holiday.

This post is part of a series of blogpost about Copilot Studio in which I create a HR Copilot and show various options available within Copilot Studio. Here are my other posts about this topic:

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Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Notify a Task is complete inside your Model-Driven App

By Ben den Blanken

When assigning critical Tasks to different users or teams, you probably want to know when they have finished them! You probably also do not want a mobile push notification disturbing you in your work. Luckily Model-Driven Apps provide a way to notify users! In this post I show you how to accomplish this using Power Automate and the In-App Notification center of Model-Driven Apps.

The In-App Notification center, when enabled, lets users see and manage all their notifications. This can be all sorts of notification, all of which you can create! You do this using either JavaScript, C# or Power Automate by creating a record in the Notifications table. The columns in this table allow you to declare for example the title of the notification, the owner who is going to receive the notification and the IconType which shows along with the notification.

But what I find really cool, is that you can create a richer card for your notification. You do so by combining the body and data column of the notification table. In the body you can use some Markdown to style your message. In the data column we can add json to add actions in the notifications. Actions allow you to add navigation urls to for example a form in your app. Building these is a breeze with the In-App Notification Builder in the XrmToolBox.

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Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Complete a Dataverse Task by an Adaptive Card in Teams

By Ben den Blanken

In my previous blogpost we created tasks in Dataverse which we can interact with using the Model-Driven App. However, sometimes the user we assign a task to does not log in to our application as often as we would like. So, we need to bring them to attention a task is waiting for them. An excellent way to do this is by automatically sending them a chat message and posting an Adaptive Card! In this post I will go through the steps to set this up.

This will not be a crash course on all the ins and outs of every detail of Adaptive Cards. But more of an inspiration style post to get you started with your Adaptive Cards. I will however, show you how to set up the Cloud Flow to post this card to Teams. Including the ability to process a response from that Card.

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Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Utilizing the AAD User table in an Approval Flow

By Ben den Blanken 2 Comments

You might have seen the new AAD User table appear in your environment. This table is available to us for a couple of months now. And you might wonder what it is and how you can use it. In this blog I will explain you what it is and how you can use this table to your benefit.

The AAD User table lists all users in your Azure Active Directory. It does not show AAD Groups. Did you know that the data of this table does not reside in your dataverse storage? It is actually a Virtual Table! Virtual Tables are tables that do not reside inside Dataverse, but instead reference a table from a different storage mechanism. It is incredibly powerful as it does not require you to copy data from another system. You can find if a table is virtual by looking at the type column of the table overview. So why is this interesting and what can you do with it?

Shows the Power Apps solution explorer where the table overview is highlighted. In it we highlight the AAD User as this is of the type Virtual.
AAD User Virtual Table
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Dataverse, Microsoft 365, Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Set out Tasks in a Microsoft 365 and Power Platform World

By Ben den Blanken 2 Comments

This is the start of our next chapter in our Business Process Flow and asynchronous work journey. How can our team keep track of tasks we need a different department to execute? In this post I want to explore different architectural choices you can make and what considerations there are. This of course depends on a lot of variables and I will try to give you some points what to think about. In other words I try to explain my thoughts whenever I say “It depends” as an answer!

Shows a meme of a person tapping the side of his head. The text above sais: "It depends". The text below reads: "Yeah.. Now I Don't have to explain anything"

This blogpost is part of a series where I explore how to support Asynchronous Work with Business Process Flows. The Business Process Flow is an old tool in our toolbelt. But coupled with all modern Power Platform and Microsoft 365 Collaboration capabilities it helps keep track of processes. Now we are on the topic of setting out tasks and keeping track of them.

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Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Download Approval Flow Example Solution

By Ben den Blanken

On this page you can download an example of the Approval Flow inside a Business Process Flow. This advanced concept can help get those extra set of eyes to your record. For a write-up of what the solution does please refer to this post. I also go in-depth of the various steps to create this advanced concept in different blogposts.

In this post I also have written down what components are in the solution with a short description. You can download the solution and follow the installation steps below.

Approval Flow Example
Approval Flow Example
Download solution here

Disclaimer: This solution is provided as is. It is not a production ready solution. It is only meant as inspiration how you can utilize Approval Flow inside a Business Process Flow. Only install this solution in develop or sandbox environments.

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Power Apps, Power Automate Flow

Download Task Group Example Solution

By Ben den Blanken 2 Comments

On this page you can download an example of the Task Group concept. For a write-up of what Task Groups are please refer to this post. I also go in-depth of the various steps to create this concept in different blogposts.

To install this solution the Checkmark Control needs to be available in your environment. You can download the solution containing from my GitHub here.

Task Group Example
Task Group Example

Task Group Example Solution

Download Now!

Disclaimer: This solution is provided as is. It is not a production ready solution. It is only meant as inspiration how the concept “Task Group” can be used. Only install this solution in develop or sandbox environments.

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