Thimmarasu Lanka, Author at Applied Information Sciences

@thimmuL

I recently enjoyed being involved in an internal Power Platform modernization hackathon. I want to share my experience to provide valuable insights and/or ideas to help others decide if they will participate in or host a hackathon themselves.

What is a Hackathon?

A hackathon is typically a single sprint event where a group of motivated technical folks collaborates intensely to implement and demonstrate the solution to a problem use case chosen by each team. It is a rapid development effort where the solutions are designed and implemented towards the overall goals of the hackathon event. Besides valuable business/account benefits, hackathons are known to be great opportunities for hands-on learning and upgrading technical skillsets.

AIS Internal Hackathon

AIS held an internal Power Platform hackathon in the summer of 2021. One such stirring event helped a few motivated AIS team members to learn and upgrade their Power Platform skills while applying those to solve practical problem scenarios at one of our major clients. The event focused on relevant use cases that can use the many features of Power Platform to solve real-time gaps and/or problems across our client enterprise. There were six teams of 4-6 team members each. Each team had at least one Power Platform developer and one person familiar with the client’s business domain. A set of senior Power Platform SMEs acted as advisors for the event.

The Case and Team

I’ve had the opportunity to propose two of the six use cases selected by a team for implementation. My team focused on a crucial financial reconciliation process which proved to be a spot-on candidate for Power Platform modernization. The existing production system was a dusty Windows Forms application created at lightning speed by AIS to help our client avoid renewing a costly COTS product. Power Rippers’ hackathon team consisted of a Power Platform developer and three .NET developers with no Power Platform experience. Two of the team members had domain experience specific to the client we focused on. We’ve had an excellent experience working intensely on the effort as a mini-project. We leveraged Microsoft Teams for all collaboration, including recorded meet-ups, shared OneNote’s, and linked a OneDrive library app to the chat space.

Power Platform and its Wide Range

We learned, utilized, and integrated a wide range of Power Platform components like Model-Driven App, Dataverse, Dataflow, Power BI, paginated reports, data alerts, Power Automate, and OneDrive. Using these technologies, we modernized the existing business processes. In addition, we added a few Power Platform-backed enhancements to demonstrate how the platform can empower business users further.

Gains

We had our share of hiccups in the project, which proved to be a significant part of the learning experience. Our team secured 2nd place, which came with a monetary reward!

From a business standpoint, it did not stop there. We made our application into a proof concept. We presented to the application leadership as a possible solution to replace the existing application, with benefits such as the following:

An application that is easier to maintain
More functionality than the original application
Decreased level of effort and costs for continued enhancements
The ability for the client to configure many aspects of the application through model-driven application
Moving the application to a platform where the functionality could be maintained, and enhancements could be done by the client themselves with limited training.

From a personal standpoint, it ticked a few checkboxes for my growth, like becoming familiar with PowerApps and Power BI to an intermediary level vs. a lesser-than-a-novice before this. It also allowed me to present my first Lightning Talk, a short presentation to pass on what I learned to others within my company.

The Transformation Saga

This excellent transformation story of a third-party product rewrites into a Power Platform opportunity that materialized to reality due to the hackathon.

Why AIS?

This effort is a testament to the technical learning appetite of AIS folks, how we as a company strive to make things beneficial and better for our clients. It also demonstrated how internal activities like hackathons, level-up sessions, lightning talks, etc. help participants achieve personal goals and work together to share their skills and knowledge.

Thimmarasu Lanka

@thimmuL

This blog will explain how a short-staffed team overcame security issues in a critical legacy application by combining modern authentication with legacy MVC frameworks. This allowed the team to upgrade the application to meet enterprise security standards without disrupting the users.

Background

I managed an in-house application, ERMS, developed a decade ago with MVC and forms authentication. The forms authentication used custom user management with SQL Server database. The skilled developer created a productive application that served the needs of the HR, managers, and employees. ERMS was developed for AIS in-house use and had lower priority than the customer engagements. Over the years, it’s been stable, requiring few changes. When changes were required, we had to juggle resources to accomplish them. Figure 1 shows the application architecture before the change.

Challenge

The application was developed before the standard security practices. Over time, it became non-compliant. ERMS needed to be upgraded the legacy forms authentication to Azure AD authentication. This required sweeping changes to the way the users logged in to the application, which would be a significant undertaking. The solution was not challenging, but it must be done with minimal downtime and minimal resources. In addition to this, ERMS uses custom roles that do not map to the Active Directory roles.

Solution

We considered several ways to solve this problem, as outlined below.

Upgrade Authentication and Authorization

The first option was to remove forms authentication and custom role management to use Active Directory, as shown in Figure 2. Equivalent AD roles would have to be created. The code at various layers needed to be updated to refer to the corresponding AD roles. This was not a viable option as it is risky with many changes.

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Upgrade Authentication and Use Legacy Authorization

Figure 3 shows another approach we explored to retain the existing role management and use Azure AD for authentication. This was a sensible fallback in the given context. That did not work as the User Principal in the HTTP request context was always not set, which would cause the authentication to break.

We learned two points from the failed trials. First, we should only attempt to upgrade the authentication but not touch the custom role management. Second, it was a resource-heavy effort to integrate Active Directory with custom role management in ERMS.

Using a Connector for Authentication

The solution that worked was to have a lightweight authenticator app that the ERMS application consumes to validate the users, as shown in the high-level flow in Figure 5. This authenticator service app would validate against Azure AD, and role management would stay the same. Figure 4 shows the solution overview.

The Right Approach

An independent authentication connector service and maintaining the existing role management are the key to the solution. This is a dependable approach if you are looking for a quick turnaround using minimal coding or resources.

BlogPosts by Thimmarasu Lanka