Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog

Considerations for Embedding Canvas Apps in Model Driven forms

We have all seen different articles and posts that detail the steps of how to embed a Canvas App within a Model-Driven form by adding the Canvas App control to a field on the form, but sometimes that might not be enough for the requirements that we have in place.

How to start with Project Oakdale (MS Teams and Power Apps)

In this blog post I will review the recent announcement from Microsoft Ignite, where we saw first hand Project Oakdale, or Power Apps within Microsoft Teams. The post will show you how to enable Power Apps within your teams tenant, and how to start working on your first app.

Update Data in your CDS using Azure SQL Server, Azure Functions or Connectors from SQL Data

Recently, while working on a project that needed to update the Exchange rates in CDS, I was tasked at finding a solution that would be able to retrieve data from a SQL Server hosted on an Azure Virtual Machine. There were so many different approaches, and security was the main one, but I decided to do a deep dive and testing out how Power Automate will be able to accommodate these requests.

Using the Maker Portal to Export to Data Lake

In my current role the matter of using a data lake has come up, and I wanted to get ready in case this implementation will become a need. I followed instructions from some of the published Microsoft blogs, and this blog post provides step by step instructions on how to configure the Azure Storage account to enable the Export to Data Lake feature as well as running the same process from within the Power Apps Maker Portal

Email enhancements in 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2, Microsoft has made several enhancements related to the email experience in model-driven apps. This post will cover the email file attachment enhancements as well as the new experience for email templates.

Document Generation Enhancements in 2020 Release Wave 2

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2, Microsoft has made some enhancements to the document generation capabilities and file attachments in model-driven apps. This first post will cover the document generation capabilities and the generation of pdf documents based on document templates.

Customer Service Workspace (Preview) in 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan

For anyone who has experience with Microsoft Omni channel interface, and has enabled the 2020 Wave 2 Release Plan, there is a new app that appeared with the name Customer Service Workspace (Preview). As noted in the release plan, the multisession app allows customer service agent to multitask on several customer cases simultaneously and seamlessly switch among issues without losing context of the in-progress work.

Sending Emails to all customers using Power Automate

Recently in the forums, there were a few questions on how to send emails to all of my customers. While there might be different options, and the right solution to this might greatly depend on the frequency that you need to be sending this as well as the number of contacts, I thought I would demonstrate a few different approaches to implement this using Microsoft Power Automate.

Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2 plan

Today, July 8, 2020, Microsoft released the Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 2 plan documentation with a list of all the features that will be made available in the Wave 2 timeframe which starts October 2020 until March 2021. Going through all of the features is almost impossible unless you want a few hundred pages of documentation.