Since I last wrote about our Ukrainian cohorts the team has continued to be hard at work to support our efforts.  And we’ve expanded a bit.

Our July group started this week with 222 students.  Our March and May groups each had over 200 as well.

Several of our students want to improve their English skills, so we updated our cloud flows and now track their input language and respond in the same language.  Previously we were hard coded to respond in Ukrainian.  (This also means we can support cohorts in additional languages.)

We’ve added more community experts to help with feedback on weekly assignments.  Let me know if you’d like to help.

We’re getting more support from the community in general.  For example, BizApps legend Lisa Crosbie is adding Ukrainian subtitles to her videos for us. You can see her playlist here, and her whole channel here.  Lisa is my go-to when I need to catch up on all things Dynamics and Power Platform.  If you are a content creator and want to do something for our students, let me know.

We’ve spec’d out the next phase of the program.  We need to build it out a little more, but it will be focused on making functional consultants who are Power Platform generalists.  Let me know if you have jobs or apprenticeships for our grads.

The entire program has been run by volunteers, with a budget of $0.  We might be seeking sponsorship of some variety soon to help with the cost of getting licenses for training environments for our students for their continued efforts.

Learn more about the groups, the impact to students and more in their own words here. 

Interested in joining the next cohort?  Apply here.

As I hope you know, we have been running training cohorts for displaced and vulnerable Ukrainians.  We have been very successful.  We built the program around having a core set of day-to-day volunteers who are Ukrainian speakers, but the support team is currently all English speakers.  We’ve used the technology to make it mostly seamless (specifically Microsoft Forms, Power Automate, Dataverse, and Power Apps.).

We are almost done making updates to be able to bring on additional language groups. We now need committed people to lead the day-to-day operation of the new groups.

Don’t worry.  We have a curriculum and proven track record of success for you to follow. 

What would you be committing to?

• No one ever pays to join any of our cohorts.
• This is run by volunteers. The first one will take a little more commitment, but after that, you should likely be able to take a team of two or three and spend fewer than 10 hours a week each.
• You would offer help grading weekly assignments. This happens in English in a simple gradebook Power App that you would be given access to use.  You would be grading assignments from all cohorts, not just your own.
• It’s a six-week cohort. But we are built around being flexible to allow you to succeed, even with all of life’s obligations.  So, often there’s a few people in each cohort who need some extra time.
• The lessons are primarily located on Microsoft Learn. There are a few out-of-the-box translations available. However, beyond the top 5(ish) you would need to help students learn how to navigate and use browser-based translations.
• The expected student commitment is about ten hours per week. Most of this is independent learning with touchpoints.  This means students can learn after their regular job, before dropping the kids off at football practice, etc.  You would need to set up and facilitate a communication channel.  Teams works well if students can easily get to Teams.  Telegram has proven effective for our Ukrainian cohorts.  I could see it working in Slack also.
• There are weekly videos for students. We have them in English to offer you.  You can have students watch them in English, you can create your own subtitles/translations, write a summary in your chosen language, etc. Most of these videos are short (less than 30 mins) and focus on relevant topics that work with the assigned Learn lessons.
• We recommend at least one open mic-style office hours meeting per week. Make it at a reasonable time based on your students’ availability.  This usually lasts about an hour.
• You would interact and get to know your students. We have found that the biggest predictor of success is simple, someone cares about the success of each student.  Get to know their names.  If someone misses an assignment, reach out, see if they need help, offer an extension, etc.

The program is focused on core tech adjacent skills and business applications.  You do not need to be an expert in the entire platform, but working knowledge of the platform is necessary, with expertise in one or two core parts.  If you find yourself with a student super interested in something that you don’t know much about, we’ve got you covered.  We will help facilitate bringing an expert to your groups as needed.

This training is designed for career switchers.  Non-tech people who need that core set of skills that we often take for granted.  “Graduates” of our groups are not job ready.  But they are ready to join already in place training that is widely available.

So, what now?  Let me know if you’re interested.  We’ll sort through the details and help you get started.

I’ve been late to write about conferences coming up.  But, there’s a bunch on the horizon!

First up is DynamicsCon live in Denver.

I’m delivering TWO sessions.  My goal for this event was to support new speakers.  So, both of my sessions I am co-presenting with women who are newer on the event circuit.

Tuesday the 14^th, Meron and I are talking CRM.  Specifically, A Beginner's Guide to Dynamics 365 CE/ CRM Sales. We’ve got a great chat about using CRM and a detailed demo from Meron.

Wednesday the 15^th is Rachel and I with our Unlocking CRM potential with Power Platform Magic session.  This session gives some foundational knowledge about both CRM and Power Platform and then we stitch together the common elements to help you do well on either or both of these technologies.

Also, this is one of those events where both Dave and I are presenting.  On Tuesday the 14^th he’s delivering Architecting business applications in an AI world.  Typical to Dave, it’s a technical talk, but he makes it very approachable for anyone interested in the topic.

After DynamicsCon, we’re doing a few days of vacation on our way to Slovenia for Dynamics Minds. 

And both of us are presenting again.  First up, my sessions.

One of my favorite sessions to deliver is Going from Citizen Developer to Professional App Maker.  This is the session for anyone who has dabbled in app making or automation and you’re ready to take the leap to do it full time, but you’re not sure where to start.  There may be photos of me as a 5-year old in the slides.  This session is on Wednesday the 29^th.

My other session is Tips and tricks for user productivity in Dynamics CRM/Sales.  This session is a bit of demo and a bit of slides.  This session is on Monday the 27^th.

Dynamics Minds is where Dave is much busier than I.  First up is his workshop on Low-code plugins.  Then he’s doing a (refreshed after Build announcements) version of his Architecting business applications in an AI world talk, and finally he’s part of a panel about Power Platform Security.

I’ve also got workshops and sessions pending at several events later in the year.  Keep an eye out here for more.

Yes, it’s true.  Literally everyone now has a podcast, including me.

Jason Gumpert and I go way back.  We’ve always been supportive of each other’s efforts, but never had a chance to work together.  But a random hallway conversation at an event in Charlotte changed that.  One of us suggested we do a podcast.  I really don’t know who it was, maybe he remembers.  So we launched the Biz Apps Classroom, our take on all things learning and training in our Biz Apps space. 

Hopefully it’s interesting 😊

We are three and a half episodes in, and so far so good.

Episode 1:  Introduces the podcast and Julie and Jason

Episode 2: Why Microsoft certifications matter

Episode 3: Goals

Episode 4: (in progress talking about role-based training).

Ideas for future episodes are always welcome.  We hope to talk about training cohorts, our efforts for displaced and vulnerable Ukrainians, value of hands-on training activities, strategy for in-person or virtual training, and more.  We’ve got some guests lined up to help keep it a little more interesting.

We hope to post episodes about every other week, with a fair bit of grace until we hit our stride.

Share your feedback and your ideas, it’s how we get better.

About a million years ago, we opened a business banking account with Bank ABC. 

At the time, they had two primary types of accounts, personal and business.

So far so good.

Personal accounts had data fields for all the expected pieces of information one might need for a personal account.

The business accounts had all you might need for a business account.  Or so they thought.  Turns out businesses are owned by people.  People have separate information from the business.  No big deal, we can have attachments and notes.  In the note we put the names and details of the business owners and an attachment of their scanned signature cards.

Then Bank ABC merges with Bank DEF.

Then Bank ABCEDF is acquired by Bank XYZ.

Let’s smush the old data model into the new data model.  Great, all done.  Nothing to see here.

A few years later during a random account review it is discovered that a particular business account of a million years has no people associated with it, no authorized users.  There was an attachment of a scanned image with two illegible signatures on it, but no names with the signatures.

Turns out somewhere among the mergers and acquisitions, notes did not come with the business account information from older accounts that were opened when records were mostly analog and a little bit of digital.

A good bank manager found this, found us, and convinced me she wasn’t a scammer and got us to the bank in person to get our personal information appropriately related to the business information.  And then we signed paper copies of signature cards (sigh).

There are a few things to learn here.

Don’t store structured data in an unstructured place.  Build the appropriate relational data structure that you need.

Don’t cut corners when moving to a new system.  It really doesn’t matter that there were mergers and acquisitions along the way, it was a new system.  A simple review of notes on common data tables could have shown there was more data that needed to be dealt with.

At some point this would have become a blocker for access to our own money in our own business account.  Hire good people who can do good work and prevent this from happening and correct it when it does.

If you were in our hands-on lab sessions, we promised links.  Here you go:

Get Started With Copilot in Cloud Flows (Microsoft Documentation)

Copilots.

Large language models.

GPT this.

Open AI that.

The world is full of excitement for AI. 

And the world is full of doom-and-gloom for AI.

While there are many over-the-top scenarios we’ve seen, the most effective uses of AI for everyday business is in small pieces.  Add some AI here.  Streamline some work over there.  Surgical. Specific.  Purposeful.

The best uses of AI happen when combined with critical thinking directly from humans.

At 365.Training we’re using AI both directly for the benefit of the users while they are training, but also behind the scenes.  I guess that ultimately benefits the user, but less directly.

365Ai is your training copilot- While in a course, you can ask contextual questions of the copilot.  The models are of course powered by the large language models, but also grounded with our own information.  We make sure that the copilot in a specific course can answer topic-specific questions and not get sidetracked on other topics. The copilot is relevant and there when you need it.

mydigest- We’ve got a few different places where we’ve inserted AI. 


TL;DR- We’ve manually curated sources (more than 150 of them so far), and we have AI generated summaries of the items in your feed. 

Categories- We use AI to help identify content topics and the job roles that are relevant for the items.

Your filters- you select topics, roles and importance and we calculate a score and combine that with our scoring of items and apply that to make your custom feed.

Your digest email- we apply similar logic as above and curate a custom email on the schedule you define.

We’ve also used some of the Copilot capabilities of GitHub to help accelerate some of the more tedious parts of development to get us to market faster.

How do you AI in your everyday world?

So much great feedback!  Keep it coming.  Use the Ideas page on the 365.Training site or reach out to me directly.

So, in case you haven’t heard, my digest at 365.Training is a place to stay up to date on all things Power Platform and Dynamics 365.  We’ve got over 150 sources for you, all in one place.  My original blog post on it is here.

So, some updates for you.

Email digest from my feed. You can set the frequency of your digest email from none to daily, weekly, monthly or after 10 days of inactivity on the site.  Your default is set to none, so if you want to get an email digest, navigate to the settings page via the gears icon on the ribbon.

You can now listen to our AI-generated TL:DR summaries.


Suggest a new source.  On that top ribbon, click the plus+ and let us know a great source we may have missed. You can also keep track of your suggestions, and the outcome on the My suggestions tab.

Time to consume.  Once you’re drilled into the summary of an item from your feed, we’ve got an estimate of how long it will take you to consume the item from the source.

You can listen to a podcast directly from our site.  Not every podcast provider supports this at this time, but most of the ones we share will have that option for you.

Once you’ve set your filter preferences, and are viewing your feed, you can also now choose what type of content you’d like to see right now.  Use it just like you use our just-in-time my view filter.

Load more items to your feed. When you first get to your digest, we give you 50 items on your feed.  If you make it to the end and want to load the next 50, use the mark all read at the bottom of the feed. That will effectively dismiss all items on your feed and reload with the next 50 items.

Still haven't tried my digest?  Go give it a try now https://mydigest.365.training 

We added 365Ai a short time ago.  It' s a great tool for getting your questions asked in the context of a course at 365.Training.  We've just released an update that allows us to dock 365Ai to the course dashboard so you can access it at any time.  It's now available in several courses that have already been enabled for 365Ai.




I made a quick tutorial.

We all knew it was coming.  Finally, it was announced that the classic designers for app, forms and views are deprecated.   So, what does that mean, from a practical perspective?

Microsoft feels that all essential tasks can be completed in the new designers.  The new designers are all accessible by default (yea accessibility!), and generally easier and more intuitive to use.  They load up with previews that include your own data. 

There is no need to panic.  It is possible that something you do all of the time is not available in the new designers.  You just know you have to revert to classic to do just this one thing.  That is still available but must be enabled by admin on a specific environment.  The setting is found in the Power Platform admin center with other Behavior settings.

Users/makers will still see the new experiences by default.  This will simply offer them the option to switch to classic as needed.

If you find yourself reverting back to classic, tell Microsoft about it. 

PS. That one thing you think you have to do in the classic designer? Chances are it’s in the new designer too, you just haven’t located it yet.