Episode 325: In the Dynamics Corner Chair: Unlocking Additi…
Brad and Kris speak with Blazej Kotelko, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Platform integration Product Manager, in this co…
June 25, 2024
Episode 325: In the Dynamics Corner Chair: Unlocking Additional Value with Power Automate
Brad and Kris speak with Blazej Kotelko, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Platform integration Product Manager, in this conversation. They discuss the use of connectors in Power Automate, the availability of APIs for integration, and the limitations of on-premises versus cloud environments. Blazej also provides insights and suggestions for getting started with the Power Platform connector. The conversation covered various topics related to the Power Platform and its integration with Business Central. The discussion highlighted the power and flexibility of the Power Platform in enhancing business processes and improving customer service.
#MSDyn365BC #BusinessCentral #BC #DynamicsCorner
Follow Kris and Brad for more content:
https://matalino.io/bio
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Chapters
00:00 - Microsoft Dynamics and LEGO Room Integration
08:30 - Enhancing Business Central With Power Automate
22:10 - Integrating Business Central With Power Automate
31:56 - Power Automate Integration and Copilot Features
47:06 - Business Central Integration With Power Automate
58:50 - Exploring Power Platform Capabilities
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner, the podcast where we dive deep into all things Microsoft Dynamics.
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Whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting your journey into the world of Dynamics 365, including Power Platform, I'm your co-host.
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Chris, and this is Brad.
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This episode is recorded on June 20th 2024.
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Chris, chris, chris, another mind-blowing episode, and we haven't had a chance to talk about this yet.
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But did you know, my latest obsession is the Rubik's Cube.
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Yeah, could you figure it out by the time we finish the episode?
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I did, I did.
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There's a sequence, right, right there is a sequence, there's a trick to it or a secret, it's some algorithms or whatever you may call it, and you can have a good workflow to go through to solve one of these yeah you can follow that workflow time and time again and let's solve.
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speaking of workflows, with us today we had the opportunity to speak with the man himself, the product manager from microsoft, working with the business central.
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Speak with the man himself, the product manager for Microsoft, working with the Business Central, connector for the Power Platform.
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With us today we have the opportunity to speak with Vlasde Kutela.
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Good morning, how are you doing?
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Good afternoon, I should say Good afternoon.
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How are you doing?
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I'm fine.
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How are you guys?
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Doing well, very well, I see you're in the famous LEGO room.
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Correct.
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I did a little bit of research before joining this and saw that a couple of weeks ago you actually had my manager, Janik, who was also in this room.
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So I thought I will use the same famous location.
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But I have something to show to you and the audience, because we have a couple of new sets that are ready to be assembled.
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So this is actually a retro radio which has a sound unit in it, apparently.
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We also have this, yes, correct, nasa Artemis launch system with the rocket and everything.
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And then this is very exciting it's Notre Dame.
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Wow, oh, the Notre Dame Lego set.
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So you have three new Lego sets to put into the famous Lego.
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We're getting those every now and then.
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These are waiting for maybe a little bit more autumn weather later.
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I don't know.
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Right now the weather in Denmark is amazing.
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People tend to spend time outside of the office whenever they can.
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Oh yes, I know all about those seasons.
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We also have football in Europe, europe.
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I don't know if you guys are aware, but the european championship for in football, which is soccer in the us right there yeah, that's a famous sport is currently on the way and we have have actually Denmark playing England today.
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So some of my colleagues are already getting ready to be excited, so you have to get some barbecue ready.
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Oh yes, you have to have some beer in the fridge stuff like that.
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You have some beer in the fridge stuff like that, but it's.
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It is today 6pm, so it starts in one hour right now in here.
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I will probably have a look at part of that game later on as well, but I'm not Danish originally, so I'm sometimes torn.
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We still can participate, hopefully we can.
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I'm not Danish originally so I'm sometimes torn.
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We still can participate.
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Hopefully we have enough time so you can get to watch the game with your colleagues.
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Oh, absolutely there's no problem with that, absolutely no problem.
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And also, we need to put the LEGO room on the map as a tourist attraction to anybody who's visiting Lego room on the map is a tourist attraction to anybody who's visiting.
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It is a tourist attraction and usually people are stopping by and we have members from our team showing various kind of offices here.
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We have a flight simulator room.
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We have an Xbox room this one, of course and a few other kind of hidden gems.
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Flight simulator room.
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I would appreciate that.
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That was a couple of years ago when we had several of our colleagues somehow magically convince someone in the site leadership here that some leftover budget could be spent on buying the actual flight simulator equipment.
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So we have the aux sticks and all that stuff.
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Is it the actual?
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flight sim game, or which game is in there?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I mean, it was actually before we had access to flight simulator Microsoft Flight Simulator so it is running something else.
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I don't know exactly, but we can research that for the next time.
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Oh, excellent, excellent, no, I want to know.
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See, now we can turn into all the fun that's there.
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It's good to have those outlets within the office, and it does increase creativity, because you can take your mind off something sometime and it helps your brain think a little bit differently.
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But we definitely appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.
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I've been looking forward to having a conversation with you, as I do with each of the members of the community that take the time to speak with us.
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Before we jump into it, though, do you think you could take a moment to tell everyone who's listening a little bit about yourself?
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Absolutely.
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My name is Boazic Oteuco.
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I work as a PM, which stands for Product Manager or Program Manager, at Microsoft, based out of Microsoft Denmark, which is actually formally not Microsoft Denmark but Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen.
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These are two different business entities located in the same building, and we are a development center for Dynamics products, and Dynamics Business Central, specifically, is headquartered here in this office.
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It's on the outskirts of Copenhagen in Denmark, and, yeah, we have most of the engineering team based here and then, of course, a few other remote locations here and there across Europe and the US.
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As well, so you work as a product manager with Microsoft and the Dynamics product.
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Which product in particular do you work with?
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Yeah, I'm responsible for integration between Business Central and Power Platform.
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That's my main responsibility.
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But when I got hired into this office I was actually responsible for the mobile app first, then a little bit of different kind of elements of UI, web client UI and kind of different aspects of the user interface of our product, and that stays with me until now and going forward as well.
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I will be looking at that as well.
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So kind of user-facing elements, but also integration with Power Platform and for that it is mostly right now Power Automate, power Apps, and recently we started doing a little bit more with Copilot Studio.
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Of course, as you know, we are looking at Copilot scenarios and Copilot being built inside Business Central, but also different scenarios that we can offer to the community using Copilot Studio.
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And as a program manager or product manager officially right now this discipline is called product management, previously program management.
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So as a product manager, I'm looking at what's going on around us.
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I'm looking at the markets, talking to partners, talking to the community, talking to customers, from time to time presenting the content, presenting news and, of course, working with engineers also to actually deliver the components or the elements of the product.
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That's great.
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That is Power Automate.
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I know when they introduced Power Automate or even the early onset, the integration with Business Central to Power Automate, it totally opened up the use of the application from where instances where someone may have to develop a solution, now they could use Power Automate to complete that solution and work with the data in a bi-directional format.
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When working with Power Automate and designing what you would need for the integration between Business Central and Power Automate, what are some of the areas that you look at to determine which entities that you may set up or which information that you will allow to have access to from the outside in Power Automate?
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outside.
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In Power Automate, yeah, we try to offer the technical capability or the capability to integrate with the product, and that is through both having the connector, that component that reaches to the data, but also integration in the UI.
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So the fact that you can have power automate flow show up in the business central UI on the side and that works independently of a specific entity and specific data.
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And, of course, the business central architecture is is defined in such a way that we have our, our platform, our, our kind of server layer, and then, on top of that, apis, and those APIs are responsible for communicating from the outside, so communicating with Business Central, giving access to data and allowing for the data to be written back to Business Central, and those APIs are provided by Microsoft.
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So we have a set of APIs out of the box, like the V2 APIs that we currently own.
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We have a couple of additional sets of APIs for various kinds of use cases, and then partners also are able to provide additional APIs APIs for our data sets or our data that is not included in the standard APIs, but also for data that is created by partners.
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So if you build an extension for Business Central with your own tables, with your own data, different, completely different entities, which actually happens quite often, because Business Central is this kind of programming platform for business applications, based, of course, on Business Central.
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But sometimes we have partners who build applications that have much more objects and tables and components included, provided by the partner, than what we originally provided with Business Central, and for that, of course, in the same way, those partners can open up with their own APIs and all of those APIs are accessible through Power Platform.
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So Power Automate, power Apps and so forth.
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We have different kind of.
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You know we can go a little bit deeper if you're guys interested.
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Oh, I'd like to.
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I'm interested in it.
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We have different technologies for that.
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No, I'm interested, I understand it all.
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I listen to you speak and it brings so much to my mind as far as questions and functionality and technology, and one of them you hit to my mind.
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As far as questions and functionality and technology, and one of them you hit.
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So you had mentioned, if there's standard APIs which may be the foundation of the connector right, or the connector is something that's within Power Automate that connects to Business Central and consumes those APIs, and if you create an extension, whether it's an ISV extension, internal extension for those that may do internal development, or a partner extension is there anything that needs to be done from the Par Automate point of view for those APIs to be accessible, or are they just already accessible?
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Is there a certain structure that they need to follow?
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That's a good question.
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Any API, any extension that creates an API in a standard way and, of course, we have some documentation explaining best practices, how to create custom APIs for Business Central but any API that is created in a proper way will be available to Power Automate through this connector out of the box, no additional steps required.
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So the connector is actually a component in Power Platform, and Power Platform right now has something like 1,400 different connectors for various data sources external and I mean first-party Microsoft-owned product, but also various external systems and Business Central is one of them, and this is a component that allows systems to work with each other.
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It's like a proxy kind of a thing, right.
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It handles authentication and so on.
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It handles also access to different APIs, so it is able to read various API roads in a specific instance of Business Central and allows you, for instance, in Power Automate it gives you like a UI where you can kind of go through the API hierarchy and select the one that you want to work with and connect with and create an action in Power Automate to read data from a specific API.
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I mean, you would think you're reading from a table, but you actually are going through APIs, right.
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So you actually are calling an API, but you don't need to understand the technicalities behind those APIs.
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It's just basically a structure of data In Power BI.
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It is even nice.
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The UI is even nicer because they have a very nice preview of the whole hierarchy of APIs and you can just cherry pick the ones that you are interested in and build your query.
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Power Automate has like a slightly different UI where you have a couple of levels of those.
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You know, selectors with different types of APIs, and then you get to a specific one and then Power Apps, on the other hand, has like a more like a flat list of different APIs that you select.
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But whatever you choose, you always have access to all those APIs that are provided by Microsoft and partners or from your own extension as well, of course.
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That's nice, it's a quick.
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You know everyone likes to use the word or the term.
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Now you know, low code, no code.
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So I guess using the connector you know if we talk about that gives someone easier access to the Business Central data and they can handle all of the without understanding the technical architecture of an API and the connectable assist with authentication for the user as well as selecting the correct company.
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That's always been one of those challenges.
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You know, with Business Central you have a multi-company solution.
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How do I know which company I'm in?
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How do I know which environment I'm in?
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Because you may have a production or a sandbox and all of that is something that you can configure with in the Connect here.
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Precisely, and environment and the company is part of that hierarchy, because environment would be on top right and then in each environment you have multiple companies, or you might have multiple companies and those companies could have slightly different APIs inside right.
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So you're going through that hierarchy and, as I said, like Power BI, power BI Desktop, this kind of report designer has like a very nice kind of experience where you have a tree view of everything that is available for you.
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Maybe you can get that in Power BI.
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So is the connector that you use for Power BI the same connector that you use for Power Automate and Power Apps, or is it something different?
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Yeah, so specifically, power BI is a different connector, it's a different code, something different.
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Yeah, so specifically Power BI, it is a different connector, it's a different code.
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It's using the same concept and it's also calling our PIs, but Power BI as a product is slightly different than the rest of Power Platform for various historical reasons.
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So the technology the connector is written in is slightly different than we had to and we still have multiple versions of that connector.
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We actually have a connector for on-prem version of Business Central that we keep using or offering to our customers, but of course, the majority of our improvements, efforts and different new features are introduced to the cloud version of Business Central Connector.
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So, as it sits today, the Power Platform Connector for Business Central can work both online and on-premise.
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Is there a difference between the two?
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Is it limited functionality between the two based upon the architecture, or are they the same?
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The functionality is limited for Business Central connector on-prem and specifically Business Central connector for Business Central on-prem is not able to react on triggers that happen inside Business Central because you have to expose data.
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So there is a way to expose data and have kind of access to your data, but we cannot kind of offer the same level of interactivity between those two systems, one living inside your on-prem environment and, of course, the rest of Power Platform being in the cloud.
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And the same, for instance, for Power BI.
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We have in Power BI integration.
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We have the ability to embed a report or dashboard inside Business Central.
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So you have a report and dashboard that you create and that report lives in the Power BI service online and that's where you can kind of go to your Power BI dashboard or you can use your Power BI mobile app on a mobile device.
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You're accessing your dashboard and data that is in the cloud.
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I mean Power BI as a system lives in the cloud.
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I mean Power BI as a system lives in the cloud.
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Then embedding that specific selected report or dashboard inside Business Central, which is also online, that works seamlessly because they share the same authentication.
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We're talking about the same Entra tenant, so there is a way to embed, and Business Central offers a very nice UI to kind of just, you know, select all of those reports and just pick one and interact with it.
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But for Power Business Central on-prem that's not possible, because then Business Central on-prem would have to reach out to cloud Power BI.
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I mean, I know that there are partners that have done something around it and it's technically possible.
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I mean, everything is possible in software, right it?
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is.
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But it's not the standard way and not the reasonable way, I would say.
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It's not the standard way and not the reasonable way, I would say.
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But of course we have a lot of customers who are still working on-prem and would like to stay on-prem, and for them we all, of course, offer some capabilities in Power Platform realm as well.
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That's good to have both options for online and on-prem, with, again, some limitations based upon the architecture you mentioned with the cloud environment, authentication and data, versus where it sits.
00:20:50.548 --> 00:21:00.237
On-prem, which sometimes you know, you get a lot of the same functionality, but sometimes the challenges have to deal with authentication and where the data may reside and how much data you need to transfer.
00:21:00.237 --> 00:21:09.873
Answer when working with the connector and you know, my mind gets blown as far as how this world is now spreading out.
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Before it used to be a nice little world of business central or, you know, Microsoft Dynamics Nav.
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Now it's spread out now because of, you know, the ability to go into Power Platform and have these external connectors to integrate with.
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What are some of the?
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If someone were to start working with the Power Platform connector?
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I want to get into working with the Power Platform Connector.
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What are some insights that you may have or some suggestions you have to overcome some challenges, or what are some of the biggest challenges that you see when someone starts working with that?
00:21:43.511 --> 00:22:07.119
I don't know if this would be the biggest challenge, but of course, there is some basic kind of stepping stone, some basics that you need to sort out as a customer in order to start, and that, of course, starts with a license or an account or the ability to actually use one of those.
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Luckily, business Central paid license gives our customers access to Power Automate, power Apps, power BI and so on at no additional cost for majority of use cases.
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So this is something that comes with our licensing terms or licensing guide, and it's described there as limited usage rights.
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That's the specific term the licensing guide uses to describe a situation where you would be integrating power automate flow, for instance, inside Business Central for the business scenarios to extend Business Central to add some additional functionality in Business Central.
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If you would like to build a power automate flow that doesn't touch Business Central data and just sends you an email every day with weather forecasts for your city, very nice scenario, but that has nothing to do with Business Central.
00:23:14.594 --> 00:23:19.815
For that specific flow you would have to have a separate Power Automate license.
00:23:19.815 --> 00:23:31.074
But if you have built a flow that sends you a weather forecast for your customer location before you go and visit that customer on a given day.
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That's a scenario that uses business central data.
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So you might think about this as within those limited usage rights.
00:23:40.944 --> 00:23:54.798
Of course, it's just an example, but in order to get that, you have to either start Power Automate like a welcome wizard and select your region, click through a couple of questions.
00:23:54.798 --> 00:24:02.775
They ask the user, that starts, and then, of course, you have to approve also on the Business Central side.
00:24:02.775 --> 00:24:08.329
You have to approve also on the business central side.
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There is a privacy guide at the beginning of of the integration when you're starting and we're asking you to approve that um integration between those two systems, um and allow that to be offered to use either by you or all users in your organization.
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When you do that, there is actually a very easy way to get started inside Business Central because we offer multiple templates which you might think about.
00:24:36.289 --> 00:24:40.971
Like you know, predefined Power Automate flows, so we have a gallery of those.
00:24:41.905 --> 00:25:08.688
When you start and you go to Automate Group on, let's say, a customer list, you will see there is a list of different templates provided by us and you can just take one of them and have a have a flow that is built based on the template and, of course, later on modify, edit, so you will have to learn a little bit.
00:25:08.688 --> 00:25:16.554
We're talking about no code, low code, no code capabilities of Power Platform, for instance.
00:25:16.554 --> 00:25:34.211
If you're talking about Power Automate, it is still some form of a macro engine executing steps one by one, being able to go through some loops or some conditions.
00:25:34.211 --> 00:25:49.534
But it's like a very lightweight computer program and of course some basic understanding of how that works is required if you want to modify and start editing that a little bit.
00:25:49.534 --> 00:25:54.817
But it's not a huge problem, I would say.
00:25:54.817 --> 00:25:56.833
So getting started is not that complicated.
00:25:58.106 --> 00:26:02.330
And once you're online and you have the connector enabled, you have access to an environment.
00:26:02.330 --> 00:26:03.494
You can choose that environment.
00:26:03.494 --> 00:26:06.107
And you touched upon the licensing.
00:26:06.107 --> 00:26:11.026
Licensing to me across this whole system is one of those I'll say over and over again.
00:26:11.026 --> 00:26:16.505
I try not to even pretend to understand because to me it just gets a little complicated.
00:26:16.505 --> 00:26:31.074
But the licensing if you have a business central user, you have access to use Power Platform or Power Automate if you're using it within a Business Central scenario as part of a process within Business Central to extend it.
00:26:31.074 --> 00:26:36.256
So if it's reading or writing, you said it's limited use Is the limited?
00:26:36.357 --> 00:26:36.459
use.
00:26:36.459 --> 00:26:38.451
As far as Limited usage rights, yeah.
00:26:38.731 --> 00:26:39.213
Usage rights.
00:26:39.213 --> 00:26:40.891
Okay, so it's limited usage rights.
00:26:40.891 --> 00:26:44.594
Does that mean it's read-only as well?
00:26:44.775 --> 00:26:45.746
No, no, no, or is it?
00:26:45.746 --> 00:26:46.650
You have access to write back?
00:26:46.650 --> 00:26:50.173
Yes, you have access to data.
00:26:50.173 --> 00:27:07.515
You can read and write data and the fact or entities that you as a user specific user have access to in Business Central, that can be controlled in Business Central as well, and Power Platform and our connector would honor that right.
00:27:07.515 --> 00:27:12.884
So, if you set up permissions, this user is not able to read employees' data, for instance.
00:27:12.884 --> 00:27:20.134
They won't be able to read employee data, regardless whether they use Excel, our web client, mobile app, power Platform.
00:27:20.134 --> 00:27:21.789
That is obviously honored.
00:27:21.789 --> 00:27:23.094
That is obviously honored.
00:27:23.094 --> 00:27:41.377
But, of course, if that user has the right to read and write data from a specific table, let's say customer's table, they will be able to do it also through Power Automate or Power Platform solutions using our connector.
00:27:42.226 --> 00:27:59.372
Connector is actually one of the ways to do to interact with our data because, as I mentioned, we have Power BI, which is read-only by nature, so that uses slightly different technology, also called a connector, but slightly different technology.
00:28:00.252 --> 00:28:04.578
But we also have another tool which is based on Dataverse.
00:28:11.244 --> 00:28:29.939
So if you, for those of our listeners here who are not familiar, dataverse is the data management platform from Microsoft, more like a complex database system for business applications, and that is also a system that sits below Power Platform.
00:28:29.959 --> 00:28:39.655
So Power Platform is built on top of Dataverse and Dataverse has a concept of something that is called virtual tables.
00:28:39.655 --> 00:28:41.989
We also support that.
00:28:41.989 --> 00:28:51.896
So virtual tables allow you to take a given API from Business Central so we're still talking about APIs in the same way and visualize that.
00:28:51.896 --> 00:29:18.338
That means a given table or API from Business Central let's say, customers API becomes a table in Dataverse and it's visible, accessible, just as any other table in the Dataverse user interface, and you can edit the data, build views on top of that, build apps on top of that.
00:29:18.338 --> 00:29:30.115
You can use that data in Power Pages, for instance, because Power Pages is built on Dataverse only, so it requires Dataverse, and so on.
00:29:30.115 --> 00:29:38.035
So there are kind of situations or scenarios where you would use Dataverse and you would use Dataverse virtual tables.
00:29:38.035 --> 00:29:47.816
As I said, it's just another technology to access business central data through APIs and have them offered to Power Platform.
00:29:49.086 --> 00:29:52.253
Are all Power Platforms sit on top of Dataverse.
00:29:52.253 --> 00:29:55.461
All of them.
00:29:56.267 --> 00:30:00.057
So, as I said, power BI is a slightly different beast.
00:30:00.057 --> 00:30:19.704
Power BI has its own data management system because the data that is imported, let's say, into Power BI and there are various ways how that can be done is, by default and by design, read-only.
00:30:19.704 --> 00:30:26.554
So all the ways of integrating data through Power BI is read-only.
00:30:26.554 --> 00:30:50.666
So they can offer different types of, let's say, more advanced data store mechanisms and also mechanisms for storing bigger data sets and data sets that are already aggregated, pre-calculated, and so on and so forth.
00:30:50.666 --> 00:30:57.392
And then you're going into different data type of solutions for analyzing data.
00:30:57.392 --> 00:31:03.653
So they are not using directly Dataverse as, for instance, powerapps do.
00:31:04.665 --> 00:31:12.611
Yeah, for some reason throughout the years, I always find Power BI to be entirely, even though it has the name Power in front of it.
00:31:12.611 --> 00:31:19.296
For some reason I don't ever consider it as part of the Power Platform family, even though it technically is.
00:31:19.296 --> 00:31:24.457
So I'm trying to have that concept in my mind be the same family.
00:31:24.457 --> 00:31:28.144
So you had mentioned about quite a few features.
00:31:28.144 --> 00:31:38.671
Is there any underutilized features in Power Automate that maybe people should consider, maybe start utilizing because it's underutilized right now?
00:31:41.527 --> 00:31:46.198
If we're talking about integration between Business Central and Power Automate, I can, of course, comment on that.
00:31:46.198 --> 00:31:47.380
If we're talking about integration between Business Central and Power Automate, I can, of course, comment on that.
00:31:47.640 --> 00:31:50.201
If we're talking about Power Automate in general.
00:31:50.201 --> 00:31:54.208
Let's leave it to my colleagues from Power Automate team.
00:31:54.208 --> 00:32:20.921
Yeah, I would definitely say that we see a lot of interest in our approval scenarios and those approvals that are built on top of Power Automate are some maybe a hidden gem, maybe a feature that might be, I wouldn't say, forgotten.
00:32:20.921 --> 00:32:28.688
But you know that's something that sits a little bit behind and not everyone is able to kind of fully use it.
00:32:28.688 --> 00:32:56.768
But it's also an interesting discussion when to use this instead of using our internal approval engine, the one that you internal approval engine, the one that you probably know even from the NAV times, because not always power automate is the answer, and that's, of course, a natural choice, a natural path.
00:32:56.768 --> 00:33:39.001
But there are ways, there are moments where the approval system should actually be happening and should be, partially at least, orchestrated outside of Business Central, when that approval needs to use some data on top of data from Business Central in order to execute the approval, find the right approver, maybe apply some rules that should be built in when the approval is actually going and adding some data to external system.
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