Category: Process & Practices

Power Platform Analytics for Administration & User Adoption

by Yawer Iqbal, posted in D365, Power Platform, PowerApps, Process & Practices

Power Platform analytics are out of box reports, located under the admin center. Historically similar statistics were available as ‘Organization Insights’ dashboard, which was a separate install-able solution.

After login to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com, under analytics section, the following four reports are available at the moment:

  • Capacity
  • Common Data Service
  • Power Automate
  • Power Apps

Lets explore Capacity and Common Data Service in this post.

Capacity

Data volume keeps growing, and this section has details about storage. It covers all environments for available licences. It shows storage capacity under the following three categories:

  • Database
  • File
  • Log

This information (report) is particularly helpful once the project is live to analyse and have a track of entitled, used and available storage.

Common Data Service

This report is a lot more critical due to the recent licencing changes which are effective from October 2019. Lets summaries quickly what these changes are. The idea is model-driven app users have a maximum limit of requests they can do in a day. What is a request? A CRUD, share or assign operation will be counted as a request, no matter it was using REST or SOAP; Plugins, Workflows or JS.

Details about requests and limits can be found in this link:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/api-request-limits-allocations#non-licensed-usersapplication-users

This report has multiple tabs and much information under them.

They have general statistics about API calls (totals, user and entity-specific details of all create, update, delete and read requests). Details about how users access applications such as user operating systems, device types, browsers, entities, security roles and business unit(s). Highlights about most used OOB and custom entities. Summary of mailbox usage, system jobs and plugin execution.

I hope you will find the usage of these reports beneficial. In the next post, we will explore Power Automate and Power Apps reports.
Enjoy your day.

D365 & PowerApps Minimum Viable Projects

by Yawer Iqbal, posted in Process & Practices

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is often referred with startups. The concept is to develop minimal features which ideally should have core functionality, just enough for the user to give feedback. It may not be very fancy and user experience focused. In product development, feedback provides direction for further work and growth. 

Here I m sharing my experience. The idea of MVP (minimal viable project in the context of D365 & Power Platform) is a more agile way of delivering, especially when clients are new to these technologies. Yes, it benefits projects of any scale in any industry with almost all types of customers. Advantages are it enables the delivery of a valuable working system in quickest possible time and cost, and of course, it mitigates the risks.

Here are a few learnings while using this concept:

  1. While developing MVP do not focus a lot on fancywork. Key is to take user feedback, communicate and demonstrate what will be ultimate user experience. I m a big fan of user experience, making system easy to use and adopt, but it shouldn’t be a priority while developing the core.
  2. Initially, the focus should be just core functionality. If for doing something a workaround is available, use it instead of developing everything in the first go. 
  3. Client and end-user may not have requirements ready, help them by understanding their needs, showing and suggesting ideas.
  4. An introduction level basic training of D365 can help user understanding system capabilities, communicate and visualize their requirements.
  5. If building core functionality has dependencies, try to sort them out in advance to avoid frustration and to have a smooth ride.
  6. Just like user experience don’t focus on implementing CI-CD and other time-consuming practices in the beginning. 
  7. Start small, go in iterations. The first version has not to be 100 % what user is looking, but at least the user will have something to see and visualize their needs. 

I hope you will find these tips useful. Please share in comments if you have used this approach, any tips or thoughts.

 

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