In this episode, Stephen speaks to Power Platform expert Shane Young about the top 3 mistakes that IT Pros make with Power Platform.
Thank you to our episode sponsor Specops. For a Specops free security audit, click here: https://password.specopssoft.com/unplugit
Transcript
[MUSIC]
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of UnplugIT. I’m your host, Stephen Rose. Thanks for joining.
Been listening in on X, what was Twitter and threads and all the different social media stuff where you all reach out to me. One of the questions I got was, we would love to learn more about Power Apps and Power Platform. As I started to chat, I realized there’s Power Platform, there’s Power Apps, there’s Power Automated, there’s Power BI, there’s Power Pages, there’s for Power Virtual Agents, there’s Flow, all this stuff. I’m like, I don’t even really understand fully, what’s the difference between them and which one to use when. If you’re an IT pro and go, I don’t even know Power Apps that’s a developer thing, let me tell you, the Power Apps Conference last December and the one this spring, they were only expecting a few hundred people to show up. There was close to 2,600 people that showed up to each one. It is absolutely huge and companies are dedicating resources and people to the building of Power Platform and Power Apps. I thought, who’d be a good person to bring on? A friend of mine suggested Mr. Shane Young. Hey, Shane, how are you? Steven, thank you. Thank you for having me on. Very excited to chat with you. Yeah. Now, it’s great to have you here. You have been an MVP for 14 years, you have tens of millions of views on your YouTube channel, you have a website, Power Apps 911, which I had a chance to go into and start to play with. I was very impressed. It’s well put together. You give all of the demos and everything you need, and all the download files, and for someone like me who’s not the most savvy at coding type stuff, I found it very easy to follow and very easy to use, and even made a very simple Power App. Take a moment, tell us about yourself, and then we’ll jump in and talk more. Yeah. Well, thank you. I think for a little time words and I’m with you. I am also or was an IT pro. I started as a network admin with a roomful of servers and printers. I hated printers, still hate printers.
The old print servers were never a good thing, that little 486 box sitting somewhere, just schooling forever without enough RAM. I mean, the fact that they can literally cause fires, they started fires was just spectacular. But yeah, so like you though, or your audience here, I was never a developer. I’ve never written a line of C sharp code in my life. I went from servers to SharePoint. I was a SharePoint MVP for a long time. I got really big in a PowerShell. I love me some PowerShell, believe it or not.
The challenge of PowerShell, it turns out there wasn’t a lot of jobs in PowerShell. So I went looking for something else, and that’s why I tripped through this whole Power Apps thing. Low code, no code, I’m like, “Hey, I can do no code.”
And so the rest is really history, but I have been doing this now for five or six years. And like you just said, for IT pros, this platform is the bee’s knees. We don’t need those stinking developers anymore. We can build our own stuff. And at the same time, though a lot of you are probably charged with governing it. I think that’s where we’re trying to help everybody with today. – No, I agree. I have a great PowerShell story I have to share. And there’s two of, number one was telling IT pros about PowerShell when it first came out that the XE and batch files are gonna go away. It’s all gonna get replaced with PowerShell. And they laughed at me. And then five years later, people came back and said, “Yeah, we’re sorry. We’ve learned PowerShell and it’s made our life so much better in managing server.” But my daughter had to take a computer class. And we would chat each week while she was in college. And we were chatting one night, she’s like, “Yeah, I had my computer class this week. I was working on this stupid language thing called Power Something.” I’m like, “Power Something?” She goes, “Yeah, it’s really dumb.” She goes, “I hate it and I don’t understand it.” I’m like, “Okay.” Next night, I just happened to be having dinner with Jeffrey Snover, who is the founder and father of PowerShell. It was a dinner at like Microsoft ready. It was him and Mark Kristinevich and a whole bunch of folks. I’m not trying to name drop or anything, but I got to go up to Jeffrey and I’m like, “Hey, Jeffrey, I have to tell you something. My daughter called me and told me that PowerShell was dumb and stupid and that she doesn’t understand it.” And he burst into tears. But being the nice guy that he was, he said, “You know what? If you want, I’m happy to call your daughter for an hour and help guide her through basic PowerShell.” And you know what? That’s the kind of guy that Jeffrey Snover is. And I wish him much luck now that he’s left Microsoft. But anyways, let’s talk about it. So PowerShell, before we get into the different types and Power Apps and all the rest, not PowerShell, sorry, Power Apps, Power Automate, all that,
what areas should you be thinking about using these forms of automation for? Like what are kind of three or four areas where you’re going to go, “Ah, this is really going to make a difference and this is really going to help.”
Well, I think, you know, especially with our IT pros and focus here, right? A lot of it is, “Hey, how do I stop doing manual things?” Right? The same reason we all fell in love with PowerShell. We’re all naturally lazy. We want to do less. So, you know, using Power Automate to automate repetitive task force is great. But what’s really interesting about this is now, with like Power Automate, for example, we can talk to the Graph API. We all know that Office 365 is completely held together with a Graph API. – Right. – And for years we needed those darn developers to interact with that API thing for us, right? Turns out– – They were the Jedis of the API Graph Force that bound the universe together. – Right? And they made them look really smart, made us look not so smart. – Right. – But so now, you know, with Power Automate Flow, I can jump in there. I can talk to any of the Graph APIs. I can do that JSON thing, right? That hipster way of spelling JSON, right? It’s really just text. – It is. – And kind of plug some pieces in there. And so the fact that as an IT pro, I can write my own API calls and such, I think that’s a big, big thing for us. – So things like security, governance, you could use this, you know, for asset management. I even know someone who’s reduced team sprawl through this, that when they go to create a new team, it says, “Okay,” and it goes to a SharePoint list. It says, “Here are eight other teams “that meet the same criteria.” Or no, sorry. Ask them first of all to pick one of, up to five terms out of 20, that it gets from Microsoft list that best fit the team. Then it goes to a list of teams and says, “These are other teams that may do the same thing. “Will any of these work?” And if not, then it puts in a request IT to build the team. They found that they reduced new team creation by 70%, by just making people aware of what’s out there. So it can be things as simple as that. What is the Center of Excellence Toolkit? Let’s start with that. – So the one big challenges that IT pros have, right, is whether you’ve embraced Power Platform or not, your organization has, right? I promise you, if you have Office 365, Power Platform is currently being built, right? It’s Power Apps, Power Automate happening in your world. And so as IT pro people, we wanna know what’s going on, right? That’s one of our jobs, is to know what’s happening in our network, in our tenants. And so the COE, the Center of Excellence Toolkit, is a group of tools that Microsoft has put out there that we can use to watch what’s going on, right? So actually get an overview of, hey, here’s all the apps are being built. Here’s all the flows that are being built. Here’s the data that they’re connecting. Here’s how much storage there’s using. Here’s the owners. Like, give us that level of insight into the platform that we need. And then as we start to embrace it, we can also start to use the toolkit to do things like managing that. So like we talked about the Power Automate flows. So being able to say, hey, you know, Steven built all those. Well, Steven now lives on his private island because he won the $1.5 million, or billion dollar mega millions, congrats. – I would love that. – And so now we have tooling in there that can say, hey, take all the flows that Steven wrote and assign those to be Laura’s, right? – Great. – And it’s done. So the COE toolkit is the IT Pro’s best friend for understanding what the heck is going on in this Power Platform in the world and then starting to manage it. – All right, we’re gonna take a look at some cool examples, but first we need to take a minute and get a word from our sponsor, SpecOps. We’ll take a look at that, we’ll come back. And then we’ll talk about the three biggest problems that IT creates with Power Platform. So give me a minute and we will be right back. Shane and your twin brother, Sean, who will talk about it.
Good to look for Sean. – Awesome, we’ll be right back. – Episode of Unplugged IT is brought to you by SpecOps software. SpecOps is an easy to use password management and authentication solution for your Active Directory. Their Breach password protection software actually blocks your end users from choosing any one of over 3 billion known compromised passwords. And that’s a list that’s updated daily. With SpecOps, you’re creating a password policy with custom parameters and extending the functionality of group policy, all while simplifying password management. Finally, SpecOps provides dynamic end user feedback at password change. This means your users are educated on the company’s password best policies without them having to call help desk. And hey, one less call to help desk makes every IT pro happy. SpecOps is offering our viewers of Unplugged IT a free password vulnerability audit. All you need to do is visit the URL right there and you’ll be able to pick it up. So hey, SpecOps, check them out today. All right, and we’re back. So three biggest problems that IT creates with Power Platform. You had told me number one was yelling about security. So we’re gonna show some demos here. So I’m gonna go ahead and let’s do that. And I will let you talk about that. How IT is not always the best at thinking about governing, replacing and keeping things up to date. So walk me through this scenario. – Yeah, so this is always the first pushback we get from IT. We talk to them about automation, building these apps like you were saying the team sprawl things. And they’re like, oh my goodness, I bet this evil Power Platform thing it’s going to help them leak all of our secrets out. That is the first thing that IT pros always lead with. I wanna be as clear as humanly possible. Power Platform does not let you do anything today that you can’t already do. Period, full stop in a discussion. So you have to have permission to do the things you’re going to do. – Now what about the OPE and things along that line? Is that also gonna kick in Azure Information Protection as we do things with documents, tagging categories? Is that also part of this too, as we think about that? – And so it’s whatever policies you’ve applied, you have to be on it, right? Because basically if I build a Power App to interact with SharePoint, it is going to use the logged in users SharePoint or logged in users credentials to interact with SharePoint. So if they can’t delete all the documents in your SharePoint site, I use the SharePoint browser then the Power App doesn’t let them do it either, right? Because the Power App is not doing things on their, it’s doing it as the user. It’s not doing it as some like service account or some type of intermediary. It is always happening as the logged in user. So whatever permissions you’ve applied, then you’re stuck with. – Cool, okay. So that’s the first big thing. Now you could though argue that, all right, so I can’t necessarily steal all your corporate secrets with the Power Platform unless I can already steal your corporate secrets. But if I do have permission to steal them all, I can do it faster with the Power Platform and that’s fair. So one of the things that you can do in the Power Platform that a lot of IT pros find interesting is they can apply a DLP policy to control those connections. So here if I go to make.powerapps.com and then assuming you have the appropriate permissions, I can go here to the admin center. And then from the admin center under policies, I’ve got data policies. So here we can create a new policy. We’ll give it a name like, hi mom, very professional name. – Absolutely. – Next. And so now what this is showing you is that, hey, Power Platform and this right now, as we sit here today has 1060 connectors, which is one of the most amazing things, right? Power Platform can talk to all the Office 365 stuff, but it can also talk to over a thousand other connectors out there. So whether that be SQL and Azure this and Azure that or AWS or Salesforce or Twitter or YouTube or Mailchimp, like all of the connectors are out there. So that’s pretty powerful. And that’s where like people are gonna start to get afraid like, well, hey, you can talk to all these other things. So what I can do here in my DLP policy is I can start to build out policies and I could go in and for example, I could say, hey, I wanna categorize some of these connectors as business critical or businesses that calls it over here on the left. And so by categorizing them as business, what it would say is that only connectors that are in this bucket can talk to each other. So if I wanted to have an app that had, we can only have SharePoint and Outlook, right? I could go here to SharePoint and I’d say, hey you move to business, move Outlook here to business. And so then now these two connectors can only interact with each other. But if someone tried to build an app that had SharePoint, Outlook and SQL, it would fail because they’re in different buckets, right? So I have to do like to quarantine off the different connectors like that. That’s one option. But maybe I want more control than just on or off. So if we go and look at any of the ones that are marked as blockable, you can see it’s blockable here. So we got yes for SQL Server. And so if we go here to configure my connector, I have two options. One is connector endpoints. So here I can specify, all right, yes they can use the SQL connector, but maybe I want to configure it so they can only use certain SQL servers. So I could go in here and I could say, hey you know what, we’re going to deny any SQL connectors servers not in here. And then we’d add an endpoint, we’d set this one to allow, and then we’d put the configuration information for our given SQL Server here. So now yes, they can use the SQL Server connector, but only to talk to the one SQL Server that we specify and the wild card group of SQL servers we specify, but giving us the ability to– – One of the HR information can’t be tapped, but the one that has current sales can be, but only by certain people. – Awesome, perfect example, Steven. So this is one piece, but Shane, I want more, fair enough. The other thing you might do, I knew you kind of got one more, more, more. So here we’ve got connector actions. And so under connector actions, what we’ve got here is I can then go into the connector and say, you know what, I’m going to add this. And so maybe it’s back to, we are going to let them use that sales data, but we don’t want to let them ever have a delete transaction in there. So even if they had permissions to delete if they were directly in the database, we’re going to say going through the connector, the connector’s never allowed to invoke a delete. And so now we’ve tailored the experience of what the connector can do once it’s connected even. This, I feel like it’s a really powerful tool that a lot of the IT pros that I talk to miss, not realizing that they have a lot of say in these type of things. And these connection actions, they aren’t just for the Microsoft stuff. Like if we go in here and we search for Salesforce, and if we configure its connector actions, look, there’s all the Salesforce actions. So we can even control what Salesforce can do. A lot of flexibility, a lot of power here. So if you are the type of IT admin, it’s all of a sudden discovering that maybe this Power Platform is doing a lot and you’re a little nervous, go turn off some things until you get your arms wrapped around them. – What’s the best way to find out which apps can be managed through Power Platform and which ones can’t? Is there a centralized list somewhere? Or what’s the best way to, I mean, without just going in and obviously searching everything across your network?
No, it’s mostly gonna be coming in here and looking. I mean, honestly, when it comes to Blockable, it’s basically, for the most part, it’s not fully, but pretty much anything that’s not Office 365 is going to be listed as Blockable, right? So there’s Dropbox, there’s, I don’t even know. – So what about a custom app that was created internally, maybe not?
So down here, so after we get through this section, we can go next here. We also have the ability to control custom connectors. So in the Power Platform, if one of those 1,060 connectors doesn’t meet your needs, you’ve built your own, Steven Fancy T-shirt Collection API internally, and you wanna build a connector to that, you can, but as the IT admin here, I could go in here and say, “Hey, Steven’s fancy connector “is business critical to us, right? “So we’re gonna even put that “into maybe our business group, right?” And so you can go in here and also configure not necessarily the action level like we were doing, but you can configure what resources they can add in as custom connectors to the Power Platform. – Okay, what about folks who are trying to govern everything? Let’s say IT didn’t try to govern something, creating a spreadsheet that they’re trying to replace, et cetera. What’s our best way to kind of approach that? – Don’t do that. – Okay, that’s good, I agree with that. And listen, I told you guys, I used to be an IT pro, I started back in the late 90s. And my very first day of IT pro training was no, right? Like my boss is like, you just, somebody asks you for something, you just say no. Doesn’t matter what they’re asking you for, you say no, and then you negotiate from there, right? I think all of those IT pros were raised that way. So when we started thinking about the Power Platform, we started saying, “Well, hey, “I wanna do that same thing here.” But no, right? No is my answer to you saying you wanna say no. And the reason for that is, you know, the same reason that we didn’t use to manage people creating Excel spreadsheets on their desktop, we don’t wanna create or manage them creating power apps that, you know, are replacing those Excel spreadsheets. – Right. – Okay, so we don’t wanna say no, but as a good response for IT pro, I do wanna know what’s going on. And so what we’re going to do for that, as I wanna introduce you guys to what we mentioned earlier, the COE, the Center of Excellence Starter Kits, right? So this is a set of Power BI reports and apps that Microsoft has built for us, and we can download for free, right? It’s free on their site, or I think it’s free in GitHub is where you get it from, but Microsoft runs it. And so what this is going to let us do is this is going to let us start to manage what is going on and watch what’s going on. Like we should monitor, even if we don’t wanna be the gatekeepers necessarily. – Right. – So you can see over here, I’ve got the COE toolkit installed. And so like, if I jump in here to my dashboard, I think this is the one I want. This is all built for me, Microsoft provides this on the toolkit, but I can start to get an overview of like what’s going on in power apps. And so you can see as a company, we’ve created 1,106. You know, you can see the different types we’ve done, you can see who’s built them, how many we do a month, and then you can start to drill in and see where they’ve been built. So we start to be able to get an insight into the use of Power Platform, right? So like if you’re one of those people sitting there saying, “No one’s using Power Platform at my company.” I challenge you to install this, run the report and see how many Power Apps are being built in your company you had no idea about.
And how much information will this give you about exactly what that Power App is, who created it, who’s using it, how often, et cetera. Will that give us some of that as well? – Yes, absolutely. So like if we go down here to Apps, so you can see that, you know, like we created as a company in June, we created 43. Who knows what we were doing that month? We were busy, right? So we can start to see who’s doing it, what departments are doing the most. So what’s funny is I’m the only one in the services department, so I’ve built the most in our company, but these are all real ones. So, you know, our different departments have funny names, but yeah, you can start to see that. And I could start to be like, “Hey, like what are all the apps that Chewy, my dog built, right?” And so you can see these are all the apps that Chewy has built over time, what environments he’s building on. – See, he’s taught his dog to build apps, so if you can’t do it and his dog can, you know, what does that say about your, you know, comfort in being able to embrace new things? – I couldn’t have said it better myself. – And there’s a picture of Chewy on this website, so check it out. It’s a very hard, very hard. – Yeah, my cute little Chewy toy here. Chewy, Chewy’s the good part. But so yeah, so you can start to see this. You can get in here. You can also start to look like we talked about those connectors, right? So you can see what different connectors are being used, the app usage. So if we want to see what apps are being used the most, like look, our real time sheet, it’s always got a real one, it’s been used 5,011 times. Let’s see who’s using it. So this is where you can start to really get a handle on what’s happening in your environment, right? These Power BI reports, they’re just here for you. You install them, you run them, and now you’ve got all of this insight in what’s going on.
Okay. – Same type of thing for licensing here, like you can drill into that. – Exactly, that was gonna be my next question. Just how do we know about licensing or Azure usage or things along that line? – Yeah, right? So this one I think is great because, so we got 1384 apps, we hit the plus, we can then say, all right, well, what departments? And so then these are the different departments. Let’s see what those nerds of a feather have been doing. And then we can be like, all right, connector tier. And so you can see that they’ve got 24 that are premium, remember premium, has that licensing, expand that out, connectors. And so then we can kind of see that they’re using 19 with a Dataverse connector for the SQL connector and one with the Azure Blob Storage connector. So we start to get real insights into who’s using the premium licenses, why they’re using the premium licenses, with just a few clicks. – This is awesome. And really see if it’s valid and do that. Before I ask you the last question, the last question I wanna ask you, we’ve now thrown out a lot of terms. We’ve had Power Platform, Power Apps, Power Automated, Power BI, Power Pages. We’ve sort of touched on Power Virtual Agents. We didn’t talk about Flow. What’s the difference between these? So let me start with Power Platform. So what is Power Platform? What is the definition of that? – Power Platform is a fancy marketing word. So Power Platform is the umbrella term that we use for all those products you just listed. But it doesn’t actually exist. I can’t touch the Power Platform. I can’t buy or install the Power Platform. It’s just a marketing umbrella word that kind of covers Power Apps, Automate, et cetera. – Got it. Like Microsoft 365 is a series of applications underneath it, but that’s the term we use to kind of gather them all together. – Perfect, yes. – Power Apps. – So Power Apps are where I kind of got my first go, right? But that’s where we build these little apps to, well, it had to be a little app, a massive app. But we build apps to solve business problems. So like, you know, that could be that asset inventory management app you talked about earlier. That could be, you know, like one of my customers blows things up for a living. And so all of the telemetry that goes into their explosions all goes through this. You know, I used it for process management, HR, hiring, onboarding, team sprawl, like you mentioned. There’s a lot of different things. But Power Apps is what a lot of people kind of like to start with because it’s, you know, building apps to solve business problems in low code or no code, right? Over 50% of the apps that I know of that are built in the world were built by people that are not IT, that are not developers. They are salespeople and accountants and, you know, administrative assistants and executives. Like it is not a platform. I mean, you can use it as a IT professional, but in reality, half of the usage of it comes out of the business. – Okay, Power Automate. – Power Automate is Microsoft’s workflow tool. So automating, creating flows. They used to call Power Automate flow. Now you call flow. It’s very confusing, but Power Automate flow are kind of the same word. But Power Automate is their automation tooling set. So building those interactions with those APIs we talked about, maybe you want to have a job every day that runs the check to make sure that all of your SQL data got processed. You know, just those types of automations for us lazy IT pros. – And there’s a bunch of those that are already created. I remember finding one and tweaking it that when I would get an email from my boss where I was on the two line and there was nobody else, it would then send up a text message or I put a thing on my screen that would say boss email. And it would notify me and it was great. That way I’d know, hey, this is one I want to look at now, not one where it’s going out to 50 other people. So there’s some value in that and in building simple things like that. All right, Power BI. I know what Power BI is, but why is that now part of Power Platform? And that was just Power BI dashboards that was pulling in information from a variety of sources. Why is that now part of Power Platform? – I think you hit the nail on the head, right? Well, it’s using the word power and so everything is power now. So Power BI, it’s the reporting side, right? So you think about, we got the apps for ingesting information, editing, working with information. We got automate for automating, adding the workflows, moving things around, running business processes. And then we got Power BI, which is the reporting side. I want to be able to make it all that data and collecting slice it, dice it, you know. And what’s really interesting is like, you can take a Power BI report once you learn how to build those and you can embed a Power app in that, right? So if you think about your Power BI being all about actionable data, now you can just embed a Power app right into your report. So you can take action from within inside your report by combining two pieces of Power Platform together. – Sure, if something hits a certain level, it can kick off a workflow that requires somebody to engage, understand why this is going so high, so low. It could let finance know, hey, you’re overspend or let a manager know that you’re coming close to spend for travel or something along that line, correct? – That’s a yes, yeah.
Power Pages, this is one I’m not familiar with at all. So this is brand new for me. I’ve not heard of Power Pages. – Power Pages is my least favorite of the Power children. So Power Pages is– – It’s a little off to the side, it’s okay Power Pages. We love you.
Maybe. So Power Pages is about building low code, no code websites off of the Power Platform. So Dataverse is the underlying data structure that lives under the Power Platform. And so Power Pages lets me build these low code, no code websites that could be anonymous, they can be authenticated, they can be a mixture, but trying to use some of those same low code, no code profiles or traits. But they’re still a work in progress. They haven’t quite caught on like the other tools yet. – It is the weird Barbie of the Power Platform world. I got it, okay. Power Virtual Agents. – Oh, Power Virtual Agents, chatbots. I don’t know if you heard of this thing called chat GPT before. – Something like that, yeah. – Yeah, I think people are kind of into chatting. So Power Virtual Agents, if you’ve ever went to a retail website or a credit card or a bank’s website, and they’re like, “Hey, how can I help you?” And you start chatting with the interface and you know it’s not a human. Power Virtual Agents is about building those in the Microsoft ecosystem. The nice thing about that though is that you’ve got your Microsofts invested in co-pilot. Now you can start to put some of those large language model smarts into these chatbots so they don’t have to feel as robotic as some of those early ones. You know, you’re like, “I want to get a refund.” And it’s like, “Do you want to have a manager? Do you?” – Right. – “Oh, just give me a human.” They’ve gotten a lot better at not making you scream, “Just give me a human.” – I love that. Yes, yeah, I agree, Chris one, but it can’t. I mean, I’ve seen companies that have used this in IT for, “Hey, here’s the top answers. Where do I download Teams from? Where do I reset my password?” Things like that that are pretty standard. The great thing is you can get past people past a tier one question and get right to tier two, which is worth then the time and value of somebody to engage and gets past a lot of the basic stuff, no matter what it is. What are your hours? You know, are you currently open? Things like that. That could be very valuable. – And I have a side note on for an IT department. And so they were using it for their FAQ. And if the FAQ didn’t have your answer, to your point, it would then prompt them for some additional information and it would automatically create a ticket and service now for them, right? Cause it would then run a Power Automate flow. It would talk to the service now connector and would write the service ticket in there so that someone could follow up properly. It was pretty cool. And it was not a lot of work to build. – I love it. So your number three top thing is not learning to use it. I think we’ve made a good case on why you want to dip your toe into the Power Platform Lake. What are some thoughts here? And then let’s talk about some good resources for people to get started. – Yeah, I think that would be my biggest advice is, yes, you’ve got to govern it. Yes, you need to start managing it. Like we talked about the COE toolkit here, but start using it. There is so much power here. I mean, for the longest time as IT pros, we couldn’t build our own tooling. Now I can build anything a developer can build, right? And so whether it’s account creation stuff. – Wait a minute, wait a minute. Is that a challenge? Are you asking for a developer to prove this? And what would it be like a throw down on a video or just your realtor? You can now feel empowered and build a lot of things that you would have had to go to a developer for. Clarify that. Cause I know I have a lot of devs that watch the show and you’re going to get one of them coming after you. So, you know, they’re coming through tough. – They’re welcome to come yell at me. That’s fair. But you know, most business apps today do not need super complex things, right? We want to collect some data. We want to edit some data. We want to send some notifications, do some approvals, a little this, a little that. – Right. You’re not wasting a developer’s valuable time who is building a, you know, incredibly complex platform app over things like this that you as the IT pro can do, automate and make people’s lives better. So they can actually really help each other and take over some of the small stuff, even some of the medium stuff that you are having app developers do and start to do that yourself are working collaboration is what you’re saying, correct? – Yeah. And one of the great things about our platform is Microsoft’s fancy words are that it’s no cliffs developments, right? What they’re really trying to say is that you can, the app can grow, right? So maybe it’s written by, you know, an assistant in some random office over here. And then all of a sudden the whole group starts using it, then the whole floor, then the whole company, you know, so the app can grow. But in the beginning, maybe it was just a simple form, but now they’re like, hey, we want to interact with this proprietary API. We want to have this custom tooling inside of here. And they can introduce that. And that’s where we go and engage with the pro developers, right? Or, hey, I need you to write me my own PCF control to make dragging and dropping here. Or I need you to interact with this ridiculous API that’s in XAML, blah, blah, blah, developer words here, right? But so that they can just easily present it back into so that the non-pro devs can consume it. So there’s absolutely a story here for the pro devs, but to your point, it’s not about making silly little forms anymore and wasting all their time moving pixels around. It’s about solving really hard problems and then solving them in ways that it can be exposed back into the power platform so that non-smart developers like myself can consume that information without needing to have, you know, understand what’s going on. – Okay. Let’s talk about some of the resources. There is training.powerapps.com. Take a moment and weigh in. – Yeah. So training.powerapps911.com. That is my lovely little training site. Come check it out. You can learn with me. We’ve got on demand classes. We’ve got live classes. We’ve got the Power Platform University, which is a six month immersive program that teaches you the business side, the tech side, the developer side, the usability side. It’s about becoming and learning how to think all up in the Power Platform. I mean, training is really important, I think. And you know, if you’re not up to speed on the Power Platform, catch up. – I agree. You can also go to learn.microsoft.com forward slash power hyphen platform. That’s where you’ll find that COE, Center of Excellence we talked about. There’s also some good really basic beginner training, but it’s not, I took one of your classes and like I said, it gave me all the sample files, everything I needed. So it was a little bit better for me as a beginner, but hey, that’s a great place to go as well. What is Power Platform University?
Yeah. That is just our fully immersive program. So, you know, we, hiring people that are good at the Power Platform is still a super duper struggle. Super duper, look at me and my fancy words. And so we, you know, we as a growing consulting company, I think we’re like 25 people now, we have a hard time even hiring. So we built a six month immersive program that we could put people into to get them up to the speed of consultants for ourselves. And now we’ve made that available to the public so that anyone can sign up and take that. We’ve got people from literally all over the globe signing up and you know, learning that. And it’s got a live component, an on demand component, an actual project component, an exam at the end. Like it’s pretty intense. – Yeah. There are also some great conferences. I’m going to be at EduCon in Chicago. I’m going to be at a tech mentor in December. And I know both of those have Power Apps and Power Platform tracks and classes. Do you have any conferences coming up in the near future? Do you think you will be out? – I’ll be at the Power Platform Conference in October in Vegas, right? And so, you know, if you’d like to party, it’d be a good time. – Yeah. So lots of opportunities. And the great thing is, is if you’ve never done this before, you know, Shane’s site is awesome, but sometimes just going to a conference and taking those beginner one-on-ones, surrounding yourself with other people that haven’t done it, building that, learning from that, and then going, okay, now I’m ready to really dive deep into Power Apps 911 or whatever, and really learn it and go deep is a great way. And it’s also really good to make those connections with other people at the same place, because community is so important and learning from them, engaging with your MVPs, all of that is a great way to really sort of move forward. Any final thoughts before we bring this to a close today, sir? – No, I really appreciate you bringing me on. And, you know, I just, all my IT pro brethren and the developers, right, they’re upset, I apologize. If you’re not, if you’re discounting with the Power Platform, this low-code, no-code stuff can do, you’re really missing the boat. So, you know, you learn from me, you learn from some other resource, you just go bang your head against the wall, embrace this low-code, no-code thing. It is real and it is coming very, very fast. – Awesome. So I appreciate you taking time out today, Shane. This is great. Are you on social, any place like that, that people can also reach out to you? – Yeah, I’m on, I guess, X, like you said before, I forget the name of it. – Twitter X. – Shane’s Cows.
I’m on YouTube. I’ve got over 350 videos out on YouTube. I mean, we were talking about PowerShell earlier. I have a PowerShell video, like 1.6 million views. The most viewed PowerShell video ever? This guy. – Wow. Nice, is that your little YouTube award behind you? Is that what that’s for? – Yeah, that’s what we call, we passed 100,000 subscribers, so. – That’s crazy. Wow, well, that gives you an idea. So, hey, if you’re not subscribed, you’re not checking this stuff out, you are behind. Here’s your chance to get caught up. So, from Unplug IT, thanks so much for joining us, Shane. Thank you for calling in this morning, and we’ll talk to you soon, and we’ll see all of you on our next episode of Unplug IT. Thanks again, talk to you soon. Have a good one. Say goodbye. – Bye. (upbeat music)