I’ve heard so many great things about Scottish Summit but have never been able to attend, until now 😊.

AND I get to deliver a fun workshop there too.  There are limited spots, but you can still sign up here.

The workshop is called My First Day of Power Platform. I just delivered a similar workshop to a room full of beginners.  I surveyed the audience…has anyone made an app or cloud flow?  Has anyone used a Power App?  Not a single hand came up.  After a few more questions, with no hands, I got one!  She had seen a Power BI report before.  These were true beginners.  Exactly who should be there.

My visual evaluation of the workshop attendees put them in the 40s, 50,s even 60s.  All starting something brand new.  (how inspiring is that!!)

By the end of the day….everyone had built a data model, everyone made and customized a canvas Power App, everyone made a custom model-driven Power App and everyone had made a working Power Automate cloud flow.

Yes, all in one day!

Join me in Scotland and launch the career you’ve been looking for, the change you need.  If not now, when?

I’ve tweaked the title and description just a bit to better reflect the day.

My first day of Power Platform (Powered by Copilot)

In "My First Day of Power Platform (Powered by Copilot)," we'll embark on a journey from idea to execution, exploring how Copilot can be your invaluable partner in crafting powerful business solutions. This session is all about making the Power Platform accessible to everyone, regardless of your technical background.  If you’re new and not sure what part of Power Platform is for you?  You’ll practice with several different tools and products and help you find the one that is best for you.

The full event agenda and schedule can be found here.

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.

I'm traumatized.

My grandson is now an orphan and I want to give him a good future.

When the war in Ukraine broke out, I had to leave for Germany with my son because it was very dangerous to stay there.

I was working in a nuclear company in Kyiv.

I am a Ukrainian refugee, and I am looking for any kind of professional education in IT.

I am 54 years old, Ukrainian refugee.

Due to the circumstances in our country, I cannot work in my specialty. For more than 10 years, I have been teaching applied mathematics at the University.

I am a professional athlete.

These are quotes from our applicants for our continuing cohorts for displaced and vulnerable Ukrainians.  Our simple application has standard input fields for names and contact details.  It also has two additional questions:

1. Why do you want to join our training cohort?
2. Is there any additional relevant information you'd like to share with us or to clarify any of your above answers?

The answers have gone through some automatic translations, but I think the sentiment is still very clear.  People need help to start over.  They are eager to move forward and do whatever it takes for a new chance.

Refresher on what we do and how we do it.

The Microsoft collection for Business Applications Professional skilling has been translated to Ukrainian (AI-assisted automated translation with manual review for minor edits).  This program gives a great introduction to the tech-adjacent knowledge and skills you need to start a career in tech.  It’s good in English, it’s good in Ukrainian.

The free cohorts take place in Telegram groups.  We tried Microsoft Teams but that proved to be a challenge on many levels because of many restrictions and issues with access to reliable connections and devices.  But the students are already in Telegram, so we go to where they are.

Each week students have an assignment from this translated content.  They also watch relevant (and subtitled in Ukrainian) videos.  And there are two questions per week (via a simple Microsoft Form) that they respond to.  These questions are great for relating the weekly topics into real-world actionable knowledge.  The questions are available in both English and Ukrainian.  I built a Power App with some swanky translation capabilities so students can respond in either language.  And then the swanky translation capabilities translate our feedback we’ve entered in the Power App from English to Ukrainian and send the student an email with feedback from an industry expert in their language.

The 6-week program exposes students to the world of Microsoft Business Applications, capabilities of the Dynamics 365 family of products, and career options. We hope to spark an interest to help them decide what is a good next move for them.  Many love the CRM side.  Many love the ERP side.  Even a few are interested in BC.

The next cohort is our biggest yet with a few hundred students enrolled.  We’re very fortunate in being able to recruit qualified volunteers to lend a hand to help us keep up. 

Everyone who applies is accepted.

Six-weeks is the plan, but anyone who needs more time gets all the time they need.

We’ve automated as much as we can and still provide personal touches and interactions.  We are all volunteers with full-time jobs but together we are making a small difference.  Thanks go out to Vlad, Dima, Kat, Olena, Andrew, and Britta for all they do to help keep this going.  Neither Britta nor I know Ukrainian language, but technology makes it feel seamless to participate.

After the 6 weeks, students stay in the Telegram groups and help the next group.  It is an amazing community that I am lucky to participate in from the sidelines.

What is your call to action?

1. Send your Ukrainian friends and colleagues to us. They can join and learn.  Or they can join and help. https://365l.ink/UkraineSignUp
2. Say yes if when I reach out to you with a specific ask. As the groups increase in size, we may need more help with weekly feedback to students.
3. Find room in your organization for one of our grads as a new hire or apprentice. 

Part of our automation sends students an email to invite them to the Telegram group upon enrollment.  One student replied and I keep it pinned at the top of my inbox.

“Thanks you very much for your answer. It did me so much happy.”

It did me so much happy too.  It really did.

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.

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?

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.

A few weeks ago, Dave came into my office and starts scribbling on the whiteboard.  Has a great idea.  And we all agreed.  And so, we jumped into the deep end and a few weeks later, we launched my digest by 365.Training.

What is my digest?  It’s your one-stop place for news, updates, blogs, events, podcasts, videos; all things current about Power Platform.  You build your interests in your saved filters and the feed only gives you things you are interested in. You can save items with notes, organized in your own folders.  You can snooze and item to read later.  You can do ad hoc views to narrow the scope of what you’re viewing right now, without changing your saved filters.

We’ve curated over 100 sources and add more pretty much every day. 

We just launched this crazy idea last week.  So, we’re in our beta phase while we work through any minor bugs and improvements.  During this beta, every logged in user has access at no cost.  We’ll sort out how we monetize it later.

Let me know if you have sources we should add or other ideas to make it better.

Go to my digest

I made a quick tutorial of how to get the most of my digest. 

This is starting to feel like the good old days 😊

Power Platform Conference Las Vegas NV October 3-5.  I’m not attending or presenting, but plan to be in town for a short time that week.  Feel free to grab some time to catch up.  https://365l.ink/MeetMeInVegas

365CommunityDays Knoxville TN- October 13^th.  I’m giving two talks at this free community event.  Come join us! https://www.communitydays.org/event/2023-10-13/knoxville-m365-community-day#schedule

Community Summit- October 15-20 Charlotte NC- I’m on a few panels and helping deliver a session for CRM/D365 Sales users.  Details here https://connect.summitna.com/8_0/sessions/speaker-details.cfm?speakerid=724

Denver Dev Day October 27 Denver CO- Not currently planning to deliver a session, but that might change.  It’s free, join us anyway.  https://denverdevday.github.io/oct-2023/

I’m always thinking about what new courses the community needs.  I recently went through my library of courses at 365.Training and keep coming back to the fundamentals.  But curated fundamentals.  Courses specifically targeting practical skills. So, instead of making new courses, I’ve re-paved my most popular (and I feel most valuable) courses.

What does that mean?  First all the labs have been updated and fully retested.  Second, I’ve streamlined the talking parts, reduced it to what you need to know to understand what you are building in the labs.  And third, I’ve added summary videos of the labs, and made this video available as a preview. You don’t have to subscribe, or purchase the course before you know more about what you are doing in these courses.

You’ll see that nearly all of these include something called 365Ai.  That’s our training copilot that is there with you while you train.  You can ask 365Ai topical questions without having to leave your training dashboard.  Give it a try, I think it’s pretty swanky.

Experience Power Platform- This course takes you through a series of hands-on exercises all designed to give you practical experience building with the tools of Power Platform.  This course includes 365Ai.

Zero to model-driven- This is a hands-on labs-based course to build a model-driven Power App.  In this course you'll learn how to build a functionally complete model-driven app for Happy Tails doggie daycare. You do not need any prior Power Apps experience. This course includes 365Ai.

Zero to canvas- This is a hands-on labs-based course to build a canvas Power App. In this course you'll learn how to build a functionally complete canvas app for Happy Tails doggie daycare. You do not need any prior Power Apps experience.

Zero to Power Pages- This is a hands-on lab-based course to build Power Pages. In this course you'll learn how to build a functionally complete site for Happy Tails doggie daycare. You do not need any prior Power Apps experience. This course includes 365Ai.

You can buy any of these courses ala carte…or subscribe and get all of these and more included.  Use my link for a 30% discount on your annual subscription.  https://365l.ink/365Julie