Microsoft Artificial Intelligence enhancing Customer Experiences
Image created with Midjourney A recent Gartner poll of over 2,500 executives, showed that 38% saw customer experience and retention as the primary purpose of their generative artificial intelligence (AI) investments. Significantly ahead of revenue growth (26%), cost optimization (17%) and business continuity (7%). With that in mind, let’s look at the history of Microsoft’s commitment to AI… Continue Reading Paul Harrison’s...
Microsoft MVP Summit — C&CA Land at The “Mothership”!
Microsoft MVP Summit — C&CA Land at The “Mothership”! “Power comes not from knowledge kept, but from knowledge shared” — Bill Gates And that is exactly what the Microsoft MVP (Microsoft Valuable Professional) Summit in Richmond Seattle last month was all about. Well, “exactly” might be a stretch as everything the MVP’s learned during the event is under strict NDA, for… Continue Reading Mike Hartley’s Article on their...
AI on the future of software engineering
Created using Bing Image Creator. Note: without specifying “female software engineer”, 16 out of 20 generations of “software engineer sitting next to a robot” were male As we reach an inflection point in artificial intelligence advancements and ease of access, what does it mean for software engineering? Today, we chat with the new Bing to get a perspective. Paul: Hi Bing, thanks for… Continue Reading Paul Harrison’s...
Capgemini taps into GOV.UK-style Power Pages templates
Image by Ian Kelsall The central government of the United Kingdom provides services to all British citizens. Whether it is to book a driving test, log an import of a product, request a grant, or report their taxes, these services adhere to a common standard, look, and feel. The applicable standards are part of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which establishes requirements for the… Continue Reading Carl Cookson...
Providing GDS-aligned themes and controls to Power Apps
Image by Ming Jun Tan Over the years, Capgemini has worked with most central government bodies in the UK and part of this is to ensure we meet the exacting standards that are part of the Government Digital Service (GDS) Government Digital Service — GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) standards. This standard provides a common language and look and feel for all government websites, whether internal or… Continue Reading Carl Cookson...
Developing an enterprise Power Platform strategy
Photo by Hassan Pasha on Unsplash With the rise of Microsoft’s Power Platform and the cementing of its status as a year-on-year market leader for Low-Code Application Platforms from both Gartner and Forrester, figuring out how to begin an enterprise’s journey with the Platform can be one of the most challenging aspects. Imagine if you’re asked, “What will be our strategy for the Power… Continue Reading Dave Wong’s Article...
Capgemini + Microsoft — delivering powerful employee experiences to delight customers
Capgemini + Microsoft — delivering powerful employee experiences to delight customers Photo by Blake Wisz The experience customers receive from a brand is often a good reflection of the brand’s employee experience (EX) — and gives an accurate indication of how strongly their staff believes in the company’s mission and values. If organizations can inspire their… Continue Reading Paul Harrison’s Article on their blog...
Dynamics 365 Field Service — Inspections
Dynamics 365 Field Service — Inspections What are Inspections? So you get to site, find the piece of equipment that you need to work on but first you need to answer a bunch of questions related to the work order. So that’s where Field Service Inspections come into play. Inspections are essentially digital forms that allow field technicians to quickly and easily answer a list of questions… Continue Reading Bal Bangard’s...
Azure Cost Management —Cost Analysis
This is the second post on Azure Cost Management, the first post is Azure Cost Management — Report Creation. Photo by micheile dot com Before I start on my approach, I should point out that Azure does an excellent job of providing recommendations on cost saving. This can be found under Cost Management / Advisor Recommendations. You may have seen this appearing as a pop-up window when you… Continue Reading Mark Hartshorn’s...
Advice to a Junior Software Engineer, from a Junior Software Engineer
Photo by Charles Deluvio My name is Joshua and I’m a Junior Software Engineer in the Microsoft Applications and Cloud Engineering Team (MACE) at Capgemini. Like many of us new joiners, I came in with many preconceived ideas of how things would be and what would be required of me to successfully deliver on my projects. Some of those notions were correct — but quite a few were not. Those… Continue Reading Joshua Anderson’s...
Azure Cost Management
Introduction Over the last year I have been managing costs incurred on a project built using Microsoft Azure technologies. In this blog post I want to highlight some of the cost management techniques we used, which resulted in the project realising a significant saving of over 50% in monthly costs. The topic will be covered in two blog posts:1) Azure Cost Management — Report Creation2)… Continue Reading Mark Hartshorn’s...
Power BI — Finding the average time between an unspecified number of events
Power BI — Finding the average time between an unspecified number of events Image by Microsoft Recently while developing a Power Bi report for a client I was asked to build a measure that displayed the average time a specific user took between each action in a list with no consistent size, e.g. a list of a customer’s purchases. This sounded like a fairly simple measure but after some… Continue Reading Daniel E Philpot’s...
Adding Value through Low-Code
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash “Not adding value is the same as taking it away.” — Seth Godin Like many software engineers having a preferred programming language, I like C#. I have gotten very familiar with C#, such that it is very difficult to switch to something else! This, I believe, is a natural resistance to change which we all exhibit. So, it was no surprise that during my… Continue Reading ekhor’s Article on...
Shift Change: How I Became A Microsoft Developer
Photo by Brendan Church The margin between today and tomorrow is narrowing fast, and the world is consuming the new technology quicker than ever. To keep up with this fast-changing environment, the demand for reliable and high-quality digital solutions is increasing significantly. Within this turbulence, new challenges and opportunities are emerging for software developers. New technologies… Continue Reading...
Why you cannot beat Azure’s Sustainability!
Learn why Azure is a sustainable cloud platform and which is the most sustainable region for your resources.Continue reading on Capgemini Microsoft Blog » Continue Reading Logan Talbot’s Article on their blog Why you cannot beat Azure’s Sustainability! Since 2012 Microsoft has been 100 percent carbon neutral (net zero). This means they are removing as much carbon each year as they are emitting, either by carbon removal...
Build Automations for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations
Image by Pxfuel Since the beginning of 2021, Microsoft managed Tier-1 environments have been removed from the basic offer for Finance and Operations. The Tier-1 servers were mainly used as developer virtual machines and golden configuration environments but most of all; build servers. As of today they are a must to create All-in-one deployable packages. Officially, Microsoft recommends 2… Continue Reading Luca Sartorelli’s...
Automated Pen Testing using OWASP ZAP and a Custom Azure DevOps Extension
Photo by Kevin Ku Authors: Ganesh Ghadge, Kenneth Babigumira Penetration testing is an important part of software development lifecycle especially for Web applications and APIs. Securing these applications is more important now than ever before and it is crucial to implement security scanning in your DevSecOps pipeline that will help you to identify application vulnerabilities at an… Continue Reading Ganesh Ghadge’s...
Unlock The Power of Community and Co-Creation in Customer Care
Effortlessly empower customers with self-service communities using Microsoft Power Apps Portals Photo by Ivan Aleksic It is commonly understood that the likelihood of acquiring a new customer is much lower than the likelihood of persuading an existing customer to repurchase. In fact, it is said to costs 5x more to attract and acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one [1]…. Continue Reading Daniel...
Hit The Ground Running on Your Next Power Apps Project
Photo by Braden Collum Starting a new project can go one of two ways: (1) Immediately begin developing features or (2) Spend some time setting up an ALM process to support the project. When it comes to enterprise projects, I hope we can all agree that the latter is preferable despite the additional upfront cost. This is where our latest tool comes in — Power Apps Project Generator. Our… Continue Reading Tom Ashworth’s...
#Shorts — Using Public Nuget Packages in Azure Synapse
#Shorts — Using Public Nuget Packages in Azure Synapse Supercharge C# Code in your Synapse Workspace Photo by Markus Spiske If you have used Notebooks in Azure Synapse, you will likely have realised that C# has been an option for a while now, but many people are not aware that you can also consume public Nuget packages (as it stands private packages are not supported yet). Very often the… Continue Reading Mark Cunningham’s...
Hello Low-Code World
Is the Microsoft Power Platform the next Excel/VBA? Photo by John Schnobrich Introduction It’s probably no surprise that end-user computing (EUC) is not a new concept for technology leaders, but as with anything in technology, it can always get faster, more portable, or deliver better experiences. This is what the Microsoft Power Platform does successfully. The Power Platform is transformative,… Continue Reading Josh...
#Shorts — Boosting your Forms with the MultiSelect PCF Control
#Shorts — Boosting your Forms with the MultiSelect PCF Control Photo by Jakob Owens The emergence of the Power Apps Control Framework (PCF) brings a whole new set of possibilities. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you want to store a one-to-many relationship between two entities in an easy to store and maintainable way. Lets take an example, a small team is responsible for… Continue Reading Mark...
Add an Input Mask Control To Your Power App Without Coding
Add an Input Mask Control to Your Power App Without Coding Photo by Sigmund Have you ever been building a Power App and wondered to yourself how to get some neat validation that doesn’t annoy your users or require custom code? Do you want users to enter information into a field using a specific custom format but want to keep your app as low-code and out-of-box as possible? Then perhaps an… Continue Reading Ajay Odedra’s...
Power BI: Source Control till Deployment
Photo by Darya Jumelya Power BI, Azure Repos and DevOps Pipelines The objective of this article is to explain a way to store Power BI report files (which don’t contain data) in Azure GIT repo and by means of CI/CD pipelines, automate deployment tasks such as: Publish File(s) to Power BI workspaceUpdate release version as a parameterUpdate Dataset(s)Refresh Dataset(s)Delete Dataset(s)Get… Continue Reading Ashutosh Kumar’s...
Power Platform — The App Matrix
Power Platform — The App Matrix Photo by Vlado Paunovic As the Power Platform continues to grow and we see a rise in demand of all types of apps, we can sometimes begin to wonder which app or apps do we really need? Example – Will a Canvas App suffice to help internal staff raise an incident OR – Would a Dynamics 365 Model-Driven App such as Customer Service, with all the built-in… Continue Reading Bal...
Data Mesh Implementation in A Multi-Cloud Architecture
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel This blog is inspired by Zhamak Dehghani’s article — ‘Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture’. If you are new to Data Mesh, please read her article as a precursor to this blog. Zhamak, in her article provides a technology-agnostic, high-level, logical architecture model for Data Mesh and its underpinning principles. This blog tries to move the… Continue Reading Man S Chawla’s Article on...
Power Platform CoE Starter Kit — First Glance
Power Platform CoE Starter Kit — First Glance Microsoft have recently unveiled the Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) starter kit to aid the process of managing the lifecycle of a Microsoft Power Platform estate. A team of us joined forces to see how we could implement this in our larger projects. In the words of Microsoft “it is a Starter kit not a finishing kit”. It is… Continue Reading Mark Cunningham’s Article...
The Application Sandbox
Microsoft Power Apps — Enabling Citizen Developers to Get Building Photo by Joshua Aragon The shifting business landscape is often seen as frenetic and less predictable than it once was. Business leaders everywhere are now faced with the reality that one must not just innovate, but instead innovate with the kind of speed and accuracy that ten years ago, would have stretched even the most… Continue Reading Ryan Clarke’s...
Announcing the CDS Data Migrator
Make data movement challenges a thing of the past Figure 1: CDS Data Migrator in XRM Toolbox What is the CDS Data Migrator? We are pleased to announce the public availability of the CDS Data Migrator. The CDS Data Migrator tool is a plugin for XRMToolBox which provides an easy-to-use UI to manage data migration operations between Dataverse environments. Using Capgemini’s Data Migration Engine,… Continue Reading Sahjan...
Create a Powerful Search Experience with Azure Cognitive Search
Is your applications search really good enough? Explore how Azure Cognitive Search can empower it!Continue reading on Capgemini Microsoft Blog » Continue Reading Logan Talbot’s Article on their blog Create a Powerful Search Experience with Azure Cognitive Search Let’s be honest, what does your application’s current search functionality really do? Is it just a “.contains”? Maybe some paging? To me, this...
We Can All Be Data Analysts
Photo by Adeolu Eletu The Digital Workplace team at Capgemini Invent are doing a series covering each element of the Microsoft Power Platform in greater detail. With each edition we will be focusing on how the platform can transform the shape of your organisation and individuals’ ways of working. We will also showcase the benefits, not just cost or time, but how employees experience work,… Continue Reading Arnaud Carras’s...
Is RPA Dead?
Introducing the Microsoft Power Platform — You may already have it! Photo by Erik Mclean The Digital Workplace team at Capgemini Invent are doing a series covering each element of the Power Platform in greater detail. With each edition we will be focusing on how the platform can transform the shape of your organisation and individuals’ ways of working. We will also showcase the… Continue Reading Josh McDonald’s Article on...
Field Service Incident Types — A Time Saver!
Field Service Incident Types — A Time Saver! Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng Let’s be honest, nobody wants to repeatedly fill in the same fields on a form or follow the same steps again and again when it can all be automated. So that is exactly where Field Service Incident Types come into play. What are Incident types? We can think of Incident Types as a template which contains a bunch… Continue Reading Bal Bangard’s...
Dynamics 365 — Opening Modal Dialogues on a Subgrid
Dynamics 365 — Opening Modal Dialogues on a Subgrid Photo by Iewek Gnos Microsoft added the ability to open records in Modal Dialogues through the use of JavaScript as part of Dynamics 365 Release Wave 1 for 2020. I’ve created a script that you can apply to any Editable Subgrid (it must be an Editable Grid) and it will open records in a modal dialogue when clicked. You can use a… Continue Reading Mike Andrews’s Article on...
Machine Learning for Non-Specialists — Part 1
Machine Learning for Non-Specialists — Part 1 Photo by Possessed Photography Introduction Put simply, Machine Learning is a process of using a code (an algorithm, also called a Model) to train on existing data to produce another code (a Trained Model) that can make predictions on new incoming data. Confusing? Don’t worry! This blog post is to debunk the concept of Machine Learning for… Continue Reading Man S Chawla’s...
Self-Taught Route into a Career in Software Engineering
Photo by C D-X For several years now, software engineering has been and remains one of the most popular career aspirations for people around the world. While the traditional route of entry for many, into this field has primarily been through a university degree or formalised instructor-led courses, effective alternatives such as the “self-taught” route do exist. As I have personally… Continue Reading David Robertson’s...
Creating a Legacy Data Archive in Azure
Photo by Ula Kuźma Capgemini recently completed a customer project, which was an excellent example of using Azure Resources to create solutions quickly and cost effectively for business problems. Background Our customer had 2 legacy Oracle ERP Applications (HCM/ELM) containing many years of important/sensitive historic data. The customer had moved away from these on-premise legacy applications… Continue Reading Simon...
Azure API Management: Configuring the JWT Validation Policy Correctly
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina Introduction Azure API management provides a scalable API management platform that can be used for securing and publishing APIs. APIs published in Azure API Management can be secured using OAuth 2.0 authorisation with Azure AD. The key steps defined in the instructions for securing the APIs published in APIM are: 1. Setup 2 app registrations in Azure AD for the… Continue Reading Kenneth...
New Service Scheduling Experience in Dynamics 365
Photo by Zan Over the past few months we witnessed significant improvements to Dynamics 365 along with loads of new features being built on top of the unified interface. Service scheduling is one of those areas which changed significantly but what are these changes and how do these changes benefit us? What are our options? Let’s review the latest from Microsoft released during the October… Continue Reading Roy Behounek’s...
Azure Resource Manager Templates: An Automated Delivery Review
Photo by Noah Implementation Overview ARM templates have become quite commonplace now and are generally regarded as essential to deliver Azure components; and an essential developer/DevOps skill-set. In my previous project, we used ARM templates quite extensively and built up a lot of linked, interdependent architecture that required a fully automated approach. I am going to review the good,… Continue Reading Dan...
Using Blazor in Your Existing ASP.Net Core MVC Applications
Photo by Halacious During lock-down; whilst working from home, I had the opportunity to investigate Server Side Blazor; Microsoft’s new SPA framework that allows developers to use C# instead of JavaScript to build interactive web UIs. I was very impressed with its component-based approach and simplicity, especially if you are already an experienced C# developer. My main concern was the… Continue Reading Simon Goodwin’s...
Huge Microsoft Certification Changes! No More 2-Year Certifications..
No more 2-year certifications? What will happen to my current certifications? What are yearly renewals? All these questions answered.Continue reading on Capgemini Microsoft Team Blog » Continue Reading Logan Talbot’s Article on their blog Huge Microsoft Certification Changes! No More 2-Year Certifications.. On December 15th 2020, Microsoft announced new changes to the process of renewing certifications and the length of time...
Power Automate — Getting to Grips with Action Request Limits
Power Automate — Getting to Grips with Action Request Limits Photo by Ludovic Charlet Power Automate has evolved hugely over the past couple of years and with that so have the limits and thresholds in place. It’s more important than ever to understand what they are and how to build flows in a way that don’t exceed the limits. There are many different limits to be aware of in Power… Continue Reading Mark Ashley’s Article on...
Power Notify: The Modern Way to Notify Power App Users
On almost every Power Apps project I’ve been involved in, there has been a requirement to notify system users, with emails usually being the solution. Personally, I think emails are outdated as there are more modern technologies and methods available, which is where Power Notify comes in. What’s the problem? In the world of enterprise Power Apps projects, we tend to build complex systems… Continue Reading Tom Ashworth’s...
Project Oakdale — Initial Impressions
Project Oakdale — Initial Impressions OAKdale As you may have heard Project Oakdale entered public preview recently. Excited for this release, we’ve started exploring the potential to move some of our existing Power Apps over, which are used for things like our new joiner’s process and to communicate out events of interest. These apps currently store data in other sources, such as… Continue Reading Luke Phillips’s Article...
.NET Developers.. Power Platform is your Friend!
Photo by Cláudio Luiz Castro “Before software can be reusable, it first has to be usable” — Ralph Johnson Until recently, I hadn’t had much exposure to the Microsoft Power Platform. Coming from a .NET background, I must confess I had viewed Power Apps specifically as a product that doesn’t lend itself to good software engineering principles. However! A recent stint working on a… Continue Reading ekhor’s Article on their...
Introduction to SpecFlow for Power Apps
Make Power Apps testing simple, easy and reliable.Photo by Joshua NewtonStart with the Why?Let’s start with a question and be honest with ourselves, how many projects have you worked on and not performed any form of acceptance testing / UI testing for a Power Apps project? My guess is quite a few.The most likely reasons you do not perform UI testing, could be the lack of automation… Continue Reading Mark Cunningham’s...
Nulls are Evil
..and so are exceptions!Photo by Martino PietropoliNow that I have piqued your interest, it falls to me to explain why I feel that way — especially as there’s a 50:50 chance that you disagree, perhaps even strongly. One thing that I am sure we can agree on is, in programming, there is no avoiding Nulls or exceptions; things go wrong, servers may be down, data may simply not exist, the… Continue Reading Jay Barden’s Article...
Access Tokens for Dynamics 365 using Microsoft Authentication Library
Photo by Henning Kesselhut In this post, we will learn how to Acquire Access Token for the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) Web API Access Token to perform different operations in dynamics using Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) in .NET. Architectural Overview CreateFromResourceUrlAsync method in AuthenticationParameters Class in Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory name… Continue Reading Vishnu...
Data Migration Engine for Power Apps
Photo by Miguel Andrade Last year the Capgemini Microsoft team released, as NuGet packages, a number of DevOps accelerators and tools that allow us to deliver high-quality Power Platform and Dynamics 365 projects. Currently we have 19 packages, with a combined total of nearly 40,000 downloads for one of these packages (Capgemini.Xrm.DataMigration.Engine). We have now made this package Open… Continue Reading Mark...