Steve reads his Blog

Dynamics Developers - Time to Get your Head out of your Ass

As I was writing my last post on Re-Thinking, I got an email from some off-shore developer, offering to assist us with any "Dynamics CRM Online" projects we may have. Based on this pretty big clue, I put on my pompous know-it-all hat, and blasted him for offering his ancient skills to a cutting edge partner. His apologetic reply included, "there is just so much to get up-to-speed on, I don't even know where to start". Then I felt like an asshole. But he did give me the idea for this post. Skills Deprecation In many of my recent posts I have been preaching that you need to get current to stay relevant. What has served you for years, is in jeopardy. Your past ability to keep up with the conveyor belt of changes, and still get work done, is failing now that the belt is moving 50 times faster. It seems that this "concept" might be resonating with a lot of people. But work will always take priority, and today, the more you focus on work, the faster and father behind you get. It is a viscous cycle with a bad ending. The Conveyor Belt Changes are coming way too fast for even the most ardent watchers to keep up with, much less while trying to keep food on your table. But among that non-stop stream are a few things that will be key to your longevity as DynamicsBusiness Applications Developer. I am fortunate to have a greater than average amount of time to digest these things. I try and pick up each piece as it goes by and study it. Many of them are like "Huh, that's interesting", and some are like "Huh, that changes everything". But you continue to... Wait... back up... "changes everything"? So I thought I would create a cheat sheet for those that can't possibly review everything, of the things they must make time for. Unified Interface This one has a laser lock on you that you cannot evade. The honeymoon is over. Unified Interface is now the default UI for new deployments. Your trusty ole Web Client (Classic UI) is still available in the background for a limited time. You need to get on this one. I have written about this one here. PowerApps PowerApps is the crabgrass in the Dynamics 365 lawn... and it is taking over. Its seeds have already taken root, leading to more seeds. You might have first noticed it in the Solution Designer, but that was just a visible manifestation on the surface. Underneath, it has already taken over the entire platform you work on every day. PowerApps is not a name change, it is a philosophical change to how Microsoft is moving forward in Business Applications. Bit by bit, PowerApps is gradually replacing everything you always knew. The way you design views for example is changing with a brand new view designer, forms are next, and it will continue. Should you freak out? If you have designed views the old way, you will be able to pick up on the new way in about five minutes... once you make the time. Common Data Service Under the hood, Dynamics 365 has very little in common with Dynamics CRM Online. The separation of the Apps from the platform may not be obviously apparent, but the changes are profound. Any developer who plans to continue their career, will need to get their arms around this concept. I have already written about this at length, so I'll just refer you to this post, this post or this post. Microsoft Flow You may have thought about Microsoft Flow as some kind of "If this then that" competitor that you can safely ignore. But the crabgrass seeds have spread. Once all the wiring is in place, Microsoft Flow will actually replace the workflow designer you currently use in Dynamics 365. Do you think you might want to bone up on that one? Power BI One of Microsoft's key differentiators in Business Applications is Power BI. Really analytics in general, but Power BI is your door in. While there will still be a place for native charts in Dynamics 365, they do not set Microsoft apart, like Power BI can. To be honest, this is one of the areas that I acknowledge that even I am behind on, but I also know I can't be. Power Platform Thankfully, the "Power Platform" is not a separate thing, but rather a concept of using PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and Power BI together. So if you understand those three, you understand the Power Platform. Extra Credit The items above, are really what I consider table-stakes, for having a future in this business as a developer. Consider those as getting your head out of your ass and wiping your face off, but if you really want to get the crap out of your teeth, then here are some items that will allow you to further stand out in the crowd. PowerApps Control Framework PCF is like crabgrass in the crabgrass. It has already taken over many things without your even knowing it. For example, the out of the box charts have all been converted to "Controls". The Editable Grid is a "control". Many of the things you are looking at right now, have been quietly converted to controls, and it is the way forward. To be fair, this is still in private preview, so you may not be able to get to it yet, but once you can, you will want to understand how this works. Dynamics 365 for Marketing Some of you may know that I have written a few posts on Microsoft's new marketing application, Dynamics 365 for Marketing. Some of you may have even stayed away as a result of those posts. But, as I recently wrote about here, the water is fine now, and you can feel free to jump in Connectors Connectors are going to be a bigger part of the picture as we move forward. As the name implies, these are bits of code that connect to some other application's API. Using the Dynamics 365 connector and any other connector, you can link the applications together. They are the cornerstone of Microsoft Flow and Canvas PowerApps. They are also not difficult to build. If you are a third-party application wondering how you might "connect" with the Microsoft ecosystem, "Connectors" could be the ticket. Summary This was just the tip of the iceberg, and while it might be awesome to stand on the peak of the iceberg, you at least need to be clinging onto the side of it, or you will drown under it. My posts tend to be about things you should be thinking about, but for the next level of how to actually get there, I highly recommend a fellow MVP, Jukka Niiranen's excellent blog http://survivingcrm.com/

Business Applications - It’s Time to Re-Think Things

Recently, I found myself looking in the Google Play Store for a mobile app to solve some issue. I found several options that were close, but none met my need perfectly. My choices were: a) continue to live with an unmet need, b) Use one of the apps that was close... but not really, or c) Hire a mobile app developer and build one, which would be insane. The challenges for Business Applications have been similar up to now, but that is changing. The Current Landscape If you are a business in need of a Business Application, which, as a business, sounds like an application you might want, you have a few paths. Before I go further, let's level-set on what I am referring to by "Business Applications". In today's terms, Business Applications include things like your CRM system, ERP system (for finance), Project Management System, Business Operations Systems, etc. These are distinct from other utility applications your business also needs, like Email, word-processing, etc. Business Applications are really the foundation of a business. For any business, imagine what a mess you would have without your accounting software, for example. While many people still use things like Email as a Business Solution, at some point of growth, that flywheel simply gets to big to effectively turn with that AAA Battery.  This is when you would consider the power-plant known as Business Applications. Let's set aside for the moment what your actual requirements are, and I know we can't set them aside, but it will only be for a minute, so I think we'll be okay. Your options, regardless of your specific requirements, will fall into four buckets. Purpose-Built Industry Solutions (Acme Law Software), Broad Solutions (Like Quickbooks or Nimble), Solution Platforms (Like Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.com), or Custom Development. Let's continue to leave your requirements aside for now, and dump these four buckets over for a closer look. BizApps Buckets So like one of those dating reality shows, we'll go ahead and eliminate one option right off the bat: Custom Development. Custom development is for the people who build these buckets, as a customer you have no business, or budget for building anything from scratch. Even the US Government has moved from pure Custom Development, to Extending Off-the-Shelf software and platforms. So that was easy, let's take a look at the Broad Solutions. Broad Solutions are a typical next step from Email and Spreadsheets alone... they are a toe in the Business Solutions water. They are typically designed for the widest possible customer segment, to fill a fairly narrow requirement. We see many customers who, over time, have cobbled together complete business solutions using multiple broad solutions. They will turn a bigger flywheel than Email alone, so we'll think of them as having 12 AA Batteries. Depending on how fast you are growing, and how much patience you have for maintaining a House of Cards, Broad Solutions could last you for quite some time. So we won't eliminate this Bachelor yet, we'll just say his prospects for long-term relationship material look dim. The next bucket is "Purpose-Built Industry Solutions", and without even knowing what your industry is, I can safely say, there is a least one for your industry. These "Industry-In-A-Box" type solutions, really blew up in the prior two decades. Before to the cloud revolution, many of these pricey solutions were cash cows for the bucket owners. But with the current speed of change, most of these have suffered from their inability to keep up with what everybody expects today, like web and mobile access, or analytics, for example. They also suffered from "Here's How it Works Syndrome", essentially dictating a fixed process for everyone in their Industry, with little wiggle room. Salesforce.com changed everything, by launching a cloud based "solution" platform that could be customized to meet your needs. It remains the highest selling Business Application, dwarfing all other "Industry-In-A-Box" solutions combined. Microsoft also joined the "Customizable Cloud Solutions" fray with Dynamics 365, and between them, suddenly the idea that you have to conform your business to your software became a silly notion. Both Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics 365 offer what might be considered on the surface as "Industry in a Box" solutions, but without a specific industry focus. They both have pre-built finished applications... but the similarity ends there. These finished applications are completely customizable to meet any requirements you may have. Granted, you have to know what you are doing, or engage a partner, but the cost of customizing on top of these platforms, is a fraction of the cost of Pure Custom Development, to get exactly what you want. This... has been the huge shift over the last decade. What's Next? Well, what's next for Dynamics 365, is recently catching up with another option Salesforce.com has offered for years, plus adding a bunch of new things Salesforce.com can't touch. First, catching up with the availability of a "Platform Only" license. I have written quite a bit about this exciting door that Microsoft has opened, primarily from an ISV standpoint, but this will be huge for customers as well. While the first-party apps are awesome, and extending them to be whatever you want, should not break the bank, there are some scenarios where they may not be the best starting point. While being customizable, the first-party apps make a lot of assumptions in their default deployment about how your business should run. Sales, for example, assumes a fairly specific path of Lead-to-Opportunity, Quote-to-Order, Order-to-Invoice, etc. This includes Views, Forms and Business Processes to match. Many businesses operate that way, and many others can customize this functionality to fit their needs. But what about a business that does not operate that way... at all... not even close? In those cases, it may make more sense to start with a Platform License and build exactly what you want. Obviously there is a step of weighing that needs to be considered. Weighing the cost of customizing the first-party app(s) vs. the cost of building your own app(s) on a naked platform. You would also have to take into consideration the difference in the recurring cost of the subscription licenses over time. But for some, it is an interesting new door. Only Microsoft While much of what I described above could be said for other platforms, there are a couple of significant things that are uniquely Microsoft, that I want to point out. The combination of Office 365 + Dynamics 365 + Power Platform + Azure is something that only Microsoft can deliver on. Charles Lamanna, GM of the Platform, helped me crystallize two truly unique scenarios: Deep Office 365 integration across transactional experiences (e.g. Outlook add-in) as well as intelligent experiences (e.g. Relationship Insights / AI). Deep Azure integration, to enable a “power-to-pro” experience for customers. That is, they can start by configuring Business Apps, then customizing them with PowerApps, and then jumping into Azure using Visual Studio, Xamarin or VS Code, to develop against them as needed. So about those requirements of yours that I set aside a while back; as you can see, it really doesn't matter. Obviously Microsoft can meet your Business requirements, whatever they may be. But comparing your your list of requirements today, to your list of requirements from 3 years ago will reveal a lot of differences. I think it is fair to say that your requirements will continue to evolve over time. So the bigger question is, who will also meet your unknown future requirements? I'm betting on Microsoft.  

Dynamics 365 for Marketing - The Giant Stands Back Up

Dynamics 365 for Marketing - The Giant Stands Back Up Back in April, I wrote a post called "Dynamics 365 for Marketing – A Giant Tripped by a Grain of Sand" about Microsoft's new Dynamics 365 for Marketing Application. It was not a favorable post. Regardless, Microsoft added us to a very small Pilot program for the product in a, "Keep the troublemakers close" strategy. A lot has changed since then. The "Trip" In that April post, I referred to an eager fictional intern named Justin, and his lazy fictional boss, who concocted a licensing scheme for Dynamics 365 for Marketing that made no sense. The "Powers that be" recognized the error, and suggested that Justin's boss should apply for a job at Salesforce.com (and they gave him a sterling endorsement). Justin was promoted to Executive Vice President, and is now a member of the SLT. In the meantime, the non-fictional team has been hard at work, and I am pleased to report that the Giant has regained his footing. The Grain of Sand The particular issue, that stalled this product from ever reaching "greatness", was a simple one: The Licensing Model. If you recall, the original licensing model was based on the number of "Contacts" in your database. Seems simple enough, and mirrors many other competing Marketing solutions. But unlike other Marketing solutions, where the contacts that reside in them, are there specifically for Marketing purposes, in the Dynamics 365 world, Contacts is a multi-dimensional construct. With the move to Common Data Service (CDS), this was further exacerbated. In almost every customer's case, there were a significant number of "contacts" in their databases, that were not there for Marketing purposes. In some cases this was over 90% of the database! For too many customers, this was a non-starter. I am not the only one who pointed this out, many partners joined the chorus. But, like a kid incessantly pointing out a zip on your chin, I hammered on this issue in every Pilot Program call. Once something is "set" in Microsoft, there is quite a bit of bureaucracy involved in changing it. While I am sure the team would have liked me to just shut the hell up about it, it was actually the stalled motion of the product that ultimately led to revisiting the licensing model. An Almost Perfect Model I would love to report that Microsoft took my suggestion to go to a 100% consumption based model... they did not... entirely, but they did get damn close. Regardless of the virtues I see in consumption, what they came up with will work in 99% of customer cases. A complete reversal of the previous model which would only work for 1% of customers. The biggest issue has been solved: "Effective with the Oct 2018 release, pricing for Dynamics 365 for Marketing will be based only on those contacts used for a marketing activity." So it no longer matters how many contacts you have in your database, or how they got there, or why they are there. From a "Marketing" standpoint, the only ones that will count towards your cost for Marketing, are those that you are Marketing to. Hallelujah! To see the full details for the new Dynamics 365 for Marketing licensing and pricing click here to download the relevant pages of the official document. With the prior model, a conversation with a customer seldom lasted more than 20 seconds... now we can have a "real" conversation. The fact is, we still don't know if Dynamics 365 for Marketing is a world-beater, or an also-ran. It was more like a cyclist in the Tour de France, with a flat tire at the starting line, who never got to race. Well the race is about to begin, the tires are good, it's time to see if this is actually a contender... or not. BTW, I am bullish at the moment. "But Steve, you have been all over the place on this". You are free to call me a "flip-flopper". When it comes to Dynamics 365 for Marketing, that would be a fair characterization. But, I have flipped... or flopped, back to product evangelist mode. Peeling the Preview Tag I have noticed recently that many Microsoft teams, across many products, seem to be a little too eager to remove the "Preview" tag. Preview typically means the product is free to use, but is still in "Beta", and so bugs are expected. In exchange for free use, users let Microsoft know about any issues they discover, so the team can fix them before a General Availability release (Peeling off the Preview label). Some products have a high Preview signup rate, and so a good number of issues can be discovered. Unfortunately, being a new space for Microsoft, the Dynamics 365 for Marketing Preview did not have a huge number of signups. Without many bugs being reported, Microsoft apprehensively peeled the Preview tag off the Marketing App in April. Dynamics 365 for Marketing is a comprehensive application, that covers a significant number of marketing use cases. Many of these use cases clearly had not been explored by the small group of users during the Preview, and so many bugs were later discovered. In hindsight, it's probably a good thing that the licensing model kept so many customers away, as it gave the team time to address the various issues that surfaced. Bug Squishing As part of the Pilot Program, I had a front-row seat to the team's efforts to stabilize the product. I can tell you, this team was nothing short of amazing. Sometimes issues were fixed within hours. Other times, the issue was discovered to not be a bug, but simply a lack of documentation, for a brand new category of product that we were all wrapping our heads around. The team was just as amazing at plugging the documentation gaps. Many partners reached out to me to ask, "Is Microsoft serious about this Marketing thing". Based on the passion I have seen, I have no doubts in my mind about their commitment to delivering a world-class Marketing solution. If I had stock in HubSpot or Marketo, I would be genuinely concerned. Summary While the path taken by Dynamics 365 for Marketing, is probably not one that Microsoft would like to repeat, we are thankfully on the other side of that bumpy road. I look at the April launch as a "soft-launch", now we have the "real" launch. The licensing model should now make financial sense to almost everybody. The product is hardening rapidly. While the product already covers a wider swath than most any competitor, the future roadmap extends father than the eye can see. From where I was 4 months ago on it, I really have to tip my hat to the whole team. I wonder how Justin's old boss is doing over at Salesforce.com... Dynamics 365 for Marketing is a powerful solution, and as such, is also a complex solution. In addition to needing some technical chops to install and configure it, you will also need to understand Marketing in general, and how Dynamics 365 for Marketing meets those goals. To be honest, even as a 3-time Business Applications MVP, I am not well-versed enough to succeed as a partner selling this product on our own, and I'm not afraid to admit it. But I now believe very strongly in the potential of this product, and I don't want to be standing on the sidelines. So we have formed an alliance with a deep, marketing-focused Dynamics partner (Coffee + Dunn) who brings the Marketing expertise, to combine with our technical and licensing expertise. If you would like to learn more about Dynamics 365 for Marketing, feel free to reach out to either me at steve@forceworks.com, or Thomas Manders at tmanders@coffee-dunn.com.

Dynamics 365 - Unpacking a recent post

As an experiment, back in February, I thought I would try using the LinkedIn "Create an Article" feature, to see how it compared to just posting to LinkedIn from my own blog. I can confidently report that the test was a huge failure. Anyone thinking of using LinkedIn's "Create an Article" feature... don't, it gets almost no traffic at all. But I did like the Article, and hardly anybody saw it, so I thought I would re-post it here on the good ole reliable blog. A while back I wrote a post called "Dynamics 365 – Are you Reporting or Engaging?" In that post I suggested some "Signs" that indicate you may not be using Dynamics 365 for its intended purpose, and therefore not benefiting from its full potential. A few people reached out and asked me to "unpack" why the "Signs" I mentioned would indicate this. So here is the list, with some comments added: A Large Number of fields have been set as required. Certainly there are reasons why certain information may be necessary, but I often see many fields set as required. In actual use, a Seller is in a discovery process with a customer, it may take a few touches to gather data, if you have made a field required on a Lead for example, and your seller is not able to obtain that information yet, a record cannot be saved. This often leads to the creation of dummy data just to be able to save a record. Dummy data is for dummies. Some data may indeed be necessary for an Opportunity for your business, critical information that must be captured before an Opportunity can be "Won", but as a required field, you are expecting the Seller to have collected this information before they can even save a new Opportunity record. Forcing your sellers to collect required information from the jump is not realistic and just leads to poor adoption. A better way might be to build a simple workflow triggered on "Qualify" for a Lead, or "Won" for an Opportunity, that checks certain fields for data, and prevents the action if those fields do not contain data. This way your Sellers are not blocked from "working" on deals as they move them towards a conclusion. Your sales team, “Checks in” periodically to update records. If your Sellers are checking into Dynamics 365 every now and then, you have obviously failed to provide an experience that helps them do their job. The effort is overloaded on Analytics. Most Analytics efforts we see are for managers. Even when a Seller dashboard is created, too often it is overloaded with where the Seller is failing against their peers or some KPI. Rarely do I see anything built to actually help the Seller. Bad sellers might be motivated by fear, good sellers are motivated by success. Give them the analytics they want to succeed. You have a deployed a large number of email “Alerts. This is related to a point above, and is a clear indication that your Sellers are not using Dynamics 365. This led to your deploying a system of alerts to email them when things are happening in Dynamics 365, so they can go and "Check in". If you had done this right in the first place, they would already be using Dynamics 365, and would not need all of these alert emails. Underestimating the intelligence of the Sales Team. One thing I hear often from customers is that they think their sellers are not smart enough to use Dynamics 365. This often leads to trying to build a platform that a child could use. Of course these same sellers have no challenges using other software platforms, like LinkedIn for example, to look for an employer who does not assume they are morons. Highest priority was Management Reporting. Too many deployments put the "cart before the horse", and the Phase One is building all of the components necessary to report on everything. For Phase Two, they attempt to layer seller capabilities on top of this big reporting foundation. This is the number one cause of failure to adopt any Customer Engagement platform from any vendor. I know there are also many more "Signs", these were just ones that popped into my mind immediately when I wrote that post, I would love to hear more "Signs" that a Dynamics 365 deployment is heading down a path to failure. Please share in the comments!

Microsoft Business Applications - Freelancers vs. Partners

Sometimes people ask me where I come up with post ideas, here's one way. I saw a LinkedIn post today from a recruiter, suggesting the use of "freelancers" for Dynamics 365, and presumably other Microsoft Business Applications. While freelancers may have a place in the process, there are some very good reasons, that you should seriously consider an actual Microsoft Business Applications Partner instead. Freelancers I don't have anything against someone looking to make a buck. We're all in business to do that. But, whether a freelancer is a true "hired gun", or someone who is simply moonlighting on the side, they are, by their nature, an individual person. There is no requirement to pass any certification, or get any license, to post out there that you are available as a freelancer. There is no government, or other body, ensuring that you have any idea of what you are doing. It is a classic "Buyer Beware" situation. As a partner, we engage freelancers from time to time, and we have found it to be a mixed bag. If a partner, who knows exactly what a true skill-set looks like, can end up with mixed results, end customers must rely on pure luck. Last year we engaged a freelancer for something outside of our wheelhouse. We reviewed his list of great customer recommendations, since that is really all we had to analyze, and moved forward with this project. Fortunately, this was an internal project, as the freelancer did a shit job across the board. I gave him an unsatisfactory review on the site where we found him, wondering how he had so many good ones. Immediately he called me, begging me to remove the negative review, even promising to work for free for as long as I needed, and even offered to refund what we had paid, to get me to change the review. Of course he sucked, so more sucky work for free did not persuade me to change the review, but I guess this must have worked with all of his other customers in the past. Why Freelancers? We, like most customers, will sometimes have a need for skills that we do not possess. Freelancers are one path, if you are lucky, to obtain those skills. The customers in the past that I have seen turn to freelancers for Microsoft Business Applications, are the same ones that try to avoid engaging partners at all. In most of these cases, I am fairly sure that the customer does not even understand what a Microsoft Partner does, and simply thinks they are some kind of middle-man. These are the same customers who buy their licenses directly, with no understanding of what licenses they actually need, and always end paying way too much for them. They also have no grasp of how all of the Microsoft Cloud pieces fit together, and hire some freelancer who only understands a narrow slice, and then wonder why the end up with a mess. Bail outs I, and many of my partner peers, have been asked to bail out many failed self-deployments, often where freelancers were used to plug gaps. In almost every case, the first thing that we discover is the customer is on the wrong licensing matrix. They are either paying way more than they need to be, or they are using licenses in the wrong way, and are significantly out of compliance with license terms (Team Member anyone). Turning to the actual work that was done, even if the freelancer was good at one thing, they seldom took advantage of everything else the customer had in place. Often, their methods were simply out-of-date, since they are not up-to-speed on everything that Partners are made aware of.  In many cases, they built a house of cards, that ended up costing twice as much to dismantle, as it would have to do it right in the first place. When the customer found themselves in a mess, the freelancer had no channel for advanced Microsoft support, nor did the customer, and they found themselves on the other end of the line with a person, with an incomprehensible accent, asking them if their machine was turned on. I have difficult time feeling sympathetic to this customer, and really lose my shit if they start saying the product is bad. Why Partner? To be fair, not every Microsoft Partner is stellar either. In the Microsoft Business Applications space, we have our share of unqualified partners, who instead of referring a customer to a qualified partner, will attempt to learn on the customer's nickel. Fortunately, they are easy to spot thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft has long used a system of "Competencies", a certification from Microsoft that a partner knows what they are doing. Obtaining a competency requires having people in your partner organization pass multiple proctored certification exams, as well as having a significant number of successful deployments. By the way, there is no such thing as a Freelancer with a Competency, these are awarded to Partner organizations, not individuals. You should also be aware that there are many Microsoft "competencies", and just because you are talking to a partner who has their "Microsoft Gold Competency for Licensing" for example, does not mean they know anything more than you do, about Business Applications. Most of the partners I know, that have their Business Applications competency, really know the product well. In addition, as Business Applications are so central to what Microsoft is doing in the cloud, they also understand all of the surrounding parts, and how they work together. The Partner licensing guide for Business Applications is over 140 pages, that only a Business Applications partner could even understand. Most importantly, if something does go wrong, Business Applications partners have access to advanced Microsoft support resources to get things fixed quickly. The Top Level If you really want to insure success, there is one more step you can take beyond making sure the partner organization has their Business Applications Competency, and that is MVP status. The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) designation is an individual award. It is given to individuals who are at the top of their game in whatever category they are awarded. One of those categories is "Business Applications MVP". I am humbled to be a part of this exclusive group of the true "brain trust" for Microsoft Business Applications, along with 161 other exceptional individuals from around the globe. MVPs are the people who are really on the forefront, as Microsoft continuously consults directly with them on the products. In fact, for anything you might want to do with any Microsoft product, including Business Applications, you might want to save some steps, and just start your search here.

Dynamics 365 & PowerApps - Let’s build a Home

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion lately about Dynamics 365 and PowerApps, particularly now with Model-Driven PowerApps. Microsoft's #FreightTrain, seems to have become a #BulletTrain of innovation, and sometimes things like "naming" and "explaining" lag behind. Let's see if I can unpack this one. Warning, this is a long post, so you might want to listen to it instead. The PowerApps Path When PowerApps burst onto the scene, it was a citizen developer tool for building simple apps using what is called the Canvas Model. The Canvas Model allowed you to "connect" to multiple data sources, including Dynamics 365, to build your App. It was not intended as a tool to build a complete business solution, but rather to build a mobile app for specific tasks. When the Common Data Service "pivoted" to the XrM platform, PowerApps and Dynamics 365 got mushed together, and a new concept was introduced for PowerApps called, "Model-Driven PowerApps". Microsoft often describes the difference between Canvas and Model driven as the ability to have either pixel precision in Canvas, or an "automatic" UI in Model Driven, but that really does not help you understand where the parts fit. What's in a Name Microsoft has struggled mightily over the years with product naming; not just in Business Applications, but across the company, product naming has been... let's call it,  less than perfect. Many partners and customers first became aware of Model-Driven PowerApps when they logged into the Solution Explorer one day, like they did everyday, and suddenly it said "PowerApps" in the header. "What the hell is this?". This was further evidence of the separation of the Apps from the platform. The Platform being CDS, and PowerApps being... what exactly? A Power Fork Today, the PowerApps brand means two distinct things, Canvas AND Model-Driven apps. These two "things" are for different purposes. The recent announcement that we will soon be able to embed a Canvas App into a Model-Driven App, has made things even more confusing for many people. One thing that PowerApps does not mean is Dynamics 365, these are not the same thing... well, not exactly. So what is Dynamics 365? What is "Power Platform? Why are there two Common Data Services? Okay, now I have gone and confused myself. Let's try another angle. A while ago I had some fun with a post I called "The Strategy Simulator", let's have some fun again, with another short-story. Steve Builds a Home I assume we are all familiar with a "Duplex". It's a residential building split in half, with two families living under one roof. Let's imagine that I want to build one, but not for two families, just for me. The reason will be clear in a minute. The first step I will do is to find a community, and I have selected one called Azure. Azure is a sprawling gated community, with rolling hills and miles of roadways, underground power grids, water systems, lakes, ponds ,etc., with many neighborhoods within it. I had looked at a couple of other communities; Amazon and Google. Amazon was an enormous gated community, but it did not have the rolling hills, it was dead flat as far as the eye could see. While there were miles and miles of roads, I did not see any amenities. The homes all looked exactly the same, like one of those old movies they showed to kids in school in the 50's, simulating a nuclear bomb leveling a neighborhood of fake homes. I pulled into, and then immediately left, the Google community, it looked like it was just getting started as none of the roads were yet paved, and the gates were unmanned. The construction workers I saw in there all looked like 60's era hippies, that did not appear to be in any hurry. So anyway, back in the Azure community, I saw a lot of interconnected neighborhoods, some of these were gated also. Gated within Gated seems like overkill on security, but I guess there are a lot of paranoid people in the world. I ultimately selected a lovely lot in the "Business Applications" neighborhood, because the neighbors all looked a lot like me. Business Applications is a fast growing neighborhood, which is adjacent to the huge "Productivity Applications" neighborhood, and they both share a lot of amenities, like the golf course, clubhouse and pool. The next step was to pour a foundation on my new lot. The left side of my foundation will be poured with "Common Data Service for Apps", and the right side will be poured with "Common Data Service for Analytics". While these halves are indeed different, for my purposes at this stage they look the same. They're both flat, with lots of pipes stubbed up out of them. There is also a vertical wall splitting the two halves of my duplex, and it has a lot of pipes pushed through it. At this time, this foundation does not "do" anything, I can't live here yet.. I can't even cook an egg. What I have so far is the CDS Platform for the "Power Platform", which in turn sits on the Azure Platform, all of which does nothing on its own. I step onto the left side of this foundation. There are a ton of pipes sticking up through the floor, but first I'll take a look at the ones poking through the wall. I walk up to the biggest one which has a label on it, "Power BI". It is so big I can stick my head through it to the other side and see the Common Data Service for Analytics floor. The slab on that side looks different, it seems a lot more porous, and still appears to be... liquid, like it will never harden. I pull my head back, and look at the other pipes through the wall, each of them is called "something Insights". It is clear that the right side is for large-scale number crunching of massive amounts of data that will eventually get pushed back and forth through these pipes. I turn my attention back to the floor, on the left side of the wall where I am standing. Scanning the floor of the left side there are so many pipes of different sizes, it is hard to even walk without tripping. Around the perimeter edge are small green pipes every few inches, hundreds of them. I take a closer look... "Twitter Connector", "BaseCamp Connector", "Dropbox Connector", etc. There is a second row around the perimeter, just inside of the first one, I see they are all labeled "Future Connector". About halfway down the left edge I see a big pipe labelled: "Connection to Productivity Applications Neighborhood". This is clearly going to be one of those new "Connected" homes. The rest of the floor is covered with steel plates embedded in the slab, with threaded rods sticking out of them. None of them appear to be marked, but clearly, they are here for something. A big truck with a flat-bed trailer pulls up out front, and I head out to see what's up. I see on the truck door a sticker that says, "Apps, Tools and Beyond".  Interesting... it looks like the trailer's bed is filled with Appliances of various sizes. Most of them have these steel base plates with holes drilled in them, that I assume marry up to the steel rods I saw on the slab. I noticed that many of them also had steel plates on their tops, with the same threaded rods... it looks like some of them can be stacked on top of each other, like those compact washer/dryer combos. The driver comes around the front of the truck to meet me and says, "Wadda ya want?". Caught off-guard, I said, "What do I need?". He says, "Whatever you want", which is not helpful at all. I said, "Well, what do most other people do?" He says, "They look at me all confused, like you are now". Boldly, I respond, "Well I want "Best Practices"!". He chuckles and says, "You realize that "Best Practices" is a made-up, bullshit term right?, "Best Practices" is whatever works for you". Then he says, "I'll tell you what, I'll leave the rig here for a couple of days so you can decide". I said, "Wait a minute, how am I gonna get any of those things in there to try, I don't see a crane or anything, and some of these look super heavy". He says, "No crane required... look", and he points to a button on the side of one these things that says "Install". He pushes it and the thing, whatever it was, vanishes off the truck bed. Startled, I said, "Where did that go?". He points over to the slab, on the left side of the wall, and I can see the "thing" sitting on the floor. Wow... that was cool. He says, "If you don't like it, there's another button on it that says "Remove", which will put it back on the trailer". With that, he turned and started walking down the street and says over his shoulder, "I'll be back in a two days". Hmm...there are a lot of things on this truck and I have no idea what any of them are. Walking around it I can see labels on them, "PowerApps", "Dynamics 365 Enterprise Sales", "Dynamics 365 Business Central", "Flow", "Power BI", and many more. I recognize Power BI, from the big pipe through the wall I pushed my head through earlier, so I push the install button on the side of it, and of course it... vanishes. I look over but I don't see it on the floor. Peering around the end of the wall, I see it now, attached to the wall like a crab, up towards the top on the left side. There are a bunch of wires dangling from it that are not connected to anything. I walk around to the other side of the wall, and I see a huge bundle of wires coming out of that pipe, streaming across the floor, running into all the other floor pipes. It does not seem to be doing anything, there is a panel of lights on the side of it, but none are lit. The right slab almost looks translucent, like I can see right into it... but I don't see anything. It's like standing in a boat, looking down into a clear lake... but there are no fish... no... anything. Well this is stupid, and useless, I push the remove button and all of the wires snake back out of the pipes, like a kid slurping in a piece of spaghetti, and they all go back through the wall and then the Power BI box vanishes. I look over my shoulder and see it re-appear on the truck bed. I wonder if there is a particular order that needs to be followed. I pull out the home-builder's guide-book, and can't make any sense of it, too many acronyms, obviously written for an experienced home-builder. I take a closer look at the PowerApps appliance on the truck bed. I see the Install and Remove buttons, but this thing has another button, "Reorder". What the hell does that do? I push it. Suddenly it lurches upward, flies over and lands on top of the Enterprise Sales Application thing. Interesting. I notice that the Enterprise Sales App thing has a similar "Reorder" button, so I push that. It does not seem like anything is happening, until I look up and notice that the PowerApps thing has lifted up from the top of the Enterprise Sales App thing. As soon as it clears the rods, the Enterprise Sales App thing lurches to the right, about its whole width distance, leaving the PowerApps thing floating in mid-air. It starts to descend slowly, and I notice that the Enterprise Sales App thing starts to rise up a the same cadence. The PowerApps things lands softly on the truck bed, and once the Enterprise Sales App thing clears its top, it starts to move to the left, over the PowerApps thing, and eventually settles on to the rods on the top of it. So it seems that these things can be stacked on top on one another in either order. I wonder why I would care? I am feeling brave now, so I push the Install button on the Enterprise Sales App and it vanishes, and reappears over on the foundation. I go ahead and do the same for the PowerApps thing, and it appears on the slab near the Enterprise Sales App thing. I walk over to the slab to see what these things are all about. They are both large... room-sized in fact, and like a room, they each have a door on their side. I crack open the door on the PowerApps thing and peer through. Whoa, that was scary, I slammed the door. It looked like an entire Home Depot store inside of this room, but how is that possible? I crack the door again and I can see the interior of this room is like 30,000 square feet, but from the outside, it looks to be a cube about 12' on each side. I close the door again, and start pacing around this cube. This is simply not possible... its like some David Copperfield illusion. I decide it must be an illusion, so when I come around to the side with the door, I swing it open and just walk right in. I gulp. I am literally standing inside the entrance of a huge Home Depot store. Rows and rows of everything I would need to build whatever the hell I wanted. Getting over the fact that there is a 30,000 sq ft store inside of this 12' cube, I think to myself, "Well this is handy". I turn around and exit the store, er, cube. As I exit the PowerApps cube, I am facing directly at the Enterprise Sales cube, which looks to be the same 12' on each side. Feeling braver now, knowing that I was able to exit the other cube successfully, I confidently move forward to open the door, I wonder what will be behind it, maybe a Lowes Store? I go ahead and enter. Well... this is different. The space is not as large as the PowerApps Home Depot, I am guessing about 10,000 sq ft, but this is a finished Mansion... and it's fully furnished. Still, it fit in a 12' cube, so that's amazing, but hard to top an entire Home Depot. Looking around I think, Wow, I can probably stop right here, and just live in this cube. Beautiful hardwood floors, a grand staircase to I don't know where, a black lacquered Grand Piano by the front window, and I'm still in the foyer. Wait.. I didn't see any windows from the outside of the cube! But never-mind, this is really beautiful, and huge! I stroll down a wide hallway with many openings on each side, and I come to one that has a plaque above it that says "Leads". Walking past, I can see luxurious seating fills the room, it looks like a waiting room for meeting a King. But there is no one in there. I see more openings for Opportunities, Contacts, Accounts, etc., but as I am walking I am starting to think that the style is not exactly me. Everything is Gold-Leafed, and the Crown Moldings are exquisite, but this would take my own "touches" to make it really what I would want. I head back and exit through the door. I am thinking that beautiful mansion would be great, if I could just fiddle with it, maybe move some walls around, or at least paint it in colors I like, and it hits me.... I have a Home Depot Right here. I walk over to the PowerApps cube and push the re-order button. It jolts upward and flies over the top of the Enterprise Sales App cube and settles smoothly on top of it. A roughly 4' square platform slides out from under the door on the upper cube. A ladder, that I had not noticed before starts to extend from under the platform. It is going straight out horizontally, then stops after about 12'. Just as I am wondering how I will reach it, it starts to pivot downward, and the bottom of it touches the slab right in front of me. I decide I will check it out, but as soon as my hand touches the rung in front of me, I am standing on the platform facing the door, 12' above... my stomach feels a jolt, like you get from a trampoline. Okay, that was freaky, but I notice that while still confused, I'm not scared anymore. I walk through the door into the now familiar Home Depot, but see immediately that the floor is transparent. I can see the whole interior of the Enterprise Sales cube below. Actually, I can't even see the floor, but it must be there as I am obviously standing on something. I reach down to touch it, and my hand goes straight through. How is this possible? At this point, I decide to stop asking myself How, and just roll with it. As a test, I walk over to the paint department and grab a gallon of Deep Blue, which is my favorite color. I walk across the clear floor to over top of the Leads room I saw before. Now what? Maybe that is not how it works. I put the can down to think, and a second later it starts to wiggle and then poof, it disappears through the clear floor, and I can see the entire Leads room is now painted Deep Blue. Okay, that is pretty damn cool. I think I am figuring out how this works now, using everything at my disposal in the Home Depot, I can remodel whatever I want in the Enterprise Sales App Manson to fit my tastes. This is going to be fun. I decide to head back out to the truck and see what else is there. I go back out the door on the platform and instead of taking the ladder I decide to just jump the 12'. But as soon as my feet leave the platform, the slab actually shoots upward... I only traveled like an inch. I look forward, expecting to see myself 12' above the street, but I am at street level, and I have that odd feeling in my stomach again. Back at the trailer, I go ahead and climb up on the bed and start perusing the items. I now know that some of these, once installed will become 12' cubes, even though none of them are more than 4' here. At the front of the bed I see some crates, so I meander though the cubes to reach them. The first crate has "Flows" printed on the side of it. The lid is hinged, but not nailed shut, so I lift the top open. Inside are what appear to be small hand weights, so I reach down to pick one up. As soon as my hand encircles the grip, some metallic claws shoot out from either end of it. It's a good thing I did not have my face down there, I could have lost an eye. The claws seemed to be reaching for something that was not there, just snapping wildly. I loosened my grip and let it fall back on top of the others. I am not sure what the hell I do with those. Next to the Flows crate is a plastic 55 gallon drum with a sticker on top of it that reads, "Steve's Data". They had my name! I'm actually a little annoyed, but I decide to check it out. After loosening the cinch holding down the lid, I grabbed the lid on each side and quickly lifted it straight up. I was half expecting one of these spring snakes to pop out like one of those toys with the fake soup can. But, it was nothing dramatic, in fact it seemed to just be a barrel of water. l started to move on, but heard small noises coming from it. I gripped the two sides of the rim, bent a little and peered down into the water.. listening. I could faintly hear what sounded like thousands of conversations, all going on at once. Yes, there was definitely something in there. I put my hand on the top of the water and swished it back and forth. As I did, a face shot up to within an inch of the top of the water, and scared the shit out of me. But I kept looking and noticed there were a bunch of faces rising into view and then slowly fading as they descended back down. I am scared again, this seems really creepy. I take two steps back away from the drum, backing into something else that is just below the height of my butt, so I sit on it... thinking. The drum is sitting on a small raised platform with a button on it. Bending over I can read that is says "Migrate". I am not touching that... at least not from this position. I jump off the truck bed and scan the dirt yard and see a stick. I grab it, and inch my way down the left side of the trailer bed, peering around the corner at the barrel. I carefully reach in with the stick and push the Migrate button, and duck. I am leaning against the trailer, just out of view of the barrel, and I can feel a vibration in my shoulder where it meets the trailer. Suddenly, whoosh, I look up and see water flying straight up, then arching over towards my house. As it starts to descend, it's spray widens like a garden hose nozzle, and it seems like way more than 55 gallons. It comes down all over the slab, on both sides of the wall, but does not make a splash or any puddles. It just disappears into the slab, on both sides of the wall. It all happened in literally 10 seconds. I'm panting, but decide to get a grip, and go see what happened. Walking back up to the slab, on the left side of the house, I stop short of stepping onto it, I immediately notice that it looks different. It appears transparent... not as transparent as the slab on the other side of the wall, but I had not noticed it before. It's like one of these geometric pictures that if you stare at long enough, and trick your eyes into a different focus you suddenly see a ship or something. Staring at the slab, I started to pick out those faces again, just under the surface. But they weren't swimming around like they were in the barrel, they were now fixed into neat rows. But there was odd movement. I stuck my head out over the slab to look straight down at one, and saw it appear to shoot way somewhere, but it was still there. Most were not moving at all, but some appeared to be talking... to whom, I have no idea. Taking a closer look at the next one I realized that I knew this person, which caused me to take a step back. Then I tripped on something and fell flat on my face in the dirt. Ouch, I think I landed on a stick. I turned my head towards the slab and was looking the edge of it. Still transparent, something looked different from this angle. The faces looked like they were made up of a bunch of layers... thin slices stacked on top of each other with a tiny space in between them. I lifted my head a little higher to get an oblique angle, and could see that the bottom face layer seemed fixed, but the face layers above it were all talking and shooting off in different directions, and also coming in to the layer stack from other places I could not see. The entire slab seemed like it was alive! But the faces did not seem to notice me. I stood up and dusted myself off and thought "this is the weirdest house I've ever seen". I stepped onto the slab. It took me a bit to get my balance walking on a slab with all these faces shooting around under my feet. Even though the slab was not moving, it felt like it was. But once my brain locked into that, I was able to walk around. I noticed that a lot of these talking faces where heading in a similar direction. I followed the path over and found myself watching a bunch of them coming in and out of the pipe to the Productivity Applications neighborhood. It was like watching ants, with as many going into the pipe as were coming out of it. All shooting in different directions when they arrived. This slab was more than just alive, it seemed to be umbilically connected to the other neighborhood. I stood there for about 5 minutes, mesmerized by all the talking faces, shooting around under the floor, and I decided to explore. I walked over to the big pipe in the wall that said Power BI and stuck my head through again. Looking down, I could see on the now completely transparent floor all of the faces, but no movement. I thought, that's odd, over here they're zinging around, and over there they are all static. Oh well, I guess it will make sense later, and as I withdrew my head and turned around I was facing the Enterprise Sales Cube again. I hesitated, and then thought, what the hell, and opened the door. The beautiful mansion, that was so quiet before, was now a buzz of conversations, it sounded like there was a cocktail party going on down the hall... in my house. I started to make my way back to that wide hallway. Looking up, I could see that the ceiling was now clear and I was walking under the Home Depot store. I was in the main foyer of the mansion, but I was also under the paint department above. Just for kicks, I put a chair on top of the grand piano and climbed up on the piano, and then the chair. I reached up and could put my hand right through the clear ceiling. But I could not quite reach the first shelf in the Home Depot above. I climbed back down and noticed a ladder in the corner of the room. I know this was not here before... maybe it showed up when put the PowerApps cube on top. I pulled it over next to the grand piano and climbed up. Now I could easily reach the first shelf and grabbed a can of paint and pulled it down. It got stuck coming through the clear floor and I had to tug on it, then suddenly, it broke free and disappeared. Ugh. I started to loose my balance on the ladder so I looked to grab the top and steady myself and I noticed that the entire foyer was now painted in a shit brown color. So it worked, but clearly I need to pay closer attention, or I could make this mansion into a mess. I hopped off the ladder and continued my walk towards the wide hallway. As I got closer to the hallway, the voices were getting louder. As I reached the end of the hallway, I stopped as I could now clearly make out many of the conversations. Somebody was talking about their sales process, blah, blah. Someone else, farther down the hall, was complaining about something, and from the first opening, the one I peered into before that said Leads, I could hear lots of conversations going on. I crept along the wall so as not to be noticed, and peeked around the edge of the opening. There was a cacophony of conversations going on, I could not actually understand any of them since everybody seemed to be talking about different things all at once. Looking into the room, I saw hundreds of floating, two-dimensional faces.. all talking. I wondered for a minute what the purpose of the nice chairs was, since these faces were all floating about 5 or so feet above the floor. I tried to focus on one of the conversations, I was able to pick out a familiar voice, and concentrated on it. Some guy was asking about licensing costs, and I realized, this is a conversation that I had a week ago with Riley Thomas, and that was Riley Thomas talking, as I turned my eyes to where it seemed to be coming from, there was Riley's face floating in the air. I shifted my focus to others, in turn, and realized, these were all conversations that I had had! Some from years ago, and others from as recently as yesterday! As I was digesting this I noticed one of the faces starting to head towards me, then it accelerated so fast I could not even duck. The floating face hit my face and exploded in to a cloud of smoke that kept going, I didn't feel anything, but I swung around to see where it was going and saw it re-assemble itself into a face and shoot into another room. The plaque over that room said "Contacts". I stepped across the hall and peeked into the Contacts room to see where the face had gone. This room was also full of floating, jabbering faces, but I knew them all. The room was full of faces that I was currently working with in my job. Looking back down the hallway, I saw the other openings and heard more conversations going on, but decided I need to take a break and absorb this, so I headed back out of the Mansion, er, cube. I stepped off the slab on the left side, and looked over at the slab on the right side of the wall. The faces were all still there, but still were not moving. I walked back to the trailer. Scanning the items on the truck bed, my gaze landed back on the Power BI thing again. I thought, "I wonder if it would actually do anything now?". I pushed the Install button, and like before it vanished. At least this time I knew where it went. I walked back to the slab, and sure enough around the corner up on the wall like a crab, there it was. Like before, all of the wires on the other side of the wall had slithered out and gone into all of the pipes, but unlike the last time, now on this side of the wall, the wires that were previously just dangling, had leapt out and connected to the Enterprise Sales App Cube. I also noticed a bunch of them had shot down the Productivity Applications Neighborhood pipe. Looking down at the floor, it seemed to be about the same amount of busy movement. I could not put my head through the Power BI pipe anymore since the now fully lit up Power BI thing was crabbed over it, so I walked around the end of the wall to the other side. The previously static faces were now all moving, but in completely different patterns than on the left side of the wall. Something different was happening, but I could not tell what it was exactly. On the left side everything looked the same, but clearly something was different, I was just not seeing it. I decided to take another peek inside the Enterprise Sales App Mansion. The walls of the foyer, that I had previously painted shit brown, now looked like the Sports Book at a casino, lined with monitors all the way around. But instead of showing some horse race, they were all displaying charts and graphs. I walked up to one that a small sign under it that read, "Lead Generation Rate", it was showing a bar graph by month of new leads. I assumed this was linked to that Leads room down the hall. Every kind of "metric" you could think of was displayed on all of these monitors in the foyer, and they were all constantly changing, in real-time. I was starting to get dizzy, and decided to get some air. As I was walking back out towards the truck on the street, I saw the driver walking back. I assumed he must have forgotten something in his truck, like his phone or something. He walked right up to me and said, "Are you done?" I said, "Hell no, you only left an hour ago!". He said, "Nope, it was two days ago like I said". I said  "That's impossible", and he said, "It happens a lot, people start messing with this stuff and time flies by". I knew it was only an hour, but he seemed convinced, and he was wearing different clothes. I said, "Well, if you have to go, can I just install everything, and then figure it all out later?" He smiled and said, "Let me show you something", and he walked over to the trailer motioning for me to follow. "Do you see that?" he said, pointing to the corner of another thing with a label called "Field Service" on it, I said "Yeah, Field Service, whatever that is". He said " No, I mean there in the top corner". I looked and saw a price tag that said "$95/user/month", I looked at the other things and now noticed that they all had price tags. Shit! He said "Are you sure you want to install all of it?" I said, "No... damn... I need time to figure this out". He said, "I got you covered" and disappeared around the front of the truck. A moment later I heard the truck engine start and thought, this asshole is leaving. The rig started backing up, and continued for about 100', then stopped. A second later it started to move forward again and I thought he must be feeling sorry for me, but instead the truck started to veer towards me. I moved out of the way, and he drove right across my future lawn and stopped. I heard the door open, and then some hissing sounds. I saw the front of the trailer lift up a bit and stop. Then the truck started to move forward again, but no longer connected to the trailer. He went down the street and turned around, and stopped on his way back by. He leaned out of the cab and said "I'll just leave this here for you, for as long as you want, just don't forget those price tags", then he waved and drove off. I sat on the slab, aware that my butt was covering at least one person's face, and looked at the trailer sitting in my front yard. After a few minutes, I thought, what the hell, and walked back over to it. I saw another crate labeled "Insights", next to the "Flows" crate. I climbed up to take a look at what was in this one. I lifted the lid, and saw what looked just like the flows... little barbells. I reached in and grabbed one, and of course the claws came out of each end. I turned my wrist over and saw printed on the side, "Sales Insights". Looking down in the crate, it seemed like an awful lot of "Insights" were in there. I felt something, and opening my palm slightly I noticed there was an Install button on the grip. I pushed it. The barbell flew out of my hand and started heading towards the house. It flew right into one of the smaller pipes in the wall, and I saw a claw extend from the end of it to the Enterprise Sales App cube, and connect to something I had not noticed before. The claw on the other end shot down some hole in the slab on the right side. So now, I guess I have to check this out. I went ahead and grabbed a handful of Flows and put them in my pocket. Then I headed back toward the slab, into the Mansion, and again made my way down to the Leads room and looked in. The faces were all there like before, but there was something new. In addition to the two-dimensional face, there was now a three dimensional box floating above each of the faces. I ventured in to take a closer look. It did not seem that any of these faces were aware of my physical presence, which was reassuring. In fact, I walked right up to a face I recognized, that was blathering away... a conversation I had last month. I looked up at the box, above the floating head and saw there were words on each side of it. I stepped back slightly so I could read it, it said "Chances of Qualification: 33%". I leaned to the left, and read on the side of the box, "You have not made contact with this Lead in 2 months". There were more words on the other sides of the box, but I think I got what was going on here. I decided instead to figure out what these "Flows" did. I headed back out of the cube and onto the slab and walked to the edge, looking at the duplex next store that was already built. Man it was nice. Lots of great additions, a perfect yard, and listening closely I could hear that it was quietly "humming". As I was about to turn, the neighbor's front door opened, and a guy came walking out with a cat on a leash. He spotted me and waved, and then tripped on a bush and landed flat on his face. I thought, what a dumbass, who walks a cat on a leash? It occurred to me, that if that dumbass could build such an awesome house, I will certainly be able to figure all this out. I smiled and waved back as he was standing back up, his cat was looking at him, probably also thinking he was a dumbass. I saw his garage door opening. He stepped into it, and there was some chatter I could not make out, and then a pickup truck slowly pulled out of it, my neighbor was waving goodbye to the driver. I saw the sign on the door of the truck said, "PartnerCo Construction", and I realized then how that dumbass was able to build such an awesome house. I really hope I won't need help too. I pulled one of the Flows out of my pocket, and gripped it so the claws would come out. As I was looking at it, I felt a tug downward, that got stronger. So strong in fact that my arm was being pulled down. A claw shot out and clamped onto the Dropbox connector, I had forgotten that they lined the edge of the slab. It sat there, motionless now, in my palm. I checked, and like the Insights, there was an Install button so I pushed it. The other claw shot out the other end and started flailing wildly. I thought it was heading towards the Enterprise Sales App cube, but then it veered off and started towards the Productivity Applications Neighborhood pipe, but skipped right past that and started hovering over all of the other connector pipes in turn, for about a second apiece. It did not grab onto anything, it just repeated this cycle. I started to walk and noticed the cable from the grip to the claw on the DropBox connector let out slack as I walked, the other end continuing to flail about, but as I walked, I noticed it started to check fewer points, seemingly understanding where I was heading. When I got to within about 3' of the Enterprise Sales App cube, the claw flew past my head and latched onto it, and I felt a pulsing in my palm which startled me and caused me to let go of it. The handle just hovered in the air, suspended by the claws and the cables tightened from each end of it. It was as tight as a guitar string. I guess I need to head back into the Mansion to see what this thing did. Looking back into the Leads room, I saw the now-familiar floating faces, with the floating boxes over them, and something new. A filing cabinet was now floating over each box, on the side it said "DropBox Files". Simple enough, I guess I know what these flows do now. I'm exhausted. It still feels like it's only been a few hours, but in this world, if that trucker was correct, it could have been a week. I head back out to the trailer. I think to myself, man there are a lot of things on this trailer, as I scan my eyes across the deck. I walk up and notice a little gold plaque on one of these things, engraved in fancy script was, "Packed with Pride by J. Phillips"... that's a nice touch. I lay down on a small hill of dirt under the trailer, in the shade, and look back at my house. My brain is racing. The trailer bed above my head is still so full of things, I have not even scratched the surface yet. My eyelids clamp shut... I'm so tired.. I try, but I can't even open them, I give up. I am thinking about all of the things I can do with this hou.... zzzzzzzzzzz.    

Dynamics 365 - The Battle for Simple

Mobile phone apps ruined everything. As a result of minimal processing power and small screen size, mobile app developers had little choice but to keep things basic. Given that mobile devices are used by everyone on the planet, including a lot of people who are not particularly smart, mobile apps also had to be "simple". Now everybody thinks that everything should be as simple to use as a mobile phone app. Simple = Simple? What may seem simple to a hard-core coder, does not seem simple to me. What may seem simple to me, may not seem simple to you. What may seem simple to you, may not seem simple to your Mom. So "Simple" does not equal "Simple".  The dictionary defines simple as "easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty", but again... for who? I think of it as the "Simple Continuum", with the coder on one end, and your Mom on the other. The rest of us fall somewhere on this continuum. Simple vs. Powerful Simple and Powerful are in an ongoing tug-of-war in every part of our lives, but since I write about Business Applications, I'll narrow the conversation here. In looking across the business applications landscape, most providers have chosen a path. They are either Simple, or Powerful. Those that claim to be both, are usually neither. Microsoft has clearly chosen the "Powerful" path for Business Applications, which makes sense for their Enterprise customer focus, and their competitive targets. But they do make some "Simple" claims here and there. Microsoft's Simple One area where Microsoft is staking a "Simple" claim is with Canvas Based PowerApps. Many of us have seen Microsoft's Ryan Cunningham dazzle us with his ability to build a complete Canvas App in minutes on stage. It's actually either real, or an illusion of simplicity, depending on where you fall on the "Simple Continuum". What I have found interesting about Canvas apps is, that it appears that having too much knowledge is actually a handicap. The hard-core coder will take three times as long, to build an app that is not even as good, as what a novice can do. My guess is that they over-think it. What is Powerful? Powerful is another loaded term, that means different things to different people. Clearly, there is no question that the Dynamics 365 First-Party apps like Enterprise Sales, Customer Service, PSA etc. are Powerful applications. These applications have the power to solve extremely complex business scenarios, for even the largest customers in the world. But what about companies, of any size, whose needs are not particularly complex? For them, Powerful might be defined differently, they might consider the ability to create a Project in a few minutes to be quite "Powerful". In fact, the number one reason companies with less complicated needs often suffer with Business Applications is that they are offered "too much" Power. More power than they need, more power than they can understand, more power than they can adopt. This is particularly acute with companies that are new to Business Applications. It is also not specific to Microsoft, many customers of Salesforce.com, and any Enterprise Business Applications vendor, struggle with this same issue. Our Choice? In designing our RapidStart CRM application, we wanted to walk the line of Simple, yet Powerful. This was no easy task, and it required us to first define our ideal customer. In our case, it was a customer who did not have complex needs, and defined Powerful differently. It could also be a customer who had the potential for complexity, but wanted to start simple, and work their way into it. So our Power would come from our Simplicity. Fortunately, the only other Business Applications out there that one might consider simple, are dead-end products that would require migration once outgrown, whereas RapidStart CRM can simply be upgraded to the Dynamics 365 First-party apps at any time. But let's circle back to this idea of "Simple", and how you get there. Less is More or Less Fortunately for us, RapidStart has a strong brand, both inside and outside of Microsoft. When we undertook to re-imagine RapidStart on the Power Platform as RapidStart CRM, we had a significant head-start. We also had the benefit of hundreds of past deployments of our original model, to really understand what our ideal customer was looking for. The biggest issues were, adding more features, and making it even simpler to use. Again, this presented a conundrum, adding features increases complexity, which is the natural enemy of simplicity. We opted to further simplify our sales capabilities, while adding Case Management and Project Management to our new application. To insure we were meeting our goal of "Simple", we enlisted the help of... Pat. What About Pat? Pat, is a fictional persona that we created. Pat is an intelligent person, who knows their business, but is not particularly tech savvy. Pat might be the owner of a small business, or a division manager of a large business. Pat just wants the team to be successful, whether the team is sales, service or project management, or a combination of all of them. Pat is looking for something simple, but with the kind of power Pat needs. Pat has neither the time, budget nor patience for anything "Complex". Over time, internally we got a pretty good idea of who Pat is, and we actually became friends. We never did figure out if Pat was a male or a female. Whenever anyone on our team came up with a new idea, we would ask: "Could Pat do it?". It is amazing how many things Pat either can or can't, or will or won't, do. In a way, you could say that Pat built RapidStart CRM, but I'm still taking full credit for it. Beyond the Application Building a Simple to use, but Powerful application for our Ideal customer was  huge amount of effort, but it was only one part of the effort. For aspiring ISVs, there are a few more things that you will need to do to succeed, some of these are complex, but the customer-facing parts still need to be simple. For example, you need to build a commerce engine for people to buy your application. On the backend. connecting to payment processors, auto-provisioning, subscription management, etc, are all complex things, but on the front end, it needs to be simple enough for Pat to buy your damn product. While Marketing campaigns can be costly and complex to design and run, they may ultimately drive traffic to a website that has to be clear and simple enough for Pat to understand. Without knowing in advance exactly where Pat will fall on the Simple Continuum, you will need to be able to provide varying levels of support and training. For all of these, and many other things I did not get into, I suggest you create your own Pat... then just run everything by him, er, or her.  

Dynamics 365 - CDS Changes Everything You Know

Dynamics 365 Customers and Partners have had a few changes pushed to them in recent years. Dynamics 365 was evolving at a pretty rapid pace since it hit the cloud, and when James Phillips took over the team, he took both of his feet and smashed the gas pedal. It's like the USS Enterprise when it hits Warp Drive (I get a chill every time I see that). Trees in the Forest I have been seeing a lot of posts about the October Release Notes and the #freighttrain of new features coming. Everybody seems to be writing about their favorite new feature(s). Don't get me wrong, new features are always fun, but if you move out of the trees, and look at the whole forest, there is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. Seismic Shift I get that "Seismic Shift" is probably an overused term... but I think it is a very real thing that is happening in Microsoft Business Applications... right now! If you have followed this blog in the past, you know that when I get highly animated about something, you probably want to pay attention to it. I said in the title that CDS changes everything you know. But at the same time you have been hearing that, if you know XrM, you already know CDS, and that is completely true. But that is looking at CDS through a specific narrow lens, a legacy Dynamics lens. But if you circle around to the other side of CDS, you can clearly see that Dynamics 365 is really just one door to CDS, of many doors. A PowerApps Stamp I was talking to Charles Lamanna recently, the GM for the CDS Platform; I suggested that he had a PowerApps rubber stamp, and that he was stamping "PowerApps" onto everything in sight. He smiled... like a guy with a rubber stamp in his pocket. PowerApps is one leg, of a three-legged stool, known as the "Power Platform", the other legs being Power BI and Flow. Dynamics 365 is not mentioned as a component of the Power Platform. I think in the very near future, the term "Dynamics 365" will actually refer to the First-Party Apps, and those apps will be sharing the spotlight with applications built by others on the Power Platform. The Power Platform I know I have mentioned it before, but it was not that long ago that I was told unequivocally, that Microsoft will never release a platform-only license. In order to get CDS, you will need to license one of their first-party apps. In hindsight, I think I recall hearing this from a GM for one of the first-party app teams. Whether he was unaware, or the decision to release a platform-only license, was made afterwards, I don't know. But somebody decided to take a risk and release a platform-only license. What risk? The risk that smart folks might actually build better "apps" than Microsoft, on Microsoft's own platform. Risky Business A quote from this 1983 movie was "Sometimes you just gotta say, "WTF". "WTF" gives you freedom". Somebody at Microsoft said "WTF", let them have the platform. At the end of the day, cloud is about scale, whoever has the most recurring revenue wins. If all of Wall Street could only place their bets on one number, it would be growth of recurring revenue. Wall Street does not give a shit about how you get there. Up until now, in the Microsoft Business Applications space, their recurring revenue growth doorway, was tied exclusively to their sale of their first-party applications. Well, they just broke down the doorway... hell the whole wall has come down. Let's do some Math Let's say you are a mid-sized Real Estate firm looking for a business solution to improve your sales process for your 500 agents. In your web search you discover this link to Dynamics 365, and click to explore it. Obviously, not wanting to waste your time, you will go to the pricing page first, and see the Customer Engagement Plan at $115/Per user/month. Hmm, that's about $57,500/month (we, as partners, know that is a worst case cost scenario, but the visitor does not). For almost $60K a month, this application must be awesome! So the customer initiates a trial. In their poking around, they are duly impressed with all of the cool features and capabilities, but... where is the Real Estate angle? "RING" There goes the phone, who could that be? "Hello Mr Real Estate CEO, I'm your friendly Dynamics 365 Partner and I see you are interested in Dynamics 365". "Well yes, but where are the features for Real Estate?". "What do you need? We can build anything for you, Dynamics 365 is fully extensible". "Well, I would need blah, blah and some blah to make this work". "No problem, we can build that for you for $100K". "Thanks, I'll get back to you". Back to the web search results, there's another link for the "Acme Real Estate Application". Taking a closer look, Acme is only $75/Per user/month. Hmmm, that's about $37,500/month... let's take a look at this. Wow! This application has been built for exactly what I need... it already has blah, blah and even blah! It says it is built on the Microsoft "Power Platform", whatever that is... I'm Sold! Looking at the difference in cost, you might think that Microsoft just lost $37,500/month ($115 Plan License, vs, $40 P2 license) to an ISV, but in reality, without that ISV solution, that customer was going to another platform. Net gain to Microsoft... $20K monthly recurring revenue. Microsoft has a half-dozen first-party apps that run on the CDS platform. Imagine 500 vertical ISV solutions running on the same platform. Microsoft will take that to the bank all day long. Transition of Power Up until now, Microsoft Business Applications success was largely tied to their Partner ecosystem of System Integrators. These are the partners that sell the first-party applications, and then configure and customize them for their customers. ISVs have been around for a long time, but mostly in the role of "Addons" offered by SIs. That wall that Microsoft knocked down, is about to change that. Already there are some ISVs, like us with our RapidStart CRM solution, that are trickling over the transom. That trickle will become a flood, and ISVs will become Microsoft's most valuable partners, in the very near future. According to Mr. Spock, “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”.  

Dynamics 365 - The Transition to Unified Interface

There is no need to panic...yet. Procrastinators can freely ignore this post, for now. But if you are one of those people who hates scrambling at the last minute, then maybe this will interest you. Waves Microsoft likes to call the significant updates for Dynamics 365 "Waves". They have also announced that there will be two major Waves each year, with minor "ripples" ongoing. The thing about "waves", as you may recall from your last beach trip, is that you cannot stop them. Nor can you slow them, or divert them. If you are in the Dynamics 365 ocean, you cannot avoid them either. Make no mistake, the shit is going to hit your fan. There is also a strong will to get to a single version of Dynamics 365 in the market as soon as possible. This is a good thing for everyone, but "control" will be ceded to Microsoft. The concept of "Optional" is being deprecated. Of course you always have the option to go somewhere else, but Microsoft is actually one of the last players to get here, so you won't find any more "control" elsewhere either. The best way to not get knocked down by a huge wave... is to ride it. Waves Stack Up Big waves that hit the beach did not pop up 50 feet offshore, they actually started miles away. While you are riding the current wave in, the next big wave is already in motion, and they each build on the previous wave. Some small thing in one wave, becomes more significant in the next wave, and critical in the next wave. Good surfers pay attention to the small things in every wave...because they know. A Small Thing It seems like several waves ago that a small thing called "App Designer" quietly made its way onshore. The idea of creating an "App" out of Dynamics 365, and actually "limiting" its power, seemed contrary to how practitioners and users have worked with the product. It also seemed contradictory to the messaging from Microsoft about #freightrains of innovation. Why on earth would we want to "hide" any of it? For us, it was a Godsend, we built a business out of "hiding" stuff, with our previous version of RapidStart CRM, but many were left scratching their heads. Photocells If you have ever looked down at a big city from somewhere high around dusk, you can see a few lights start to come on early, as it grows darker you see more, and once it is completely dark, you can see quite a few... but not all. Many of us involved with Dynamics 365 have our own Photocells; for some of us the light comes on early, for others a little later, and sadly, for too many, the light does not come on at all. Not long ago, you were free to sit in the dark and no one would bother you. But now, you will get hit by a huge wave... in the dark... and probably drown. So while many of us are enjoying a moonlit evening on the beach sipping Piña Coladas watching people drown, I thought I would ruin the entertainment, and toss a small life ring out. I can handle the boos from the crowd. A Life Ring That App Designer thing I mentioned, has had a few more waves roll onto it to augment and clarify its true purpose. What we may have first thought was just a tool for creating granular, role-specific "versions" of Dynamics 365 for subsets of users, has morphed into one of the most critical concepts for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. It is also something you will not be able to ignore. A Simple Tick For those of you with your lights on, who have been using App Designer for some time now to create these role-specific apps, you may have noticed an option on the App Properties Tab. For "Client", you have the choice of "Web" or "Unified Interface". This snuck in on one of those waves. From now on, we will call it the "Future Button". If you have already built apps with the App Designer, ticking this option will transport you to the future of Dynamics 365. But, don't tick it yet. First let's take a peek at this future. Unification of an Interface If you have been listening, Microsoft has been ramping up the conversation about what they are calling the "Unified Interface", aka "Unified Client Interface", "UCI", "New UI" and "The other thing that is not the Web UI". While it may feel like this came out of nowhere, it has been steadily building with each wave. The Unified Interface is the UI of the future, and we have actually had it for a while now, behind the curtain. Back in this November post I wrote "For many of you who have seen, or started to deploy, Dynamics 365 V9. You may have noticed that the UI looks a little different. This would be the "Web UI". This is not the New UI, this is a bridge UI. Currently the New UI, is in the background, with this interim UI taking front stage. In the next release, these positions will change and the New UI will be front and center, with the interim UI in the background. By V10, the interim UI will be gone." Well the time has come for one of those predictions, as of now, new Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement deployments will utilize the Unified Interface by default. You can still opt for the now ancient WebUI, but why would you? Okay, there are a few reasons. Cart meet Horse Sooooo, the Unified Interface is not quite feature complete. There are some parts missing from the box. Are they critical? That depends on where you are coming from. If you have been using Dynamics 365 for a while, and already transitioned to V9 and got the new, now old, WebUI, you may have some challenges moving to the Unified Interface today, because of those missing parts. So if it is missing parts, why is it now the default UI for new customers? Because they won't know what they're missing. The good news is that there is another wave, already on the way here, it hits in October, and brings onshore most of the missing parts. Where's that damn Life Ring? So you build things for the Unified Interface, primarily in the App Designer. While still an option, Unified Interface soon will not be. How soon? I would guess, as soon as most customers have moved to the Unified Interface. When will that be? An excellent question, for which there is no answer yet. But you can be sure that the pressure will be ramping up. You might want to get ahead of it. If you are looking for more technical information to make this move, I highly recommend my fellow MVP Jukka's blog, he has way more patience writing the technical stuff than I do. I regularly punt the hard questions to Jukka... keeps my hands clean.

Dynamics 365 - Making Work for Partners

I was chatting with another Dynamics 365 partner the other day. He was talking about his existing customers, and how once deployed, configured and tweaked etc., he did not do much follow-on work with them. He was however, spending tremendous effort trying to get new customers.  I thought, "I think you are missing something here". Opportunities It is pretty easy, when focusing on new customer deployments, to forget about those past customers, who already deployed and are using business solutions. But, due to the pace of advancement, there is probably almost as much opportunity for partners with their existing customer base, as there is with net new customers. I understand that Microsoft is always driving net new seats, and you need that to stay relevant with Microsoft... but that is far from your only avenue for revenue. Granted, it is also not in your best interest to go convince a customer to spend money of dubious value just because you want/need it either. But there are quite a few opportunities for win-win here. Let's unpack this. If it ain't Broke, don't fix it There are still a large number of legacy customers utilizing on-premise deployments. For many, their interest level in a migration to the cloud has not been very high. Initially it was all about security FUD, then it was about not seeing enough value to justify the cost of migration. Today, both of those arguments are complete bullshit. While you can make a nice piece of change migrating your on-premise customers to the cloud, their ROI on that investment will probably be among the highest you can offer them. On the Cloud, Now what? Presumably, most of your customers have already made the migration to, or they started out on, the cloud version of Customer Engagement. But they could have actually done that about 6-7 years ago by now. Sure, they would have had to upgrade several times since then, but that does not mean they are taking advantage of everything there is to offer. In fact, it is less likely that your existing customers are up-to-speed, than your brand new ones. Your existing customers, who signed up a long time ago, stopped paying attention to what is happening, and are instead focused on their own business/industry. Remember, while Dynamics 365 may be incredibly important us, it is not nearly as important to our customers. It is really your responsibility as their partner to make them aware of opportunities to further enhance their businesses with Dynamics 365. You do this by making them aware of both whole new capabilities, or more efficient new options for accomplishing things they are already doing. In addition, you need to be communicating features that they are using, that are being deprecated. Feature a Day I would not be surprised, if un-bundled, there was not a new Dynamics 365 feature being released for each day of the year. Fortunately, or maybe not, we get them in waves. The first thing we all do is to try and absorb them, so we can explain their value to our new customers. At the same time, we should be identifying those features that an existing, but maybe quiet, customer could get value out of. For half of the methods you used two years ago in a customer's deployment, there is a better way to accomplish that today. Is it worth the cost to change? That is what needs to be determined, for each customer, based on how they are using the product. No Budget I hear you, customers do not have any budgets for "enhancements". I call bullshit again. If you can demonstrate to a customer some "enhancement" that will increase their efficiency or effectiveness to a degree that their gain is more than their cost... they'll find the budget for that. Across your older deployments, if you can't find 10 things that would meet that threshold... have your customer call me, because you don't deserve to be their partner. Greener Grass Okay, I know I said that Microsoft cares about Net New Seats, and of course that's true. But there is another metric that this directly effects, that they care equally about... churn. Churn is customers who cancel. While net new seats are important, it's pointless if you lose one for each one you gain. I can't count the number of Salesforce.com customers who moved over to Dynamics 365 because of some cool features that we have... that in fact... Salesforce also has. But the customer was unaware. Needless to say, I didn't mention it. Today, between everything that Microsoft brings to Business Solutions, from within the product, to across other connected Microsoft products, I can't think of a single feature or capability, that Salesforce has, that we don't have an even better answer for. Do your current customers know that? Some Examples Unified Interface, App Designer, PowerApps and Flow... four new things, that within each hold tons of opportunities to exceed the threshold I mentioned above. There are many, many more, but these are no-brainers. I think the number one reason these are not presented more often to existing customers, is that not enough partners are even up-to-speed on them. If you are in this business, you need to be up-to-speed, as hard as that is to do. Otherwise, again, you don't deserve to be your customers' partner. These are some good example of things to enhance and extend, and add value to your customer deployments. But how about whole new things? New First-Party Apps When you did that customer deployment a few years ago, were they thinking about Marketing? At the time, in the first-party arena, you had little to discuss, but today with Dynamics 365 for Marketing, there is a whole conversation to be had. What about Field Service... what about Project Service... My guess is that a significant number of your older deployed customers are not only, not using these, but are probably not even aware of them. Whose job is that? Are you waiting for them to call and ask you? Third-Party Apps ISVs are not static. Every day there is a new ISV solution being launched to solve one of your customers' problems. In addition, existing ISVs are hard at work, advancing their offerings to be better, faster and more capable. Your customer has even less of chance of discovering these, than the first-party apps, that they probably don't know about either. Unless you are making them aware. My Suggestion If you are not already, take about 1/3 of your new client generation motion, and redirect it towards your existing customers. In my opinion, there is no possible excuse for any Dynamics 365 customer to ever leave Dynamics 365 for Salesforce.com, or leave their current partner either... except a complacent partner.