Month: January 2018

Introduction to Microsoft PowerApps

In this blog let us see what is PowerApps, PowerBI and Flow. I will orient you about all these products one by one. All these are excellent products for power users and even for developers, almost no coding is required.

PowerApps is the app development platform, with which we can develop apps compatible with mobile, tab and can also be viewed in desktop or laptop browsers with no additional coding required.

To learn PowerApps like any other technology, you need to understand its UI design, the connectors and its integration capabilities.

Data is the heart of any application and I always prefer to understand the data connectivity first. It’s really easy to do DB operations in PowerApps with readily available connectors. There are two types of connectors used for PowerApps

  • Standard Connectors
  • Custom Connectors

Standard Connectors are the connectors which are supported by PowerApps.  and if you want to connect to your own web service its called custom connector. You have to register your custom connectors before you consume it.  PowerApps can connect to any of existing data you have in the organisation either on premise or on cloud.

The most popular connectors are mentioned below:

  • Common Data Service
  • SharePoint
  • SQL Server
  • Dynamics 365
  • Office 365 Users
  • Office 365 Outlook
  • Excel
  • OneDrive and OneDrive for business
  • DropboxConnectors

In case you need to connect to on premise data sources, PowerApps provides excellent feature of on Premise gateways. We can install on premise gateway and then connect to on premise data base through this gateway. Gateway should be in the same network where your database exists. once you have the gateway ready, you can define the connector to connect to your on premise database using this gateway.

We can go through detailed steps on how to actually create the connectors and connect to data sources in my subsequent blogs

 

Is it the decline of Scribe Era in Dynamics 365 CE implementations?

Dynamics CRM being online, we do not have access to the database for any operations and in integration scenarios, it’s very common to use the database to database communications. Here Scribe Replication services was the quick help for everyone.

Scribe is very popular in all dynamics developers for integration and replication, however now I think they have to upgrade their skills and learn new way of the integration and replication. Microsoft has come up with Data Export Services which replicates the data from Dynamics CRM to either Azure SQL database or SQL server on the Azure virtual machine.

The Data Export Service, replicates the complete CRM data along with the schema changes. I really liked this feature of  Microsoft.  You can even select the entities which you want to replicate.

I am not going in details of the steps to configure the replication as there are many blogs which provide details of complete procedure step by step.

You can refer to below links for the more details of data export service

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt788315.aspx

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/crm/2017/04/11/introduction-to-dynamics-365-data-export-service/

http://www.crmchap.co.uk/microsoft-dynamics-365-data-export-service-review/

While exploring more, came across a limitation as it does not replicate the attachments. Hence you need address this limitation by using some workaround, if you need attachments also to be synced.

As I mentioned, instead of Scribe replication service we can definitely use data export service, which is free a service from Microsoft. However we need to consider the cost of Azure subscription as it’s not available for on premise database. Further developments would tell us on how this feature would be enhanced and will it be successful to get on the Scribe.