The first change that I saw, that is not really related to the solution experience, but only the ability to navigate between the different parts of the platform are links to Chatbots where you can create new chatbots or list the chatbots that you have already created for your environments. The image below shows the new links that are available in the Maker Portal.

The next part is a few additional to the solution experience. While navigating to a solution and opening a particular entity for example, you will see a few buttons added to the command bar in your maker experience. The new buttons are Add subcomponents, Edit data in Excel, Export data, Export to data lake and AI Builder.

The Export to data lake and AI Builder are already available in the left navigation, so I won’t really discuss these.

The Add subcomponents, something that is available in the Classic solution explorer allows the addition of entity components to your entity, without having to go back to the list of components and then adding from there. This was something that has been desired for a while.

The Edit data in Excel will download an Excel file with all the columns in your entity. You will need to connect to the environment by signing in Microsoft PowerApps Office Add-in pane. You will be able to make changes to your data and then publish it so that it writes it back to your entity records.

The Export data will download a zip file containing a csv with the data from your entity. This can be used for later migrating data to other environments, backup or other transformation requirements.

The final change that I saw in the solution experience was in the Forms tab of the entity component. A new button called Form Settings has been added, again to bring closer parity to the experience that we have in our Classic interface.

This button allows us to change form settings which include the Form Order, Fallback forms and Security roles. The interface is cleaner and provides drag and drop functionality to set the form order. It seems though that Security roles are not yet available, but hopefully sometime in the near future.

I hope that Microsoft continues to sync the classic explorer and the modern explorer so that we will all eventually have to only work with a single interface.

The post June 2020 Updates to Solution Experience appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

I ran my tests using 4 different types of business cards and wanted to see how well this works. The results overall were pretty good, but not perfect. It is still hard to expect perfect results, as not all Business cards are created equal.

I created a small Canvas App with the AI Builder Business card reader component, and attempted to perform recognition on the business cards that I provided. I had a set of business cards to test and the results of the majority of them were pretty good. First, I need to see what information can be retrieved from the business cards. The list below, shows the fields that can be retrieved from the Business card reader component:

First Name, Last Name, Full Name, Job Title, Department, Company, Street, City, State, Postal Code, Post Office Box, Country, Full Address, Business Phone, Business Fax, Mobile Phone, Email Address, Web Site.

The three images below contain the screenshots of the scan results. I blurred some of the information to provide privacy to the people that I scanned their business cards. Even with the blurs you will see that the results are pretty accurate. My own business card is two sided, where the company name is on the other side, so the scanner thought the company name was Microsoft based on the MVP logo. Overall I was happy with the results.

I did scan some other business cards, where the results were not so great. I am not sure the reason, if it had to do with coloring, text or design, but I am happy with the results.

I also tried to use the Business Card Reader PCF Control that is available with the Sales Enterprise version of Dynamics 365. The results were similar, as this uses the same model that I used for the Canvas app. The difference here is that the Account Name (Company Name) is a Customer field. PCF Controls cannot be bound to lookup fields, so in there lies the problem. Technically we could bind this to a text field and add our own logic to validate if the business name exists (on create), and create an account record and populate the lookup if there is no match, or if there is just populate the business record. You can use Power Automate flow as well to call the AI Builder Read business card information action, which will read an image file and provide the fields to populate your target record (regardless of system).

I will be updating this blog article with a link to the YouTube video that will demonstrate the same.

The post AI Builder Business Card Reader appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

First thing is first, login to your Power Apps environment, and in the left navigation under AI Builder click on Build. This will show you the available models that you can use. In our case we will use the Form Processing Model which was recently updated.

To get started we will provide a name to the AI model, and click on create. Notice that we will be required to provide 5 documents (or more) with the same layout.

The AI Builder Model wizard will start and ask us to upload the documents. You can click on the Add documents button on the command bar or on the screen to start.

You can add your documents from local storage, SharePoint or an Azure Blob Storage, something that was not available in earlier releases.

In my case, I had 6 documents of the IRS W-9 form that I prepared earlier available at local storage.

The wizard will then show you the list of documents that you selected. Make sure that you select at least 6 documents for this purpose. Click on the Upload documents button

You will then see that the documents have been uploaded. Click on the Close button to continue with the wizard and analyze the document structure.

Next you will thumbnails of all the documents that you uploaded. To start analyzing the documents click on Analyze, or if you need to add additional documents, click on the Add documents button in the command bar.

A modal window will pop up showing that the process is analyzing the documents. Based on the complexity of the documents, the number of pages and the amount of fields this can take up to a few minutes. In my case, since they were all single page with not too many fields, this took a little under a minute.

After the analysis has been completed, the wizard will move to the next phase which is adding the form fields. It will show you that 0 fields have been selected. Click on the thumbnail and then click on the Next button to start selecting the fields

You will be navigated to a page that contains a copy of your form with the fields that AI Builder found. You will need to click on each of the fields that you want as part of the form and add it to the list of selected fields

You can simply select the field on the form, change the name of the field if you need to, and click on the check mark in the tooltip window

Repeat this for all the fields that you want. If there are fields that AI Builder did not detect or select for you, you can select them yourselves (a new feature from yesterday’s release), and add them to the list of fields.

Once done accept the fields, which will redirect you to a Save page. Select the form fields that you want to save, and Save your changes.

The next and almost final phases is to train the AI model. Click on the button that will start the training. This might take some time, so you can navigate away and come back later when the training has been completed.

Once the training has been completed, you can do a test run with a different form, and then publish your changes. When your changes have been published you can use the AI Builder form directly from a Canvas App or Power Automate flow.

This entire process took less than an hour from start to finish (once I had the forms completed and ready). Now it’s your turn. Find a form that you would like to use AI for, and see how easy it is to get this up and running.

Please review the blog post from Joe Fernandez on the Microsoft Power Apps blog:

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ai-builder-form-processing-now-lets-you-recognize-undetected-fields/

The post New Features in Form Processing for AI Builder appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.