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 happy hour and networking. Then we had two great presentations. First, there was a member showcase showcasing a Power Platform solution for small business loans. Then the Microsoft Power CAT Team joined us to talk about Application Lifecycle Management for the Power Platform and even shared some top secret information.
Power Platform for Small Business Loans
Robert Silverman and Cassandra LaForest talked about how his firm, FI Consulting, developed a solution for reviewing small business loan applications using Power Platform Tools. This is a complex problem because of the multiple reviews, different types of tasks and more tasks from the 425-page standard operating procedures. Oh and of course these standards and process can change every few years.
The Loan Review Tool the team created streamlined the review process, standardized the review function, added felicity, plus added transparency! This was all delivered within 6 months!
Technology used in this project included:
- Dynamcis 365 Model-Driven App
- Custom Tables (entities) with calculated and rollup fields
- Actions and Custom Workflow Activities called from a ribbon button
- Custom Controls
- Reports
- Power BI
- Automation through Power Automate
- Azure
Check out the recording to learn more about the Small Business Administration, see the actual solution and hear lessons learned from this huge project. In addition, the presentation is also available for download.
This solution was nominated for an award! You can see that submission video in our recording or directly on YouTube.
ALM for the Power Platform
We had an amazing panel of speakers featuring Phil Topness, Marc Schweigert, Mike Ochs and Shan McArthur. This team is responsible for the Center for Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit which works to give you the tools to make your Power Platform deployment successful.
Now they are enhancing the CoE Starter Kit by adding ALM components! This will include out of the box Azure DevOps pipelines and GitHub Workflow templates to help set you up for success with working with solutions. It will also include two canvas apps geared at different audiences to ensure everyone has what they need.
Announced at this meeting was full open source for canvas apps to enable full source control! This will be released in experimental form very soon! In addition, they are moving towards full open source for the CoE Starter Kit. See this in the recording along with many other recent enhancements and tips!
For more information, check out these links that were shared:
- https://aka.ms/powerplatform/alm
- https://aka.ms/powerplatform/devops
- https://aka.ms/powerplatform/github
So are you interested in joining the Private Preview for PowerOps+? Contact Mike Ochs to get involved!
Join us!
We host these meetings every few months. This is a great way to connect with others who love Dynamics and Power Platform! Join our Meetup group to be notified about future events. I also post all my upcoming events on my events page. Also make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel to see all these recordings.
I hope to connect with you at a future event!
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