Reasons why fusion development is the new norm when it comes to building IT applications/software solutions:

Business users and non-IT users adding requirements to the IT backlog and waiting for the IT team to fulfill it is a story of the past. With the pace at which the businesses are growing and changing, the IT team will find it challenging to deliver to the rapidly evolving business. Fusion development with the Power platform is an approach to combining the worlds of the citizen developer, the professional developer, and the other parties instrumental in building and using applications to further the objectives of the business.

 2 key personas or groups –

• Citizen developers or makers: Individuals who are at the forefront of a job; individuals who understand the business process in detail with some or no IT background
• Pro-developers: professional IT developers
   

Fusion development is focused on bringing these two groups together by providing low-code/no-code tools to citizen developers to build their applications & automation to support their business productivity while offering a rich spectrum of extensibility points and tooling capabilities providing the professional developers a great experience for extending the platform – making Power Platform a truly no-cliffs platform.

This blog post is focused on reasons why the Fusion development gives organizations a competitive edge!

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Power Apps – Recapping highlights of 2019!

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! 2019 was an incredible year for Power Platform with exceptional feature releases and improvements. In early 2019, Forester recognized Microsoft PowerApps as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Development Platforms For AD&D Professionals, Q1 2019, and rated strongest on strategy! Later, it made it to the Gartner leader quadrant in Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms Magic Quadrant as well. It was a great year overall and I would like to recap on some of the 2019 additions to Power Apps in this blog post.

 

Canvas and Model-driven Apps:

• Reusable Controls/Components (Canvas Apps):

  Canvas components were introduced earlier in 2019 which makes it easier to create reusable controls like dialog boxes, navigation menus etc.. These controls can be reused within an app and shared between apps. In addition, you can also define more advanced behaviors with custom properties. Here is a great blog and a few videos to learn more about Reusable components

  

AI Builder in Action – Binary Classification

AI Builder is a new Power Platform capability which was recently announced (in Preview right now) and you can read all about it here.

Let’s start with understanding a few basics:

Currently, there are 4 types of AI models you could use. In this blog, I’m going to explain Binary Classification with an example.

What is Binary Classification?
It is an AI model that predicts binary outcome (Yes/no) by learning about your data. With your historical data, the AI builder can learn how some factors influence the outcome and predict it for you and overtime, the AI builder will continue to learn and improve its prediction. Read about Binary Classification here:

Extending Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations with PowerApps Blog Series

Want to learn how to extend Dynamic 365 for Finance and Operations with PowerApps, but don’t know where to start? This blog series is just for that!

When implementing Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, we tend to think that any small gap can only be filled with customizations or some complex integrations. Sometimes the solutions are simple and using PowerApps with Finance and Operations is one of them

I’m glad to introduce this blog series (in official PowerApps blog site) to showcase different scenarios where PowerApps can be used with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations to increase productivity and drive digital transformation.

Simplify your work life with Microsoft Flow.

Here is my attempt at making a quick video on Microsoft Flow to showcase its capability at a high level, in less than 2 minutes. Hope you enjoy it!

Are you ready for the Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations One Version (Continuous updates)

Microsoft recently announced a change in the way Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations will be updated. Starting April 2019, each Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations customer will be running on the same product version (including Platform, Application and Financial Reporting). This approach will lower upgrade costs and will provide you access to the latest capabilities, performance improvements and the best support experience.

For customers, it is important to know that the support for older versions (7.0 to 7.2/July 2017) will end in April 2019. If you/your customer is running on these old versions, it is very important to upgrade the application as soon as possible. Version 7.3 support will be extended through April 2020 only for customers who have unfulfilled extensibility requests with Microsoft. So, If you cannot upgrade to the latest release due to unfulfilled extensibility requests, you are still required to upgrade to application release 7.3 and the latest platform update.

Watch Microsoft Managed Continuous Updates TechTalk for more details.

 

Important action items for customers running older version of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations application:

Launch function in PowerApps

This blog explains few of the capabilities of Launch function in PowerApps.

I would like to directly jump into an example as it is quite simple and self-explanatory. Here is a PowerApp which is connected to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations customers entity through the connector. The App is reading customer data and showing some important information on Customer Details page. For an end user (maybe a salesperson), along with the required or some important customer details, you can also provide him/her with easy ways to connect with the customer right from within the App. Give ability to users on a PowerApp to Visit customer’s website, Call primary phone number, Email Primary contact or Get directions on the map to go meet them directly, all using one function – Launch!

Integrating Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM – Using Microsoft Flow and Common Data Service

This blog was written a while back! If you’re trying to integrate Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM, please refer the following document:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/supply-chain/sales-marketing/prospect-to-cash

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Dynamics 365 unifies CRM and ERP capabilities into applications that work seamlessly together across different areas of a business. Two main components of Dynamics 365 are CRM and ERP applications.

For customers who use both CRM and ERP applications (for example, Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for operations), it is important that these applications integrate and work together and one option for customers/partners is to use Microsoft Flow and Common data service (CDS)

Creating Companies in Dynamics 365 for Financials

When we sign up for Dynamics 365 for Financials, we get access to a demonstration company (called Cronus). The demonstration company contains sample data like sample orders, invoices, ledger entries etc., which lets us explore the application, view charts and reports with sample data.

We will be able to create additional companies with demonstration data or we can create companies to work with our own data. Assisted setup in Dynamics 365 for Financials guides us with creating these companies easily. I would like to list the options available to create new companies through assisted setup.

Using multimedia in Microsoft PowerApps

Microsoft PowerApps provides an option to add multimedia in the mobile applications. In this blog, I would like to briefly describe how we can use the available media controls in our Apps.

Image: This control is used to display an image from local file or a data source. This control mainly uses Image property where the source of the image is specified.