Learning a new platform

It's always good to learn something new but sometimes you don't know what to learn or where to start.

With my recent employment at Simple.io (An intelligent Marketing Platform), I was introduced to the concept of Microsoft's Power Platform. This is a powerful set of tools for developers and non-developers alike to improve internal and external processes with a wide variety of no-code/low code solutions. These include mobile/tablet apps, internal and external web sites, automation and business process flows, Reporting BI, and even AI. Because its Microsoft, these tools are also strongly integrated with Dynamics 365 as well, another multi-featured online SAAS enterprise application.

So now I know what to learn, where do I start? Well, Microsoft provides a site for learning a lot of their products. You can search their site for a particular topic e.g. Power Platform which will show a list of certifications available and the learning paths. They provide links to be able to sit the exam in a variety of different ways including from the comfort of your own home.

Note: The online learning path doesn't cover all of the topics in the exam. I recommend looking at the "Certification Skills Outline" before sitting the exam to make sure you have everything you need to pass the exam

My first exam was Power Platform Fundamentals which involved all the base-level knowledge needed to employ many of the tools. I learned a great deal and even created an app to improve an internal process.

Our support team had a single channel on Microsoft Teams for all communication related to the product. Unfortunately, this included everything from bug reports to deployment schedules. Needless to say, this made the channel very busy and difficult to navigate because requests for information were lost amongst the constant stream of chat. Repeat questions were often asked for updates sometimes made even if the answer was given further up in the conversation.

To improve this process I created a task management chatbot to allow the support team to create investigation tasks for the development team to be able to prioritise and act upon when available. Because our team was already integrated into Microsoft's Azure Directory a Power Platform solution was perfect as it reduced the need to implement another third party application.

They would simply add a new task through the bot with all the relevant information. Using Power Automate I created a Flow that informed all users whenever a new task is created so anyone in the team would see it and if available, assign it to themselves. Using the same bot a user could also set their progress and update any other information so the support team had a clear view of how their task was moving along without having to add more clutter to an already messy channel.

As a developer, the ability to create a chatbot like this without the need to open an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) was really quite amazing. With Power Platform, tt also meant that if any of the non-developer team members in our group want to change/add functionality they didn't need to learn a new coding language or wait for me to do it. I look forward to creating more tools and apps with Power Platform.