Five Real-World Scenarios Where Microsoft Dataflex is a Game Changer

July 27, 2020
Last week, Microsoft introduced its new Dataflex technology for data services inside of Microsoft Teams, in addition to the rebranding of its former Common Data Service (CDS) to be called Dataflex Pro.

Below I have outlined five real-world scenarios where Microsoft Dataflex is a game-changer, particularly in larger enterprise organizations. These 5 scenarios are a reflection on actual situations I see playing out with AIS clients today.

Requirement-driven Application Development

These are common scenarios when the organization has a specific set of requirements or use cases for which you are seeking to build a new, modern application. For some time now we’ve lacked a true data service to build solutions of moderate data complexity but that don’t require the premium Power Platform licensing. Power Apps built on top of Dataflex now fit nicely between SharePoint (lower complexity) and Power Platform or custom-Azure solutions (higher complexity). Use Dataflex when you need a relational data source that isn’t complex enough to require Dataflex Pro or SQL, and use Teams and your existing M365 licensing instead. Now we’ve got a great new arrow in our app development quiver.

Application Modernization

Here we’re talking about cases when you have a legacy application (or portfolio of applications) that you’re looking to modernize through a Rebuild approach (reference Gartner’s 5R Model). Many legacy applications are built in very complex ways, creating immense technical debt. In past times, we’ve lacked the tools to build solutions more simply and rapidly using low-code tools. For rebuilds that don’t require the complexity of Dataflex Pro or Azure data services, Dataflex inside of Teams introduces an extraordinary new path to rapid rebuild (maybe time for Gartner to add a sixth “R”).

Business group-based app development

We often encounter workloads that are specific to individual business groups, and thus not deployed enterprise-wide. Many business groups—be they functional, geographic, product-aligned, or event smaller teams or departments—already use a corresponding Microsoft Teams team. Dataflex’s 1:1 relationship with each team provides an excellent place to digitize business processes localized to individual business groups. For example, a training team that needs to manage their upcoming events and student attendees, or a department head who needs to take stock of employees’ outside skills as she re-jiggers post-pandemic “return to work” assignments.

InfoPath Migration

As Microsoft InfoPath faces end-of-life, we’re seeing more and more organizations needing to migrate thousands (or more) forms to some combination of new technologies (usually Power Platform). Like the previous example, though, many of these InfoPath forms are localized to activities inside specific business groups. Dataflex inside of Teams provides a pathway for rapid modernization of these forms, allowing more significant efforts to be directed to the enterprise-wide InfoPath “workloads” whose impact, complexity, and scope will necessarily make them heavier lifts.

Enterprise-wide Power Platform adoption (low-code cloud transformation)

Gartner predicts that 65% of all app development will take place atop low-code platforms such as Power Platform by 2024 – what I often refer to as “low-code cloud transformation”. The idea is that there is tremendous opportunity to modernize in the cloud when we’ve got both citizen and full-time developers working together to build solutions along a very wide complexity spectrum. Dataflex is a game-changer here because it allows productivity to important grade workloads (check out the model for this) to be built and delivered inside of Teams (where many users already are) using a truly relational data source. It also allows apps built in one part of the organization to be push-button installed to Teams serving a different part of the organization via an app store like service. That’s going to be powerful for propagating innovation across large organizations.

We will see tremendous innovation around Dataflex and Dataflex Pro in the months ahead. Organizations’ potential here will be enabled by their ability to effectively manage and govern the technology in the hands of users. Another topic for another day, but I would be remiss not to say so. For this, I recommend starting with the Power Platform Adoption Framework, and our recent video outlining the Center of Excellence (CoE) as a Service concept.

AIS is the 2020 Microsoft worldwide Partner of the Year for Power Apps and Power Automate.

AIS is a Microsoft US Partner Award Winner

July 18, 2019

AIS is the 2019 MSUS Partner Award Winner – Business Applications – Dynamics 365 for Sales. This is our vision for the Power Platform era.

I am incredibly excited to share that AIS has been announced as the 2019 MSUS Partner Award Winner – Business Applications – Dynamics 365 for Sales at #MSInspire!

Some background on how we won:

Story for MSUS Win Dynamics 365 SalesWhen the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) needed to score a big win for its members, they brought in the AIS team to build a single, shared player management system, called PA.NET. AIS extensively customized Dynamics 365 for Sales to meet the unique needs of NFLPA, integrated it with Office 365… and then took it all to the cloud with Microsoft Azure.

Using Dynamics 365 for Sales, PA.NET provides one master set of player data and powerful reporting tools. Now employees across the organization can turn to the same system to answer questions, uncover marketing and licensing opportunities, and identify other ways to help members. When a specific licensing request comes in, they can find the right person, or people, in minutes.

So where do we go from here? From Dynamics to Power Platform.

Our Business Applications & Automation Practice is investing heavily in Dynamics and the Power Platform. We recognize that an organization’s adoption of the Power Platform should be thought of as a journey, not a one-off “app of the moment” solution. By focusing on enterprise management and leveraging the Common Data Service (CDS) as much as possible, we help clients like NFLPA scale their adoption as they migrate workloads and make use of Power Apps, Power BI, Flow, and Dynamics 365.

Power Platform Technologies

Earlier this year, we worked with friends in the business applications community around the world to launch our Power Platform Adoption Framework. Mature organizations realize that rigor, discipline, and best practices are needed to adopt the platform at scale.

The Power Platform Adoption Framework is the start-to-finish approach for adopting the platform at scale.

It helps enterprise organizations:

  • Get to value quickly
  • Educate, train, and grow their community of developers and power users
  • Create durable partnerships between business, IT, and the user community
  • Continuously improve ROI on the platform by identifying and migrating new workloads
  • Blend agile, rapid app development with rigorous, disciplined enterprise management

I hope that the framework will continue to become a worldwide standard for enterprise-grade adoption of the Power Platform. I’ve been lucky to collaborate with Power Platform experts and users around the world to create the Power Platform Adoption Framework. I’m proud to say that AIS is fully behind the framework, sharing it with the community, and committed to its future development as best practices for scaled adoption evolve. We’re sharing it so that everyone can use it because we believe that a vibrant and thriving community around this technology is good for everyone who uses it.

Please join me in congratulating the AIS team, and please join us on this journey to scale the Power Platform to meet the challenges of the years to come.

Power Platform is all PLATFORM

January 24, 2019

Driving value, lowering costs, and building your organization’s future with Microsoft’s next great business technology

Lately, I’ve been helping folks understand the Microsoft Power Platform (MPP) by sharing two simple diagrams.

The first one is below and is my stab (others have made theirs) at contextualizing the platform’s various components in relation to one another.

The Common Data Service (CDS) is the real magic, I tell people. No matter which app you are using, the data lives there in that one CDS across your entire environment. (And no, folks outside your organization don’t get to use it.) This means that data available to one of your apps can be re-used and re-purposed by your other apps, no wizardry or custom integration required. I promise, it just works. Think expansively about the power of this in your organization, and you’ll come up with some cockamamie/brilliant ideas about what you can do.

These are the types of data-driving-business-function that geeks like me always dreamed of.

A diagram of Microsoft Power Platform components

Then there’s Power Apps, in purple. Most folks think of this as a low-code/no-code app development tool. It is, but it’s more. Imagine that there are three flavors of Power Apps:

  1. Dynamics 365, which in the end is a set of really big Power Apps developed by Microsoft
  2. COTS apps developed by Microsoft partners (including AIS), available for organizations to license and use
  3. Custom apps you build yourself

Point Microsoft PowerBI at all of this, then mash it up with data from outside of your CDS that you get to via hundreds of out-of-the-box connectors, automate it all together with workflows in Flow…and you’ve got Power Platform in a nutshell.

When I’m presenting this to a group, I turn to my next slide pretty quickly at this point.

A rearranged look at Microsoft Power Platform

Here I’ve essentially re-arranged the pieces to make my broader point: When we think about the Power Platform, the emphasis needs to be on the Platform bit. When your organization invests in this technology, say via working with an implementation partner such as AIS or purchasing Power Apps P1/P2 licenses, you’re not just getting a product or a one-off app solution.

What you’re getting is a platform on which to build your modern business. You’re not just extending Office 365. Instead, you’re creating a future where your organization’s data and business processes are deeply integrated with, driving, and learning intelligently from one another.

The more you leverage the platform, the higher the ROI and the lower the marginal costs of those licenses become. A central goal of any implementing partner ought to be guiding organizations on the journey of migrating legacy systems onto the platform (i.e., retiring legacy licensing + O&M costs) and empowering workers to make the platform even more valuable.

We don’t invest in one-off apps anymore, i.e. a CRM in one corner of your network where you run your sales, something in another where you manage your delivery, clunky Human Resources Management off over there where you take care of your people, etc.. No, what we care about here is the platform where you integrate all of the above — not through monolithic one-size-fits-all ERP — but rather through elegant app experiences across all your users’ devices that tie back to that magical Common Data Service.

This is what I mean when I tell folks sky’s the limit, and thinking about your entire business is what’s called for here. It’s because Power Platform gives us the ability to learn and grow with our customers, constituents, vendors, employees, and other stakeholders like never before.

That’s what has everyone at Microsoft so excited. I am as well.

I want to learn from you. How do you make Power Platform understandable to those who haven’t thought about it too deeply? How does your organization make it valuable as a platform rather than just a product? I love to build beautiful things, so inspire me!

Three Trends Changing the 2019 Business Applications Landscape

January 18, 2019

The business intelligence, automation, and enterprise application landscape is changing dramatically.

In the previous incarnation of enterprise technology, line-of-business owners were forced to choose between pre-baked commercial off the shelf (COTS) software, which was difficult to customize and often did not truly meet the business’s unique needs, or custom solutions that (though flexible and often tailor-made to the business needs of the moment) cost more and were far riskier to develop and deploy.

Furthermore, certain classes of applications do not have a COTS answer, nor do they justify the cost of custom software development. In the chasm between the two arose a generation of quasi-apps: the homegrown Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, Google docs, and all manner of other back-of-the-napkin “systems.” End users developed these quasi-apps to fill the gaps between the big software IT provided and what users actually needed to do their jobs.

We’ve all been there: The massive spreadsheet that tracked a decade’s worth of employee travel but was always one accidental click away from oblivion. Or the quirky asset management database living on your officemate’s desktop (and still named after an employee who left the company five years ago); the SharePoint site full of sensitive HR data, or the shared network drive that had long been “shared” a bit too liberally. A generation of do-it-yourself workers grew up living on the edge of catastrophe with their quasi-apps.

Thankfully, three trends have converged to shatter this paradigm in 2019, fundamentally changing the relationship between business users, technologists, and their technology.

Connectivity of Everything

The new generation of business applications is hyper-connected to one another. They allow for connections between business functions previously considered siloed, unrelated, or simply not feasible or practical. This includes travel plans set in motion by human resources decisions, medical procedures scheduled based on a combination of lab results and provider availability, employee recruiting driven by sales and contracts.

Citizens’ Uprising

Business users long settled for spreadsheets and SharePoint, but new “low-code/no-code” tools empower these “citizen creators” with the capability to build professional grade apps on their own. Airport baggage screeners can develop mobile apps that cut down on paperwork, trainers and facilitators put interactive tools in the hands of their students, and analysts and researchers are no longer dependent on developers to “pull data” and create stunning visualizations.

New Ways of Looking at the World (& Your Data)

This isn’t just about business intelligence (BI) and data visualization tools far outpacing anything else that was recently available. It’s not even just about business users’ ability to harness and extend those tools. This is about the ability of tools like Microsoft Power BI to splice together, beautifully visualize, and help users interpret data that their organizations already own — data to which you’ve connected using one of the hundreds of native connectors to third-party services, and data generated every second of every minute of every day from the connected devices that enable the organization’s work.

It’s an exciting time. I’ve explored these trends further, plus how Microsoft’s Power Platform has become the go-to platform for organizations mastering the new landscape in my whitepaper, Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Future of Business Applications. We’re way past CRM. I hope you’ll read it and share your thoughts with me!