Power Pages and beyond with Ulrikke Akerbæk

Ulrikke Akerbæk: [00:00:00] I always say, you know, start with the heaviest thing that you can and take away stuff. It's much easier to do that than to start basic and then add stuff. So for me, I always start with a partner portal. I get the most functionality. I just hide whatever things I don't need. 

Neil Benson: Welcome to Amazing Applications session 118. It's the last episode in our recent series showcasing Scottish Summit sessions. It's not the last ever episode of Amazing Apps, but I did want to take a moment to recognize the joy and Upiness brought into our lives by The Up Podcast. Megan Walker and Lisa Crosbie announced that episode 76 was their last one. And I just wanted to thank them for the love and the passion they put into their show. 

Amazing Apps isn't going anywhere. So make sure you subscribe to catch all the great content we've got coming up. 

Scottish Summit, however, is going somewhere. It's going to Glasgow on 9th and 10th of June, 2022. So this is your last chance to register for your free ticket and get your travel booked. Visit ScottishSummit.com. 

The Scottish Summit presenter joining me as a guest today is Ulrikke Akerbaek. She's the Low Code Practice Lead at Itera, a new role, which had just started after we recorded this episode. So congratulations and best wishes, Ulrikke. 

A couple of quick apologies before we get started. It only lasts a couple of seconds, but sorry to any Norwegian listeners for my slightly Norwegian, slightly terrible accent at the start of this podcast interview. And sorry to Ulrikke for discussing Microsoft confidential material that we had to cut. [00:02:00] And we were both worried about losing our MVP awards over. It's all safely on the cutting room floor.

Here's Ulrikke Akerbaek.

 Ulrikke welcome to the Amazing Applications podcast. I was going to do the whole introduction with a Norwegian accent. That would be, that'd be crazy, but welcome all the way from Norway. Ulrikke, it's great to have you on the show.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Thank you so much, Neil. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Neil Benson: It's my pleasure. I wanted to give you a chance to come onto the show and talk about an upcoming session you've got at Scottish Summit. It's about some new Power Apps Portal templates. I am trying to keep up with all the name changes of all the products. I still would love Microsoft to make Power Apps Portals its own product, but it's not there yet, but someday it might be.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Yeah, I think so. Someday it might be, and now in the community, we're kind of in the midst of, is it Power Portals or is it Power Apps Portals? What do you think? I'm seeing more and more Power Portals these days. 

Neil Benson: Okay. So if Microsoft hasn't changed the name, we're going to change the name for them.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Maybe we'll give it a logo or I'm sorry, icon as well. Who knows? 

But thank you so much. Yeah, I'm doing a session at Scottish Summit about the portal templates the, the different kinds of portals that you get out of the box just by clicking a button and having your Dynamics environment in order to as well, you need the Dynamics app in order to get those different options. So when creating your portal, you can choose what kind of portal you want to start with.

So you don't have to start from scratch. You can actually start with a template as you can in Power Automate and Power Apps, these days. You can start from a template and and you can do that in portals as well. And it's a great way to get started and see what you can do. And you get so much free stuff that no one really knows about, no one really talks about..

So I just wanted to showcase the different types of portals you can create, and what's the difference between them [00:04:00] and, and, and how they work. 

Neil Benson: I would love to get into some of those because it's been quite a while since I started at portals project from scratch. And it's going to show my age a little bit, but just before we get into those, can you give us a quick introduction into Ulrikke and some of your background and how you got into business applications? We'd love to find out a little bit more about you.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Oh, thank you. I'm I actually started with portals and that's probably a weird thing to do because I, I am actually a user experience person at heart. So I started in the SharePoint world of all things. I am a trained web developer from my education and I started doing SharePoint intranets back in the day.

And then Microsoft shifts the intern at the SharePoint to the cloud and I got gone and I went on maternity leave. And when I got back, I didn't have a job. It was that simple. It wasn't possible to do branding of SharePoint sites anymore. They, they took all that away. So I essentially didn't have a job.

So I looked around the Microsoft stack. I didn't want to leave my job at a Microsoft partner, and so I just looked at the stack and what can, what else can I do? And then portals was acquired just a few months before. It was ADX Studio, and then it was Dynamics portals. And so I looked at the product and it fit my profile well, and it was user experience and it was interaction design, everything that I love about the web, but it was still within that Microsoft stack and the the business part of things. So not for external users only. And so if, if in my profile while I'm, so I just got started. So that's six years ago and I think, and it's been an uphill struggle. I can tell you, I mean, you probably know because you started quite early with portals yourself. Didn't you? 

Neil Benson: Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you about that because I have met people from a user experience background who are used to doing custom web development. And they can take a pixel perfect [00:06:00] wireframe and they want to build a pixel perfect website from that wireframe. Designers get pretty upset when you can't use the right font or the button doesn't have the rounded edges. 

So I've had a lot of running battles with user experience designers because portals was a rapid portal development kit. And it's not a custom site where you can specify the design of everything. And that comes with some constraints and limitations in order to give you that rapid deployment capability.

And so we'd have a lot of heated discussions. And some clients were very disappointed that their exact designs couldn't be met with portals and other clients, it wasn't a problem. They were pretty happy with, you know, a four-week project to give them a basic form capture, lead capture type of website.

What's your perception coming from that background of Power Apps? Portals, does it give you everything you want to be able to do?

Ulrikke Akerbæk: No, but actually that's really interesting because I come from the SharePoint world where you have the same limitations. So you couldn't flip your SharePoint internet upside down, or you shouldn't at least. And so my job for five years was to start with that kind of template and enhance the user experience because what people are on is SharePoint 2017 and not really that great user experience.

So what we ended up doing was often create a user experience, very similar to what SharePoint online looks today. And that's something we feel pretty great about when you look back on what we did then. So when I started working with Portals, it felt natural to me to just go with what was out of the box and enhance upon that.

So if my client would come in with these details, sketches and, and pixel perfect views of what they wanted, I would challenge them back and say, "All right, so are you sure that it's worth it? I can do this, but are you sure it's worth doing, because it will take a lot of time and it wouldn't give that user that much better of user experience anyway."

And [00:08:00] so have you worked quite a lot with Marketing, I guess. And it's the same thing with the email templates as well. We would have customers come in with these great emails that they want to push out. And then the cost of making that dark mode friendly, mobile friendly respond to all the clients, Outlook friendly and not forget. It's it's yeah, it's a big job. Right. And is it really worth it? And instead of using the templates, you get out of the box and just enhancing and putting on your font and your, and your colors and your logo and go and go we'll live with that. So I think we should be good advisors to our clients and explaining to them why it's difficult, why it's taking long and what they will end up getting at the end. And, and they can make the judgment if it's worth it or not. 

Neil Benson: Right. So you're going to have to bring me up to speed on what's changed in Portals. Last time we did a Portals project was probably around 2018. And since then I've been working with clients who've maybe got Sitecore or something similar. And all they're doing is calling the Dataverse APIs from their website. 

But what's changed in portals recently? What's what are the new templates? Because we did have some templates back in the days of ADX Studio, but I'm presuming it's not just a simple update of those. It must be more to it than that.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Oh, yeah, no, unfortunately they didn't bring all the Adxstudio templates to Power Apps Portals. So we don't have, for instance, the government template, which was really great in ADXstudio. 

We do have a Customer Service template as I'm sure. You know, because most Portals project starts there and you get the case management and you get the knowledge base articles and you get all that.

And then you have the Community template, which gives you much of the same. But in addition, you get the blog, which is not on t he Customer Service template. And so that's something that our customers want more and more: the blog functionality. 

And then you have the even more dense template that is [00:10:00] the Partner template which gives you the form for application. You can apply to be a partner. You can deny or accept. You have that kind of workflow that enables you to, to bring in new partners and administer them in a good way. And also, it gives your client the possibility to invite new users into their partner account and administer their users themselves which is something that all clients also want more and more.

So those templates are great to start with. Especially those who are starting out with Portals. I always recommend, you know, do the partner portal and take a pick it apart to see what you get, go deep. See what kind of scripts and yeah, cause there's a lot of functionality that's kind of hidden in this template pages and the list and forms that you can apply to your own project later.

Neil Benson: Right. So even if you not building a partner portal there's some lessons to be learned from seeing how a partner portal works under the covers. Some clues, some of the advanced functionality you can get.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Yeah, absolutely. I I always say, you know, start with the heaviest thing that you can and take away stuff. It's much easier to do that than to start basic and then add stuff. So for me, I always start with a partner portal. 

I get the most functionality. I just hide whatever things I don't need. And then I can always enable that or show that later if the client, when the client gets there or matures enough where I see the potential in the product and want to use kind of functionality. 

Neil Benson: And does it come with case management, knowledge management as well 

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Absolutely. 

Neil Benson: Okay. So even if you're doing a customer portal, you might start with a partner one, hide the lead management, the partner registration pieces. Aha, smart.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the, the four project, the last four projects I did, it has always all been partner portals. You don't take anything away and you get additional functionality. So, it works very good very well. 

Neil Benson: Okay. Thinking about a portals project these days, what kind of team do you think you need to assemble? You know, if I'm going to deploy, let's say it was a partner portal [00:12:00] for a manufacturing company that's got some resellers and they need to build out the case management and knowledge management functionality. What kind of project team are they going to need? Does it still take, you know, five or six people to deploy a portal project these days or, or be more or less than that?

Ulrikke Akerbæk: I'm, I'm really not sure how many people you would need, how big a team we would need. I'm usually on a one to two person portal project, and I work with the rest of the Dynamics part or the ERP part of the project. And they're usually like 10 to 15 people. And so it's, it's hard to say exactly what you would need for just an isolated Portals project. 

But what I do see now that we're, we're trying to recruit portal people and it's hard. They're hard to come by. There's not of portal people in Norway. So what we always look for is the combination of Dynamics or Dataverse understanding and the Dynamics apps, and then web development as well, or, or general development. So the combination of those two would give you the knowledge that you would need to understand the product.

And now, just to go back to your previous question about how we work with portals these days and what you've missed since 2018, the way that we work on the back with portals now is totally different, but what we did two or three years ago. So what they've actually done and this, I must say it's credit to Microsoft, they didn't do what we wanted them to do. Because we wanted them to, to make it easier to be editor, easier to create content, make it more like WordPress! Where's the widget? Where's the add-ons? You know, but they say, "No, wait a minute. We want to do this the right way." 

So they did the backend first. So now we got the Power Portal CLI which makes it possible to, to talk to the code in a much easier way we have the Visual Studio Code extension, then make it possible to edit the code in Visual Studio, like a proper developer tool. It's so great. And it, it removes the necessity for XrmToolBox. It does all the things that you need. [00:14:00] And, and I can, now I can create a portal quick and easy in a Portals Studio.

So actually started using the studio because of the CLI capabilities that came this summer. And so you spin up your portal quick and dirty, and then you download the portal to your computer and you use Visual Studio Code. You upload your source control to GitHub. You do everything in sprints and dev ops.

You know this. You're Agile Man. We'll just call you Agile Man. And you can actually have a proper Portals code studio or our project working as a, as a true developer and that developer should, and, and then that's great. I that's, it's really, really good to see. 

And as you were talking about earlier, the portals web API makes it possible to talk to the portal, the source, in a completely new way. And it has transformed the way that we work with portals altogether. So it's hugely different from what it was two or three years ago. 

Neil Benson: That's cool. Thanks for that update. Cause I remember my teams just really struggled, like you said, with they deployments because there was so much data involved in a portals solution. It wasn't just a metadata, but there was records inside Dynamics and they extract those and deploy those through test and into production. And that wasn't so easy. Good on Microsoft for finally fixing some of that challenge that we had.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Absolutely. And now that we have a proper ALM kind of pipeline set up and we have the test. We have the dev, the test and a production, and we have production profiles and everything, and it makes that job easier. And you feel like you're much more in control and you know, what the source looks like, and it feels better to use Visual Studio Code than to use the, the browser to edit and config. So it feels more like development meant and less like configuration now that it used to. Yeah. And so that's that feels great. 

Neil Benson: How does that play with a low code, no code story of being able to configure business applications? What you just said sounds like developers love [00:16:00] portals even more than they used to because it's become professional developer friendly. What about citizen developers? Where are they in the portal story today? Are they still being able to configure their own quick and easy portals too?

Ulrikke Akerbæk: That's a great question. And that is what we asked for when Microsoft said, "Stop, wait a second. We want to do the back end first." So what they actually did was to go to counter their own vision of the low code approach and they served the hardcore developer first. And that's kind of interesting when you look at it that way, because if they should have followed their own strategy just should have started with the low code developer, right? So hold your horses... 

... and then we have Build that's coming, I think in June, early June. And so we will have some announcements coming. I think. 

Neil Benson: Hey, sorry about this. But it's at this point I had to cut a couple of minutes of my chat with Ulrikke when we realized they were both in danger of discussing material that is Microsoft confidential. Let's pick it up again afterwards.

Of course, we're just speculating, but.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Of course we're speculating. 

Neil Benson: Very good. Well, that sounds super exciting, but also quite challenging to build a presentation around things that haven't been announced yet. So you must have some, an exciting couple of weeks coming up. Not quite knowing what's going to be in your session.

 Ulrikke, as well as your session coming up at Scottish Summit. Are there any other Portals presenters or content you'd recommend the audience dive into if portals is their thing?

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Oh, absolutely. You know what? They're going to be so many Portals people presenting us go to summit that it's just take your pick. I think all the big names are going to be represented. And especially, I think Nick Doelman's going to do how to get started. Everything you need to know about Portals, if you want to get started.

And actually it's so great. We have a community now. When we started out, it wasn't really much, there was five, six people. They called them Black Belts that came from the Adxstudio team. They were very busy and not really that easy to get hold of them. But now, there's so many people doing portal stuff and Victor Dantas 

I want you to just highlight [00:18:00] Victor Dantas with his Portals Zero to Hero series that he's done for one and a half year now. He's been doing that. So much great content for free on YouTube. Just go and learn. And that's a great way to start. If you want to start getting to know Portals. 

Neil Benson: Yeah, Victor's content is awesome. So I'll make sure we include links to that on our show notes. Thank you for that reminder. And I'll also highlight any other portals sessions in the show notes for this episode as well. 

So Ulrikke what other content or things that you're doing, any other events coming up as well that you'd like to highlight to our audience.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Yeah. So, you know, it's been two years without much in-person events. So I'm, I'm doubling down doing as much physical as I can. And as do you know, it's not really that easy to pin something down these days. So it's all kind of fluid, but I know this fall, I'm going to go travel as much as I can. And I want to highlight we have a Dynamics user group event coming up this fall and we have the Nordics Summit, I think in Stockholm. I think it's November they haven't set a fixed date yet. But if you're in Scandinavia and you're looking for a great show, then yeah, Nordic Summit should be on your radar.

Neil Benson: Yeah. So I've heard a little bit about Nordic Summit I was chatting with Vivian Voss recently and she teased me with that. So, yeah, that sounds exciting. I think we're all just dying to get back to in-person events. I'll have to think about what we can do here in Asia Pacific or Australia, New Zealand for some in-person events.

We normally let the our friends across the ditch in New Zealand to go first. They love organizing in person events, and once they're up and running, then we can copy their formats. And off we go too.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: That's great thing to do. Yeah. And I'm actually going to Australia in 1, 2 years, so then I'll catch up and we can do a community event together. That would be great. 

Neil Benson: That'd be awesome. So what else are you involved in? Are you hosting any user groups locally or what else have you got going on?

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Absolutely. So I, as I mentioned, it's not really so many Portals people in Norway, so we're trying to build that community. We're having a [00:20:00] portals lunch every quarter, and we're going to pick up the pace and do it actually more often now than we have been doing during the pandemic and trying to do that physical have a bit of a pizza and beer afterwards and get the community going.

And they have asked for more Power Platform stuff. So Power Apps and Power Automate stuff. They would want some, some more about more stuff on that. And so we're trying to build the community in Norway around that. So if anyone listening wants to join that initiative and want to be a presenter or want to participate, the user group for Power Apps and Power Platform, then just holler or connect me. I'm on every social platform. Search my name and I'll pop up. And get in touch. 

Neil Benson: We try to do a lot of those very informal events here in Brisbane as well. And it's, you know, sometimes you do technical presentations. Other times we've got customers coming in, but even just, yeah, no agenda catch up over a beer. Somebody pulls out a laptop and shows off something cool that they're building or that they're stuck on. And when we all jump on their laptop and try to help them out. Those are really fun, just the chance to get to know other people in our industry and in our community locally. Those are great. So, anybody listening, if you do have an opportunity to go and find a local user group go visit the powerusers.microsoft.com website, and you'll find lots of local user communities in your area.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: Absolutely. 

Neil Benson: Okay, Ulrikke, is there anything else we should know about you or about your upcoming session that we haven't already covered?

Ulrikke Akerbæk: No, I think that's about it. I hope to see so many peoples in the community that I've connected with over the last few years that I'm dying to see and I'm so looking forward to it and just connecting with the community. And I was at the last physical Scottish Summit was just before it closed down. And we were there. Best event that I've ever been to. So if you're on the couch, wondering if it's worth it, it's definitely worth it. And the Power Addicts are all there and then this community spirit is so [00:22:00] great and it's a very welcoming crowd and I just love it. So, yeah. Join, get your ticket and the book, your flight. 

Neil Benson: Cool. Well, thanks so much for joining me on the Amazing Applications show. We'll look forward to your session.

Ulrikke Akerbæk: I'll thank you so much for having me. It was great chatting with you and good luck with the floods and the house and everything that's going on and the podcast and everything. 

Chike Eduputa: Thanks so much for listening to the amazing apps podcast you can join the show's mailing list at https://AmazingApps.Show you'll Get a personalized welcome video from yours truly and a notification when there's a new episode available there are also shortcuts So you can follow the show on all major podcast players and you can follow amazing apps show on Twitter LinkedIn YouTube Instagram and Facebook You can send me a message or a voicemail if you'd like your question answered on a future episode and even support the show through BuyMeACoffee or by buying an amazing apps t-shirt visit https://Amazing.Apps.Show Thanks again for listening I really appreciate you Until next time take care and keep sprinting