Over the past few months, we have invested heavily in the Human Resources templates that enables modern CHRO or VP of Human Resources to recruit, manage, reward, and retain their top-performing talent in our constantly changing business environment more easily and efficiently. Productivity of a company’s human capital has never been more important, due to tight labor markets and persistent inflation. According to the 2023 Work trend Index report, feeling uninspired is one of the top obstacles to employee productivity. Enterprises must empower their employees to do their best work in hybrid and mobile environments. Human Resources must be re-imagined and extended to meet the new challenges of a global, diverse and hybrid workforce.

Employee Kudos template

Employee Kudos is one of the most used Power Apps solutions internally at Microsoft and was made publicly available with the initial launch of Enterprise templates back in June and can be downloaded from here. Now every customer can leverage the best practices from Microsoft in their own company. Employee Kudos template improves the employee experience by providing an easy and friendly way to engage in peer-to-peer praise. Learn more.

Employee Awards and Recognition template

The Awards and Recognition template streamlines and automates the process of acknowledging outstanding efforts in an organization. By facilitating an engaging and efficient awards system, this template aims to encourage a positive work culture that recognizes and appreciates exceptional contributions. You can download the template from here. Learn more about the template here.

Employee Onboarding Buddy template

Data from the 2022 Work Trend Report suggests that Onboarding buddies help new hires expand their networks and become more productive n their new role. Onboarding Buddy template enables an organization to automate a program whereby employees sign up as “onboarding buddies” so that they can be paired with new hires or transfers into a group to help them onboard and ramp up successfully. Learn more about the template here. Download the template from here.

We will continue to invest in more solutions such as Onboarding Hub which will be released in the upcoming months to make Hire to Retire process easy and seamless for you with Power Platform. We are also investing in Power for IT to help transform your core IT processes. The first solution for Power for IT, IT Procurement & Asset Management will be released soon. Stay tuned!

The post Power for HR: Transform your HR processes with Power Platform Enterprise Templates appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Offline is critical in today’s world, but difficult.

Mobility is crucial in our modern world. It is natural to access your data anytime and anywhere. You don’t want to have to think about it! But, to create an offline app for canvas today is hard. Makers have to implement complex logic within the app, download data (many tables with a large variety of sizes) on the device, synchronize and merge the data when you make changes on your device, decide whether the app should work against the local content or the server, and track network availability – which can be challenging in spotty connectivity areas.

With this new canvas offline feature, the built-in offline engine does all of the hard work for you!

Canvas offline apps are easy. Here’s why.

Offline with Power Apps Canvas is easy. First, enable your tables for offline. Then, enable the App for offline and you’re on your way. Here is what happens in the background: an offline enabled Power App first downloads all of the data it needs from the server. A customizable offline profile defines what data is downloaded to the device. Once your data is downloaded, your offline enabled canvas app works in an offline first approach – the app reads and writes data to a local store on the device whether or not the network is available. It doesn’t have to be connected to work. Then, your changes and changes on the server are regularly synchronized for you automatically in the background when the network is available.

Limitations and Availability

• Dataverse Files and Images are not yet supported for this feature. We know how important it is for users and we are doing our best to enable it as soon as possible.
• Non-Dataverse connectors like Sharepoint are not supported in offline.

Power Apps developers can turn on the canvas offline feature in the Power Apps Studio by navigating to list of experimental features in settings dialog of the canvas app (Settings > Upcoming Features > Experimental) and toggling “Dataverse offline”.

The feature will roll out country by country from May 15th, 2023 to May 30th, 2023 in https://make.powerapps.com. It requires the latest version of the Power Apps mobile applications in the iOS, Android and Windows stores. Check out the prerequisites for more details.

We are looking forward to your feedback

Your feedback will help us make this new app even better. Share your feedback on our Power Apps forum.

You can also reach us by filling out this form and we’ll get back to you right away. We are particularly interested to understand how you are using offline in your apps.

For more details, see the documentation.

The post Announcing Experimental Preview of canvas built-in offline appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Creator Kit, published by the Microsoft Power CAT team, is a collection of 24+ Fluent UI controls and templates for Power Apps makers to create delightful app experiences more rapidly.

What’s included

The Creator Kit is distributed in three managed solutions, each containing unique components:

All controls and components included in the kit use the Fluent UI framework to help easily create consistent, beautiful, and effective user experiences for custom business applications.

Creator Kit (CreatorKitCore)

A solution that contains the core components of the Creator Kit:

	Display name	Type	Status
	AutoWidthLabel	Code	Stable
	Breadcrumb	Code	Stable
	Calendar	Code	Preview
	CommandBar	Code	Preview
	ContextMenu	Code	Stable
	Dialog	Canvas	Experimental
	Elevation	Code	Stable
	ExpandMenu	Canvas	Experimental
	DetailsList	Code	Stable
	Header	Canvas	Experimental
	Icon	Code	Stable
	KeyboardShortcuts	Code	Stable
	Nav	Code	Stable
	Panel	Canvas	Experimental
	Picker	Code	Stable
	ProgressIndicator	Code	Preview
	ResizableTextArea	Code	Stable
	SearchBox	Canvas	Experimental
	Shimmer	Code	Preview
	Spinner	Code	Preview
	TagList	Code	Stable

See the control reference for all updated controls and their status.

You will notice some components are marked as preview or experimental. Preview is tagged for controls added recently, and experimental is if an underlying platform capability a component depends on is not generally available (e.g., canvas components are not supported in custom pages).

Reference Solutions

These solutions provide templates and utilities for building with Creator Kit components in canvas apps vs custom pages (embedded in Model Driven apps).

Each reference solution contains a reference application that lets you interact with each component and see the underlying formulas that render it. It’s a great way to quickly learn how the components behave and are implemented.

Real world scenarios

Custom Outlook Panel

The kit components were used created a flyout experience in the Outlook web app using the Panel, Elevation, and Icon controls. Posted by Mats Necker.

CoE Starter Kit Environment Management refresh

The Environment Creation Request experience to view a request in detail, migrated into a custom page. part of the CoE Starter Kit.

Get Started

Start using the Creator Kit by reading the setup instructions.

Support

Report bugs in our GitHub repository issues. Our team will triage issues with the Creator Kit components. See our support documentation for more guidance.

Feedback

We host our backlog in the GitHub repository to make our roadmap publicly available. We largely depend on community feedback to prioritize feature development and continued investment in the kit.

Upvote (?) backlog items you would like to see in the kit next to help our team determine the demand for each component. Work that is committed will be associated with a specific release.

You can also submit a feature request if the backlog does not have the Fluent UI components or capabilities you need.

Everyone benefits from the Creator Kit

The kit provides many improvements that affect Power Platform makers, users, and admins:

• Makers can focus efforts on building the problem-solving features of an application. The cohesive Fluent UI design makes it easier to make custom pages look more consistent and like model driven apps. You don’t need to be a front-end prodigy – or have budget for a design team – the kit will help you make stunning apps with the latest and most contemporary designs.
  
• Users will interact with the cohesive set of components that are intuitive and familiar (same controls used in all modern Microsoft applications). The components provide a performance boost which also provides a better user experience, which can help users be more productive while using your apps.
  
• Administrators who must govern UI consistency within an organization benefit from the modern theming architecture that Fluent UI provides inherently in the kit’s components. The components are developed and supported by dedicated engineering teams at Microsoft, so companies can deploy apps with Creator Kit components into production with confidence.

Additional Resources

• GitHub Repository – Master
• GitHub Repository – Code components
• User Interface Guidance Documentation
• Fluent UI Documentation

The post Introducing the Creator Kit – Efficiently create performant Fluent UI based Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

What is new?

As of today, we provide you two new managed Dataverse table with details about refreshes of your dataflows in your environment. We populate the tables with new data automatically after each refresh.

DataflowRefreshHistory – Contains the overall dataflow refresh history data
EntityRefreshHistory – Contains data of all entities involved in the refreshes

Using the new tables you are able to extract information about errors , duration of the refreshes and, how many new records got inserted into your Dataverse table.

To get you started we have set up a step-by-step guide to deploy a template which will give you insights right away. Go to the docs page and get started today with a more data driven monitoring experience.

How does it work?

The new tables are available in your environment right away. To find the tables in your environment; do the following:

• Navigate to https://make.preview.powerapps.com/ 
• Open the Dataverse tables overview:
  
• Navigate to the managed tables section:
  
• Scroll down to the dataflow refresh history tables:
  

To use these tables, we suggest you to use Power BI to get data via the Dataverse connector. To help you bit, we suggest to leverage the guide and template from docs page.

Resources

Docs: Monitor your dataflow refreshes with Power BI – Power Query | Microsoft Docs

The post Monitor all your Dataflow refreshes with a Power BI dashboard appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

These apps are additions to the series of extensible sample apps such as Employee Ideas, Inspections, Issue Reporting, Bulletins, and Milestones. Thousands of customers have already deployed these sample solutions and are benefitting from using them as-is or customizing them using low code extensions to meet their unique needs. These template solutions are helping organizations accelerate their journey to digital transformation by integrating Line of Business applications directly into the collaboration fabric of Teams.

Learn more about the people in your organization with Profile+

The Profile+ solution helps you quickly look up colleagues, understand org structure and roles, and learn about open positions. You can update your profile right from within Teams and express your personality by adding an introduction and even a video. You can add additional information that will help colleagues to know you better – such as your current projects, areas of expertise, goals and interests. The ability to filter by project and expertise creates new opportunities for like-minded people to find one another and connect. Once you find someone you’d like to meet or collaborate with, it’s easy to introduce yourself in chat, give that person a call, or schedule a Teams meeting.

Most employees prefer to look for new roles within a specific team or reporting to a specific manager. Profile+ enhances the visibility into open positions by enabling managers to highlight open positions on their team. They can provide a brief description of the role with a link to the formal job posting.

The Profile+ solution is designed to add to, not replace, the current system of record for employee information. You can extend the application to meet the unique needs of your organization. Integrate into your HR system to surface information for team members to browse, or add additional information to the user profile – for example, territory managed for field sales, research papers written for an R&D firm etc. You can get the preview version of the app from github at https://aka.ms/TeamsProfilePlus. The application can be deployed on Teams using One-Click installation. Click here to learn more about Profile+.

Tap into the knowledgebase of peers and experts with Perspectives

The Perspectives app is a place to listen and be heard in your organization. Start a discussion on any topic by simply posting a question or a conversation starter. Other members of the team can provide responses to the posted questions. The most relevant content rises to the top when team members upvote a response or the discussion’s creator flags one as “Recommended”. A simple search-and-browse experience makes it easy to find interesting discussions, whether you’re looking to share your perspective or tap into the collective knowledge of your team. You can easily bring ongoing Teams conversation into Perspectives.

By centralizing important conversations in a single application,  teams can start to create a community sourced knowledge base that enhances information discovery. The app can be used for employee engagement, diversity and inclusion efforts, support systems, process Q&As, and more.

Once installed, you have full access to the source code of these solutions. You can edit the apps using the Power Apps personal app in Teams to bring your own custom features – such as your company branding, adding proactive communications on new discussions etc. You can get the preview version of the app from github at https://aka.ms/TeamsPerspectives. The application can be deployed on Teams using One-Click installation. Click here to learn more about Perspectives.

Stay organized and discover content with Boards

Information and resources relevant to a particular topic can be spread across a broad surface area – a Teams channel, a chat conversation, a file on Share Point, an internal web link, a Yammer post etc. making it hard to find. With Boards, you can create shared space to collect all this information and organize them by categories. All members of the team can contribute to the Boards – enabling crowdsourcing to organize information. Team owners can govern the accuracy of the information with the ability to edit any user created information.

As with other sample solutions, the application can be customized to meet your unique business needs, from adding additional sources or integrating with other applications such as Bulletins. You can get the preview version of the app from github at https://aka.ms/TeamsBoards. The application can be deployed on Teams using One-Click installation. Click here to learn more about Boards.

Create better connections and a more inclusive workplace with Power App solutions

These applications can be used with others in the Power Apps solution portfolio to promote a more collaborative and inclusive environment in the workplace – especially in the post COVID reality of remote work. They take advantage of the great collaboration gestures that are core to Teams. Employee Ideas app can be deployed to give a voice to every individual on improvement opportunities. Perspectives can be deployed to encourage open conversations on wide ranging topics. Boards can be used to enable everyone to discover information about employee resource groups (ERGs) or other special interest groups. Bulletins can be used to share stories and information about diversity and inclusion programs. Profile+ can be used to give every individual a voice to tell their story in their own words.

All of these applications can be extended using low-code development tools on Power Platform. Here are some tips to get started with customizations and be on the lookout for extensive documentation, how-to videos, and additional resources to extend these solutions.

Once you have configured and customized these applications to your needs you can deploy them to be used within the team, or deploy more broadly by sharing it with members outside of the Teams team. You can even make these apps available on your company Teams store and even pin it to the app bar for your users to easily discover these apps.

How do you plan to leverage these solutions in your organization? Please share your ideas and other feedback in the comments below.

The post Three new Power Apps Solutions to enhance information discovery and create more inclusive organizations appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

If admins create policies that block specific connectors or disallow certain connectors to be used together, these restrictions will impact apps and flows at design and run-time.

We are excited to introduce you to the DLP Editor – a new app that is part of the Center of Excellence Starter Kit. You can use the DLP Editor to observe the impact of an existing policy or the potential impact of policy changes you’re considering.

The goal of the DLP Editor is to provide admins with a view of currently impacted apps and flows, and a view of resources that would be disabled if new or updated policies were to be enforced. The tool reads and updates DLP policies while showing a list of apps and flows that are impacted by the policy configurations.

You can use this app to:

• Review whether existing policies impact canvas apps and cloud flows in your tenant.
• Change existing DLP policies and update the connector grouping in the policy.
• See what flows or apps would be impacted by the change, before you save the policy.
• Mitigate the risk by contacting makers and informing them about the best course of action for their app or flow.

Update existing DLP policies to review the impact:

Our recommendation is to create a policy in the Power Platform Admin Center with the connector configuration that you want, don’t assign it to any environments (thus not causing an impact), then opening the DLP editor app of the CoE Starter Kit to modify the policy, assign it to the environments you want and performing an impact analysis there.

DLP documentation for admins

Detailed documentation about Power Platform DLP capabilities can be found here:

• Data loss prevention policies
• Create a DLP policy
• Manage DLP policies

Get started

Download the solution pack at aka.ms/CoEStarterKitDownload.

The DLP Editor is part of the Center of Excellence – Core Components; this documentation explains how to set up the Core Components.

CoE Starter Kit Overview

The Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is a set of templates that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting, maintaining and supporting the Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps and Power Automate.

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit (such as Dataverse and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations.

Support

If you face issues with:

• Using the kit: Report your issue here: aka.ms/coe-starter-kit-issues (Microsoft Support won’t help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.)
• The core features in Power Platform: Use your standard channel to contact Support.

The post New in the CoE Starter Kit: Review the impact of DLP policy changes appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We recently announced the ability to share Dataverse for Teams apps beyond the immediate members of the team. This feature unlocks organizations’ ability to bring collaborative Line of Business scenarios to the Teams platform using the power of Dataverse for Teams to broad groups of people within the organization.

We are excited to launch two new solutions optimized for broad distribution scenarios and help your organization get immediate productivity gains – Bulletins and Milestones. These solutions are designed to work out of the box with simple configuration options provided within the apps.  And since these solutions are built on the Power Platform, they can easily be extended using the powerful low-code platform  from right within Teams to meet the unique needs of businesses.

Keep members of your team informed with Bulletins

Keeping your team informed of the latest company news and information is critical in normal times – even more so when team members are working remotely during the pandemic. The Bulletins solution empowers the communication team to share company or departmental news and information in a central place. News articles can be organized under categories and contain rich content, including images, videos, actionable buttons. Publishers can also view metrics for articles posted, such as view rates over time.

Team members can pin the Bulletins app on the left rail of Teams for easy access. They can customize their views by selecting categories they are most engaged in, and bookmark articles that interest them the most.

The apps are optimized for mobile scenarios. You can post new messages or consume these messages on a mobile device. This enables your frontline workers in the field to send and receive relevant information – such as weather alerts, system outages, etc.

Once installed, you have full access to the source code of these solutions. You can edit these apps using the Power Apps personal app in Teams to bring your own custom features – such as your company branding, adding proactive communications on new message posts etc.

This app is an evolution of a widely successful Crisis Communication template Microsoft released at the start of COVID crises. Hundreds of organizations around the world installed the app. The new iteration is significantly easier to implement, built on Dataverse for Teams database, and have several feature enhancements.

Get the app from the Teams store now: https://aka.ms/TeamsBulletins

Confidently track key initiatives with Milestones

Every day members from different functions get together to work on significant milestones. Successful delivery of the milestones relies on all team members staying informed of the work items and their status. Milestones improve collaboration for these cross-functional teams by creating a central place to track status and updates. This app can be pinned to the team’s channel or on the left rail for easy access.

The app enables you to track work items by owners and status. Updates to status are tracked in the activity log. The dashboard provides a 360 view of the overall project.

The unparalleled value of the Milestones app is its extensibility. Every organization has a unique need from their project tracking software. Milestones app gives you the ease of low-code to customize this experience. You can update the fields’ labels, add new fields, or add business process flows such as notifications to work stream owners when there is a status change in the task.

Get the app from the Teams store now: https://aka.ms/TeamsMilestones

To learn more about these and other extensible solutions, head over to Use sample apps from the Microsoft Teams store docs, and as always, please share any feedback in the comments below.

The post Communicate broadly and collaborate effectively with two new Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Innovation Backlog app gives your business users a place to record and prioritize their wish list of digital innovations. Your teams can use this app to submit ideas for apps and flows and describe pain points with the current process. Using a wizard to describe the current process, team members provide information about the people involved, the tools used, and ways to measure improvement. This information is then used to calculate an ROI and a complexity score.

You can deploy the app in your Power Apps environment or embed the app in Microsoft Teams using Dataverse for Teams.

Browse ideas that have been submitted, vote on ideas or add your own scenarios to an existing idea. From the dashboard, you can also pick the most impactful ideas for your development team to build or select them for an upcoming hackathon.

Add your own idea to the Innovation Backlog by describing the current process, people and tools involved.

Describe ways to measure improvement and value – this could time or money savings, or increasing employee or customer engagement.

After the work is delivered, developers can request feedback and testimonials to build their portfolio.

The current release is the first version of the Innovation Backlog – we are already planning further features, such as a dashboard to help with your decision making.

Get started

Directly download the solution pack at aka.ms/CoEStarterKitDownload.

The documentation explains how to set up the Innovation Backlog and how to use the components.

CoE Starter Kit Overview

The Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit is a set of templates that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting, maintaining and supporting the Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps and Power Automate.

The Innovation Backlog can be used standalone and has no dependency on other CoE Starter Kit components.

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit (such as Dataverse and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations.

If you face issues with:

• Using the kit: Report your issue here: aka.ms/coe-starter-kit-issues (Microsoft Support won’t help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.)
• The core features in Power Platform: Use your standard channel to contact Support.

The post Use the Innovation Backlog to manage app and flow ideas appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, hospitals had to quickly adapt their operations to care for the surge of new cases. Working closely with local healthcare providers, Microsoft developed a Hospital Emergency Response Solution that helped track bed capacity and key resources. Now, state and local governments have come together to help monitor regional healthcare systems, facilitate emergency responses, and assist in the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE). Continued monitoring of healthcare capacity and supplies across a region is critical to safely re-opening economies. The insights gained by Microsoft from working closely with healthcare providers and state governments has now been translated into a new Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring solution built on Microsoft Power Platform.

The Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring solution provides an aggregated view of COVID-19 cases, bed capacity, equipment usage, supplies, and staff across a large region. The solution was designed to meet the needs of both healthcare providers and state or regional public health departments. Mobile healthcare workers can quickly provide updated counts on their terms and in their time frame. The solution is built on Microsoft Power Apps Portal and Microsoft Power BI. It can be rapidly deployed across large geographic regions and across a variety of healthcare facilities including hospitals, clinics, elderly care, and long term care centers. Near real-time dashboards provide all organizations visibility into critical data necessary to establish situational awareness and coordinate responses.

The Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring solution has now been adopted by the State of Washington Department of Health and deployed to over 115 hospitals across the state.

“During an unprecedented public health crisis, the project team at Microsoft stood up a highly functional database with an engaging user interface that we rapidly deployed to every hospital across the state. The WA HEALTH platform gives health officials and hospitals a powerful shared view of our health care system’s state of readiness on any given day. It will be an indispensable tool as we confront the coronavirus pandemic and prepare for an influx of patients.” – Clark Halvorson, Assistant Secretary, Emergency Preparedness and Response, Washington State Department of Health 

Get the full instructions for how you can implement the solution in this documentation.
Watch the Power Platform Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring solution video.

The solution involves several components.

Portal for healthcare providers and regional agencies

• Healthcare workers can quickly update counts of beds, cases, supplies, and staff using a number of devices including desktop and mobile phones.
• There is also access to dashboards and reports for decision makers in the organization to view the roll-up information.
• Facility administrators are provided with the ability to manage their users, facilities, and systems.

Dashboards and maps for regional decision makers

Regional decision makers have access to overview dashboards and heat maps for establishing situational awareness and coordinating responses. Regional users include state and city public health agencies, emergency responders, fire departments, regional command centers, and regional procurement teams.

All of these components are built on the Microsoft Power Platform and backed by the Common Data Service. The platform is designed for enterprise scale, and is capable of handling high volume and sensitive information. Every element from the solution to the underlying data model can be easily customized and extended with low code tools to meet the needs of specific organizations.

In order to support the rapid response of organizations who need these tools urgently, we’re also offering a 6-month free usage of full Power Apps capabilities to organizations in the healthcare, government, nonprofit, and education sectors that are responding to the COVID-19 crisis. Contact your Microsoft account representative for details on how to take advantage of this trial.

Today’s release is just the first step.  We will make improvements continually as we learn from existing and new deployments. Watch this space for updates and chime in with feedback and suggestions.

NOTE:

This solution is a sample and may be used with Microsoft Power Platform for dissemination of reference information only. This solution is not intended or made available for use as a medical device, clinical support, diagnostic tool, or other technology intended to be used in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease or other conditions, and no license or right is granted by Microsoft to use this app for such purposes. This solution is not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgement and should not be used as such. Customer bears the sole risk and responsibility for any use of this app. Microsoft does not warrant that the solution or any materials provided in connection therewith will be sufficient for any medical purposes or meet the health or medical requirements of any person. Sample data included in this solution are for illustration only and are fictitious. No real association is intended or inferred.

The post The Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring Solution appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

• SharePoint Integration
• Document Templates
• Reports
• Server-side sync & Exchange Integration

SharePoint Integration

SharePoint integration with Common Data Service makes the richer document management and collaboration features available to citizen developers with just a few clicks. It empowers app users to manage common document types, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and create folders to save and manage those documents that are seamlessly stored in SharePoint from within Common Data Service apps.

Let us take an example of Contoso, a firm that provides legal consultation to large corporates. Each of these large corporate customers would be stored as Accounts within the Common Data Service. As Contoso adds new customers, they sign a contract with each of these customers. The contract document captures the terms of service, contractual obligations, and other conditions as needed. These documents can now be authored and stored securely and seamlessly from within Common Data Service.

A few clicks are required here to configure SharePoint connection, so that you can customize the location of site etc. before wiring it up with Common Data Service. You will need to create a SharePoint Team site which will act as the repository for documents, set up permissions and then configure the Common Data Service for document management by enabling server-based SharePoint integration. Step by Step instructions are provided here. Once server-based SharePoint integration is enabled you will need to enable the entities you want to make available for document management integration. More information: Enable document management on entities

Note: Once server-based SharePoint integration is enabled you can also enable integration with OneNote and OneDrive. More information: Set up OneNote integration and Enable OneDrive for Business (online)

For the scenario with Contoso, we will just focus on enabling document management for Account entity, which is used to store the customer information.

To enable this, you would launch the Document Management Settings wizard as shown in the picture below, from settings–> Document Management. See Settings for help with this navigation.

Specify the SharePoint site URL and continue with the wizard. Next screen, it would ask for confirmation on the folder structure and finally the screen confirming the successful creation of document library for the entity (Account).
You are now all set to start using the document management capabilities of Common Data Service. Navigate to any app where Accounts can be viewed, and you will see the option to upload or view previously uploaded documents.

If you observe in the grid, you will see the option to directly navigate to the SharePoint location, in case you wish to upload larger documents, or use advanced document collaboration features through SharePoint.

Document Templates

A large portion of contract agreement might be repetitive and here is where you wish you could have a template that dynamically picks up the corresponding account related information. Common Data Service enables you to use document templates, right from your accounts view, as shown here.

If you need more information, read more details about how you can configure a word template in this article.
Note: Common Data Service also supports other templates like Excel, Article and Email templates.

See these articles for more information.

Templates Overview

• • Word Template

  • Excel Template

  • Article Template

Reports

Common Data Service allows you to create reports out of the box. In the Contoso scenario, we discussed above, you could build reports like, VIP accounts based on certain criteria, for e.g. say accounts with more than $1M annual revenue.
On your Reports app, click new report and fill in the metadata before launching the “Report Wizard” button on this page. In case you do not have a reports app, you can create a new one or modify the sitemap of any app to add the “Report” entity, as per your business requirements.

Click through the wizard and here you will see the option to choose the entity – Accounts and the reporting or filtering criteria i.e. for the Contoso scenario it will be customers with annual revenue greater than $1M. More details on working with reports is provided here.

Server-side sync and Exchange Integration

While working with apps dealing with customer communication, scheduling, and other collaboration activities, you will realize the power of server-side sync and Exchange integration that Common Data Service provides as out of box feature. Once exchange integration is setup, Contoso will be able to synchronize appointments, tasks, and contacts etc. across different customers.

The configuration steps required to wire up Exchange integration is documented here.

Once the server-side sync is configured, you are all set to sync emails, appointments and tasks. For example, I received an email in my inbox, see snapshot of outlook web access (OWA) as shown

To keep a track of this email, I categorized this email as “Tracked to Dynamics 365” so that I can sync it as an activity within Common Data Service. Additionally, I decided to create a task in outlook, and an appointment as well to block some time.

All the 3 activities, Email, Task and Appointment were categorized as “Tracked to Dynamics 365” so that it would sync into Common Data Service.

Now, on the Common Data Service side, I created a model- driven app, with just the Activities entity in the sitemap to facilitate the view.

Once the app is published, I could see all the three activities that were categorized in outlook.

Additionally, you could also use App for Outlook, the model-driven app to extend Common Data Service experiences to Outlook. Please see this blog for more details.

To summarize, all these office integration features (SharePoint Integration, Document Templates, Reports, Server-side sync & Exchange Integration) are part of Common Data Service and available for you to leverage, with Power Apps license.

The post Office 365 Integration features in Common Data Service appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.