CTRL+ALT+JOPX

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Quick tip: troubleshooting Jupyter notebook not starting correctly

The other day my Jupyter notebooks did not start correctly from Anaconda navigator - luckily the Jupyter docs have a section Jupyter - What to do when things go wrong. So I tried starting it from Anaconda prompt and it indeed gave me an exception that there was an invalid path in the Jupyter config file - to find out where to look for the config file check out Jupyter common directories and file locations

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Quick tip: updating Anaconda with command prompt

I recently started getting a popup for updating Anaconda Navigator on my Windows machine and I also received a warning when installing packages using the Anaconda prompt. I first started the update through the user interface but this update completely stalled and I had to do a hard reboot after almost 2 hours (when my patience ran out). Running the update using Anaconda prompt worked without problems - next time I will use this method first. If conda is installed on your machine, you can update it to the most recent version and patches using conda update -n base -c defaults conda

Sunday, September 18, 2022

Speaking engagements in coming months

With all Covid bans lifted and summer holidays well over, the conference season kicks off.

I will be speaking at a couple of events in the coming weeks and months:

Dataminds evening session Upcoming in-person event on September 29th organized by dataMinds.be at Inetum-Realdolmen offices in Kontich together with Benni De Jagere. First session a little bit off the beaten track for data professionals: #dataviz for investors. Second session: #PowerBI roadmap and #AMA by Benni.
Collabdays Belgium 2022. Free community-driven event in Brussels, Belgium. Focus is Microsoft 365 with some Power Platform and Azure sprinkled on top. I am particularly excited to be speaking at this conference which was born out of the SharePoint Saturday conferences which I helped organize many years ago. I will be delivering Dataverse Deep Dive: watch out for sharks.
Cloudbrew 2022. A two-day conference focusing on all things Azure on November 18-19 in Mechelen Belgium. I will be delivering Using Python and Azure Cloud for trading and investing

Thursday, September 01, 2022

Dataminds event - How data visualization can help you become a better long-term investor and Power BI roadmap session

I will be delivering a Dataminds session together with Benni De Jagere (@BenniDeJagere) on September 29th - for registration and info see the Dataminds in-person event at Realdolmen.

Below the summary of the session and a sneak peak at the opening slide (spoiler alert: investing like a sloth isn't that hard)

How data visualization can help you become a better long term investor

Summary: Whether you prefer passive investing or are more into actively managing your investments, data visualization can help you overcome the emotional biases associated with investing in the financial markets. In this session, we will explore how you can use Python, Azure and Power BI to become a better long term investor. We will start with gathering the relevant data using Python, process it with Synapse and Python, and finally finish off with building data visualizations using Jupyter notebooks and Power BI. We will see how these visualizations can help you understand portfolio returns and risk, get a better understanding of market manias and crashes and visualize different investment strategies.

The aim of this session is not to tell you what stocks, bonds, funds or ETFs to buy but will show you how data visualization might help you not to fall for the irrational and manic-depressive characteristics of Mr. Market or other pitfalls when starting to invest.

Attendees are invited to fill in this survey (max. 5 minutes) https://ecv.microsoft.com/pteCfVQ89I – survey results will be used in the session.

Friday, August 26, 2022

Detailed Power Platform request usage information in Power Platform Admin Center in preview

I wrote a post in January 2022 on the changes in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform request limits and allocations mentioning that detailed reporting was not available at that point in time.

In the meanwhile Microsoft has released Detailed Power Platform request usage information in the Power Platform admin center (Preview). For integration application users you need to look at the Non-licensed User report which shows request usage per day for non-licensed users and the total entitlement for the tenant. Unfortunately for environments with a lot of integrations you might need to revert to some Excel skills or Power BI to make sense of the data (currently working in a tenant where we have 100K+ lines in the CSV export file).

For the moment there is no high usage enforcement for Power Platform request limits, but this might start at least six months after the reports have been made available.

References:

Power Platform Licensing FAQ - what add-ons are available to the Power Apps and Power Automate plans

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Presentation on using Python and Azure Cloud for (stock) trading and investing

The presentation from Dataminds Connect 2021 - Using Python and Azure Cloud for (stock) trading and investing is now available on Github - the Jupyter notebooks I demoed during the presentation are also available on Github:

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list July 2022

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 release 2022 wave 2

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Applications Platform consultants, project managers and power users

Friday, August 12, 2022

Using the yFinance Python package to download financial data from Yahoo Finance - part 2

In a previous post I showed how you can download ticker data from Yahoo Finance using the yFinance Python package. I now updated the Jupyter notebook code sample using YFinance to also show how you can retrieve additional information (sector, industry, trailing and forward earnings per share, etc...). The Ticker class in the yFinance library contains the info property which returns a dictionary object ( a collection of key-value pairs where each key is associated with a value) which allows you to access specific information about an asset.

Since I wanted to know how fast data retrieval would be I also include the %%time magic command . Wall clock time measures how much time has passed. CPU time is how many (milli)seconds the CPU was busy.

Yahoo Finance contains data about stocks, Exchange Traded Funds (ETF), mutual funds and stock market indices - the information that you can retrieve for each of these differs, so it is safe to check in your code for the quoteType. Below example retrieves information about Apple stock, the iShares MSCI AWCI UCITS ETF (Acc) and a thematic mutual fund from KBC.

I also included a code snippet which shows how to retrieve this information for multiple assets and convert this into a Pandas dataframe.

Tuesday, August 02, 2022

Explore and analyze stock ticker data in Azure data lake with Azure Synapse serverless SQL Pool

In this walkthrough, I will show how you can perform exploratory data analysis on stock market data using Azure Synapse serverless SQL pools. To simplify things I will just focus on daily quotes for the S&P 500.

The S&P 500 (short for Standard & Poor's 500) tracks the performance of 500 large companies listed on exchanges in the United States. The composition of the S&P 500 is typically rebalanced four times per year. The S&P 500 is a capitalization-weighted index meaning that the stocks with a higher market capitalization have a big impact on the changes in the index (See Top 10 S&P 500 stocks by index weight)

I downloaded all daily data for the S&P 500 stock market index (ticker symbol is ^GSPC) from Yahoo Finance using the historical data tab in CSV format. The S&P CSV file contains the date, open, high, low, close, volume, dividends and stock splits for the S&P 500 from December 1927 (but the index in its current form was only created in 1957) until now (dividends and stock splits are not relevant). I manually downloaded the file but take a look at Using Python and Pandas Datareader to retrieve financial data part 3: Yahoo Finance and Using the yFinance Python package to download financial data from Yahoo Finance for ways to automate retrieving data from Yahoo Finance using Python.

Serverless SQL Pools in Azure Synapse

Serverless SQL Pool is an auto-scale SQL query engine that is built-in to Azure Synapse - as the term serverless indicates you don't need to worry about provisioning underlying hardware or software resources. Serverless SQL Pool uses a pay-per-use model so you will only be charged for a query if you run it to process data. Like Synapse dedicated SQL pool, serverless SQL pool also distributes processing across multiple nodes using a scale-out architecture (Check out the Microsoft research publication Polaris: the distributed SQL engine in Azure Synapse for an in-depth discussion).

Synapse Serverless SQL enables you to query external data stored in Azure Storage (including Data Lake Gen 1 and Data Lake Gen2), Cosmos DB and Dataverse. The data remains stored in Azure storage in a supported file format (CSV, JSON, Parquet or delta) and is query processing is handled by the Synapse SQL engine.

Walkthrough: analyzing S&P 500 data with Synapse serverless SQL

In this post I will not show you how you need to setup Azure Synapse - take a look at Quickstart: Create a Synapse Workspace for a detailed walkthrough - the Microsoft Learn learning paths which I added in the references are also quite useful.

In this post, I will be primarily using SQL to analyze the data but this is a matter of preference (having a coding background I prefer Python to do exploratory data analysis)

After you downloaded the data you will need to upload the CSV file to the Azure data lake storage associated with Synapse Link (you can also use a different Azure storage).

The OpenRowset (Bulk..) function allows you to access files in Azure storage. The SP500.csv file has a header row specifying the different columns in use - it contains all daily ticker data since December 1927. I am using Parser_Version 2.0 since it is more performant but it has some limitations (see the Arguments section in Microsoft's OpenRowSet documentation) - also check out How do Synapse serverless SQL pools deal with different file schemas (or schema evolution) part 1 CSV for some interesting info on how schema changes are handled.

If you will be using the data quite frequently, it might make more sense to use a CETAS process (CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE AS SELECT) to generate a dataset pointing to the data residing in the data lake ready for querying. In the Synapse Studio data hub, you can simply right click on a file and select the option to create an external table.

Next, select the database and the name of the table. You will need to create the external table by selecting "Use SQL Script" since you will need to adapt the script to skip the header row for reading data. For CSV files you have the option to infer column names.

You will need to modify the generated script for creating the external file format so that it skips the header row. You are still able to modify the database in which you want to create the external table (1) and I added a line to indicate that the external file contains a header row so data read should start on row 2 (2). Once you understand the script, it also possible to modify it to use wildcards, so that you can read from multiple files in multiple folders.

Now let's try out some queries in Azure Synapse Studio:

Let's get all closing prices for this century ([date]> '2020-01-01') - you will notice that you can also visualize the data using some basic graphs.
Which were the years with the largest percentage difference between the highest and lowest close for the S&P 500? No surprises here - we have the Wall Street crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and the Covid crash in 2020 in the top 10
Which were the days with the highest difference between the day's closing price and the previous closing price - so the days in which the market crashed. In this example I used the SQL Lag() function. Besides the 1930s we also see Black Monday with a 20% decline in the S&P 500 - this triggered a global sell-off (Take a look at this video about Black Monday documentary (YouTube) with traders actually still working on the market floor)
You can also use common table expressions (CTE) for working with temporary named result sets for more complex queries and data manipulations. In the example below I want to find the 3-day trend for the S&P 500. (See Introduction to the SQL With clause if you are new to CTEs). The idea behind this query is to create a three-day trend variable for any given row. If the closing price on a day is greater than the closing price on the previous day, then we assign that day +1 one, otherwise, that date gets assigned -1 (minx_close columns). If the majority in the previous 3 days consists of positive values, the trend is positive, otherwise the trend is negative. (Example taken from Coursera: Introduction to Trading, Machine Learning & GCP )

As seen in this post, Synapse serverless SQL is quite useful for data professionals in different situations. Data engineers can use it to explore data from data lake to optimize data transformations, data scientists and data analysts can use it to quickly carry out exploratory data analysis (EDA). Take a look at Build data analytics solutions using Azure Synapse serverless SQL pools (Microsoft Learn) if you want to learn more. In an upcoming post I will show how easy it is to consume the data from Azure Synapse SQL Serverless in Power BI.

References:

Friday, July 29, 2022

Thoughts about the Dynamics 365 solution architect role

I having been working as a solution architect for over 15 years now and the last 7 years as a Dynamics 365 solution architect (from when we still referred to it as simply Dynamics CRM) and I really like it. But if I tell people that I work as a Dynamics 365 solution architect (even people work in IT), I immediately get the idea that they don't have a clue about what the role entails or what I do (and don't get me started about recruiters).

In this post I will try to shed some light on why it is so hard to clearly define the role and responsibilities of a Dynamics 365 solution architect. I will also explain on what Microsoft thinks about the Dynamics 365 role and why what Microsoft prescribes is not necessarily what applies to the project that you will be working on as a solution architect. I will also list a number of lessons learned and learning resources that I used in the last couple of years.

Context matters

How we approach architecture, defines what architecture, in effect, is, at least for our system. That is, no matter what we say architecture is (for), architecture is (an outcome of) what we do. (Source: What is Software Architecture and related concerns)

The last couple of years, I mainly worked as a solution architect in a large team at Toyota Motor Europe (TME), so I adopted the way of working of TME and the standards and boundaries set for solution architects within Toyota (I will be writing a separate blog post on lessons learned from the Toyota way)

So depending on the customer your work for, the size of the Dynamics 365 project and the associated complexity, the number of consultants working on the project and the overall maturity of the project team as well as the project methodology (agile vs waterfall) the tasks you take on as a Dynamics 365 solution architect and your role and responsibilities might differ quite a lot.

Whether you are full-time working for a single project (embedded architect) or supporting multiple teams (wandering/travelling architect) also makes a big difference.

Architecture is about significant design decisions

I think that if you look at the role of the Dynamics 365 solution architecture from a very minimalistic viewpoint, there are three key activities and deliverables:

The high level architecture visualization - remember a picture says more than a thousand words - definitely take a look at good models like C4 from Simon Brown
Maintaining a list of architecture design decisions together with the project team (take a look at Architectural Decision Records | adr.github.io for some more info)
Coaching and mentoring the team to create an architecture awareness (understand design trade-offs, keep track of non-functional requirements, identify architecture risks and counter measures, understanding and handling technical debt)

A solution architect has to keep the long-term use of his solution in mind and implement scalability and adaptability into the solution for the future.

Success By Design and FastTrack

I learned a lot from the joint-design workshops and conversations with the Microsoft FastTrack solution architect assigned on some of my projects. For those of you unfamiliar with FastTrack for Dynamics 365, this is a Microsoft implementation support program for large Dynamics 365 implementations - this includes Customer Engagement (Sales, Customer Services, Field Services, Project Operations and Marketing) as well as Dynamics 365 Finance, Commerce, Supply Chain Management and Human Resources.

The full FastTrack program is only available for a selected group of customers (threshold based on Dynamics 365 annual licensing revenue or internal approval by Microsoft account team) and Microsoft partners (only partners with gold or silver status in Cloud Business Applications competency). When you participate in the FastTrack program, you will be assigned a Microsoft FastTrack solution architect which you can use as a sounding board for design choices, receive guidance on best practices and how to plan for a successful roll-out.

Even if you can't join the Dynamics 365 FastTrack program it is still useful to take a look at the Success By Design resources - especially the Dynamics 365 Implementation Guide (recently revised) is a very extensive reference.

Also take a look at Dynamics 365 Fasttrack Architecture Insights - recordings created and shared by solution architects from the Dynamics 365 engineering team.

Microsoft about the Dynamics 365 solution architect

Two years ago I took a Microsoft certification exam targeted at solution architects in the Dynamics 365 space. I really enjoyed taking the exam MB-600: Microsoft Dynamics 365/Power Platform Solution Architect (now replaced by PL-600: Microsoft Power Platform Solution Architect) since it gives great insights on how Microsoft looks at the role of a Dynamics 365 solution architect.

As a preparation for this exam, I followed the Architect solutions for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform (screenshot below taken from this learning path) and together with the Microsoft FastTrack boot camp for Dynamics 365 CE solution architects, this shaped a lot of my thinking about the role of a Dynamics 365 solution architect.

A key task of the solution architect is solution envisioning. Traditionally, a development-focused architect would start with custom development and low-level Azure services. A business applications focused solution architect will instead start with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform and then use third party components, custom development and Microsoft Azure to address any gaps.

In-depth knowledge of the products in the Microsoft BizApps stacks is therefore a must have and hands-on experience with one or more products helps you in becoming a better architect. If you look at the videos from Gus Gonzalez on How do you become a solution architect and 3 rules for solution architects and consultants or listen to some of the episodes of the CRM MVP Podcast you will also get a feel about what other solution architects think about their role.

Microsoft seems to assume that a solution architect needs to be embedded into the team and does not make any mention of the notion of the travelling architect. The idea behind a travelling architect is that he/she will support multiple projects and provide support for teams who lack architectural skills by either coaching them, tackling specific architecture issues by him/herself, etc ... If you are working for a partner organization who is doing multiple smaller projects in parallel the role of a travelling architect makes more sense.

Working with other architects

Depending on their scope of work, different types of architects work at different levels of abstraction - until now I have worked with enterprise architects, business architects and technical architects. In my current project, I work very closely with EA to make sure that the solution blueprint aligns with the set of architecture principles and principles defined by EA.

A solution architect is not the same as an enterprise architect (although you might combine both roles) - an enterprise architect has a more strategic role and handles the initiatives that are required within a digital transformation at enterprise level to ensure that the business achieves their goals (business intent). It is however useful that you have a good understanding about enterprise architecture as a function and affinity with EA frameworks.

Get involved during the initial definition of a project/program

When I took a TOGAF training course years ago, I still remember an architect being called a "best effort architect" when he is not involved in the early stages of a program or project. If you are working on customer side and you are not involved during the initial business case creation, project or program initial scope definition, you are a "best effort architect" meaning that you miss a lot of the context and a large numbers of important decisions have already been made so you can only give it your best effort.

Same goes for architects working at a consultancy or implementation partner, if you are not involved during the initial presales phase, you are constrained due to (implicit) design decisions which were already made during presales phase while answering the RFP or presenting demo cases.

Learn by doing

So if you are a Dynamics 365 solution consultant or technical consultant and you want to take the leap, there are a lot of resources to ease into the role but nothing beats learning by doing. Also keep in mind that as a solution architect lifelong learning is a prerequisite for success (but probably also for other roles)

If you are lucky, you might encounter someone within the company you work for who can coach you to grow into the role but also reach out to the broader Dynamics 365 community for questions or feedback.

References:

3 rules for solution architects and consultants by @gusgonzalez
Dynamics 365 Fasttrack Architecture Insights - recordings created and shared by solution architects from the Dynamics 365 engineering team
Fasttrack - Dynamics 365 Implementation Guide (pdf) - not being updated anymore - Microsoft only updates the web version at https://aka.ms/D365ImplementationGuide
Common types of Software Architects
Software architecture for a Post AI and Post Quantum World (Grady Booch - YouTube)
Handbook of software architecture (Grady Booch)
The solution blueprint review as cornerstone of FastTrack Success by Design
How architecture diagrams enable better conversations by @kzhen
An architect is not an evangelist

Monday, July 25, 2022

Quick tip: finding the Azure data center for your Dynamics 365/CRM online environment

Dynamics 365 (CRM) is being hosted in a number of different Azure datacenters - on Administer Power Platform - Data center regions you will see an overview of the different regions. If your region is EUR (so url is crm4.dynamics.com), then the linked Azure datacenters can be in Amsterdam (West Europe) or Dublin (North Europe). There is a interesting visualization available on Azure Global Infrastructure

If you need to know whether a CRM instance is hosted in Amsterdam or Dublin (for example when you are setting up Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse), you can simply ping the url of your CRM instance (it will time-out but that is no problem) - if the response url starts with ams it is hosted in Amsterdam, if it is hosted in Dublin, the response will start with dub.

If you want to change the primary datacenter from North Europe (Dublin) to West Europe (Amsterdam) or vice versa, you can open a Microsoft support ticket. This seems to be a quite common operation and the support request is usually treated quite quickly.

Friday, July 22, 2022

Quick tip: download links for icons of Azure, Power Platform and Dynamics 365 products

If you are looking for the official collection of icons for Power Platform, Azure or Dynamics 365 that you can use in architectural diagrams or diagrams - here they are:

Thursday, July 21, 2022

Using the yFinance Python package to download financial data from Yahoo Finance

In a previous post I explained how you can retrieve data from Yahoo Finance using Python and Pandas Datareader - an alternative Python library for retrieving data from Yahoo Finance is yFinance maintained by Ran Aroussi.

If you are using conda package manager, you will notice that you can not install yfinance using conda so you will need to revert to pip install yfinance. All documentation is available on yFinance as well as on https://github.com/ranaroussi/yfinance but I also uploaded a Jupyter notebook code sample on my Github - https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/yfinance_sample.ipynb

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

ActivityParty not supported in Azure Data Factory copy activity for Dynamics 365

I must admit that I am not a frequent user of Azure Data Factory but now and then I give it a try again ( see Getting started with Azure Data Factory for Dynamics 365 CRM consultants for my previous post on the topic) when I need to import data into Dataverse/Dynamics 365 CE or export data from Dataverse/Dynamics 365. Usually I do this when I hit a snag with the out-of-the box tooling or when I need to connect to a legacy on-premise Dynamics CRM environment.

Last week I tried doing a bulk export of incoming e-mails in Dynamics 365 CE to Azure Blob Storage using the copy activity. I quickly created setup a sink and source, created by my FetchXML query and then run the data pipeline. It immediately blew up with an exception message "ErrorCode=DataTypeNotSupported,'Type=Microsoft.DataTransfer.Common.Shared.HybridDeliveryException,Message=Column: from,The data type Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.EntityCollection is not supported.,Source=,'

When looking at the mapping, I found the exception so I thought let's take a look at the blog posts of @Joejgriffin - Sink limitations with the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement/CDS connector for Azure Data Factory seemed to be provide some good pointers but unfortunately did not get my any further so I just decided to write a console app ...

Monday, June 20, 2022

Analyze model-driven apps and Microsoft Dataverse telemetry with Application Insights

Beginning of May 2022, Microsoft announced that the ability to configure an Azure Application Insights resource to receive telemetry on diagnostics and performance of Dynamics 365/Dataverse model driven apps was generally available.

Integration of Dynamics 365/Dataverse with Application Insights enables new monitoring strategies for Dynamics 365/Dataverse. Application Insights will allow you to detect and resolve issues before the end user notices it. I also think this is very useful for following up on performance impact during big data loads/migrations (see screenshot below where Dataverse processed 6.1 million requests). Application Insights integration is a nice addition to the already extensive toolkit as outlined in the Monitoring the Power Platform blog series by @pfedynamics

The logs in Application Insights allow you to build queries to troubleshoot and monitor your solutions and answer questions like:

If you want to learn more and see some examples - definitely take a look at the blog post from @decastroallan on Analyzing your Dataverse environment using Application Insights

The performance insights (preview) for model-driven apps is probably leveraging the same telemetry but since you now have access to the raw data in the underlying logs it will be easier to pin point potential issues or discover ways to improve the performance and/or user experience.

KQL (Kusto Query Language) can be used to query the logs in Application Insights in a scalable fashion - KQL can be used to also query other Azure components like Azure Log Analytics, Microsoft Defender and Azure Data Explorer. KQL is a SQL-like query language which is powered by the Kusto Engine that allows you to query, filter, sort and aggregate data. It was built specifically built for the cloud and scales quite well. Unlike SQL, KQL can not create, update or delete data - it is purely meant to be used for query operations.

References:

Sunday, June 12, 2022

Using Python and Pandas Datareader to retrieve financial data - part 3: Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance is one of the most popular sources of free financial data. It does not only contain historical data but also financial statements, dividend information and calculated metrics like e.g. 50 and 200 day moving average, beta, etc ... Yahoo Finance does not have an officially supported API anymore but pandas-datareader still allows you to access the data from Yahoo Finance in Python (other alternatives are yfinance and yahoo_fin).

This post is part of a series on using Pandas datareader to retrieve financial data:

In this post I have used version 0.10.0 of pandas-datareader (released July 13, 2021) which is currently working with Yahoo Finance - previous versions of pandas-datareader had to be updated after Yahoo made some changes on the underlying API.

Warning: Accessing Yahoo Finance using Python libraries is quite brittle so don't try to built production trading systems using this data source.

Accessing the Yahoo Finance API using pandas-datareader is very simple as shown in the screenshot below but I would also recommend implementing a cache mechanism for your queries using the requests-cache Python library to avoid having your IP address being banned. The full source of this Jupyter notebook is available at https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/YahooFinancesingle.ipynb

References:

Thursday, June 09, 2022

Optionset support in the Power BI Dataverse connector

One of the gotchas of using Power BI to build reports for Dynamics 365 CE (or Dataverse) has been how to easily handle optionset columns (or choice columns as they are now called in the new Dataverse terminology). You had to use work arounds to display the optionset labels as explained in Using Power BI Desktop to build Dynamics CRM Online reports part 4 (article dating back to 2015).

As outlined in Create a Power BI report using data from Dataverse - choice columns are now handled out of the box e.g. in the account table you have a choice (optionset) column called "industrycode" - in Power BI you will now see two columns - "industrycode" (the integer value) and "industrycodename" (the friendly display name of the item)

Also consider the warnings outlined on the official Microsoft documentation though - filtering by choice value can have a performance impact and you also need to make sure that all customizations in Dataverse have been published.

Related links:

Evaluating Power BI Desktop Connector Options for Microsoft Dataverse / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Wednesday, June 01, 2022

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list May 2022

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Applications Platform consultants, project managers and power users

Monday, May 23, 2022

The answer to every licensing question is 42

The answer to life, the universe and everything else is 42 (check out The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy if you want to know where this comes from), so when a customer asks a question about Dynamics 365 and Power Platform licensing, I would also like to just be able to answer 42.

Having worked with Microsoft products for over 20 years now, the single constant seems to be that Microsoft licensing is in a continuous state of flux. This is especially true for cloud platforms so make sure that you involve the necessary experts to help you in making the correct decisions and keep you up to date.

In this blog post I am trying to shed some light on some interesting licensing updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. I will also provide some links to excellent posts/videos from other community members - this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Power Platform and Dynamics 365 request limits and allocations

I recently wrote a blog post about the Update to Power Platform and Dynamics 365 request limits and allocations . Microsoft has finally released a preview of the Power Platform requests reporting in May 2022.

As noted in the official docs - What are the timelines for Power Platform Request limits? - enforcement of these limits will be activated at least 6 months after reports have been made GA. In my opinion, things like requests limits and allocations are quite hard for customers to understand and also difficult to design for.

Pay as you go licensing for Power Platform

In March 2022, pay-as-you-go licensing for Power Platform reached general availability. With apay-as-you-go plan, customers can use an Azure subscription to pay for Power Apps based on active usage of the apps instead of purchasing and allocating licenses in advance. If you compare the unit pricing you will see that for similar workloads - the pay-as-you-go licensing price per unit is higher. So this will make an interesting balancing act for customers.

Scenarios combining Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365

Don't get me wrong; I am really excited about the integration scenarios between Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 but announcements like Bring Dynamics 365 into the flow of work with Teams - at no additional cost generate a lot of excitement with customers but once you try to implement it you will notice that users do need a Dynamics 365 team member license. Be cautious and take big announcements with a grain of salt and always validate them yourself. When a user has a valid Dynamics 365 license, you are now able to view and edit Dynamics 365 records inside Microsoft Teams.

Integration scenarios with Microsoft Teams are a great feature but the obscurity of Microsoft licensing around this, makes the discussion for consultants harder than needed.

References: