2020: New Year, New Job
Happy 2020, a new year, a new decade, and for me, a new job.
My new role is still with Microsoft, still a Premier Field Engineer, but now I am focusing on the Power Platform. The Power Platform consists of three pillars: Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. When I began working for Microsoft, I was focused on SharePoint, I wrote a blog about that experience here. Many people ask me ‘What do you do for Microsoft’, I’ll begin with that.
A Premier Field Engineer focuses on the customer. We go onsite or remotely, have conversations about how to use the technology they bought from us. We will show them demos, guide them along to a solution on a defined business gap, and more often than not, we are also the first line of defense for troubleshooting. I do this for the the first two pillars of the ones I listed above.
I feel so powerful supporting such powerfully named technology. Even my skinny, wimpy-dude 16 year old self now feels fantastically vindicated!!
Power Apps is our app creation platform. For those of you who are familiar with Open Source technology it is built on the Apache Cordova engine. The beauty of this is that it enables cross-platform development using standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript. The best way to describe this platform is a ‘Less code, more Power’ platform. Anyone with little to no development experience, can create an app in less than an hour. This is increasing the productivity of the workplace by empowering what we call ‘Citizen Developers’. A citizen developer is someone who can create an app using an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas. Think about the cost and time benefits of opening these doors that were previously required exclusive and expensive knowledge. I do want to state, with obvious clarity, that this model does require caution. Governance is absolutely needed to prevent a proliferation of apps by people who may have the best intentions but wield too much Power (pardon the pun) for their own good. This document on that subject is a good start. Now onto Power Automate!
Inevitably, after an app is created, there is a need for some kind of workflow process. The most common one I see is an approval process. For example, this app I helped one of my customers create now needs to do the following:
Send a notification to an administrator/approver
Upon approval, a Microsoft Team site gets created
Upon rejection, a rejection notice is sent to requestor
That is where Power Automate comes into play via Flows. Flows are comprised of a Trigger and then a series of steps that do specific tasks. A trigger can be a new file is created in a SharePoint List, an email from a certain address is received, something that ‘Triggers’ the workflow. Actions are things like send a notification to someone, ask for an approval and so on. Below is an example of the Flow that creates a Microsoft Team channel upon the (request) of one via a SharePoint list.
Lastly, I will quickly mention Power BI. I do not support this product but for all of you data scientist and people who have fun creating charts and graphs from data, this is your playground.
Below is an example of a chart created in Power BI that reads data from a SharePoint list.
I’m very excited that puberty is long gone (see scary picture of me at 16 above), that I work for Microsoft and that I get to support a new and exciting product like the Power Platform!!!
