Power Baseball League: Chart Basics
It is important to balance your data views with data visualizations using charts! CHARTS RULE! Today the Power Baseball League is taking on Chart Basics. This builds on the system and personal views we built the last two weeks. Now we want to show you a few things you can do with charts for those views. Graphical representation of data is powerful tool. In some ways, it adds context to… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: System View Enhancements
I am running out of baseball pictures! So here is the hubby and I enjoying a game at Nationals Park when both of us had much shorter, pre-quarantine hair! This week on the Power Baseball League we look at System View enhancements. Views are a simple yet powerful element of any model-driven app. They provide users with relevant information and help users see the information they need at a… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Editing System Views for Model-Driven Apps
Improving the views in your Model-Driven App will make your users like you as much as Hashtag likes the Washington Nationals! It’s time to spend some time improving our Power Baseball League Model-Driven App by editing the System Views. In our previous videos, we worked to get the basics of our app set-up. We added in Contacts, Accounts, and a couple of custom tables for registration data… Continue Reading Kylie...
2021 February DC Chapter Meeting
Thanks to everyone who joined us for our 2021 February DC Chapter Meeting! If you missed it, check out all the great information that was shared. Great turnout for our 2021 February DC Chapter Meeting! Chapter Updates There were several different chapters within the Washington area region dedicated to different areas of the Power Platform. We recently decided to merge these captures… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
Power Baseball League: We’re Back!
Power Baseball League is back! Welcome back baseball fans! Malcolm and I took some time away to enjoy the holidays. We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and your 2021 is off to a fabulous start! Both of us have started new jobs in the past couple of months so we’ve each been busy acclimating ourselves to these new roles. We both took the leap into the partner world as… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
2021 January DC Chapter Meeting
Check out all these smiling at the 2021 January DC Chapter Meeting! Earlier this week we had a great chapter kick off with our 2021 January DC Chapter Meeting! Virtual meetings are really fun because we get to connect with people from all over the world. This meeting featured attendees for DC, Virginia, Maryland, New York, London, Scotland, Denmark and more! The meeting started with a… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Dynamics is Weird
If you have worked with Dynamics (or Dataverse or Common Data Service) for sometime you have probably said some variation of “Well, Dynamics is weird”. This tends to come up for me when troubleshooting odd issues. It is so easy to assume a feature will function one way but then upon further inspection that is not quite the case. To be clear, I do not mean this is a bad way. It’s just that… Continue Reading...
Power Baseball League: The Final Pitch of 2020!
Malcolm is so happy about the 2020 Power Baseball League season that he is dancing for joy! We have covered so much this year in the Power Baseball League! For the final pitch of 2020 is a quick wrap up of what we have done and where we are going. Listen in to this video to remember the season highlights. Power Baseball League 2020 Season Wrap Up Thanks again to everyone who has… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article on...
Power Baseball League: Customer Voice and Power Automate Build (Part 2)
The fans are coming to this stadium just like all of you lined up to read another Power Baseball League post! The snack prices are much better here Let’s keep going on our work with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and Power Automate! As we learned last week, the data from Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is stored in the Dataverse (formerly Common Data Service). However, we want this data in our… Continue Reading Kylie...
Power Baseball League: Customer Voice and Power Automate Build (Part 1)
It was looking a bit stormy when we first started working on our Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and Power Automate build but we pulled through in the home stretch! We have been talking for a few weeks about Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and using this to get data into the Power Baseball League. Today we are going to start the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and Power Automate build! Keep in mind… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Customer Voice and Power Automate with Special Guest Todd Mercer
As per usual, this picture has nothing to do with the article to follow but let’s jump in and talk about Customer Voice & Power Automate! It’s time for another special guest! Todd Mercer (Blog, LinkedIn, Twitter) joins the Power Baseball League crew to talk about Customer Voice and Power Automate. We talk through how the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice responses come in to Dataverse (formerly… Continue Reading Kylie...
Power Baseball League: Dynamics 365 Customer Voice Creation
I would like to relate Dynamics 365 Customer Voice Creation to Nationals Park Presidents but I cannot. Let’s continue the Power Baseball League journey by starting the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice creation process! So far we’ve talked about getting data into our system via manual import (hello historic spreadsheets!). Next we tackled Forms Processing to handle any hand written… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
MB-600 Study Group
Look at all these amazing panelists for the MB-600 Study Group! It’s time to get some certifications! Join the CRMUG/D365CEUG MB-600 Study Group! If you haven’t joined one of the User Group Study Groups before this is a great time to get involved! For each series, there is a panel of experts who will guide the content and topics each week. Different panelists will join each session and… Continue Reading Kylie...
Power Baseball League: Add Forms Processing to a Power App
The app we create today allows you to take a picture and extract data. Thankfully we do not have an app to tell us the health stats of all this ballpark food! Last week, we set up a Forms Processing Model. Today we are going to add Forms Processing to a Power App! This simple App will allow us to take a snapshot of the application and get the data. Then all this data will be fed directly… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Build a Forms Processing Model
As I may have mentioned, one of the things I love about Nationals baseball is the Presidents Race. Sometimes they race like Mario. Last week we talked about getting started with a Data Import so we want to look at more ways to keep bringing data into the system. That means we are going to build a Forms Processing Model! You may remember our first attempt at the forms processing function… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Let’s Add Some Data!
Currently our system is like an empty ball park and it is time to fill it with data and Play Ball! So far in the Power Baseball League, we have been talking about the system but we have not put any data in. Today, we will start to add some data! We are going to start with the basics of data import. In this video, we will set the tone for the next portion of the series where will be… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
October 2020 DC User Group Meeting
We had a great group of heroes, witches, stars, and administrators for the October 2020 meeting of CRMUGDC / PowerPlatformUGDC! We had another great virtual event from the Washington, DC Community this week! This chapter focuses on CRM / Dynamics 365 / Power Platform technologies and creating a space for networking. The October 2020 DC User Group Meeting featured two great presentations… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Dynamics 365 Customer Voice with Megan V. Walker
Just as hot dogs are essential to the enjoyment of baseball, so it is also essential to get data into your system. It is also beneficial to support multiple methods of data entry such as forms processing or typed forms. Similarly, it is acceptable to enjoy your hot dogs with whatever toppings you like or even as a veggie dog if you wish. Welcome back to the Power Baseball League. In… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
Power Baseball League: Forms Processing with Phil Topness
I have already told you of my love for the Presidents (the mascot versions) so of course I love the portion of the baseball experience where they run around! It’s time to add another star player to the Power Baseball League line up – Phil Topness! We have invited Phil here to talk to us about using Forms Processing to get data into our system. We’ve already talked about how our… Continue Reading Kylie...
Power Baseball League: Custom Entities
Even the Washington Nationals are excited about our Power Baseball League and Custom Entity Creation! In our last post, we set up a Model Driven App. In our last post, we set up a Model Driven App. Now, we want to create some custom entities to go with the out of the box entities. We will work through the creation of a custom Registration entity to track each new application. We also… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
Power Baseball League: Model Driven App Creation
Just as Warrior II is foundational to any yoga practice, today we will create our Model Driven App as the backbone or our solution. Sometimes I enjoy baseball for the activities such as this Yoga in the Outfield event at the Washington Nationals Park. Last time on the Power Baseball League, I set up the environment in Common Data Service. Now Malcolm tags in and will build out the basic… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Environment Set-Up
Just as you need to set up a play in baseball, we need to prep for the Power Baseball League by creating our environment. Following our conversation with Nick Doelman, we finalized our plan; build out a Power App that leverages the Common Data Service (CDS). This will give us the functionality of a relational database while providing the flexibility to build it out as we need. It also… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Initial App Design with Nick Doelman
Another thing I like about baseball but completely unrelated to the sport, is my baseball shoes. Aren’t they so adorable with their baseball stitching? Also note that the stadium is empty because we got their super early for more popcorn eating time. To CRM Or Not To CRM Special Guest Nick Doelman joins us as we start to design our app. We want to determine if we need traditional CRM… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
DynamicsCon Workflow Deep Dive
DynamicsCon is here to save the day! Virtual Training for your organizations heroes! Last week was the 1st ever DynamicsCon! This was a free community event with sessions voted on by attendees and it was a huge success! Sessions were prerecorded which meant that speakers could engage in the chat and answer questions as the session continued to play. Then there was still time for live… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
Power Baseball League: Data Mapping
My other favorite part of going to baseball games at Nationals park is seeing the presidents! Now that we have figured out our core goals for phase 1, we need to figure out how all this data links together. Today we are going to walk through a data mapping exercise for the Power Baseball League. We start with the core data points we have identified and start to break down the data that… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Where to Begin?
Even Hashtag (the CRMUGDC Mascot) enjoys going to a baseball game every once and a while! Now you have heard about the Power Baseball League idea but you may have thought we went a bit crazy. Obviously everything we talked about in our introduction would take a very long time to scope out and to build. So we asked, how should we get started? Where to begin? In today’s (much shorter)… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Power Baseball League: Introduction
In this video Malcolm calls me a baseball fan. Please do not tell him that I really just go for the sunshine and the food. This was a particularly good day at the Washington Nationals Park! I am working on a cool new project with Malcolm McAuley called the Power Baseball League. We will be sharing content over the next few weeks, months, or who knows how long as we work through this… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
2020 DMV Regional Chapter Meeting Recap
This week we hosted the 4th Annual DMV Regional Chapter Meeting! This user group event featured chapters from the DC, Maryland, Virginia area namely DC, Reston, VA and Richmond, VA. I wanted to take a few minutes to share a 2020 DMV Regional Chapter Meeting Recap and give you some resources. I have previously shared the agenda and session descriptions for this event so now I will share some… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Virtual Camp Coding and Dance Parties
Vintage Beacon when we could go in person. Featuring my co-presenter / Dad and myself ready to roast approximately 12 hotdogs. Then I would argue that kids camps are an essential part of any fun summer experience. As a kid I was fortunate enough to spend time each summer at Beacon Bible Camp in beautiful northern Ontario. I enjoyed my time there so much that even when I was in high… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
2020 DMV Regional Chapter Meeting
This year marks the 4th annual DMV Regional Chapter meeting! In this event we bring together the Washington, DC; Reston, VA; and Richmond, VA chapters for a special full-day chapter meeting. Of course, this year is a little different and so our meeting will be virtual. That means that everyone is invited to the 2020 DMV Regional Chapter meeting! I want to give you a quick preview of the… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Hero Insights: The Final Result
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! Well we have finally made it to the end of our exciting adventure. I have learned a lot through this blog series and I hope you have too! Let’s take a look at what we accomplished. The Results
Hero Insights: Setting up Measures in Customer Insights
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! After we narrowly escaped the dangers of creating our segments, we now want to create some measures in Customer Insights. Measures are different types of calculations or rollups on the data. These can… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Hero Insights: Creating Segments in Customer Insights
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! Welcome back to HQ, my dynamic band of heroes! Today we are going to talk about segments. A segment is just a portion of the customer base. So we want to define characteristics that fit a certain… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
Hero Insights: Search & Filter Index in Customer Insights
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! In our last daring adventure we dove deep into Unity data but before being able to view your hero (customer) profiles, you will need to set up the Search and Filter index. We are almost there! Click… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Hero Insights: Unify Data in Customer Insights
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! When we left off yesterday we had imported all our data but it was still not powering anything. So today we are going to work on the Unify process. This includes 3 parts: Map, Match and Merge. Through… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
June 2020 DC User Group Meeting
Thank you to everyone who came out to our D365 / CRM / Power Platform User Group meeting last night! This was a “local” meeting for the Washington, DC Chapter but we had attendees and speakers from around the world! Here are some more details on our presentations and speakers. D365 Performance Calling in from Australia, Yawer Iqbal gave us tips and tricks to improve and maintain… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Hero Insights: Adding Data Sources to Customer Insights
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! Previously in our adventure, we set up our data to be in Dynamics 365 / CDS and we have a Customer Insights trial so now we are going to add some data! Connect to The Common Data Service Our… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article on...
Hero Insights: Setting up Customer Insights Trial
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! Today is going to be a very screenshot-heavy post as we walk through the steps to set up your Customer Insights trial. Before we get started here are a few helpful resources: Customer Insights Guided… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Hero Insights: Using Power Automate to Set Contact Images
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! Disclaimer Previously, we added data on the Common Data Service. Today, we’re using Power Automate for something exciting! I think this solution was super cool for my example scenario. However, I do… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Hero Insights: Adding Data in the Common Data Service
If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using comic superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy! Prerequisites Before we get to the exciting meat of Customer Insights, we need to do some environment and data set up. Getting started today, we want to make sure we already have our Common Data… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Hero Insights: Introduction
As you may know, I like to find random use cases and then create a series of blogs to learn new technologies (such as #PowerPizza to learn Power Apps). I have been wanting to learn about Microsoft’s Customer Insights and trying to think of good data sets to test this functionality on. I discovered there is this cool Google Dataset Search where you can search for data on almost anything and… Continue Reading Kylie...
What is a Text Area Field?
Since I come from a Microsoft CRM / Dynamics 365 background I am still learning about the Maker Portal. So the other day, when my team mentioned the text area field I was curious what this was and how it was different from Multiple lines of Text. So, let’s do a quick comparison of the Text, Text Area and Multiline Text fields to see the differences. Here you can see the 3 text field… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Quarantine Chat Bot: How Did it Go?
This week I have talked through a few lessons I’ve learned related to Power Virtual Agents. We started building a bot as virtual daughter for my parents and it has sentiment analysis, approval flows and so much more. Today I am going to show you the final piece – seeing what is happening in the back end! Analytics < figcaption>There are pre-built analytics available automatically for your… Continue Reading Kylie...
Quarantine Chat Bot: Set up an Appointment
I have been talking through how I created a chat bot that I built using Power Virtual Agents to talk to my quarantined parents. We have already looked at how to get started and how to use sentiment analysis to customize responses. Today we are going to set up an appointment! Before getting the scheduling information, I had to ask if they wanted to talk to me. Getting the TIme The… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article on...
Quarantine Chat Bot: Sentiment Analysis
Yesterday, I started talking about how I built a chat bot to talk to my parents during this quarantine. We got started by setting up the environment, provisioning the bot, editing the greeting messages, and adding our first question. Now, we are going to add a few more brains into the operation! I wanted the bot to be able to respond correctly to free form text input. The goal was to… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
Quarantine Chat Bot: Let’s Build a Virtual Agent!
In these odd days of quarantine, I have spent a lot of time talking to my parents to convince them to stay home or just finding ways to keep them entertained. My mom loves this quarantine life and never has a need to leave but my dad is a bit of a different story. So, I thought I should use Power Virtual Agents to create a virtual daughter for them to chat with, because this is our new normal… Continue Reading Kylie...
Present at User Group Summit!
It’s time for you to start presenting at conferences! You have something to share! Remember a year ago, you didn’t know what you know now – so there is someone else who still doesn’t know those things! As I mentioned in Do You Want to Speak at User Group Summit?, I am involved with a new initiative we are calling the User Speaker Cultivation Project. The goal is to help more new speakers… Continue Reading...
Exciting Plans for CRMUGDC in 2020
Great group for the CRMUGDC February 2020 Meeting The Washington, DC has been working on many exciting plans for 2020! We know these are very weird times but that is all the more reason to look for ways to connect and learn. First, keep in mind that you have 3 amazing chapters to check out: DC, Reston and Richmond. Reston and Richmond meetings will continue to be quarterly and focused… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s...
Do you Want to Speak at User Group Summit?
Speaking with Patrick Wright at User Group Summit 2019 in Orlando Have you ever wanted to speak at User Group Summit but not known where to get started? Well I have the webinars for you! For User Group Summit 2020 in Nashville we are starting an End User Speaker Cultivation program. This idea came from the brilliant mind of Britta Rekstad as a way to educate people on the process of… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article...
Microsoft Ignite the Tour DC 2020
I will be speaking and sharing my love for the DC User Group communities at Microsoft Ignite the Tour DC! Hey Microsoft Ignite the Tour DC Attendees! I wanted to share some information for you on where to find me over the next few days and some resources for after the sessions! Data and the Power Platform I will be leading the learning path session called: Connecting Power Apps,… Continue Reading Kylie Kiser’s Article on...