Intro to Power Platform Copilots: Power Platform Global AI Hack Sept 18 10AM PST

Intro to Power Platform Copilots: Power Platform Global AI Hack Sept 18 10AM PST

by | Sep 16, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Picture showing Intro to Copilots session bannerPicture showing Intro to Copilots session banner


Power Platform AI Global Hack. Please visit here for more details: http://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai


 


Build, innovate, and HackTogether! It’s time to get started building solutions with AI in the Power Platform! HackTogether is your playground for experimenting with the new Copilot and AI features in the Power Platform. With mentorship from Microsoft experts and access to the latest tech, you will learn how to build solutions in Power Platform by leveraging AI. The possibilities are endless for what you can create… plus you can submit your hack for a chance to win exciting prizes! ?


 


WHAT IS THE SESSION ABOUT?


This is the first full week of Hack Together: Power Platform AI Global Hack! Join the hacking:rocket:: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai


 


In this session you’ll learn about:



  • Power Apps Copilots for building and editing desktop and mobile applications

  • Power Automate Copilot for creating and editing automations

  • Power Virtual Agents Copilot and conversation booster for creating intelligent chatbots

  • Power Pages Copilot for creating business websites


You’ll get a high level overview of what you can do with these Copilots and get live demos of them in action! Please visit here for more details: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai


 


WHO IS IT AIMED AT?


This session is for anyone who likes to get into the weeds building apps and automations and are interesting in learning a skill that can accelerate their career. If you’re interested in how AI can help you build solutions faster and with more intelligence in the Power Platform then this session is for you!


 


WHY SHOULD MEMBERS ATTEND?


Build, innovate, and HackTogether! It’s time to get started building solutions with AI in the Power Platform! HackTogether is your playground for experimenting with the new Copilot and AI features in the Power Platform. With mentorship from Microsoft experts and access to the latest tech, you will learn how to build solutions in Power Platform by leveraging AI. The possibilities are endless for what you can create… plus you can submit your hack for a chance to win exciting prizes!


 


MORE LEARNING/PREREQUISITES:


To follow along, you need to access the onboarding resources here: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai


 


WATCH THIS VIDEO FOR PREPREQUISTITES 



– You will need to create a free Microsoft 365 Developer Program account: https://aka.ms/M365Developers and a free Power Platform Developer Account: https://aka.ms/PowerAppsDevPlan


 


To view all the required environment setup, click here: https://aka.ms/hacktogether/powerplatform-ai and setup a Microsoft Developer Account and Power Platform Developer Account. This will give you access to all the services and Licenses you will need to follow along and build your own solution.


 


SPEAKERS:


April Dunnam – https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/advocates/april-dunnam

Announcing Unified Trial and Developer Environments for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations apps 

Announcing Unified Trial and Developer Environments for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations apps 

by | Sep 15, 2023 | Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This is a continuation of an earlier blog post on unified environment management options in Power Platform admin center.  

Customers of finance and operations apps have historically had two choices for deploying their development workloads: self-hosted as a virtual machine on-premises or hosted on a customer-provided Azure subscription.  Both of these models have been available through the Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) admin center and have been heavily used by more than 99% of customers.  This speaks to the extensibility requirements that enterprise customers have to enrich the products, creating competitive advantage and tackling unique circumstances. 

Over the last couple of years, customers have been increasingly seeking faster and low-code extensibility options to complement their core Dynamics 365 business software.   To that end, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of unified, developer environments that IT administrators can deploy directly from Power Platform admin center. 

New environment templates in Power Platform 

Customers who have purchased Dynamics 365 customer engagement have been able to enjoy a concept in Power Platform known as environment templates, which allow for faster creation of new sandbox environments that include Microsoft Dataverse, their Dynamics 365 application of choice, and several other related apps in a single deployment workflow.  Now, finance and operations apps customers will find new templates available to them in Power Platform admin center for Finance (Preview), Supply Chain Management (Preview), and Project Operations for ERP (Preview).  This will include Dataverse, the finance and operations core enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, and related apps for dual-write, virtual tables, and business events pre-installed and configured so that they are ready for immediate use. 

How to deploy these new templates 

If you want to simply try the deployment process for free, you can read about signing up for a no-cost, subscription-based, trial offer.  After which, you will see templates such as these when you deploy a new trial environment via Power Platform: 

Trial subscriptions are limited to 30 days, and you can only deploy up to 3 trial environments at the same time.  During preview, we will not support converting the trial to a sandbox environment. However, this restriction will eventually be removed. 

For the unified developer environments, during the preview these are limited to deployment via Power Platform for administrators PowerShell.  For more information, see the step-by-step tutorial.   

Storage-based provisioning model 

As part of this preview, the new unified, developer environments will utilize the storage-based provisioning model that other Dynamics 365 applications rely upon today.  For finance and operations apps customers, they will have two main categories of storage to manage: Dataverse database and Finance and operations database: 

Every new environment requires at least 1 gigabyte (GB) of available storage for both Dataverse and Operations database capacity to deploy.  Capacity is granted from finance and operations apps user licenses, sandbox add-on purchases, as well as add-on capacity packs.  For more information on storage, as it relates to finance and operations apps, see the documentation. 

Customers, partners, and ISVs can leverage this storage-based capacity model, and it will not bill to your Azure subscription.   

More capabilities for admins and developers 

Historically administrators for finance and operations apps have needed to manage time-consuming and complex tasks on behalf of the development teams they support.  Such examples include backing up and restoring copies of production data over to the developer VMs hosted on-premises or in Azure, manually deploying new environments and assigning remote desktop credentials to a developer, and managing virtual machine uptime schedules to reduce cost.   

Now administrators can: 

  • Deploy environments at scale using admin tools like PowerShell or the Power Platform API.   
  • Copy Lifecycle Services-based production or sandbox environments directly to the new, unified, developer environments both via the new admin center or via admin tools. 
  • Add developers in Dataverse to give them permissions to deploy X++ to the new environment. 
  • Add microservice add-ins to the developer environments such as Planning Optimization, and Export to Data Lake. 
  • Enable customer-managed keys (CMK) for Dataverse and finance and operations apps together. 

And more capabilities are coming!  For developers, they can enjoy a simpler way of writing and deploying X++ alongside Dataverse solutions. For more information, see the related Unified Developer blog post. 

Call to action 

Ready to get started?  Check out the Unified admin experience for finance and operations apps article to learn about this new way of provisioning developer and trial workloads.  If you have any questions or feedback, please join our community in Viva Engage.  We look forward to hearing from you! 

The post Announcing Unified Trial and Developer Environments for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations apps  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Private preview of Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database

Private preview of Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database

by | Sep 15, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We are very happy to announce the private preview of Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database. Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database enables working with CSV, Parquet, and Delta files stored on Azure Storage Account v2 (Azure Blob Storage) and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Azure SQL Database will now support: CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE (CET), CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE AS SELECT (CETAS) as well as enhanced OPENROWSET capabilities to work with the new file formats.


 


The list of capabilities available in private preview are:



 


Metadata functions:


 


Just like in SQL Server 2022 (Data Virtualization with PolyBase for SQL Server 2022 – Microsoft SQL Server Blog) and Azure SQL Managed Instance (Data virtualization now generally available in Azure SQL Managed Instance – Microsoft Community Hub), Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database also supports updated metadata functions, wildcard search mechanism, and procedures that enables the users to query across different folders and leverage partition pruning, commands like:



  • Filename();

  • Filepath();

  • sp_describe_first_result_set.


 


Benefits:


 


Major benefits of Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database are:



  • No data movement: Access real-time data where it is.

  • T-SQL language: Ability to leverage all the benefits of the T-SQL language, its commands, enhancements, and familiarity.

  • One source for all your data: Users and applications can use Azure SQL Database as a data hub, accessing all the required data in a single environment.

  • Security: Leverage SQL security capabilities to simplify permissions, credential management, and control

  • Export: Easily export data as CSV or Parquet to any Azure Storage location, either to empower other applications or reduce cost.


 


Getting started:


 


For simplicity, we are going to use publicly available NYC Taxi dataset (NYC Taxi and Limousine yellow dataset – Azure Open Datasets | Microsoft Learn) that allows anonymous access. 


 


 


 

-- Create data source for NYC public dataset:
CREATE EXTERNAL DATA SOURCE NYCTaxiExternalDataSource
WITH (LOCATION = 'abs://nyctlc@azureopendatastorage.blob.core.windows.net');

-- Query all files with .parquet extension in folders matching name pattern:
SELECT TOP 1000 *
FROM OPENROWSET(
 BULK 'yellow/puYear=*/puMonth=*/*.parquet',
 DATA_SOURCE = 'NYCTaxiExternalDataSource',
 FORMAT = 'parquet'
) AS filerows;

-- Schema discovery:
EXEC sp_describe_first_result_set N'
 SELECT
 vendorID, tpepPickupDateTime, passengerCount
 FROM
 OPENROWSET(
  BULK ''yellow/*/*/*.parquet'',
  DATA_SOURCE = ''NYCTaxiExternalDataSource'',
  FORMAT=''parquet''
 ) AS nyc';

-- Query top 100 files and project file path and file name information for each row:
SELECT TOP 100 filerows.filepath(1) as [Year_Folder], 
filerows.filepath(2) as [Month_Folder],
filerows.filename() as [File_name], 
filerows.filepath() as [Full_Path]
FROM OPENROWSET(
 BULK 'yellow/puYear=*/puMonth=*/*.parquet',
 DATA_SOURCE = 'NYCTaxiExternalDataSource',
 FORMAT = 'parquet') AS filerows;

-- Create external file format for Parquet:
CREATE EXTERNAL FILE FORMAT DemoFileFormat
WITH ( FORMAT_TYPE=PARQUET );

-- Create external table:
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE tbl_TaxiRides(
 vendorID VARCHAR(100) COLLATE Latin1_General_BIN2,
 tpepPickupDateTime DATETIME2,
 tpepDropoffDateTime DATETIME2,
 passengerCount INT,
 tripDistance FLOAT,
 puLocationId VARCHAR(8000),
 doLocationId VARCHAR(8000),
 startLon FLOAT,
 startLat FLOAT,
 endLon FLOAT,
 endLat FLOAT,
 rateCodeId SMALLINT,
 storeAndFwdFlag VARCHAR(8000),
 paymentType VARCHAR(8000),
 fareAmount FLOAT,
 extra FLOAT,
 mtaTax FLOAT,
 improvementSurcharge VARCHAR(8000),
 tipAmount FLOAT,
 tollsAmount FLOAT,
 totalAmount FLOAT
)
WITH (
 LOCATION = 'yellow/puYear=*/puMonth=*/*.parquet',
 DATA_SOURCE = NYCTaxiExternalDataSource,
 FILE_FORMAT = DemoFileFormat
);

-- Query the external table:
SELECT TOP 1000 * FROM tbl_TaxiRides;

 


 


 


 


Private Preview Sign-up form:


 


Data Virtualization in Azure SQL Database is in active development, Private Preview users will help shape the future of the feature, with regular interactions with Data Virtualization product team. If you want to be part of the private preview a sign-up form is required and can be found here.


 


HugoQueiroz_MSFT_0-1694710909771.png


 

Leverage Warehouse management only mode to optimize your business 

Leverage Warehouse management only mode to optimize your business 

by | Sep 15, 2023 | Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Introduction

In the fast-paced realm of modern business, companies often find themselves in need of agile warehousing solutions that can quickly adapt to changing customer demands. This evolution frequently involves a departure from their central ERP(enterprise resource planning) system, enabling the rapid establishment of a new warehousing entity. This shift requires the separation of warehouse management functionality from the broader ERP functions. In certain cases, the inexorable shift towards cloud-based operations drives the adoption of cloud-based warehouse systems.

The swift adoption of advanced warehouse management systems in a two-tier environment, working in harmony with any ERP system, represents a significant leap forward in operational efficiency. This dynamic solution provides robust core Warehouse Management System (WMS) capabilities, supports shared warehousing, seamlessly facilitates extended warehousing scenarios beyond advanced core WMS capabilities through pre-configured integrations with Microsoft’s suite of cloud solutions, including Sustainability Cloud, Intelligent Order Management, PowerBi, and a wide array of others. At the same time, it offers the flexibility to effortlessly integrate with numerous third-party Material Handling Equipment (MHE) systems, cloud-based printing solutions, and carrier hub cloud platforms.

Depending on specific operational requirements, businesses may choose to implement a Warehouse Management Only solution to address temporary or growing warehousing needs. These solutions offer customizable deployment options finely tuned to align with the enterprise’s unique demands. Operating in Warehouse management only mode enhances warehouse capabilities, ensuring a trifecta of flexibility, efficiency, and scalability—all achieved without necessitating a comprehensive overhaul of the existing system.

The embrace of Warehouse Management Only mode optimizes warehouse operations in an exceptionally effective manner, unlocking transformative potential that should not be underestimated. Take the plunge into these possibilities today by exploring the preview release and immersing yourself in the profound impact it can have on your business.

You can use lightweight source documents that are dedicated to inbound and outbound shipment orders to communicate between the systems. These documents focus exclusively on warehouse management, so they can replace multiple types of general-purpose documents (such as sales orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders) from a pure warehouse management perspective.

Warehouse management only mode also provides several deployment options to support your business needs. You can use Supply Chain Management to handle only warehouse operations, or you can use it to handle warehousing plus a wider range of processes (such as sales, purchase, and production orders). You can also set up a dedicated legal entity in Supply Chain Management that handles only the warehouse management processes for external systems.

To learn more about how Warehouse management only mode works and how to set it up, see Warehouse management only mode in Supply Chain Management.

Conclusion

Warehouse management only mode is a great way to enhance your warehouse management capabilities without having to overhaul your existing systems. It offers flexibility, efficiency, and scalability for your warehouse operations. Don’t miss this opportunity to try out this feature and see how it can transform your business. Try out the preview release today and get ready to experience the power of Warehouse management only mode. 

Supply Chain at Microsoft

Take a tour – Supply Chain Management | Microsoft Dynamics 365

Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot: Dynamics 365 AI webpage

The post Leverage Warehouse management only mode to optimize your business  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Adding Regional Formats to Reports in Business Central

Adding Regional Formats to Reports in Business Central

by | Sep 14, 2023 | Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Business Central 2023 release wave 2 introduces regional formats for reports, which adds a new dimension of customization for reports. This feature gives you more flexibility to tailor how reports print, according to your unique needs. Addressing inherent limitations, such as the inability to customize region formats for specific reports, the absence of support for designating a specific format for Customers and Vendors, and the reliance on report format settings from My Settings, this enhancement simplifies the reporting experience in Business Central. In this article, we’ll dive into the mechanics of these changes and explore how they enhance the overall reporting process in Business Central.

Behavior and Priority Order

To understand how the new regional format feature works, let’s explore its behavior and order of priority. This insight will help you grasp how Business Central determines the language and format to use for reports in different situations, so you can adjust these settings to suit your business requirements.

1. Request Page: Advanced Settings Take Center Stage

The highest priority in the report generation process resides with the advanced settings on the report request page. When you generate a report, you can specify the language and format you want to use for the report.

Advanced settings in the report request page

2. Report Object in AL: Precise Configuration

The heart of the matter lies in the AL triggers associated with the report object. Reports now include two important properties: Report.Language and Report.FormatRegion. These properties, defined within the AL triggers, play a key role in configuring reports. For many standard document reports in the Base App, these properties are set based on the Language Code and Format Region fields from the document itself. These fields get their values from the corresponding entity settings. For example, the Sales Header report gets its settings from the customer entity.

3. Language and Format in Customer/Vendor Card

If a report should be printed in the language of the recipient rather than in the working language, the developer can add code in the report to handle this. This functionality is already enabled for most reports in the standard Business Central database. The document is printed in the language that is specified in the Language Code field on the Customer or Vendor Card page.

Example of Language and Format Region Codes on the Customer page

4. Language and Format in My Settings

If the report properties mentioned earlier aren’t configured within the AL triggers, Business Central then refers to the settings in My Settings. For example, consider a scenario where a regional format isn’t defined for a customer. In this case, when you print documents associated with the customer, the Report.FormatRegion property won’t have a specific regional format set. Consequently, Business Central will turn to the regional format setting in My Settings as a fallback. While My Settings had a more prominent role in earlier versions, its current function is to step in when no alternative settings are available.

By using this order of priority, Business Central ensures that the report output language and format are based on the most relevant and specific configurations. This approach gives you greater control over language and format customization for individual reports. Ultimately, this feature streamlines the reporting process, making it more efficient and user-centric.

The post Adding Regional Formats to Reports in Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.