Author: Andrew Ly (Page 1 of 11)

Microsoft Business Applications MVP, based out of Adelaide Australia.

Self-Service Disaster Recovery for Power Platform and D365

April 14, 2025 / Andrew Ly

Microsoft provides Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) across all production environments as part of the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform offerings. This aims to minimize outages and disruptions and ensure that your data is protected at all times.

Infrastructure is deployed to an Azure Geography, and a geography is made up of between 2 to 3 Azure Availability Zones (generally located 300 miles / 482 kms away from each other). An Azure Availability Zone deploys critical data center infrastructure such as network, power, and cooling. To ensure resilience across a geography, your environments are replicated across to at least two Availability Zones in real time.

The diagram shows a typical architecture of a geography that serves a single or multiple countries/regions.

Figure 1 – Example of Azure Geography and Availability Zones

If a failure is detected within an availability zone, disaster recovery will route traffic to the unaffected availability zone. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is stated to be near zero, and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is stated to be less than 5 minutes.

As part of Wave 1 Release 2025, Microsoft released Self-Service Disaster Recovery for Power Platform as a public preview.

Today we’ll be further exploring this capability by running a Disaster Recovery Drill.

Power Platform Update Guide for Administrators

Navigating Updates: Your Guide to Microsoft Power Platform Updates

April 2, 2025 / Andrew Ly

This article provides a high-level overview of managing updates for the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365. It is important to stay informed about the latest updates and understanding the different types of updates that are deployed to ensure platform stability and minimize disruptions.

New features, optimisations, bug fixes, deprecations, and security patches are constantly being deployed, making this guide essential for anyone whose role involves managing Power Platform environments. It covers both new and existing information that is crucial for effective management.

In this article I will be focusing on four core concepts:

Release Wave Updates – Major updates to the Power Platform service that are generally available twice per year in April and October. These updates are deployed automatically.
Early Access Updates – Updates designed for testing functionality in test environments, available ahead of the automatic wave updates. These updates are deployed manually.
Refresh Cadence (Incremental Updates) – Updates that occur between Wave Release cycles and can be deployed weekly or monthly. These updates occur automatically.
Release Channels (for Model Driven Apps) – Semi Annual (twice yearly) or Monthly updates to the Unified Interface that drives Model Driven Power Apps.

Enhancing Copilot Conversations in Model-Driven Power Apps using Copilot Studio

January 11, 2025 / Andrew Ly

Today we’re going to be having a quick look at how we can extend and enhance the Copilot capabilities within Model Driven Power Apps.

This is new preview release functionality and the documentation will be available on Microsoft’s website here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/model-driven-apps/customize-copilot-chat

In this video, we’ll look at two scenarios for a fictional Fitness Club. It will focus on using knowledge based search to find relevant information for a member, as well as helping us qualify if a member is eligible for a seniors discount.

How Can I Still Find Classic Themes in 2024 for Power Apps and Dynamics 365?

November 11, 2024 / Andrew Ly

As part of the 2024 Power Platform Release Wave 1, Microsoft have moved the classic Advanced Settings menu over to the new Power Platform Environment Settings app.

The Power Platform Environment Settings app provides a modern, performant, accessible, secure, and extensible settings management experience. This app is intended to provide a single, unified experience for application developers to create settings for their applications.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform/release-plan/2024wave1/power-apps/use-power-platform-environment-settings-app

However, you may have classic Themes which you may wish to edit/update/publish/export or change a logo, at this point in time (at time of writing) it’s not possible to do through the new PP Environment Settings App. Well never fear, this quick tip will help you find Classic Themes easily again.

Using Power Automate to manage Dataverse File/Image Column Types

May 1, 2024 / Andrew Ly

Microsoft Dataverse has several ways of managing file attachments, one of which is File or Image Column types. In this blog post, I will discuss how we can use Power Automate to overcome some of the challenges in creating automation that manages content stored within Dataverse File and Image Column Types.

Using SQL Stored Procedures within PowerApps via PowerFX

March 26, 2024 / Andrew Ly

Customers can now call stored procedures in Power Automate without incurring performance penalties, leading to improved efficiency in action-based apps.

Feature Details:

Direct Stored Procedure Calls: Customers can utilize Power Fx to directly call stored procedures, eliminating the need for additional steps.
Seamless Integration: Adding a SQL Server Database object to their data sources enables customers to access Stored Procedures actions directly from the database object.
Performance Optimization: This feature helps customers avoid performance hits during app initialization by calling Power Automate. Additionally, it reduces the need to move data in and out of collections, resulting in better overall data call and update performance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service – An Approach to Data Migration of Work Orders from External Systems

February 23, 2024 / Andrew Ly

If you are transitioning to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service for the first time from a legacy system and have scheduled work orders and bookings that need to be migrated, there are a lot of considerations in regard to the generation of service tasks, billing products/services, durations, and pricelists.

In this article, I will detail one approach that aims to simplify the process and ensure that all the correct configurations are applied.

Dataverse Long Term Data Retention

February 4, 2024 / Andrew Ly

What is Dataverse Long Term Data Retention?

Currently in Public Preview (Q1 2024), Dataverse Long Term Data Retention allows your organisation to archive data to long term storage. But what exactly does this mean?

This means that you can achieve a number of goals:

Reduce your overall Dataverse Database Capacity (more on this later)
Have more control over data that will only primarily be used for auditing or occasional read-only access. It is designed as an interim stage between having live data, and deleted data. Microsoft calls this ‘retained data’.
The ability to query retained data on demand.
Build long term retention policies that will work within your ALM, meaning that you can define as a solution layer and carry your long term retention policies between your higher environments.

Note, that this feature should only be enabled in non-production environments for testing purposes at this stage (see Known Issues).

How do I set up Long Term Data Retention?

Overview of Third-Party Form Builder (Voice of Customer) Applications that Integrate with Dynamics 365/Power Platform

January 11, 2024 / Andrew Ly

Clients often ask me if it is possible to integrate third-party form builder applications with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the broader Power Platform. The short answer to that question is yes. However, there are a number of considerations to be made when choosing which is the right form builder application for your deployment.

Extending the Patient Clinical Timeline on Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

August 25, 2023 / Andrew Ly

The Patient Clinical Timeline enables care managers to track key clinical information such as conditions, episodes of care, procedures, or medications by providing an at-a-glance view via the calendar control.

It also enables the quick creation of events via the control.

One of the key advantages of this control is the ability to extend it to custom tables within your solution.

In this article, we will explain the basics of the configuration of the patient clinical timeline and how to format your configuration schema file properly.