Power Baseball League – The Nerdy Admin

Power Baseball League – The Final Pitch

Published on May 14, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

If you watched last weeks episode, you know that we’ve tossed our final pitch of the Power Baseball League!

I have had so much fun doing this – what started out initially as an idea to build out a CRM platform for a youth hockey league turned into so much more. The pivot to Baseball was one thing, but we also learned a ton as we discovered some great features and functions along the way.

When the idea came up, we decided we’d start doing a few and see how they went. We had fun, so we kept doing them, and were joined by some great guests along the way. I never imagined we’d hit 30 videos!

About a month ago Kylie and I started talking about how we wanted to move forward and agreed that it was a natural time to wrap up. Our “project” was at the point in time we’d turn it over to our fictitious customer for testing and such. We could surely continue, but we were ready for a break and to give attention to other areas.

I need to give some seriously HUGE kudos to Kylie for her video editing efforts!! She is the one who produced every video throughout! We wanted this series to be natural – not too scripted or planned other than the core topic and main points and I think we achieved that.

Some might argue we were too loose, but this wasn’t about being super formal. It was about learning and sharing knowledge with those who might consume it. We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. Who knows, we may circle back to this again some day, or perhaps we’ll tackle a whole new idea. That’s the beautiful thing about what Microsoft has done with the Power Platform – the options are truly limitless!!

As one final video, Kylie spent some time combining all of our goofs and gafs into a Power Baseball League Blooper video – so fun!! We hope you get a chuckle! Thanks so much for watching!!

This is part of the Power Baseball League Series with Kylie Kiser (follow her on LinkedIn, Twitter or her Blog). You can follow the series on the Power Baseball League Series Page and the Power Baseball League YouTube Playlist as they are added.

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: Themes

Published on May 7, 2021May 7, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

Hello Baseball Fans!

This week on the Power Baseball League we work on configuring the theme for our app. In some ways, this represents the end of our configuration work on the app as we are now ready to hand it over to the customer. The themes feature allows you to set a custom image and adjust the colour of a number of components within the Model Driven-App.

Have a look as we quickly make some tweaks to our app. We also talk about some considerations, tricks and tips when thinking through the theme for your app.

We’ve included some links in the video description for your reference that should prove helpful as you dive into theming your app.

Beyond this, we’d start to think about testing, training and getting our users ready for go live! Exciting times indeed, and the customer is eager to dig in.

Switching directions, a big announcement is unveiled on this weeks session!! We’ll play the ‘click bait’ game and say, WATCH TO FIND OUT WHAT IT IS!!

Themes and a special message await you here!

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Photo by Antoine Schibler on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: Security

Published on April 30, 2021May 4, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

Ah, the wonderful world of system security! While this topic may make some people run for the hills, it’s critical that anyone implementing or managing any kind of system gives thought to the security model being used.

Dataverse security can be overwhelming. The security role matrix is filled with dots for nearly every system component you can think of. Those dots are used to control the level of access across various types of actions such as create, read, update, delete, (commonly referred to as “CRUD”), among others.

Join Kylie and I as we talk through our approach to security role creation for our Power Baseball League system. We also share some tips and considerations you’ll want to make as you dive into the matrix for yourself.

Kylie and Malcolm discuss Security tips and tricks!

Additionally, Kylie dug up a number of resources she’s produced over the years for additional information, which we’ve linked below and on the video description.

Power Platform 24 Security Overview: https://365.training/Courses/Enroll/Power24-10-2020/64defc7a-5df8-ea11-a815-000d3a3479c5

Collab365 Security Concepts for Dynamics 365 and Dataverse: https://events.collab365.com/c365_sessionroom/gc5-d365-security-concepts-for-dataverse/

Overview of CDS Security: https://link.kyliekiser.com/Overview

Security Concepts: https://link.kyliekiser.com/SecurityConcepts

Security Roles: https://link.kyliekiser.com/SecurityRoles

Field Level Security: https://link.kyliekiser.com/FLS

Model Driven App Security: https://link.kyliekiser.com/MDA

Environment Security: https://link.kyliekiser.com/EnvRoles

Security Groups and Licenses: https://link.kyliekiser.com/SecurityGroups

Hierarchy and Position Security: https://link.kyliekiser.com/PositionSecurity

CoE Starter Kit: https://link.kyliekiser.com/CoE

Deep Dive into Security mechanisms and performance impacts with Marco Amoedo: https://link.kyliekiser.com/Marco

DynamicsCon Best Practices for Dynamics 365 CE Security Design with Kelsey Carrier: https://link.kyliekiser.com/Kelsey

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Photo by Frankie Lopez on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: Relationships

Published on April 27, 2021April 26, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

No, we’re not going to try to give you any relationship advice! This week on the Power Baseball League we dive into the world of table relationships.

Relationships are an important aspect of the Dataverse, but they are sometimes under-thought. Did you know you can control the behaviour of actions on the parent and child records in a 1:N relationship? Did you know that you can control whether a record can be deleted based on its child records?

There is plenty to understand about the structure of relationships, and during project planning it’s important to map these things out. Join Kylie and I as we scratch the surface on the topic of relationships in this weeks episode!

Chatting Dataverse Relationships on Power Baseball League!

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Cover Photo: Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: Rollup Fields

Published on April 20, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

We’re back at it on the Power Baseball League as we take a swing at Rollup fields. We even touch on Calculated fields as well.

Rollups and Calculated fields are smart fields in Dataverse that are set automatically by other data in the system.

Rollup fields aggregate data from other related records. This aggregate could be a sum or a max or several other options. Plus you can also filter the records that you will aggregate. Calculated fields allow you to use formulas on one or more fields already in your data.

Some quick examples? Total up the number of cases an Account has. Or the number of opportunities, or the value of open opportunities. There are plenty of options out there that could be beneficial for an organization. We touch on a few and implement one of our own today.

In this video, we walk through the step-by-step process to set up a Rollup field. Then we talk through some potential use cases for both types. Finally, we cover some limitations and best practices.

Power Baseball League: Rollup Fields

Did that give you everything you need to get started? If not, you can also review the Docs pages for more information.

See you next week for another exciting topic!

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Cover Photo: Photo by Nick Jio on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: Business Rules

Published on April 20, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

All sports have rules – well, perhaps not that one that’s got the “No Rules…” in the title, but aside from that, rules are present. Business rules exist in the world of process, too!

Business Rules allow our citizen developers to create form scripting with point-and-click customization. They allow you to do things such as set fields as required, show recommendations, show error messages or set field values. These tools bring immense value to the platform because they increase the flexibility of what we can do with the platform without needing heavy code.

To get started, you can read the docs content. Then watch our video to see us build a simple rule and share some tips and tricks.

Power Baseball League: Business Rules

It’s time to go build your own Business Rules! What are the coolest uses for them you can think of?

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Cover Photo: Thanks to Toa Heftiba for sharing their work on Unsplash.

Power Baseball League: Marketing Lists

Published on April 3, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

Back with another week of Power Baseball League! Last time we dove into detail on creating and using E-mail Templates. Today we take the next logical step and start to configure our Marketing Lists. We also talk about Quick Campaigns and how they might be useful.

Getting Started

To be able to use Quick Campaigns and Marketing lists you do need to enable the Dynamics 365 Sales app. This can be done within your environment settings. However, this does require you to have enabled your environment for Dynamics 365 Apps when you create it.

Here are a few docs to review:

Marketing Features

We tackle two topics today; Quick Campaigns and Marketing lists. Quick Campaigns allow you to create Activities for a group of records. This could be Phone Calls for the owners to complete, sending a template email, sending an ad hoc email and more.

Marketing lists let you define a set of records that you can market to later. These can be done in a couple of different ways – dynamic (where list members are generated based on a query and pulled at the time of use), or static, meaning the list must be manually curated by adding and removing members ‘by hand’.

Check out the video to see the step-by-step creation of quick campaigns and marketing lists. We will also talk about the difference between Static and Dynamic Marketing Lists noted above. Plus a few tips, tricks and lessons learned thrown in there too!

Marketing Lists, Quick Campaigns, and more!

Have you been using these tools? How can this benefit your organization?

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Cover Image: Photo by Savannah Rohleder on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: E-mail Templates

Published on March 27, 2021April 3, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

Welcome back to the Power Baseball League! Today we are going to talk about E-mail Templates. Somehow it is already March and that means its real life MLB baseball season! Malcolm couldn’t be happier about spring training starting (not to mention the Toronto Blue Jays are looking pretty solid – not likely our year just yet but the team is fun to watch!).

This week we dove into e-mail templates. Warning: the Dynamics 365 email editor does not have many glamourous features. We believe this is intentional as the Dynamics 365 Marketing platform comes with far enhanced tools, though we did notice some enhancements that are nice additions.

You can definitely create useful notifications and emails from the out of the box features. In today’s video, we create an email template. However, we had some unexpected twists as we went through the process in the new UI. Watch the video to see and hear about our experience. Plus learn some tips on how to use this in a real world scenario.

Power Baseball League: E-mail Templates

How do you use email templates in your organization? What potential uses do you see for this feature?

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Photo by Eduardo Balderas on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: On Demand Flow

Published on March 19, 2021April 3, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

Today in the Power Baseball League we are building an On-Demand Flow!

Power Automate brings a tremendous amount of automation power to your finger tips (pardon the pun). But it’s true! It has the ability to interact with a growing list of applications (both inside and out of the Microsoft eco-system).The potential to create linkages between systems has never been greater.

In today’s post we look at building an on-demand flow to create a new registration for a youth in our baseball league. But this isn’t just any on-demand flow – we add in a layer of interaction with the user so they are giving the information to the flow while it executes. This is a really cool feature that opens the door to a number of use cases.

P.S. We mentioned that we struggled with the creating the lookups to other entities. For more information, check out this great Blog Post for all the details. Thanks EY for the assist!

What do you think?! Do you have ideas of how you might leverage this functionality in the real world? We’d love to hear it!

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w

Cover Photo: Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

Power Baseball League: Interactive Dashboards

Published on March 15, 2021 by Malcolm McAuleyLeave a comment

In our second Dashboard focused session on the Power Baseball League, we scratch the surface on Interactive Dashboards. What a cool addition to the platform these are! As you know, we’re learning alongside you – so neither of us had a great deal of experience with these. The more we dove into them, the more impressed we were!

In today’s video we get a basic interactive dashboard set-up and ready to use. Then we talk a bit about the differences between single-stream and multi-stream. We also look at the differences between the ‘maker portal’ and the classic interface.

If anything is clear after producing this video it’s that there is a whole lot more to explore! Such as what they are, how they work, and what an organization could do with them. Perhaps we’ll need to revisit in a future segment! For now, we hope this video gives you a basic overview of their intent and how to get started. Plus there is a wealth of information available in the Microsoft Docs page.

Join us next week as we continue our work to build out our app. We’ll be tackling how to build an on-demand flow in Power Automate to create a record in the system. Sounds simple, but we’ll be touching on how you can now have an element of interaction on these workflows to have data incorporated into the flow. So cool!

You can find Kylie’s content at the following:

Blog: https://kyliekiser.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylie-kiser/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/KylieKiser

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7jIvOwE4mHsr1Tjk1jj3w