September 30, 2024 • 38 mins
In this [delayed] episode of Refresh the Cache, George and Nick dive into the latest Wave 2 2024 release notes for Power Pages. They discuss the evolving landscape of agile development, where new features roll out continuously, and release notes serve as checkpoints rather than game-changers. The conversation touches on deprecations, governance updates, and intriguing AI-driven community template features, like thread summarization and AI moderation. They also debate the future of web templates and Power Fx integration. They even make a bet on how Microsoft’s event management solution will be implemented.
Credits
Cover image by chatGPT (inspired by terrible prompts)
References
- Overview of Power Pages 2024 release wave 2
- Create an event portal allowing access to event details, registration
- Important upcoming changes and deprecations in Power Pages
Get in touch
- voice@crm.audio
- Nick Hayduk @Engineered_Code
- George Doubinski @georgedude
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
George (00:11):
good afternoon,
Nick (00:12):
Good evening.
It's late for me here, but the sunhas just gone down because we're
right in the middle of summer here.
What time does it go dark therein, in Australia these days?
George (00:23):
about 5 p.
m.
Depends which coast you're on, but same asin Canada, but on East Coast, around 5 p.
m.
ish.
We're in the middle of the winter,so energy prices are high and nights
are chilled, not by Canadian standards,
but
Nick (00:41):
I was going to say, do you have
your boots and your parkas and have
George (00:45):
Oh we've got we've got our gillettes.
Anyway hi
everyone.
I'm George Dubinsky.
Nick (00:53):
I'm Nicholas.
Hayduk
George (00:55):
And we're here with Refresh the Cache.
It's been a while we've beenbusy doing other things, but it's
nice to kick back into action.
And what is the better occasionto do that than the release notes?
Nick (01:09):
Yay, release notes.
Yeah, that's always afun time of the year.
George (01:12):
I'm kind of don't know what to feel about release notes in general,
because teams are very agile these days,and they continuously release something.
We already on preview for this andthat, and something's been announced
a month ago or two months ago sorelease notes, I guess it's nice for
those teams to have a checkpoint acheckpoint but did you find anything that
(01:37):
kind of blew your socks off?
Nick (01:40):
I wouldn't say in this one.
I agree with you that so every monthwhen we do our community calls, I do
a little new segment and I remembera few years ago, like some months
there'd be like, Not really much news.
This, these days, like every month,there's usually four or five new things
that have been published via the powerpages, like the product team blog.
(02:01):
And many of them have nothing to dowith what was in the release notes.
They just brand newfeatures that come out.
The release notes, it's a, a fun timeof year, fun time to, to speculate
about what, what might actually happenand what might just be a dream, but
it's certainly not the, a comprehensivelist of everything we're going to see
because we know we're going to see,or at least pretty sure we're going
(02:22):
to see a whole lot more than that.
I would say this time therewasn't really anything in there
that Really knocked my socks off.
A couple of cool things.
I'm interested to see, how they're goingto invest in that community template with
some of that AI stuff but just in general,there wasn't usually there's always been
that one big, wow, I can't wait for that.
I would say there's nothing inhere that is really going to be a
(02:46):
game changer as far as I can see.
George (02:47):
Okay, let's start not with the release notes, but with our
favorite segment, deprecations.
We did talk about it lasttime, and I think since then
there was one thing deprecated.
That's Enhanced linkcreation in Design Studio.
(03:07):
I guess we're splitting the hairs hereand we're talking to HTML nerds, but
I'm reading it is that they used toimplement buttons as the button element.
Now they're doing it as uh, hyperlink.
(03:28):
And style it with CSS
Nick (03:30):
Yeah.
And that makes sense.
It looks like they had it as a button withan on click event that just has a little
bit of JavaScript to kick them over.
If I was writing the HTML, it wouldhave been as a, as an anchor tag.
So it seems like a smart change.
Honestly, I'd question why it wasdone the other way to begin with, but
George (03:47):
I'm on fence here.
Button is a nice semantic.
It's yes, you can certainly fromvisuals, you can do whatever you
want with hyperlinks, but buttongives you a nice semantic way to
differentiate the links and the buttons.
I'm special on the mobile devices, so I'm
yeah, I'm,
I'm not
Nick (04:06):
But if your button is purely a link to another page,
George (04:09):
yes, then it should be, then it's not definitely.
Oh,
and I think I missed that,
Button
Nick (04:16):
because they're saying before they would have a button with a simple
on click event, and that, to me Now, Iagree if it's a button on a form, and
it's providing some action, I agreewith there being a button there, but
to implement what should be a hyperlink
George (04:27):
Oh, I see what they, oh, that's yuck.
I'm reading.
It's oh, that's a link to URL.
So what they've done,the button with on click.
JavaScript snippet,Windows location, href,
equal, url.
That's rubbish.
Yeah,
Nick (04:47):
I'm glad we're on the same page, because, I didn't want to
call you out, but if you continuedthe way you were going down,
George, you would have been wrong.
George (04:53):
Yeah, okay.
I'm glad I actually stopped andread a little bit more into it.
Yeah, that's this is exactly whatkind of how not to use buttons,
because semantically it's a hyperlink.
I guess so.
That's enough for deprecations wealready talked about PowerApps, Portal,
Studio, Be Retired good riddance.
It wasn't very useful at all.
Cool.
(05:14):
But I don't see PowerApps management
app going away anytime soon.
Nick (05:20):
No, the power.
Yeah.
The power pages management or the pagesmanagement app or whatever it's called.
They spent all that time building out thenew one for the enhanced data model and
yeah, I don't see that going away anytime
George (05:32):
And we'll talk about it once we get to one of the
items, I believe, templates.
So let's talk about the release wave.
They group it into.
Four major themes.
I don't know why they even
theme it.
Do I really care?
Nick (05:50):
I skip all that garbage preamble and
get right, give me, justget right to the list of
George (05:55):
Okay, list of
features.
So let's let's go intoadministration and governance.
There's been so many little thingsthey kept adding in the past few
months that I don't see this one.
It feels like PMs are saying,Hey, you are PM for governance.
You have to put at least one thingon the list and say, Oh, for crying
(06:15):
out loud, we just released seven.
What can I put on the list?
And they're going, yeah.
Okay.
You can.
Disable external authenticationproviders in websites.
You deal with the, my customers areusually smaller than than yours.
You deal with the larger customers.
And, uh, for smaller customers,I don't see value here.
(06:37):
Like we, we control whatevergets created anyway.
Do you have a customer who spins offthe websites and it's like there's
17 portals of PowerPages
Nick (06:49):
You know what, this is another one of those features that until we run into
a couple of large customers, and thiswould have been three or four years ago,
and I might have told the story alreadyonce on the podcast, but I'll tell it
again, where we did run into this wheretheir security team would almost not
allow the product to go in there Like,of course, we can control that, the maker
(07:11):
can control which authentication providerscould go on there, but there was no way
for as a tenant administrator for youto control what the makers could do.
And that was it.
That was a deal breaker, right?
And so that's what some of these thingsare, is we don't necessarily trust the
makers themselves to make those decisions.
And so we need at it as aglobal administrator, we
(07:33):
want to set those settings.
So I'm to me, a lot of theprojects like, Oh is this really
where we're going to invest?
George (07:38):
I totally appreciate it.
If a person governing the entire tenantor people governing the entire tenant and
security in the entire tenant, there'sa different crowd from the, from makers.
Then this totally makes sense.
It's basically saying, we're notgoing to allow you to use Facebook
under no circumstances you are to useFacebook as authentication provider.
(08:01):
End of story.
I don't want to hear about it.
That's it.
Close it off.
As I said, on a small customerscale it's not very helpful because.
We are makers, and we're also usuallyglobal admins, and we are the ones who
advise and control for small to mediumbusinesses, you advise and control what
they can or cannot or shouldn't do.
(08:22):
But that's totally safe for largercustomers ability to govern and say, We
only allow for Entra hold on it's notB2C, External Entra ID, is that right?
It's,
That's the new name for B2C replacement.
Nick (08:36):
Yeah, so that's, it's not the name for, new name for B2C.
It's a completely separateproduct, but that's the direction
George (08:42):
the idea is it will eventually replace B2C.
So people with B2C shouldn't jump upand down and say, oh, what's changing?
What's changing?
Nothing is changing in B2C.
But there is another productcalled Entra External ID.
I believe that, that.
is the replacement.
B2C has its
own share of the problem, so internally.
(09:03):
Okay,
Nick (09:04):
that's a pretty good segue into the set up Microsoft Entra
external ID with a wizard thing.
So well, well done onthe segue there, George.
George (09:11):
Oh go ahead because I never used Wizards, so I used to type in
seven
Nick (09:18):
Oh, I see.
George (09:19):
tag boxes,
so
Nick (09:21):
so
I'm not sure how many of ourlisteners would remember.
So at one point there was a wizard youcould follow in for Azure AD B2C that
was one, one set of screens where youdidn't actually have to go over, like
it set up the actual B2C tenant for you.
So you could just go through this wizard.
You didn't have to jump betweenthe Azure portal and all
these other different screens.
(09:41):
You just went through theflow and it was great.
And that's that was our go to.
It disappeared for a little bit.
And so it's not accessibleright now, as far as I know.
I know I followed up with theproduct team a few times to find
out, Hey, where's that thing going?
And they said just hold on.
We're working on it.
So recently they have announced.
They, and I think when I looked intothis, it was actually one of those
(10:03):
things that went into the release notesfor the previous wave, but it wasn't
there when it was originally announced.
But if you go back to the releasenotes for wave one, you'll see that
support for Microsoft Entra external ID.
Is being added to power page.
Now I don't, when I checked lastweek, it still wasn't there for
me, but we're in Canada, so we'realways like the last ones to get it.
(10:26):
but the
George (10:27):
Shouldn't you, use the US Preview Tenant
to see all the
Nick (10:32):
I I probably should.
Yes.
Yes.
I did that the other day to playwith some of the co pilot stuff.
Cause we're also, we never getco pilot stuff here in Canada.
George (10:39):
Oh, nice segue into the
Nick (10:41):
um,
George (10:43):
pit of despair,
the Copilot stuff, anyway.
Nick (10:48):
but so essentially what we have here is they're, It said
available in July at some point,the ability to set up Microsoft
Entra external ID with PowerPages.
So I'm guessing the experience for thatone would be similar where you'd probably
have to go set up the actual Entra.
Entra external ID setting somewhere else.
(11:08):
And then you hook it into what'sannounced here in these release notes
is that they will be introducing awizard that will be similar to what the
wizard was, would be to see where youcan do everything all in one screen.
So it's an enhancement to a featurethat I don't have access to it yet.
And I don't know if it's quite outthere because it did say it said July.
George (11:25):
For preview.
The release
notes say it's December,
maybe private preview.
Nick (11:30):
no.
So
George (11:31):
Oh, the feature itself,
sorry.
Nick (11:33):
The, yeah, the original feature without the nice fancy
configuration wizard, just to addexternal Entra ID to PowerPages
George (11:40):
one would think that if an Entra External ID would be compliant with
Open open standards.
So, OpenID
Nick (11:49):
would be an open a connect, but in the same way that's also what Azure
ADB2C to see, but I think they justwant to show up as the, one of those
ones in the list and the, copy andall your settings and make it easy.
So I'm assuming that, that featurethat's coming out in July right
away here is, pasting all yourvalues into this nice screen.
And then later on, what's coming is youdon't even have to set it up elsewhere.
(12:10):
You can do it you can do it
George (12:12):
Yeah, and Some things you can hard code, like for example,
oh, we know it's going to be login.
microsoftonline.
com then slash tenant ID, so I justask for tenant ID and it's creates
a very tight and neat package for,just for that product, which is nice.
We are now in design studio areaof release notes and file upload.
(12:34):
We did talk about it.
And.
There is nothing specific.
It's just general availability.
In December there's no
public preview.
Why there's no public preview, or
private preview.
Nick (12:46):
If you actually, this was released here in the last couple days, on the
PowerPages blog, there is a descriptionof the Of the file upload features.
So if you check out the power pages,product blog, you'll see that they
describe what some of the new featuresare relating to the file uploads.
So they're expanding the sizeof the file so that you can
(13:09):
upload files up to 10 gigabytes.
They're enhancing theactual UI for uploading.
There's actually a progressive, likeyou can see the progress of your upload
the ability to download and edit anddelete the files And a lot of this has
to do with enhancing the experienceof the Azure Blob Storage integration.
Another thing that they're doing isyou can, I believe you're going to
(13:29):
be able to set up that Azure BlobStorage integration right in the
PowerPages Design Studio, as well asaccess those files via the web API.
So I think previously, if you storedfiles in Azure Storage Blob, it was
like they didn't exist in the web API.
Okay.
But that's another thing that's changingis that you'll be able to interact
with those files via the web API.
George (13:48):
Okay, we'll drop the link to that blog post in the notes.
There is also scan files for malware.
Okay.
that's, uh, It's a promise,
In release notes.
Let's see, and the other one, configurefile upload for SharePoint storage.
I assume it's just morestreamlined experience.
(14:09):
and similar to Blob Storage, you shouldbe able to upload files to SharePoint.
Any improvement in thisarea, yeah, would be welcome.
More certainly yeah.
The side loading, it's a bit painful.
You've done a few of those,
right?
companion apps that would do a properSharePoint integration with a smooth
(14:30):
experience and nice file upload and so on.
But it does take a bit ofeffort to achieve that.
And of course, it's
iframe, right?
Nick (14:40):
It's, yeah, it's often not pretty.
In fact, we I think it was a fewyears ago where I blogged about some
validation with the SharePoint stuff andactually got a question on that, that
I was just responding to where someonewanted to limit the total file size.
So they want to say, Hey,you can upload up to a total.
You can upload as many files as you want.
But combined, it can beno more than 25 megabytes.
(15:01):
That one's a bit of atricky solve on that.
The only way I could think to solvethat would be maybe a power automate
flow that you could, trigger throughthe web API that calculates how
much storage is taking up right now.
George (15:10):
Oh, don't get me started.
I just had a call a couple of weeksago, a call with a customer and say,
Hey, look, we can't upload files.
I said, remember the file sizeyou asked us to set to 10, 10
megabytes or something like this.
He said, yes, but I'm uploadingfile which says nine megabytes.
Why doesn't it allow me?
Oh, you want me to explain toyou what Base64 does to files.
Nick (15:35):
Uh,
George (15:36):
Because the file that's just for listeners, it's consider tip
of the podcast episode, that fileupload, the limit is set on base
64 encoded file and base64 tendsto blow up the size if it's binary.
So if you upload something like a zipfile, you can't compress it anymore.
(15:57):
So a good zip file, let's say ninemegabyte, chances are it will be by the
time it's encoded, it will be 11 or 12megabytes and it will blow up the limit.
So it's always approximate limit.
It's under that.
And it could be up totwo thirds under that.
Something to keep in mind.
(16:17):
It's never a precise number.
Scanning for malware, they used tobe solutions like you could set up
intermediate storage and we've doneit for one customer like files would
go into intermediate storage into blobstorage where they would get scanned.
And then once they scan, they would.
be picked up and upload it towhere the final destination.
(16:39):
So you upload file and it'sa couple minutes later, it
appears where it belongs.
Like it's yeah, we've done it.
I'm not sure what, how theexperience is going to be here.
If file is large, it willtake time to scan it.
What is going to be, it's like file.
I'm here, but
I'm not here.
Nick (16:55):
I know that's a huge
ask.
There's lots of.
Government contracts wherethat's a pretty firm requirement.
So it's good to see that there's going tobe something so that we can at least check
that box without, the more sophisticatedsolutions that you're talking about.
George (17:09):
I'm curious about user experience on that one.
Oh, no doubt.
That's actually very nice feature.
And since we're talking about smalland large businesses, for large
businesses, it's a nice featurebecause you're ticking the box.
For small businesses, it's anice feature because I don't have
to explain customers, like howimportant it is and just enable them.
And we're done.
(17:30):
Yep.
Moving on.
Transform natural language.
I'll let you talk about it, because I'mso opinionated about it, it's, I suspect
here you're empowering the wrong people.
There's medieval times, andsome lord calls upon his people
(17:52):
and says, Let's go to war.
Here's the weapons for you.
And says, dude, we grow wheat, right?
We don't fight.
No, there is the good, arrowsand bows and swords and things.
And those people get killed, right?
Pretty much very fast because thereis no weapon against trained army.
(18:16):
You're empowering the wrong people.
So that to me smells the same way.
It's if you need translation ofnatural language into Power Fx
formula chances are your formulais going to be so long you will not
be able to understand what it does.
And two, there's a good chancesthat we'll get it wrong.
(18:36):
It's just it will improve.
The second one will improve overthe time, but we struggle even now
with people documenting what theycreate and explaining their intent.
Here you just say some words and theformula appears and you record it
and No one else knows what the heckdid you mean by that and then you
(19:00):
go on vacation for three months andsomething else falls apart and it's
like, why this formula is there?
What did he mean by that?
Decipher That, on the other hand, is good.
this is kind of twosides of the same coin.
Someone writes a formula anddisappears into sunset, and someone
else would come back and say, whatthe heck did they mean by that?
(19:22):
And so they decode the formula andthen it goes like in the circles
and it will produce some magic.
Look as a study thing to helplearn, I find it quite valuable.
explain functions likedifference in Power Facts.
I can't remember off the topof my head, because I don't use
(19:42):
Power Facts day in, day out.
But for example, there'sconcatenate and there's concat.
And one works with the ta I don'tremember which one which, but one works
with tables, another one with strings.
Nick (19:54):
It replaces a google
search.
George (19:56):
yeah, it's things like that.
Anyway, but let's move on to somethinga little bit more interesting, unless
you have something to add to that.
Nick (20:02):
No, I think they're just, trying to get it to level with The liquid
stuff that already exists tryingto get parity between those two.
So makes sense
George (20:11):
I found git git hub copilot quite helpful in getting
the liquid expressions right.
I found it learns on the job.
You start, it generates somethingand say, dude, that's wrong.
It's oh, okay.
And it learns and you correctit and it learns its way.
And then the next time itgenerates the way you want it.
(20:31):
So it's adjusted.
So it's quite helpful.
It's definitely I find myselfwriting things much, much faster.
using suggestions, propersuggestions, discarding
suggestions, and things like that.
Anyway, let's move to web templates.
Oh that's interesting.
We should have a separate episodetalking to people about what web
(20:52):
templates are and how they work becausepeople now coming into PowerPages
Studio without doing hard time.
At lower level.
And they jump at the higher level andthey may not know what web templates are.
We're not gonna spend time right now.
But what's what do you think is commonin this area in preview, in October?
Nick (21:16):
So I found the name of this feature to honestly be a little misleading.
It says use power fx inweb template components.
And so web template components are thosekind of new things where you can create
a web template, develop the manifest, andthen have people within the design studio.
(21:37):
Insert those web templates into the thing.
So I don't think you canactually use Power Fx within
the web templates themselves.
Or, that's really not whatthis feature is about.
This is about how you can usePower Fx in the parameters that
are passed into the components.
So when a Power Page DesignStudio user is going to insert.
(22:01):
You're one of your web templatecomponents that they have the
ability to pass in parameters.
And I believe what this is in thoseparameters, you can insert your power fx
George (22:10):
commands.
one of the things, definitely.
It's authoring a Power Fxformula using the formula bar.
But the next bullet point I'm readingactually says you can use Power Fx,
but as you would in web template.
Utilization of data from Power Fx formularesults in the web template for logic and
experience.
Nick (22:31):
Yeah.
So I just, I wasn't sure if thatmeant for that because you've
passed in the data via the parameter
George (22:39):
I have
no idea.
But how much can youpass via the parameters?
Nick (22:42):
Yeah.
George (22:44):
parameters are only strings.
That's one of the limitations, right?
How much can you serialize it to that?
Nick (22:50):
Hey,
George (22:50):
That's not going to be very effective, but,
No.
Nick (22:53):
a string George.
Everything's a string.
George (22:55):
When we were studying high energy physics, string theory was very popular.
I don't know what happened.
It's still there, but it was very popular.
Now, when I was studying, it was quitea kind of one of the more newer, shinier
things, but yes, everything is a string.
You're right, both on quantumlevel and in power fx formulas.
(23:16):
Or rather manifests for templates.
Do you see in the future like power fxmingling with liquid or replacing it?
What do you think
the intent is here?
Nick (23:27):
I find it hard to believe at some point that Microsoft would get like, would
actually replace it just there's just somuch of it out there for, so for them to
cut it out you're looking at something onthe scale of the, the enhanced data model
migration or the bootstrap five migration.
And so I don't know if there'sreally a need to eliminate it.
But I could see that the investments.
(23:50):
that they make, which is honestlyat this point, relatively small.
When's the last time wehad a new liquid feature?
It's relatively rare.
All I can really think about is as they'veadded new support for new field types,
whether, file or images, that sort ofthing, they are adding that to liquid, but
in general, that you're not seeing that.
seen a whole lot ofinvestment on the liquid side.
So I would say thatwould probably continue.
(24:11):
They'd probably still want to maintainparity, but if they are going to invest
in some cool new, let's just say wayto, to build forms using low code stuff,
that's going to be done with power fxand maybe not so much with liquid, man.
That would be real painful totry and get rid of all the liquid
that already exists in the world.
George (24:31):
I'm not sold on the replacement thing, even if it was possible
because fundamentally I think liquidis a templating language, whilst
Power Fx is expression language.
So they're fundamentally differentbecause in Liquid you, you mix
and match HTML and the output.
(24:54):
Liquid is all about string output, right?
That's what you produce.
But it's so easy to write templatesand mix and match like HTML and
output of the liquid expressions.
and add some processing,like using objects.
The part where Liquid does someprocessing, that is tedious
part, because Liquid is justnot designed to do it very well.
(25:18):
like looping through things.
There are constructs,but they're a bit clunky.
So that's something that Power Fxwould do well, but I struggle to see
how Power Fx would deal with HTML.
What are you going to do?
Like in PHP echo strings to the output?
What, how are you going to do thetemplate, the layout of things?
(25:40):
I don't know.
I need to play with it.
Have
you played with PowerFX?
Is it
available?
Nick (25:46):
Just a little bit.
It was mentioned in one of mycommunity calls and someone was
asking about, could you edit it inlike using the VS code integration.
And so I created some, apower of X formula and I tried
to see how it was written.
And it was, I forget the exact format,but it did look like you could edit it.
There was some sort of I forget if itwas, some curly braces and then, but
(26:07):
there was some kind of similar to liquid.
So some sort of token that wouldidentify that this was power fx.
So I, in looking at it, it seemedyeah, if you use those, if you open
and close your power fx area thatyou should be able to do it in there.
George (26:22):
And you would use Liquid for that, right?
Bracket percent PowerFX, bracket
percent, then you write PowerFX end
PowerFX.
Nick (26:30):
which one would get evaluated first,
Could you write power fxthat generated the link?
I wonder which one they'd process first.
George (26:36):
Oh, that's interesting thing to try Power Fx spitting liquid?
Does it get picked up?
Or liquid spitting?
Something to try out.
Definitely.
Let's move on.
That's it for Design Studio,whatever this area is.
Let's move into Copilot.
This is actually quite aninteresting thing, because Unlike
Copilot for creating Websites.
(27:01):
This is not about it.
Though it's in preamble, they talkabout makers can use copilot and power
pages to create parts, yada yada.
That's fine.
They still didn't addresswhat I'm dreaming of.
It's like point to the website and say,I want my site to look like that website.
Bring it over.
But that's coming.
I can do bits of it right nowwith chat, GPT or whatever you
(27:24):
want, a copilot, other copilots.
And I can pull apart the website and say,give me design elements and this and that.
One of the selling points of ADX,never got any facelifts since then.
those templates, partner template andhelp call center or help desk template
(27:47):
customer service, whatever it was.
So there were a lot of templates and thisone is a newer one, community template.
That's a new reincarnation offorums and blogs, I believe.
What else is there
in community template?
Nick (28:05):
So that was one thing I wasn't quite clear on.
Are they referring to the, causethere's the modern community and then
there's the old one, do you thinkthis is the modern community template?
George (28:15):
They don't specify.
I would think
so.
Nick (28:18):
Because I do the forums exist in the modern community.
I didn't think they did, but I could be,we haven't used the modern community one.
I thought the modern communityone was just about ideas.
I think it's still the kind of that older,the older school community template.
Cause that's where the forums
George (28:36):
To describe the, what do you care to describe with the features?
Nick (28:40):
So basically we've got some copilot features that are going to help you if
you are using the forum functionalitythat exists in some of those templates.
So one is to actually have anAI moderator for the forum.
So you can have the the AI try toidentify forum posts that are spam, or
(29:00):
they also mentioned forum posts thatdon't meet the community guidelines.
So you can have it automaticallyjust filter those out without
any human intervention.
They also are talkingabout thread summarization.
If you want your users to not haveto read pages and pages of posts in
a particular thread, and you justwant a nice, AI summary of, here's
the question, here's the answer, andhave AI give you that summary for you.
(29:23):
They've got that coming as well asjust using enhancing the search.
So using an AI search within theactual forums, and I think other
aspects of the community template.
So an enhancement in the search area.
So those are the three areaswithin the PowerPages Copilot area.
And again, so these arefeatures not for the makers.
So not to help you build the site,but for the actual users of your site.
(29:45):
In this case, they talkabout the community template.
George (29:48):
Interesting.
That's not called copilots.
These are called AI Moderator, AISearch, and AI Thread Summarization.
I guess because they're notthey're not that community facing.
You don't, as a member of the community,as a user, you will not face any of these.
It's behind the scene action, mostof it, thread summarization is one of
(30:10):
the most useful features that you seeright now on the web where AI is used
and ubiquitous Amazon reviews, right?
That's a good example where it's superuseful because you have 700 reviews.
And then you've got summary sayspeople like the color and the shape
(30:32):
of I don't know, of the speakers andpeople dislike the functionality and
short lived, Nature of those speakers,because most of them break down within
two months, something like this.
And those summaries is super useful.
Incidentally, I came across of thesituation, you go to the forums and
then you find here's the question.
(30:53):
And here's verified answer and you readit and say, dude, that's just wrong.
This is not the answer.
And then you start reading andthen say, this is the answer.
Not that one.
This is the answer, right?
And interestingly enough, if youfeed it into OpenAI or Compiler,
or whatever you're feeding itinto, it will pick those up.
(31:15):
It picks up the sentiments ofpeople talking about proposed
solutions and things like that.
And you see it like on Stack Overflow andon forums when something is marked as the
answer, but it's actually not the answer.
Hopefully, thread summarizationwill give better experience
with the suggested solutions.
Or, say, hey, look, People talked aboutfor seven pages, but there is no solution.
(31:40):
The problem is still there, sothat's definitely very much useful.
Okay that's pretty much it.
You think so, but wait a minute.
Started, I think we both independentlyopened up something where we
started but we no longer go there.
Dynamics 365 released notes and dida quick search on PowerPages, and
(32:02):
lo and behold, what do we have here?
Nick (32:06):
I want to keep this show family friendly, so I'm not going
to give all of my thoughts onwhat I think of the events portal.
But it, there were some references inthe Dynamics 365 release plans about
a new, improved portal to allow peopleto view events, register for events
(32:30):
and what I thought was interesting wasthe fact that it wasn't just it's oh,
it's for power pages it was you couldembed it on power pages or you could
embed it elsewhere which just broughtup all of the terrible memories of the
Kind of previous version of this thatwas built on angular and it was again
you could you could host it with powerpages or you could host it yourself And
(32:55):
yeah George are you excited for this?
George (32:57):
Excited is not the word I would use, but I'm more
curious than anything else.
It's been in the making for a long time,and people continue to weep and cry and
use Angular, the app, because we don'thave any better experience than that.
And I think we should make a bet what theheck is going to be the implementation.
(33:20):
Just to read out the conditions areso portal hosting options embedded in
an existing website embedded is sucha broad name, could be iframe could
be leveraged and out of the box filepages templates for quick deployments.
So one thing is clear.
They're probably not going to do it twice.
So they're not going to doanything special for PowerPages.
(33:42):
So PowerPages will be just awebsite where you can embed.
And what they're going for is a list ofupcoming events and detailed summary for
each event included session informationand speakers and ability to register.
Ability to register is there now becauseit's embedded forms, marketing forms
that do allow you to register right now.
(34:03):
So there is nothing groundbreaking there.
So do you want to make a bet howthey're going to implement it?
Nick (34:11):
Oh, man.
Like, how would I, do that?
Yeah because if you're goingto embed the iFrame, the iFrame
still has to live somewhere.
Just some ugly URL that like,yeah, some iframe that's built
directly into that marketing thing
George (34:28):
my bet is surely they will not go for React, right?
Because that's just Angular
make two
Nick (34:37):
probably build it react themselves, but they're not going to say, here's
the react code deployed somewhere.
, George: How on earth would you recompile it
then?
No, I'm just saying that they would,
They would host the react codethemselves and you embedded in an iframe.
So within your iframeit's their react code,
But they're not giving youthe react code to actually
George (34:55):
So you can't even change the layout of the thing?
That's the mystery to me.
And with iframe now I have somedoubts about iframe, you know why?
The screenshot that I have, it'sprobably designed in whatever
Microsoft designer, right?
It's not real.
Let's be honest.
It's got sign in button in the corner.
(35:16):
With iframe, you're going to haveall sorts of issues with trying
to sign in inside the iframe
or outside the iframe.
It's just
going to be a
Nick (35:28):
does the, does, does the history of this events portal over the last
10 years give you any confidence thatthere just won't be all of these issues?
Like normally I'd be like theycan't possibly be, come up with
something that wouldn't, thatwould be so silly like that.
But I can't say that I have the confidenceto say that's not going to be a thing.
Yeah.
George (35:47):
were doing it, honestly, I would say I would say something to the tune.
In PowerPages, createa nice lean template.
That just works directly with marketing.
You have ability to change thingson the backend, talk directly to
the backend on the marketing sideor CIJ customer side journey side.
(36:09):
So do that.
There is a events API that you canuse because registration is a mystery
where they write registration data.
I would do that.
And then in parallel, I will do atotally separate implementation.
Could be React, could be somethingelse based on this events API.
I would give people referenceimplementation and then say,
(36:32):
knock yourself out becausewhatever is your hosting engine,
whatever you want do it, right?
If you react guy, he's yourreact way to approach it.
Give the substance.
Event API, event managementAPI gives you enough.
Things to, to go by, right?
If you want to build a website,build the website, if I were to say
(36:55):
that this is what you have to do,George, you have to embed it on the
website or host it in PowerPages.
It needs to be the same code.
I would probably go for spittingout HTML but do it in a smart way.
So it's not embedded, but sorry, it'snot iframe, but actually embedded.
Similar way as people generateforms, the form can be generated by
(37:18):
JavaScript and inserted on the fly.
So I would do something like that.
Then I can preserve the semantics ofthe data and say, whatever styling
you want, he's CSS reference.
And you do your own styling because thenyou can make it look whichever way you
want.
So that's what I would do.
I would, sorry.
Nick (37:39):
I still think it's going to be an iframe.
George (37:40):
Okay.
You say iframe and we'll come backwhen we're going to come back.
Public preview November.
We'll do a checkpoint in November,and Nick saying iFrame, I hoping the
team will not let me down and willspit appropriate HTML that inserted
by using some smart JavaScript
Nick (38:01):
see, now I'm in a lose situation because either I'm wrong
or I'm right and it's iframe.
George (38:07):
That's about it.
What's coming up in the next six toeight months, there's more coming up,
but this is what's in release notes.
let's put it way.
Thank you very much and until next time.
Nick (38:19):
I'm looking forward to uh, seeing who's right.
good afternoon,
Nick (00:12):
Good evening.
It's late for me here, but the sunhas just gone down because we're
right in the middle of summer here.
What time does it go dark therein, in Australia these days?
George (00:23):
about 5 p.
m.
Depends which coast you're on, but same asin Canada, but on East Coast, around 5 p.
m.
ish.
We're in the middle of the winter,so energy prices are high and nights
are chilled, not by Canadian standards,
but
Nick (00:41):
I was going to say, do you have
your boots and your parkas and have
George (00:45):
Oh we've got we've got our gillettes.
Anyway hi
everyone.
I'm George Dubinsky.
Nick (00:53):
I'm Nicholas.
Hayduk
George (00:55):
And we're here with Refresh the Cache.
It's been a while we've beenbusy doing other things, but it's
nice to kick back into action.
And what is the better occasionto do that than the release notes?
Nick (01:09):
Yay, release notes.
Yeah, that's always afun time of the year.
George (01:12):
I'm kind of don't know what to feel about release notes in general,
because teams are very agile these days,and they continuously release something.
We already on preview for this andthat, and something's been announced
a month ago or two months ago sorelease notes, I guess it's nice for
those teams to have a checkpoint acheckpoint but did you find anything that
(01:37):
kind of blew your socks off?
Nick (01:40):
I wouldn't say in this one.
I agree with you that so every monthwhen we do our community calls, I do
a little new segment and I remembera few years ago, like some months
there'd be like, Not really much news.
This, these days, like every month,there's usually four or five new things
that have been published via the powerpages, like the product team blog.
(02:01):
And many of them have nothing to dowith what was in the release notes.
They just brand newfeatures that come out.
The release notes, it's a, a fun timeof year, fun time to, to speculate
about what, what might actually happenand what might just be a dream, but
it's certainly not the, a comprehensivelist of everything we're going to see
because we know we're going to see,or at least pretty sure we're going
(02:22):
to see a whole lot more than that.
I would say this time therewasn't really anything in there
that Really knocked my socks off.
A couple of cool things.
I'm interested to see, how they're goingto invest in that community template with
some of that AI stuff but just in general,there wasn't usually there's always been
that one big, wow, I can't wait for that.
I would say there's nothing inhere that is really going to be a
(02:46):
game changer as far as I can see.
George (02:47):
Okay, let's start not with the release notes, but with our
favorite segment, deprecations.
We did talk about it lasttime, and I think since then
there was one thing deprecated.
That's Enhanced linkcreation in Design Studio.
(03:07):
I guess we're splitting the hairs hereand we're talking to HTML nerds, but
I'm reading it is that they used toimplement buttons as the button element.
Now they're doing it as uh, hyperlink.
(03:28):
And style it with CSS
Nick (03:30):
Yeah.
And that makes sense.
It looks like they had it as a button withan on click event that just has a little
bit of JavaScript to kick them over.
If I was writing the HTML, it wouldhave been as a, as an anchor tag.
So it seems like a smart change.
Honestly, I'd question why it wasdone the other way to begin with, but
George (03:47):
I'm on fence here.
Button is a nice semantic.
It's yes, you can certainly fromvisuals, you can do whatever you
want with hyperlinks, but buttongives you a nice semantic way to
differentiate the links and the buttons.
I'm special on the mobile devices, so I'm
yeah, I'm,
I'm not
Nick (04:06):
But if your button is purely a link to another page,
George (04:09):
yes, then it should be, then it's not definitely.
Oh,
and I think I missed that,
Button
Nick (04:16):
because they're saying before they would have a button with a simple
on click event, and that, to me Now, Iagree if it's a button on a form, and
it's providing some action, I agreewith there being a button there, but
to implement what should be a hyperlink
George (04:27):
Oh, I see what they, oh, that's yuck.
I'm reading.
It's oh, that's a link to URL.
So what they've done,the button with on click.
JavaScript snippet,Windows location, href,
equal, url.
That's rubbish.
Yeah,
Nick (04:47):
I'm glad we're on the same page, because, I didn't want to
call you out, but if you continuedthe way you were going down,
George, you would have been wrong.
George (04:53):
Yeah, okay.
I'm glad I actually stopped andread a little bit more into it.
Yeah, that's this is exactly whatkind of how not to use buttons,
because semantically it's a hyperlink.
I guess so.
That's enough for deprecations wealready talked about PowerApps, Portal,
Studio, Be Retired good riddance.
It wasn't very useful at all.
Cool.
(05:14):
But I don't see PowerApps management
app going away anytime soon.
Nick (05:20):
No, the power.
Yeah.
The power pages management or the pagesmanagement app or whatever it's called.
They spent all that time building out thenew one for the enhanced data model and
yeah, I don't see that going away anytime
George (05:32):
And we'll talk about it once we get to one of the
items, I believe, templates.
So let's talk about the release wave.
They group it into.
Four major themes.
I don't know why they even
theme it.
Do I really care?
Nick (05:50):
I skip all that garbage preamble and
get right, give me, justget right to the list of
George (05:55):
Okay, list of
features.
So let's let's go intoadministration and governance.
There's been so many little thingsthey kept adding in the past few
months that I don't see this one.
It feels like PMs are saying,Hey, you are PM for governance.
You have to put at least one thingon the list and say, Oh, for crying
(06:15):
out loud, we just released seven.
What can I put on the list?
And they're going, yeah.
Okay.
You can.
Disable external authenticationproviders in websites.
You deal with the, my customers areusually smaller than than yours.
You deal with the larger customers.
And, uh, for smaller customers,I don't see value here.
(06:37):
Like we, we control whatevergets created anyway.
Do you have a customer who spins offthe websites and it's like there's
17 portals of PowerPages
Nick (06:49):
You know what, this is another one of those features that until we run into
a couple of large customers, and thiswould have been three or four years ago,
and I might have told the story alreadyonce on the podcast, but I'll tell it
again, where we did run into this wheretheir security team would almost not
allow the product to go in there Like,of course, we can control that, the maker
(07:11):
can control which authentication providerscould go on there, but there was no way
for as a tenant administrator for youto control what the makers could do.
And that was it.
That was a deal breaker, right?
And so that's what some of these thingsare, is we don't necessarily trust the
makers themselves to make those decisions.
And so we need at it as aglobal administrator, we
(07:33):
want to set those settings.
So I'm to me, a lot of theprojects like, Oh is this really
where we're going to invest?
George (07:38):
I totally appreciate it.
If a person governing the entire tenantor people governing the entire tenant and
security in the entire tenant, there'sa different crowd from the, from makers.
Then this totally makes sense.
It's basically saying, we're notgoing to allow you to use Facebook
under no circumstances you are to useFacebook as authentication provider.
(08:01):
End of story.
I don't want to hear about it.
That's it.
Close it off.
As I said, on a small customerscale it's not very helpful because.
We are makers, and we're also usuallyglobal admins, and we are the ones who
advise and control for small to mediumbusinesses, you advise and control what
they can or cannot or shouldn't do.
(08:22):
But that's totally safe for largercustomers ability to govern and say, We
only allow for Entra hold on it's notB2C, External Entra ID, is that right?
It's,
That's the new name for B2C replacement.
Nick (08:36):
Yeah, so that's, it's not the name for, new name for B2C.
It's a completely separateproduct, but that's the direction
George (08:42):
the idea is it will eventually replace B2C.
So people with B2C shouldn't jump upand down and say, oh, what's changing?
What's changing?
Nothing is changing in B2C.
But there is another productcalled Entra External ID.
I believe that, that.
is the replacement.
B2C has its
own share of the problem, so internally.
(09:03):
Okay,
Nick (09:04):
that's a pretty good segue into the set up Microsoft Entra
external ID with a wizard thing.
So well, well done onthe segue there, George.
George (09:11):
Oh go ahead because I never used Wizards, so I used to type in
seven
Nick (09:18):
Oh, I see.
George (09:19):
tag boxes,
so
Nick (09:21):
so
I'm not sure how many of ourlisteners would remember.
So at one point there was a wizard youcould follow in for Azure AD B2C that
was one, one set of screens where youdidn't actually have to go over, like
it set up the actual B2C tenant for you.
So you could just go through this wizard.
You didn't have to jump betweenthe Azure portal and all
these other different screens.
(09:41):
You just went through theflow and it was great.
And that's that was our go to.
It disappeared for a little bit.
And so it's not accessibleright now, as far as I know.
I know I followed up with theproduct team a few times to find
out, Hey, where's that thing going?
And they said just hold on.
We're working on it.
So recently they have announced.
They, and I think when I looked intothis, it was actually one of those
(10:03):
things that went into the release notesfor the previous wave, but it wasn't
there when it was originally announced.
But if you go back to the releasenotes for wave one, you'll see that
support for Microsoft Entra external ID.
Is being added to power page.
Now I don't, when I checked lastweek, it still wasn't there for
me, but we're in Canada, so we'realways like the last ones to get it.
(10:26):
but the
George (10:27):
Shouldn't you, use the US Preview Tenant
to see all the
Nick (10:32):
I I probably should.
Yes.
Yes.
I did that the other day to playwith some of the co pilot stuff.
Cause we're also, we never getco pilot stuff here in Canada.
George (10:39):
Oh, nice segue into the
Nick (10:41):
um,
George (10:43):
pit of despair,
the Copilot stuff, anyway.
Nick (10:48):
but so essentially what we have here is they're, It said
available in July at some point,the ability to set up Microsoft
Entra external ID with PowerPages.
So I'm guessing the experience for thatone would be similar where you'd probably
have to go set up the actual Entra.
Entra external ID setting somewhere else.
(11:08):
And then you hook it into what'sannounced here in these release notes
is that they will be introducing awizard that will be similar to what the
wizard was, would be to see where youcan do everything all in one screen.
So it's an enhancement to a featurethat I don't have access to it yet.
And I don't know if it's quite outthere because it did say it said July.
George (11:25):
For preview.
The release
notes say it's December,
maybe private preview.
Nick (11:30):
no.
So
George (11:31):
Oh, the feature itself,
sorry.
Nick (11:33):
The, yeah, the original feature without the nice fancy
configuration wizard, just to addexternal Entra ID to PowerPages
George (11:40):
one would think that if an Entra External ID would be compliant with
Open open standards.
So, OpenID
Nick (11:49):
would be an open a connect, but in the same way that's also what Azure
ADB2C to see, but I think they justwant to show up as the, one of those
ones in the list and the, copy andall your settings and make it easy.
So I'm assuming that, that featurethat's coming out in July right
away here is, pasting all yourvalues into this nice screen.
And then later on, what's coming is youdon't even have to set it up elsewhere.
(12:10):
You can do it you can do it
George (12:12):
Yeah, and Some things you can hard code, like for example,
oh, we know it's going to be login.
microsoftonline.
com then slash tenant ID, so I justask for tenant ID and it's creates
a very tight and neat package for,just for that product, which is nice.
We are now in design studio areaof release notes and file upload.
(12:34):
We did talk about it.
And.
There is nothing specific.
It's just general availability.
In December there's no
public preview.
Why there's no public preview, or
private preview.
Nick (12:46):
If you actually, this was released here in the last couple days, on the
PowerPages blog, there is a descriptionof the Of the file upload features.
So if you check out the power pages,product blog, you'll see that they
describe what some of the new featuresare relating to the file uploads.
So they're expanding the sizeof the file so that you can
(13:09):
upload files up to 10 gigabytes.
They're enhancing theactual UI for uploading.
There's actually a progressive, likeyou can see the progress of your upload
the ability to download and edit anddelete the files And a lot of this has
to do with enhancing the experienceof the Azure Blob Storage integration.
Another thing that they're doing isyou can, I believe you're going to
(13:29):
be able to set up that Azure BlobStorage integration right in the
PowerPages Design Studio, as well asaccess those files via the web API.
So I think previously, if you storedfiles in Azure Storage Blob, it was
like they didn't exist in the web API.
Okay.
But that's another thing that's changingis that you'll be able to interact
with those files via the web API.
George (13:48):
Okay, we'll drop the link to that blog post in the notes.
There is also scan files for malware.
Okay.
that's, uh, It's a promise,
In release notes.
Let's see, and the other one, configurefile upload for SharePoint storage.
I assume it's just morestreamlined experience.
(14:09):
and similar to Blob Storage, you shouldbe able to upload files to SharePoint.
Any improvement in thisarea, yeah, would be welcome.
More certainly yeah.
The side loading, it's a bit painful.
You've done a few of those,
right?
companion apps that would do a properSharePoint integration with a smooth
(14:30):
experience and nice file upload and so on.
But it does take a bit ofeffort to achieve that.
And of course, it's
iframe, right?
Nick (14:40):
It's, yeah, it's often not pretty.
In fact, we I think it was a fewyears ago where I blogged about some
validation with the SharePoint stuff andactually got a question on that, that
I was just responding to where someonewanted to limit the total file size.
So they want to say, Hey,you can upload up to a total.
You can upload as many files as you want.
But combined, it can beno more than 25 megabytes.
(15:01):
That one's a bit of atricky solve on that.
The only way I could think to solvethat would be maybe a power automate
flow that you could, trigger throughthe web API that calculates how
much storage is taking up right now.
George (15:10):
Oh, don't get me started.
I just had a call a couple of weeksago, a call with a customer and say,
Hey, look, we can't upload files.
I said, remember the file sizeyou asked us to set to 10, 10
megabytes or something like this.
He said, yes, but I'm uploadingfile which says nine megabytes.
Why doesn't it allow me?
Oh, you want me to explain toyou what Base64 does to files.
Nick (15:35):
Uh,
George (15:36):
Because the file that's just for listeners, it's consider tip
of the podcast episode, that fileupload, the limit is set on base
64 encoded file and base64 tendsto blow up the size if it's binary.
So if you upload something like a zipfile, you can't compress it anymore.
(15:57):
So a good zip file, let's say ninemegabyte, chances are it will be by the
time it's encoded, it will be 11 or 12megabytes and it will blow up the limit.
So it's always approximate limit.
It's under that.
And it could be up totwo thirds under that.
Something to keep in mind.
(16:17):
It's never a precise number.
Scanning for malware, they used tobe solutions like you could set up
intermediate storage and we've doneit for one customer like files would
go into intermediate storage into blobstorage where they would get scanned.
And then once they scan, they would.
be picked up and upload it towhere the final destination.
(16:39):
So you upload file and it'sa couple minutes later, it
appears where it belongs.
Like it's yeah, we've done it.
I'm not sure what, how theexperience is going to be here.
If file is large, it willtake time to scan it.
What is going to be, it's like file.
I'm here, but
I'm not here.
Nick (16:55):
I know that's a huge
ask.
There's lots of.
Government contracts wherethat's a pretty firm requirement.
So it's good to see that there's going tobe something so that we can at least check
that box without, the more sophisticatedsolutions that you're talking about.
George (17:09):
I'm curious about user experience on that one.
Oh, no doubt.
That's actually very nice feature.
And since we're talking about smalland large businesses, for large
businesses, it's a nice featurebecause you're ticking the box.
For small businesses, it's anice feature because I don't have
to explain customers, like howimportant it is and just enable them.
And we're done.
(17:30):
Yep.
Moving on.
Transform natural language.
I'll let you talk about it, because I'mso opinionated about it, it's, I suspect
here you're empowering the wrong people.
There's medieval times, andsome lord calls upon his people
(17:52):
and says, Let's go to war.
Here's the weapons for you.
And says, dude, we grow wheat, right?
We don't fight.
No, there is the good, arrowsand bows and swords and things.
And those people get killed, right?
Pretty much very fast because thereis no weapon against trained army.
(18:16):
You're empowering the wrong people.
So that to me smells the same way.
It's if you need translation ofnatural language into Power Fx
formula chances are your formulais going to be so long you will not
be able to understand what it does.
And two, there's a good chancesthat we'll get it wrong.
(18:36):
It's just it will improve.
The second one will improve overthe time, but we struggle even now
with people documenting what theycreate and explaining their intent.
Here you just say some words and theformula appears and you record it
and No one else knows what the heckdid you mean by that and then you
(19:00):
go on vacation for three months andsomething else falls apart and it's
like, why this formula is there?
What did he mean by that?
Decipher That, on the other hand, is good.
this is kind of twosides of the same coin.
Someone writes a formula anddisappears into sunset, and someone
else would come back and say, whatthe heck did they mean by that?
(19:22):
And so they decode the formula andthen it goes like in the circles
and it will produce some magic.
Look as a study thing to helplearn, I find it quite valuable.
explain functions likedifference in Power Facts.
I can't remember off the topof my head, because I don't use
(19:42):
Power Facts day in, day out.
But for example, there'sconcatenate and there's concat.
And one works with the ta I don'tremember which one which, but one works
with tables, another one with strings.
Nick (19:54):
It replaces a google
search.
George (19:56):
yeah, it's things like that.
Anyway, but let's move on to somethinga little bit more interesting, unless
you have something to add to that.
Nick (20:02):
No, I think they're just, trying to get it to level with The liquid
stuff that already exists tryingto get parity between those two.
So makes sense
George (20:11):
I found git git hub copilot quite helpful in getting
the liquid expressions right.
I found it learns on the job.
You start, it generates somethingand say, dude, that's wrong.
It's oh, okay.
And it learns and you correctit and it learns its way.
And then the next time itgenerates the way you want it.
(20:31):
So it's adjusted.
So it's quite helpful.
It's definitely I find myselfwriting things much, much faster.
using suggestions, propersuggestions, discarding
suggestions, and things like that.
Anyway, let's move to web templates.
Oh that's interesting.
We should have a separate episodetalking to people about what web
(20:52):
templates are and how they work becausepeople now coming into PowerPages
Studio without doing hard time.
At lower level.
And they jump at the higher level andthey may not know what web templates are.
We're not gonna spend time right now.
But what's what do you think is commonin this area in preview, in October?
Nick (21:16):
So I found the name of this feature to honestly be a little misleading.
It says use power fx inweb template components.
And so web template components are thosekind of new things where you can create
a web template, develop the manifest, andthen have people within the design studio.
(21:37):
Insert those web templates into the thing.
So I don't think you canactually use Power Fx within
the web templates themselves.
Or, that's really not whatthis feature is about.
This is about how you can usePower Fx in the parameters that
are passed into the components.
So when a Power Page DesignStudio user is going to insert.
(22:01):
You're one of your web templatecomponents that they have the
ability to pass in parameters.
And I believe what this is in thoseparameters, you can insert your power fx
George (22:10):
commands.
one of the things, definitely.
It's authoring a Power Fxformula using the formula bar.
But the next bullet point I'm readingactually says you can use Power Fx,
but as you would in web template.
Utilization of data from Power Fx formularesults in the web template for logic and
experience.
Nick (22:31):
Yeah.
So I just, I wasn't sure if thatmeant for that because you've
passed in the data via the parameter
George (22:39):
I have
no idea.
But how much can youpass via the parameters?
Nick (22:42):
Yeah.
George (22:44):
parameters are only strings.
That's one of the limitations, right?
How much can you serialize it to that?
Nick (22:50):
Hey,
George (22:50):
That's not going to be very effective, but,
No.
Nick (22:53):
a string George.
Everything's a string.
George (22:55):
When we were studying high energy physics, string theory was very popular.
I don't know what happened.
It's still there, but it was very popular.
Now, when I was studying, it was quitea kind of one of the more newer, shinier
things, but yes, everything is a string.
You're right, both on quantumlevel and in power fx formulas.
(23:16):
Or rather manifests for templates.
Do you see in the future like power fxmingling with liquid or replacing it?
What do you think
the intent is here?
Nick (23:27):
I find it hard to believe at some point that Microsoft would get like, would
actually replace it just there's just somuch of it out there for, so for them to
cut it out you're looking at something onthe scale of the, the enhanced data model
migration or the bootstrap five migration.
And so I don't know if there'sreally a need to eliminate it.
But I could see that the investments.
(23:50):
that they make, which is honestlyat this point, relatively small.
When's the last time wehad a new liquid feature?
It's relatively rare.
All I can really think about is as they'veadded new support for new field types,
whether, file or images, that sort ofthing, they are adding that to liquid, but
in general, that you're not seeing that.
seen a whole lot ofinvestment on the liquid side.
So I would say thatwould probably continue.
(24:11):
They'd probably still want to maintainparity, but if they are going to invest
in some cool new, let's just say wayto, to build forms using low code stuff,
that's going to be done with power fxand maybe not so much with liquid, man.
That would be real painful totry and get rid of all the liquid
that already exists in the world.
George (24:31):
I'm not sold on the replacement thing, even if it was possible
because fundamentally I think liquidis a templating language, whilst
Power Fx is expression language.
So they're fundamentally differentbecause in Liquid you, you mix
and match HTML and the output.
(24:54):
Liquid is all about string output, right?
That's what you produce.
But it's so easy to write templatesand mix and match like HTML and
output of the liquid expressions.
and add some processing,like using objects.
The part where Liquid does someprocessing, that is tedious
part, because Liquid is justnot designed to do it very well.
(25:18):
like looping through things.
There are constructs,but they're a bit clunky.
So that's something that Power Fxwould do well, but I struggle to see
how Power Fx would deal with HTML.
What are you going to do?
Like in PHP echo strings to the output?
What, how are you going to do thetemplate, the layout of things?
(25:40):
I don't know.
I need to play with it.
Have
you played with PowerFX?
Is it
available?
Nick (25:46):
Just a little bit.
It was mentioned in one of mycommunity calls and someone was
asking about, could you edit it inlike using the VS code integration.
And so I created some, apower of X formula and I tried
to see how it was written.
And it was, I forget the exact format,but it did look like you could edit it.
There was some sort of I forget if itwas, some curly braces and then, but
(26:07):
there was some kind of similar to liquid.
So some sort of token that wouldidentify that this was power fx.
So I, in looking at it, it seemedyeah, if you use those, if you open
and close your power fx area thatyou should be able to do it in there.
George (26:22):
And you would use Liquid for that, right?
Bracket percent PowerFX, bracket
percent, then you write PowerFX end
PowerFX.
Nick (26:30):
which one would get evaluated first,
Could you write power fxthat generated the link?
I wonder which one they'd process first.
George (26:36):
Oh, that's interesting thing to try Power Fx spitting liquid?
Does it get picked up?
Or liquid spitting?
Something to try out.
Definitely.
Let's move on.
That's it for Design Studio,whatever this area is.
Let's move into Copilot.
This is actually quite aninteresting thing, because Unlike
Copilot for creating Websites.
(27:01):
This is not about it.
Though it's in preamble, they talkabout makers can use copilot and power
pages to create parts, yada yada.
That's fine.
They still didn't addresswhat I'm dreaming of.
It's like point to the website and say,I want my site to look like that website.
Bring it over.
But that's coming.
I can do bits of it right nowwith chat, GPT or whatever you
(27:24):
want, a copilot, other copilots.
And I can pull apart the website and say,give me design elements and this and that.
One of the selling points of ADX,never got any facelifts since then.
those templates, partner template andhelp call center or help desk template
(27:47):
customer service, whatever it was.
So there were a lot of templates and thisone is a newer one, community template.
That's a new reincarnation offorums and blogs, I believe.
What else is there
in community template?
Nick (28:05):
So that was one thing I wasn't quite clear on.
Are they referring to the, causethere's the modern community and then
there's the old one, do you thinkthis is the modern community template?
George (28:15):
They don't specify.
I would think
so.
Nick (28:18):
Because I do the forums exist in the modern community.
I didn't think they did, but I could be,we haven't used the modern community one.
I thought the modern communityone was just about ideas.
I think it's still the kind of that older,the older school community template.
Cause that's where the forums
George (28:36):
To describe the, what do you care to describe with the features?
Nick (28:40):
So basically we've got some copilot features that are going to help you if
you are using the forum functionalitythat exists in some of those templates.
So one is to actually have anAI moderator for the forum.
So you can have the the AI try toidentify forum posts that are spam, or
(29:00):
they also mentioned forum posts thatdon't meet the community guidelines.
So you can have it automaticallyjust filter those out without
any human intervention.
They also are talkingabout thread summarization.
If you want your users to not haveto read pages and pages of posts in
a particular thread, and you justwant a nice, AI summary of, here's
the question, here's the answer, andhave AI give you that summary for you.
(29:23):
They've got that coming as well asjust using enhancing the search.
So using an AI search within theactual forums, and I think other
aspects of the community template.
So an enhancement in the search area.
So those are the three areaswithin the PowerPages Copilot area.
And again, so these arefeatures not for the makers.
So not to help you build the site,but for the actual users of your site.
(29:45):
In this case, they talkabout the community template.
George (29:48):
Interesting.
That's not called copilots.
These are called AI Moderator, AISearch, and AI Thread Summarization.
I guess because they're notthey're not that community facing.
You don't, as a member of the community,as a user, you will not face any of these.
It's behind the scene action, mostof it, thread summarization is one of
(30:10):
the most useful features that you seeright now on the web where AI is used
and ubiquitous Amazon reviews, right?
That's a good example where it's superuseful because you have 700 reviews.
And then you've got summary sayspeople like the color and the shape
(30:32):
of I don't know, of the speakers andpeople dislike the functionality and
short lived, Nature of those speakers,because most of them break down within
two months, something like this.
And those summaries is super useful.
Incidentally, I came across of thesituation, you go to the forums and
then you find here's the question.
(30:53):
And here's verified answer and you readit and say, dude, that's just wrong.
This is not the answer.
And then you start reading andthen say, this is the answer.
Not that one.
This is the answer, right?
And interestingly enough, if youfeed it into OpenAI or Compiler,
or whatever you're feeding itinto, it will pick those up.
(31:15):
It picks up the sentiments ofpeople talking about proposed
solutions and things like that.
And you see it like on Stack Overflow andon forums when something is marked as the
answer, but it's actually not the answer.
Hopefully, thread summarizationwill give better experience
with the suggested solutions.
Or, say, hey, look, People talked aboutfor seven pages, but there is no solution.
(31:40):
The problem is still there, sothat's definitely very much useful.
Okay that's pretty much it.
You think so, but wait a minute.
Started, I think we both independentlyopened up something where we
started but we no longer go there.
Dynamics 365 released notes and dida quick search on PowerPages, and
(32:02):
lo and behold, what do we have here?
Nick (32:06):
I want to keep this show family friendly, so I'm not going
to give all of my thoughts onwhat I think of the events portal.
But it, there were some references inthe Dynamics 365 release plans about
a new, improved portal to allow peopleto view events, register for events
(32:30):
and what I thought was interesting wasthe fact that it wasn't just it's oh,
it's for power pages it was you couldembed it on power pages or you could
embed it elsewhere which just broughtup all of the terrible memories of the
Kind of previous version of this thatwas built on angular and it was again
you could you could host it with powerpages or you could host it yourself And
(32:55):
yeah George are you excited for this?
George (32:57):
Excited is not the word I would use, but I'm more
curious than anything else.
It's been in the making for a long time,and people continue to weep and cry and
use Angular, the app, because we don'thave any better experience than that.
And I think we should make a bet what theheck is going to be the implementation.
(33:20):
Just to read out the conditions areso portal hosting options embedded in
an existing website embedded is sucha broad name, could be iframe could
be leveraged and out of the box filepages templates for quick deployments.
So one thing is clear.
They're probably not going to do it twice.
So they're not going to doanything special for PowerPages.
(33:42):
So PowerPages will be just awebsite where you can embed.
And what they're going for is a list ofupcoming events and detailed summary for
each event included session informationand speakers and ability to register.
Ability to register is there now becauseit's embedded forms, marketing forms
that do allow you to register right now.
(34:03):
So there is nothing groundbreaking there.
So do you want to make a bet howthey're going to implement it?
Nick (34:11):
Oh, man.
Like, how would I, do that?
Yeah because if you're goingto embed the iFrame, the iFrame
still has to live somewhere.
Just some ugly URL that like,yeah, some iframe that's built
directly into that marketing thing
George (34:28):
my bet is surely they will not go for React, right?
Because that's just Angular
make two
Nick (34:37):
probably build it react themselves, but they're not going to say, here's
the react code deployed somewhere.
, George: How on earth would you recompile it
then?
No, I'm just saying that they would,
They would host the react codethemselves and you embedded in an iframe.
So within your iframeit's their react code,
But they're not giving youthe react code to actually
George (34:55):
So you can't even change the layout of the thing?
That's the mystery to me.
And with iframe now I have somedoubts about iframe, you know why?
The screenshot that I have, it'sprobably designed in whatever
Microsoft designer, right?
It's not real.
Let's be honest.
It's got sign in button in the corner.
(35:16):
With iframe, you're going to haveall sorts of issues with trying
to sign in inside the iframe
or outside the iframe.
It's just
going to be a
Nick (35:28):
does the, does, does the history of this events portal over the last
10 years give you any confidence thatthere just won't be all of these issues?
Like normally I'd be like theycan't possibly be, come up with
something that wouldn't, thatwould be so silly like that.
But I can't say that I have the confidenceto say that's not going to be a thing.
Yeah.
George (35:47):
were doing it, honestly, I would say I would say something to the tune.
In PowerPages, createa nice lean template.
That just works directly with marketing.
You have ability to change thingson the backend, talk directly to
the backend on the marketing sideor CIJ customer side journey side.
(36:09):
So do that.
There is a events API that you canuse because registration is a mystery
where they write registration data.
I would do that.
And then in parallel, I will do atotally separate implementation.
Could be React, could be somethingelse based on this events API.
I would give people referenceimplementation and then say,
(36:32):
knock yourself out becausewhatever is your hosting engine,
whatever you want do it, right?
If you react guy, he's yourreact way to approach it.
Give the substance.
Event API, event managementAPI gives you enough.
Things to, to go by, right?
If you want to build a website,build the website, if I were to say
(36:55):
that this is what you have to do,George, you have to embed it on the
website or host it in PowerPages.
It needs to be the same code.
I would probably go for spittingout HTML but do it in a smart way.
So it's not embedded, but sorry, it'snot iframe, but actually embedded.
Similar way as people generateforms, the form can be generated by
(37:18):
JavaScript and inserted on the fly.
So I would do something like that.
Then I can preserve the semantics ofthe data and say, whatever styling
you want, he's CSS reference.
And you do your own styling because thenyou can make it look whichever way you
want.
So that's what I would do.
I would, sorry.
Nick (37:39):
I still think it's going to be an iframe.
George (37:40):
Okay.
You say iframe and we'll come backwhen we're going to come back.
Public preview November.
We'll do a checkpoint in November,and Nick saying iFrame, I hoping the
team will not let me down and willspit appropriate HTML that inserted
by using some smart JavaScript
Nick (38:01):
see, now I'm in a lose situation because either I'm wrong
or I'm right and it's iframe.
George (38:07):
That's about it.
What's coming up in the next six toeight months, there's more coming up,
but this is what's in release notes.
let's put it way.
Thank you very much and until next time.
Nick (38:19):
I'm looking forward to uh, seeing who's right.
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