Dynamics Corner

Episode 325: In the Dynamics Corner Chair: Unlocking Additional Value with Power Automate

• Blazej Kotelko • Season 3 • Episode 325

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Brad and Kris speak with Blazej Kotelko, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Platform integration Product Manager, in this conversation. They discuss the use of connectors in Power Automate, the availability of APIs for integration, and the limitations of on-premises versus cloud environments. Blazej also provides insights and suggestions for getting started with the Power Platform connector. The conversation covered various topics related to the Power Platform and its integration with Business Central. The discussion highlighted the power and flexibility of the Power Platform in enhancing business processes and improving customer service.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner, the podcast where we dive deep into all things Microsoft Dynamics. Whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting your journey into the world of Dynamics 365, including Power Platform, I'm your co-host.

Speaker 2:

Chris, and this is Brad. This episode is recorded on June 20th 2024. Chris, chris, chris, another mind-blowing episode, and we haven't had a chance to talk about this yet. But did you know, my latest obsession is the Rubik's Cube.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, could you figure it out by the time we finish the episode? I did, I did.

Speaker 2:

There's a sequence, right, right there is a sequence, there's a trick to it or a secret, it's some algorithms or whatever you may call it, and you can have a good workflow to go through to solve one of these yeah you can follow that workflow time and time again and let's solve.

Speaker 2:

speaking of workflows, with us today we had the opportunity to speak with the man himself, the product manager from microsoft, working with the business central. Speak with the man himself, the product manager for Microsoft, working with the Business Central, connector for the Power Platform. With us today we have the opportunity to speak with Vlasde Kutela. Good morning, how are you doing? Good afternoon, I should say Good afternoon. How are you doing?

Speaker 3:

I'm fine. How are you guys?

Speaker 2:

Doing well, very well, I see you're in the famous LEGO room.

Speaker 3:

Correct. I did a little bit of research before joining this and saw that a couple of weeks ago you actually had my manager, Janik, who was also in this room. So I thought I will use the same famous location. But I have something to show to you and the audience, because we have a couple of new sets that are ready to be assembled. So this is actually a retro radio which has a sound unit in it, apparently.

Speaker 3:

We also have this, yes, correct, nasa Artemis launch system with the rocket and everything. And then this is very exciting it's Notre Dame. Wow, oh, the Notre Dame Lego set.

Speaker 2:

So you have three new Lego sets to put into the famous Lego.

Speaker 3:

We're getting those every now and then. These are waiting for maybe a little bit more autumn weather later. I don't know. Right now the weather in Denmark is amazing. People tend to spend time outside of the office whenever they can.

Speaker 2:

Oh yes, I know all about those seasons.

Speaker 3:

We also have football in Europe, europe. I don't know if you guys are aware, but the european championship for in football, which is soccer in the us right there yeah, that's a famous sport is currently on the way and we have have actually Denmark playing England today. So some of my colleagues are already getting ready to be excited, so you have to get some barbecue ready.

Speaker 1:

Oh yes, you have to have some beer in the fridge stuff like that.

Speaker 3:

You have some beer in the fridge stuff like that, but it's. It is today 6pm, so it starts in one hour right now in here. I will probably have a look at part of that game later on as well, but I'm not Danish originally, so I'm sometimes torn. We still can participate, hopefully we can.

Speaker 2:

I'm not Danish originally so I'm sometimes torn. We still can participate. Hopefully we have enough time so you can get to watch the game with your colleagues.

Speaker 3:

Oh, absolutely there's no problem with that, absolutely no problem.

Speaker 2:

And also, we need to put the LEGO room on the map as a tourist attraction to anybody who's visiting Lego room on the map is a tourist attraction to anybody who's visiting.

Speaker 3:

It is a tourist attraction and usually people are stopping by and we have members from our team showing various kind of offices here. We have a flight simulator room. We have an Xbox room this one, of course and a few other kind of hidden gems.

Speaker 2:

Flight simulator room. I would appreciate that.

Speaker 3:

That was a couple of years ago when we had several of our colleagues somehow magically convince someone in the site leadership here that some leftover budget could be spent on buying the actual flight simulator equipment. So we have the aux sticks and all that stuff. Is it the actual?

Speaker 2:

flight sim game, or which game is in there? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

I mean, it was actually before we had access to flight simulator Microsoft Flight Simulator so it is running something else. I don't know exactly, but we can research that for the next time.

Speaker 2:

Oh, excellent, excellent, no, I want to know. See, now we can turn into all the fun that's there. It's good to have those outlets within the office, and it does increase creativity, because you can take your mind off something sometime and it helps your brain think a little bit differently. But we definitely appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today. I've been looking forward to having a conversation with you, as I do with each of the members of the community that take the time to speak with us. Before we jump into it, though, do you think you could take a moment to tell everyone who's listening a little bit about yourself?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. My name is Boazic Oteuco. I work as a PM, which stands for Product Manager or Program Manager, at Microsoft, based out of Microsoft Denmark, which is actually formally not Microsoft Denmark but Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen. These are two different business entities located in the same building, and we are a development center for Dynamics products, and Dynamics Business Central, specifically, is headquartered here in this office. It's on the outskirts of Copenhagen in Denmark, and, yeah, we have most of the engineering team based here and then, of course, a few other remote locations here and there across Europe and the US.

Speaker 2:

As well, so you work as a product manager with Microsoft and the Dynamics product. Which product in particular do you work with?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm responsible for integration between Business Central and Power Platform.

Speaker 3:

That's my main responsibility.

Speaker 3:

But when I got hired into this office I was actually responsible for the mobile app first, then a little bit of different kind of elements of UI, web client UI and kind of different aspects of the user interface of our product, and that stays with me until now and going forward as well.

Speaker 3:

I will be looking at that as well. So kind of user-facing elements, but also integration with Power Platform and for that it is mostly right now Power Automate, power Apps, and recently we started doing a little bit more with Copilot Studio. Of course, as you know, we are looking at Copilot scenarios and Copilot being built inside Business Central, but also different scenarios that we can offer to the community using Copilot Studio. And as a program manager or product manager officially right now this discipline is called product management, previously program management. So as a product manager, I'm looking at what's going on around us. I'm looking at the markets, talking to partners, talking to the community, talking to customers, from time to time presenting the content, presenting news and, of course, working with engineers also to actually deliver the components or the elements of the product.

Speaker 2:

That's great. That is Power Automate. I know when they introduced Power Automate or even the early onset, the integration with Business Central to Power Automate, it totally opened up the use of the application from where instances where someone may have to develop a solution, now they could use Power Automate to complete that solution and work with the data in a bi-directional format. When working with Power Automate and designing what you would need for the integration between Business Central and Power Automate, what are some of the areas that you look at to determine which entities that you may set up or which information that you will allow to have access to from the outside in Power Automate?

Speaker 3:

outside. In Power Automate, yeah, we try to offer the technical capability or the capability to integrate with the product, and that is through both having the connector, that component that reaches to the data, but also integration in the UI. So the fact that you can have power automate flow show up in the business central UI on the side and that works independently of a specific entity and specific data. And, of course, the business central architecture is is defined in such a way that we have our, our platform, our, our kind of server layer, and then, on top of that, apis, and those APIs are responsible for communicating from the outside, so communicating with Business Central, giving access to data and allowing for the data to be written back to Business Central, and those APIs are provided by Microsoft. So we have a set of APIs out of the box, like the V2 APIs that we currently own. We have a couple of additional sets of APIs for various kinds of use cases, and then partners also are able to provide additional APIs APIs for our data sets or our data that is not included in the standard APIs, but also for data that is created by partners. So if you build an extension for Business Central with your own tables, with your own data, different, completely different entities, which actually happens quite often, because Business Central is this kind of programming platform for business applications, based, of course, on Business Central. But sometimes we have partners who build applications that have much more objects and tables and components included, provided by the partner, than what we originally provided with Business Central, and for that, of course, in the same way, those partners can open up with their own APIs and all of those APIs are accessible through Power Platform.

Speaker 3:

So Power Automate, power Apps and so forth. We have different kind of. You know we can go a little bit deeper if you're guys interested. Oh, I'd like to. I'm interested in it. We have different technologies for that.

Speaker 2:

No, I'm interested, I understand it all. I listen to you speak and it brings so much to my mind as far as questions and functionality and technology, and one of them you hit to my mind. As far as questions and functionality and technology, and one of them you hit. So you had mentioned, if there's standard APIs which may be the foundation of the connector right, or the connector is something that's within Power Automate that connects to Business Central and consumes those APIs, and if you create an extension, whether it's an ISV extension, internal extension for those that may do internal development, or a partner extension is there anything that needs to be done from the Par Automate point of view for those APIs to be accessible, or are they just already accessible? Is there a certain structure that they need to follow?

Speaker 3:

That's a good question. Any API, any extension that creates an API in a standard way and, of course, we have some documentation explaining best practices, how to create custom APIs for Business Central but any API that is created in a proper way will be available to Power Automate through this connector out of the box, no additional steps required. So the connector is actually a component in Power Platform, and Power Platform right now has something like 1,400 different connectors for various data sources external and I mean first-party Microsoft-owned product, but also various external systems and Business Central is one of them, and this is a component that allows systems to work with each other. It's like a proxy kind of a thing, right. It handles authentication and so on. It handles also access to different APIs, so it is able to read various API roads in a specific instance of Business Central and allows you, for instance, in Power Automate it gives you like a UI where you can kind of go through the API hierarchy and select the one that you want to work with and connect with and create an action in Power Automate to read data from a specific API.

Speaker 3:

I mean, you would think you're reading from a table, but you actually are going through APIs, right. So you actually are calling an API, but you don't need to understand the technicalities behind those APIs. It's just basically a structure of data In Power BI. It is even nice. The UI is even nicer because they have a very nice preview of the whole hierarchy of APIs and you can just cherry pick the ones that you are interested in and build your query. Power Automate has like a slightly different UI where you have a couple of levels of those. You know, selectors with different types of APIs, and then you get to a specific one and then Power Apps, on the other hand, has like a more like a flat list of different APIs that you select. But whatever you choose, you always have access to all those APIs that are provided by Microsoft and partners or from your own extension as well, of course.

Speaker 2:

That's nice, it's a quick. You know everyone likes to use the word or the term. Now you know, low code, no code. So I guess using the connector you know if we talk about that gives someone easier access to the Business Central data and they can handle all of the without understanding the technical architecture of an API and the connectable assist with authentication for the user as well as selecting the correct company. That's always been one of those challenges. You know, with Business Central you have a multi-company solution. How do I know which company I'm in? How do I know which environment I'm in? Because you may have a production or a sandbox and all of that is something that you can configure with in the Connect here.

Speaker 3:

Precisely, and environment and the company is part of that hierarchy, because environment would be on top right and then in each environment you have multiple companies, or you might have multiple companies and those companies could have slightly different APIs inside right. So you're going through that hierarchy and, as I said, like Power BI, power BI Desktop, this kind of report designer has like a very nice kind of experience where you have a tree view of everything that is available for you.

Speaker 2:

Maybe you can get that in Power BI. So is the connector that you use for Power BI the same connector that you use for Power Automate and Power Apps, or is it something different?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so specifically, power BI is a different connector, it's a different code, something different. Yeah, so specifically Power BI, it is a different connector, it's a different code. It's using the same concept and it's also calling our PIs, but Power BI as a product is slightly different than the rest of Power Platform for various historical reasons. So the technology the connector is written in is slightly different than we had to and we still have multiple versions of that connector. We actually have a connector for on-prem version of Business Central that we keep using or offering to our customers, but of course, the majority of our improvements, efforts and different new features are introduced to the cloud version of Business Central Connector.

Speaker 2:

So, as it sits today, the Power Platform Connector for Business Central can work both online and on-premise. Is there a difference between the two? Is it limited functionality between the two based upon the architecture, or are they the same?

Speaker 3:

The functionality is limited for Business Central connector on-prem and specifically Business Central connector for Business Central on-prem is not able to react on triggers that happen inside Business Central because you have to expose data. So there is a way to expose data and have kind of access to your data, but we cannot kind of offer the same level of interactivity between those two systems, one living inside your on-prem environment and, of course, the rest of Power Platform being in the cloud. And the same, for instance, for Power BI. We have in Power BI integration. We have the ability to embed a report or dashboard inside Business Central. So you have a report and dashboard that you create and that report lives in the Power BI service online and that's where you can kind of go to your Power BI dashboard or you can use your Power BI mobile app on a mobile device. You're accessing your dashboard and data that is in the cloud.

Speaker 3:

I mean Power BI as a system lives in the cloud. I mean Power BI as a system lives in the cloud. Then embedding that specific selected report or dashboard inside Business Central, which is also online, that works seamlessly because they share the same authentication. We're talking about the same Entra tenant, so there is a way to embed, and Business Central offers a very nice UI to kind of just, you know, select all of those reports and just pick one and interact with it. But for Power Business Central on-prem that's not possible, because then Business Central on-prem would have to reach out to cloud Power BI. I mean, I know that there are partners that have done something around it and it's technically possible. I mean, everything is possible in software, right it?

Speaker 1:

is.

Speaker 3:

But it's not the standard way and not the reasonable way, I would say. It's not the standard way and not the reasonable way, I would say. But of course we have a lot of customers who are still working on-prem and would like to stay on-prem, and for them we all, of course, offer some capabilities in Power Platform realm as well.

Speaker 2:

That's good to have both options for online and on-prem, with, again, some limitations based upon the architecture you mentioned with the cloud environment, authentication and data, versus where it sits. On-prem, which sometimes you know, you get a lot of the same functionality, but sometimes the challenges have to deal with authentication and where the data may reside and how much data you need to transfer. Answer when working with the connector and you know, my mind gets blown as far as how this world is now spreading out. Before it used to be a nice little world of business central or, you know, Microsoft Dynamics Nav. Now it's spread out now because of, you know, the ability to go into Power Platform and have these external connectors to integrate with. What are some of the? If someone were to start working with the Power Platform connector? I want to get into working with the Power Platform Connector. What are some insights that you may have or some suggestions you have to overcome some challenges, or what are some of the biggest challenges that you see when someone starts working with that?

Speaker 3:

I don't know if this would be the biggest challenge, but of course, there is some basic kind of stepping stone, some basics that you need to sort out as a customer in order to start, and that, of course, starts with a license or an account or the ability to actually use one of those. Luckily, business Central paid license gives our customers access to Power Automate, power Apps, power BI and so on at no additional cost for majority of use cases. So this is something that comes with our licensing terms or licensing guide, and it's described there as limited usage rights. That's the specific term the licensing guide uses to describe a situation where you would be integrating power automate flow, for instance, inside Business Central for the business scenarios to extend Business Central to add some additional functionality in Business Central. If you would like to build a power automate flow that doesn't touch Business Central data and just sends you an email every day with weather forecasts for your city, very nice scenario, but that has nothing to do with Business Central. For that specific flow you would have to have a separate Power Automate license. But if you have built a flow that sends you a weather forecast for your customer location before you go and visit that customer on a given day. That's a scenario that uses business central data. So you might think about this as within those limited usage rights.

Speaker 3:

Of course, it's just an example, but in order to get that, you have to either start Power Automate like a welcome wizard and select your region, click through a couple of questions. They ask the user, that starts, and then, of course, you have to approve also on the Business Central side. You have to approve also on the business central side. There is a privacy guide at the beginning of of the integration when you're starting and we're asking you to approve that um integration between those two systems, um and allow that to be offered to use either by you or all users in your organization. When you do that, there is actually a very easy way to get started inside Business Central because we offer multiple templates which you might think about. Like you know, predefined Power Automate flows, so we have a gallery of those.

Speaker 3:

When you start and you go to Automate Group on, let's say, a customer list, you will see there is a list of different templates provided by us and you can just take one of them and have a have a flow that is built based on the template and, of course, later on modify, edit, so you will have to learn a little bit. We're talking about no code, low code, no code capabilities of Power Platform, for instance. If you're talking about Power Automate, it is still some form of a macro engine executing steps one by one, being able to go through some loops or some conditions. But it's like a very lightweight computer program and of course some basic understanding of how that works is required if you want to modify and start editing that a little bit. But it's not a huge problem, I would say. So getting started is not that complicated.

Speaker 2:

And once you're online and you have the connector enabled, you have access to an environment. You can choose that environment. And you touched upon the licensing. Licensing to me across this whole system is one of those I'll say over and over again. I try not to even pretend to understand because to me it just gets a little complicated. But the licensing if you have a business central user, you have access to use Power Platform or Power Automate if you're using it within a Business Central scenario as part of a process within Business Central to extend it. So if it's reading or writing, you said it's limited use Is the limited?

Speaker 3:

use. As far as Limited usage rights, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Usage rights. Okay, so it's limited usage rights. Does that mean it's read-only as well?

Speaker 3:

No, no, no, or is it? You have access to write back? Yes, you have access to data. You can read and write data and the fact or entities that you as a user specific user have access to in Business Central, that can be controlled in Business Central as well, and Power Platform and our connector would honor that right. So, if you set up permissions, this user is not able to read employees' data, for instance. They won't be able to read employee data, regardless whether they use Excel, our web client, mobile app, power Platform. That is obviously honored. That is obviously honored. But, of course, if that user has the right to read and write data from a specific table, let's say customer's table, they will be able to do it also through Power Automate or Power Platform solutions using our connector.

Speaker 3:

Connector is actually one of the ways to do to interact with our data because, as I mentioned, we have Power BI, which is read-only by nature, so that uses slightly different technology, also called a connector, but slightly different technology.

Speaker 3:

But we also have another tool which is based on Dataverse.

Speaker 3:

So if you, for those of our listeners here who are not familiar, dataverse is the data management platform from Microsoft, more like a complex database system for business applications, and that is also a system that sits below Power Platform.

Speaker 3:

So Power Platform is built on top of Dataverse and Dataverse has a concept of something that is called virtual tables. We also support that. So virtual tables allow you to take a given API from Business Central so we're still talking about APIs in the same way and visualize that. That means a given table or API from Business Central let's say, customers API becomes a table in Dataverse and it's visible, accessible, just as any other table in the Dataverse user interface, and you can edit the data, build views on top of that, build apps on top of that. You can use that data in Power Pages, for instance, because Power Pages is built on Dataverse only, so it requires Dataverse, and so on. So there are kind of situations or scenarios where you would use Dataverse and you would use Dataverse virtual tables. As I said, it's just another technology to access business central data through APIs and have them offered to Power Platform.

Speaker 1:

Are all Power Platforms sit on top of Dataverse. All of them.

Speaker 3:

So, as I said, power BI is a slightly different beast. Power BI has its own data management system because the data that is imported, let's say, into Power BI and there are various ways how that can be done is, by default and by design, read-only. So all the ways of integrating data through Power BI is read-only. So they can offer different types of, let's say, more advanced data store mechanisms and also mechanisms for storing bigger data sets and data sets that are already aggregated, pre-calculated, and so on and so forth. And then you're going into different data type of solutions for analyzing data. So they are not using directly Dataverse as, for instance, powerapps do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for some reason throughout the years, I always find Power BI to be entirely, even though it has the name Power in front of it. For some reason I don't ever consider it as part of the Power Platform family, even though it technically is. So I'm trying to have that concept in my mind be the same family. So you had mentioned about quite a few features. Is there any underutilized features in Power Automate that maybe people should consider, maybe start utilizing because it's underutilized right now?

Speaker 3:

If we're talking about integration between Business Central and Power Automate, I can, of course, comment on that. If we're talking about integration between Business Central and Power Automate, I can, of course, comment on that.

Speaker 3:

If we're talking about Power Automate in general. Let's leave it to my colleagues from Power Automate team. Yeah, I would definitely say that we see a lot of interest in our approval scenarios and those approvals that are built on top of Power Automate are some maybe a hidden gem, maybe a feature that might be, I wouldn't say, forgotten. But you know that's something that sits a little bit behind and not everyone is able to kind of fully use it. But it's also an interesting discussion when to use this instead of using our internal approval engine, the one that you internal approval engine, the one that you probably know even from the NAV times, because not always power automate is the answer, and that's, of course, a natural choice, a natural path. But there are ways, there are moments where the approval system should actually be happening and should be, partially at least, orchestrated outside of Business Central, when that approval needs to use some data on top of data from Business Central in order to execute the approval, find the right approver, maybe apply some rules that should be built in when the approval is actually going and adding some data to external system. When a request for approval happens, it has to be logged somewhere else on top of Business Central, when the approval, the fact that the document or the change, data change has been approved needs to be logged somewhere else as well. And I'm not even talking about, you know, sending the actual request for approval to your mobile device, sending someone's text message or WhatsApp message, stuff like that. It's all possible in Power Automate using different connectors not necessarily inside Business Central, because Business Central would not know how to send a text message or a WhatsApp message. Power Automate does.

Speaker 3:

So there are cases where this system makes total sense, but also then and this is also discussions we have been quite often with customers the actual approval process then is to some extent handled through Power Automate and is run in Power Automate, and the data is stored in Power Automate, actually in Dataverse environment, and not necessarily everything is stored in Business Central. So there is always a little bit of a compromise and a little bit of a decision in terms of which system to use and how to build it, but it has a great potential, so definitely something that I would like to see more of our customers kind of being interested in. We actually also know that we have plenty of things to do in terms of our features or features that are missing. But we are trying to deliver with every wave, with every update, trying to deliver new improvements in that area and react on feedback and talk to our partners.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's Improve, that's great. So I know there's been a lot of the AI co-pilot where it's simplifying it in a sense, where you need to create a part automate flow and just be able to describe it. Is that a continued push for people Like you know, let's say, for example, myself are very interested in it? You know, obviously you can get started with using Copilot to build that. You know what's one way for me to learn more about Copilot using with Power Automate. You know where do you get started. I know there's still a lot of people figure out where do I even begin? There's so many things you could do with Power Platform or Power Automate in general.

Speaker 3:

No, this is a good point and definitely an interesting development that is happening right now in front of our eyes. So let's talk about that and demystify a bit. First of all, power Automate as a product has a co-pilot experience in the designer, especially the new designer, where when you are editing a flow, you have already this kind of macro instructions, step-by-step, what to do and so on. You have that already on screen and then you would like to modify it, you would like to add a new action and you would like to add an approval or condition and so on. So the normal procedure is you select one of the actions from this whole catalog and all actions in Power Automate, so those building blocks like like loop condition and so on, and various kind of actions that are offered in standard mode but also from those connectors. So there is like a a really really huge selection of different things that you that you need to understand and of course, there is a you is different search experiences and different kind of ways to select or indicate your favorite actions. But you need to understand what you're doing to some extent.

Speaker 3:

If you are using Copilot, pain inside Power Automate, you can tell Copilot hey, I would like to add an additional approval step. I need to send an email. Additional approval step I need to send an email and the copilot inside Power Automate would know ah, okay, so that user would like to use the Outlook connector action to send an email and it will add it to Power Automate flow. So it's a great help. They already. They also introduced a feature where you can start that flow describing what you would like to create. As you mentioned, you kind of like create a flow using natural language. That feature actually, by the way, was available in Power Automate even before this whole, you know, chat GPT revolution. That happened, what was like almost two years ago, right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, november 20, 2022.

Speaker 3:

Yeah precisely so. That feature already existed in Power Automate. It was based on a slightly different model but the concept was the same. Business Central right now is integrating with that feature and that is because Power Automate team also introduced a different interactive kind of way of creating those flows and there was a really cool demo at a recent build conference where they were showing how Copilot from Power Automate is able to kind of interact with the user and detect the intent of the user and maybe even suggest the ways of building automation based on that intent and then on the end the output of it will be a proposed flow structure which then of course the user or the creator in the flow designer experience can continue to edit and also use co-pilot features to add more and more steps to it. So it's like an interactive design process between the user and co-pilot inside Power Automate. So this feature is currently being integrated inside BC.

Speaker 3:

At this point today we don't have it yet shipped in production. So you have seen various kind of videos and posts about that. You have seen us demoing that at recent conferences, but this is not yet released in production. Just wanted to clarify. But we're working on finalizing this and we hope to have that later this wave, and that will allow you to start flow from within Business Central, not only by selecting a pre-built template that we have, but just like typing or, you know, using Windows H and dictate feature in Windows to just speak to your computer and explain what you wanted, and then observe the results and then edit.

Speaker 1:

That would be amazing. I saw that on the piece. What Surface Copilot Plus or something like that, which is going to be pretty exciting.

Speaker 3:

That is another angle. That is another angle, but it's actually Power Automate, because Power Automate offers this feature to translate the natural language into a flow. Already that feature is available in Power Automate. What we are right now building inside Business Central is just that kind of integration right. So this Power Automate user interface needs to fit inside BC, but the feature itself is available so it's easy to go and play with that in Power Automate. Of course, Power Platform teams various Power Platform teams are integrating Copilot in the design experience so you can also build Power Apps using natural language right, Describing what is that you needed, and then Copilot will build that.

Speaker 1:

It's almost meant to be for Copilot and Power Platform, because a lot of times when you're using Copilot, you could ask exactly what you're trying to accomplish with Power Automate or Power Platform. I mean, you have all the tools you need to build something for you. It just makes more sense. Now. You know, I've been working with Power Automate and sometimes you have several people that would help you, or a company may have, you know, internal IT staff members. A company may have internal IT staff members. How do you manage in terms of versioning, Someone jumping in, making some changes or I make some changes? Is there an easy way for someone to be able to manage?

Speaker 3:

some of those versions? Yeah, that's a good question and that's also where you will see, or you see already, power platform, various power platform teams and components, kind of evolving from, you know, like a couple of years ago being relatively simple tools for a single creator, local developer, and right now becoming a tool for normal standard development teams or traditional development teams with support for tools like GitHub versioning and so on. So Power Automate right now has the ability to, you know, like the definition of the flow is actually a JSON content which can be stored in a standard source control version, you know, being versioned as a normal kind of source code. We have added support for Power Platform solutions to our AL go for GitHub tooling. So if you're building your solutions for Power for Business Central specifically, you can build code in AL and extensions for Business Central and Power Platform solutions, you can build that or use that in the same build process and it will generate an extension for Business Central but also a Power Platform solution, and that solution in Power Platform is this kind of package so it can include a Power App, power Automate, power BI and so on.

Speaker 3:

So this is kind of currently normally supported in our development tools and of course you can discuss, like in some cases, should I need a Power Automate inside my fantastic AL program that I love, inside my fantastic AL program that I love? I know that there are some traditional developers out there that do not believe that the new modern world is coming. But yeah, it is. So get started with PowerEdge Copilot.

Speaker 2:

No, it's definitely coming. The world changes and sometimes it's important to look forward to see some of the benefits that you have. I'm happy to hear that there's an effort into the source control management or the version control management to work with deployments, because even with it being a JSON file, whatever it is, a simple change could affect the flow. To go back, a few moments ago you had talked about the workflow and I liked one point that you had mentioned. It's not always just because you have the tool doesn't mean you have to use the tool. You need to evaluate your process to determine would the standard business central workflow work or do you want to use a Power Automate workflow? In discussions that I've had with Power Automate and workflows in particular, I would like to talk about some other scenarios afterwards.

Speaker 2:

It's a matter of what are some considerations. You had mentioned one, which was if you need to have access to an external system to come up with a decision, such as maybe emailing or doing a WhatsApp message or something. The decisions such as maybe emailing or doing a WhatsApp message or something would be one consideration for when to use Power Automate or to use a flow for an approval process. What are some other considerations that you would suggest for when to use Business Central processing and Power Automate processing, but then also in a particular workflow.

Speaker 2:

Is it that once you hand it over the approval to Power Automate, now Power Automate owns the approval and it finishes there? Or is there a workflow or a process where you can send something for approval? An external process will occur, whether it has to read data from Power Automate to have a flow and then come back into Business Central to be able to pick up the process again, to continue the approval process. So is it my question. More is is it a complete handoff or is it a handoff for a step, come back and then I continue within Business Central?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's a good question. There is some form of a handshake system between business central approval system and the power automate. It's relatively simple but in essence business central approval actually starts power automate and then at the end whatever is happening on Power Automate could be for multiple days, even right. The end result will be sent to Business Central and stored and the basic workflow in Business Central that uses Power Automate would be very simple. But you can imagine kind of mixing them a little bit more and kind of like maybe getting some additional actions on Business Central side after the approval was completed on Power Automate Possible.

Speaker 3:

I would say that most cases for situations or for customers who are interested in a little bit more flexibility and a process that is happening outside of Business Central for a good reason. As I said, external data, storing data somewhere, for instance storing some prerequisites or outputs of the approval process on a SharePoint location that all is available in Power Automate very easily and it's also easily editable. So if you have a requirement from your customer, hey, I would like to change this a little bit and add something. It's relatively easy to modify an already running Power Automate flow to add more without calling a developer or without doing too much of tweaking in what is available in Business Central.

Speaker 3:

Now, that said, business Central approval engine, that built-in kind of engine, is also relatively flexible and has an ability to deliver most of the standard kind of scenarios, right Multi-level approvals, group approvals, and so on and so forth, sending an email with that approval details, and so on. So there might be scenarios where you can just do everything in Business Central without touching Power Automate. You would be, of course, a little bit limited to the UI that we offer in that workflow engine. That workflow engine UI, or the UI when you build and configure your approval, is a bit old style, I would say. So for some it might be a little bit difficult to to understand how to tweak it, but on the other hand, it might be absolutely good enough for some cases, right? So yes, it depends a little bit.

Speaker 2:

yes, you had mentioned primarily workflows was a good use case that you said was a hidden gem, where using Power Automate within the flow process working. We've talked about Power BI for reporting again, which it's its own animal, and then, with this, consuming APIs. What are some other use cases that you have come across where leveraging the connector for Power Automate enhanced the Business Central implementation?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think we should also go a little bit beyond Power Automate, but let's stay with Power Automate for a while. So Power Business Central is integrated with Power Automate in three different ways. You might say we talked about approval process and the approval engine. That's probably the most kind of common scenario, but you have also two different other ways, and they are actually represented inside BC in the Automate group, because the gallery of templates differ and we have different templates for those three different kind of use cases, and so let's leave approvals on the side now. The other use cases are when we are talking about automated flows that run in the background, read data from Business Central and process the data, and for that you might have scenarios where either you need to react on data changes in Business Central and, for instance, you're integrating with some system and you need to send data whenever that data changes in BC or whenever a new sales order is approved or posted stuff like that or you need to build an integration that is happening or reacts on an event that is outside of Business Central. You get a new email, you get a new order from a third-party system. Now that you have to integrate with inside Business Central, you want to build something that runs every Monday morning. That's also another kind of type of an automated flow based on different events trigger that is happening outside of business center. It could be pretty much anything, starting from an email or new files that showed up on a SharePoint location. If someone uploaded a new file, that triggers some automation, that happens to add some data to BC. That's also one of the popular scenarios. Those types of flows would be kind of invisible to the user. They are running behind the scenes and they can react with data or interact with data.

Speaker 3:

And then the third way is the action that is based on the flow. So in BC we have that way, that integration component where you can build an action, place it in this central UI, you can personalize that, move it, rename it and so on, and that action looks like a normal action in the action bar on the, let's say, sales document page but triggers a flow power automate flow and that flow shows up in business central on the side as a power automate site pane. There is a very easy way to build some additional user interface components in power automate so you can ask file name, date, additional comment or text field, so you can build a drag and drop way, some additional UI that shows up in BC and then process the data. So then Power Automate Flow is aware of the data from BC because it is running in the context of a specific record. You are on a sales order, you press that button, power Automate got the idea of that sales order, the user, the environment, the company, the date, all that stuff, and then it can additionally get the user input at runtime.

Speaker 3:

So the user wrote a comment or selected a date, and then Power Automate Flow uses the data from Business Central record from the user, reads anything else that is needed from other third-party systems and then executes the action and then sends an update or writes back to BC or sends notifications, sends an email, whatever you want, but it's an action that is then triggered manually by the user. Power Automate calls it an instant flow, which is like basically an instant flow run instantly when the user selected, and the fact that it could be integrated within BC and shown in the UI gives our consultants and customers a very easy way to expand Business Central. Right, if you need to add something, especially if you need to add something that kind of interacts with the external world or one of the actions is that interaction with the external world, sending a Teams message or an email? That type of a flow based on an action is really useful.

Speaker 1:

Talk about some scenarios.

Speaker 1:

I think last year, one of the summit sessions, I did a summit and I love how Power Automate continues to push the envelope, because I was able to take the Power Automate, use it with Power Virtual Agents and Teams and Outlook, and then Business Central, where the conversation started from a chat with the end user about, you know, maybe at their website or something like that, where you ask certain questions and it takes those answers as variables and then use Power Automate to go ahead and collect all of that and either post it on Teams or send an email and say, hey, there's a new client that's interested and then have it right into Business Central as a contact or a customer which is at that time was like this is amazing, this is amazing, and I'd love to see more of those, more of those demos showcasing like, hey, you can have a basically almost a free sales order taker Not free, but like a sales order taker where you don't have any interaction and I just want to say, hey, I'm interested in this, you know, and then have a record show up in Business Central as a new client.

Speaker 1:

So it is quite powerful.

Speaker 3:

That's a perfect scenario. This is a great scenario and this is also something that, as you mentioned, it was already possible for using Power Virtual Agents. So Power Virtual Agents used to be or this is the product that existed for a while called Power Virtual Agents and that was designed specifically to build chatbots. Those chatbots were relatively programmed in a similar way as Power Automate, so they were prescribed and they were able to call Power Automate and that way you will be able to call Business Central and so on. Nowadays, microsoft actually rebranded this product as Copilot Studio. So right now, part of Power Platform family is a product that is called Copilot Studio. But it's not only a rebrand, it's actually much more powerful. It still has the same concept of topics and bots and so on, and you can still use Power Automate, but you can also use our connector, or most of the connector, as plugins, as data plugins. You can point that chatbot or copilot that you create because you're actually creating copilots using Copilot Studio to a specific documentation page or feed it with some data and it will learn and it will build some logic and it will build some kind of conversation with the user and then you can hand off to data to create some data in BC, as the example that you explained. But on top of that, copilot Studio and actually the rest of Power Platform products also have access to AI Builder, which is part of Power Platform platform, and that AI builder allows, gives you a capability to build your own large language model actions. So you build your own black box prompt which takes an input and spits out something, right? So you think about your, your own kind of add-on to ALM and then you can use it inside your Power Automate flows or inside your Copilot Studio chat experience, right? So if you think about the customer is coming to your website, that chatbot based on the Copilot Studio, copilot can be placed inside your PowerPages website. So you build a page using PowerPages, another component from PowerPlatform. It can read data from Business Central. You can see my catalog of items, for instance. So inventory published for your users, for your potential users, external users, sure, but you can build an experience where that customer can kind of explain what they really want like, explain a little bit more.

Speaker 3:

Then the prompt you will have to build like a specific prompt for your use case. Think about, I don't know, you have a bike shop and you have different bike components and the user is interested in building a specific type of a of a bike or needs to buy a special kind of headlamp that would be available for them, lamp that would be available for them. They can explain pretty much in natural language and you just build a prompt that reads the data, reads the input from the customer, but it's also grounded in some knowledge about the domain, in some knowledge about the domain, right? So let's say, you have a couple of Word documents that explain how to offer those different types of lamps or bike components to your customers. So the output of that black box kind of prompt, using AI Builder, could be a suggested list of items or like products that we would like to offer.

Speaker 3:

And then, as you know from various examples online, the ability of generating an email as a response. That's a basic capability of any ALM model right now. So building some form of, you know, automated or semi-automated tool that would take an input from a potential customer, save that data as a contact, propose an email response with some suggested lines, no problem at all, right? So for a specific use case, that is perfect scenario for Power Platform. So definitely. I mean it's just mind-blowing sometimes like what can be done. It just requires a little bit of poking around and learning those new tools. But it's really, really amazing.

Speaker 1:

You just did a dreamer, I listened to all of this and you could do anything with it.

Speaker 2:

It's just the way. And what were the efficiencies we're able to gain from all of this and to also offer better customer service? You know you talk about the order entry and in suggesting products it's something that's available 24 hours a day and the amount of data that can be processed in a shorter period of time to offer those suggestions. You know we're going to have all this like I want this, and it'll be automatically built, put together, sent and shipped within a few moments. It is mind-blowing and it does force someone to change the way they think. He mentioned earlier how sometimes some may be a little resistant to identify or to see what's happening, but it seems to be here and I see a lot of, a lot of changes coming from. It is well too.

Speaker 3:

Wow, yeah, and the whole thing is that, as we discussed, you as a business central partner, integrator or even an admin or operator of Business Central inside a company, if you're familiar with those tools and you can kind of visualize or you can imagine what could be done for a specific scenario that you have in mind.

Speaker 3:

So if you're thinking about improving your business process, power Platform might be an ideal tool, just because it is this kind of low code, no code. But of course, as we discussed, it doesn't have to be Power Platform. Sometimes it's very easy to just use a Business Central mobile app, load it on your device, customize the UI a little bit inside Business Central just using a page customization tool, and just remove some of the fields that are not needed, build something more simplified and that will be shown on your mobile device and you can edit data and that's it. Maybe that's what you needed. Right, you don't need to build a separate specialized app for that, but if you do, then Power Apps could be your friend, because then it allows you to build a user interface for a mobile without actually coding the mobile platforms.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think in the SMB space this is certainly an advantage and a differentiator, especially when you're growing your business and sometimes adding more people may not be the right thing. Certainly, I would highly encourage for SMBs to look at Power Platform, to kind of expand the business that way, and I still think that there's a lot more that we need to do to educate the SMB space about its capabilities. It's slowly getting there, at least from my experience, because a lot of people are still like, wow, I didn't know that existed.

Speaker 2:

I didn't know you could do that. Some of that I think it goes with also the partner channel being aware of it, because if customers aren't aware of it, where are they going to hear from it? If partners aren't aware of it, where are they going to hear from it? So it's, and listen to you talk about even the mobile app as a solution. It's how many people would think that modifying the mobile app slightly, like you said, with the page customization, would be a solution and not have to create something in power app or have to create a new page or a new option or a new integration as well. So it's, it's, that's the only thing that keeps you know.

Speaker 2:

It sort of scares me is knowing all of these options, because before you could have a few people who knew things well. Now you have to really know what options are available and then be able to determine how to you know, analyze and evaluate which solution is going to provide the better, which, which tool is going to provide the better solution for the problem that you're trying to solve, because you know, as you'd mentioned, the mobile app may be perfect in one case, a power app may be perfect in another case. And then, using the Business Central application itself may be another one. That is a challenge. With all of these new options, which is the best for a scenario? How do we solve that problem? Which is the best for a scenario? How do we solve?

Speaker 3:

that problem. That's the-. Yeah, we are trying from our end here, you know, updating documentation, changing, publishing various videos and kind of sharing the knowledge. I'm a big fan, of course, of, you know, speaking to our partners whenever I can and sometimes we have events happening here in the office, sometimes, of course, different conferences and meetings that we that you know, in the community, in the partner community or partner channel, in business central partner channel, we also present in, like, we're working with Power Platform teams as well, right, so, because we actually are kind of similar or the same engineering organization, so we're working quite closely with them.

Speaker 3:

Sometimes, you will see, you know, business Central mentioned in Power Platform announcements and news because it's actually a very popular product from Microsoft for similar group of customers, because Power Platform quite often is also popular within SMB customers. So we tend to work with them. They come to our conferences. You will see Power Platform people speaking at directions. You will see us speaking at Power Platform conferences. I will be speaking in Vegas a couple of weeks from now again talking about Business Central and showing Business Central to our platform community. So we operate together. But, yeah, of course, always it's a huge challenge, especially that the world is moving forward, so all of those tools are evolving constantly. So, yeah, it is a bit of a challenge to keep up as pretty much with technology.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it is it is and it's, you know I don't know if anybody has the answer it's just a matter of how to manage the information. There's a lot of information being presented to a lot of people, so how do you filter it and process it? This is another. It's a philosophical conversation. I go down sometimes as far as data management but, uh, this, I think of this. You know I had to start drawing lines. I know things exist and I'll just stop there and know that, hey, let's talk to somebody about this to explore the option. Uh, they have the awareness. So, uh, well with that belagia, so well with the Appalachia.

Speaker 2:

As with every episode, I'm always overwhelmed, mind blown. There's always a lot of information and it's amazing to see how much the world is changing, how rapidly it's changing. But I would like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us today to share some of your insights onto using the Power Platform with Business Central, talking just a little more about what the connector is and also we've been touched upon, you know, identifying the different solutions and options that are available for some of the areas. If anyone would like to learn a little bit more, as we were just talking about Power Automate, the Power Auditor, connector and some of the options. How do you suggest somebody get in contact with you, or are there any specific resources you think that someone should look at to get the information?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so, as always, we have gathered all the resources under various kind of akams links, if you're familiar with this concept, under various kind of akams links, if you're familiar with this concept, the one and single link to rule them all is always bcol. So akams slash, bcol gives you a doc page with various kind of links to different doc sites and resources that will be, also for partners, but also for customers.

Speaker 3:

And in the same way you can go from there from BC All, but we have individual resources for Power Automate, like BC Automate, bc PBI, bc Power Apps and so on. The easiest way is just to start with BC All and then for partners, we have a Yammer community as you might be familiar with. We have a really kind of active community and discussion on Yammer. We use that as a tool to talk to partners directly. So I'm kind of actively operating within that Power Platform group that exists there. And then, of course, my email is no secret. So, if anyone would like to, I mean no secret at all, because basically Microsoft employees have all common email addresses, right? So which is the first name, dot, last name at microsoftcom. So that's how you can also reach me blazeykotelko at microsoftcom.

Speaker 2:

Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Time is the currency of life and once you spend it, you can give it back. So anybody who speaks with us, we appreciate you doing that and thank you again.

Speaker 3:

Thanks a lot, guys. It was great talking to you and being on the show. Thanks a lot All right, great Thank you Talk to you soon. Bye, take care.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, chris, for your time for another episode of In the Dynamics Corner Chair, and thank you to our guests for participating.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, brad, for your time. It is a wonderful episode of Dynamics Corner Chair. I would also like to thank our guests for joining us. Thank you for all of our listeners tuning in as well. You can find Brad at developerlifecom, that is D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-Ecom, and you can interact with them via Twitter D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E. You can also find me at matalinoio, m-a-t-a-l-i-n-oi-o, and my Twitter handle is Mattelino 16. And see, you can see those links down below in their show notes. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you and take care.

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Kris

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Brad

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