The Road to ECS - S1 E5: April Dunnam

so hello everyone and welcome to the fourth only fourth episode of the road tsl to ecs today or this morning or this evening wherever it depends where we are sitting with april dunham of course as always with me mustafa how are you doing my man a little bit tired long week uh just behind us did you do anything this week what did you do the last week a little bit like we we scheduled the we've created the agenda basically your first draft it was not an easy task with two hundred plus speakers on the list and approximately two hundred and forty sessions more to come It's going to be interesting. To be honest, I wouldn't be at this place where I needed to choose from all of that. I cannot even imagine how it looks like. But imagine this. The main problem is not putting two hundred plus speakers. We've got software for that. But there are people, troublemakers, like that guy Valdek. I mean, you might know him, who are speaking on two or more events. So before assigning a slot to Valdeck on the Collab Summit, you need to check does it clash with anything Valdeck does on Cloud Summit and vice versa. So basically we needed to always look back and forth on the screens and everything was going there because especially for the first time we've got three conferences and this is uh one of the reasons not by far not the only one why april is uh with us today we've got the european biz up summit uh with us uh today well it was it was really a long weekend and i need to say that i was mainly basically cooking coffees while uh ahmad bajar and you were actually doing doing the real work and i was When I watched the agenda we have on the end, I'm actually really impressed. I need to ask a thing. Do. Because you mentioned three events, three events going simultaneously at the same time. Yes. Is there somebody, anybody, speaking at all three of them? Yes. Really? Yes. You can guess. No, shut up, shut up. I wanted you to guess. You do not count, right? anybody else actually don't like no one from the core team is able to present right no one is able to prepare a session and deal with everything that's going on in the background we kind of have a rule that team doesn't speak at all so and the only thing will actually be speak is except of opening and closing but that doesn't count just basically waving to the people but there is somebody there is somebody i'm giving you hints okay american american american okay is that it texas shops There you go. It really is. It really narrows it down. You get sessions at all three events. Is there anybody else in Texas? We have a few other people from Texas. Jason is coming. Jason is in Texas. Don is in Texas, I think, as well. Don Kirkem. Don is in Texas, I don't know, Neil is in Texas. I mean, we have people from here. Of course, you're right. Wow, yeah, people move, of course. There are a few who are unfortunately not here this time. It's true, who usually are there. For example, Matt McDermott this year couldn't make it. He is from Texas, for example. Yes, we do have quite some people. But let's stop speaking about Texas. April, welcome. I mean, especially you have someone from Oklahoma here. There's a little bit of a rivalry before Texas, Oklahoma. I have no idea. Geography and territorial things are not my thing. I don't know. No, but really, I mean, when I looked at the agenda, I mean, it's one thing when we chose the people, the sessions, the speakers, it looked impressive. But when you actually see it in the grid, And when you actually try to place the sessions, not to collude with each other, and then you see how difficult that is because there are so many good sessions. This is where I was like, okay, this is really good this year. With that, April having two sessions. Yes. I'm really excited. Look at Mustafa. Or more. Or more? Okay. I mean... i'm always up for more you know now i kind of want to compete with shops and like speak at all three you know have a session in all three just so which event do you have no talks in right so i can imagine like you are on the power side obviously duh you are at least yeah so aren't you like you don't have nothing on the clown cloud summit Just the power side. You know, I got some power apps and a prompting session. You want to join? Two steps back. April, can you just... I mean, this is easily to go now because Mustafa, Valdek, and myself know you, obviously, and it seems logical and obvious what we want to ask, but for the people who... don't know you and who are going to meet you for the first time in Dusseldorf. Can you just tell us a few things about yourself, about things, awesome things you do in Microsoft and about your awesome studio that you are just joining us from and all those things behind your back there. Yeah, sure. Well, I work at Microsoft. I've been here about five years. I'm a principal cloud advocate, so working in the advocacy team with Waldick. But I am obviously focused on the Power Platform, so I lead the Power Platform team with four other great advocates. So we focus all on low-code, AI automation, all that kind of stuff, and do a lot of blogging, speaking, creating learned documentation, samples, speaking at events, YouTube, all that kind of stuff, just to educate and upskill people on how to use and get the most out of the Power Platform. Wow. And I mean, just for the other people, you just mentioned those few things that your group of Cloud Advocates work. And maybe you can delve a bit more into it. Because I think I know your whole team. And with some of them, I'm really friends. What is that what you and Valdek and Daniel and people like Lee or Carlota on the cloud side, what are you doing? What are actually cloud advocates in Microsoft? That's a good question. I don't know if I'm going to have the most eloquent explanation, but I really see it as kind of in a way where like everything that you get to do as an MVP, but working for Microsoft, because we're kind of, you know, getting to really be plugged in with the community and hearing, you know, what are the pain points of the product? What are some, you know, gaps in documentation like where are people really struggling or what are they really liking about the the product and being able to be that conduit between the community and the product teams and really have the pulse of kind of what you know where customers and community is struggling but then also you know kind of being those smes as well like you know here's what we think is needed, you know, and the product here is what we think is needed as far as, you know, tutorial samples and stuff to be able to upskill people. So it's a lot of content creation, a lot of kind of thinking outside the box on, you know, what are kind of the gaps that we're seeing and how can we best enable people to get the most out of the products. And is it fair to say that you are actually being generally helpful? I mean, even Valdek, the last time we met, he gave me a real... He gave me a really, really good notebook with some configuration for some LLMs, which I need to thank you for this, Valdek. Thank you very much. No, this is actually really good. But you are for the first time at ECS. We all knew why that didn't work in the April when April was announced as a speaker. And now we are finally there with April in the twenty twenty five at the same place, actually Dusseldorf. So you see something, some things are coming back. And it's also the first time where we split Microsoft three sixty five content from our platform content because we as an organizer, we actually found that those two big areas are trying to starting to kind of take the air out of each other. We were trying to put more and more stuff inside and we have been making too much compromises. And then the only logical choice was actually to split it to different events and to make this to the both conferences, the air to breathe, to breath actually, to be there. So Mustafa, how many sessions do we have on the Power Platform side? I think I count something like ninety sessions altogether. between eighty and ninety that's that's probably it's gonna be ninety something at the end because we are waiting for some content to be added basically sessions that we have agreed that will be added from the microsoft side of the things so basically it will it will exceed ninety overall So we have got three tutorials focused on Power Platform. One, the awesome architecture tutorial led by Claire Edson and Laura Graham Brown, which both of them legends on their own. I think we all can agree about that. Then what else have we got, Mustafa? I'm kind of... We also have one on Fabric. and Power BI. Right, John and Jace. We also shouldn't forget that Power BI and Fabrica are also part of the European BizApp Summit. And we have actually a Microsoft-led tutorial on, and this is something that I want to touch on later, a Microsoft-led tutorial on Power Platform plus AI. Power Platform plus Copilot, developing... Sir? Computer intelligence. Computer intelligence. Here we go. Here we go. Actually led by three people from Microsoft, by Andre, by Robert, and by member of April's team, Daniel. So there are really three great, great tutorials, AT plus or not AT plus sessions later. April, what are your expectations from ECS? Yeah, so I have two different sessions, one on building Power Apps in the modern era. So really just kind of touching on the fact that how much Power Platform and Power Apps specifically has evolved and kind of the updates and new ways of developing. And then one on the art of crafting effective prompts for your Power Platform tools. As we all know, AI, we can build with Copilot now and we can extend with agents and there's so much that we can do. So being able to write prompts is really important to getting the best and the most out of the tools. So that's kind of what I'll be covering. April, you just said the catchphrase, the power apps in the modern era. I'm holding something to my camera. Ten years. We just can be discussing this. Yeah, I can't. I mean, when you told me, I guess I hadn't thought about it, but it's been ten years since Power Apps, or will be this year, came out. It's crazy to think that it's been that long, and then it's really got me thinking how much it's changed, because I started with it when it first came out. You know, I was a SharePoint dev. I was doing InfoPath. I wanted something, instead of InfoPath, to develop on. Yes, right, dirty word. So I kind of gravitated over Power Apps, and I can just, thinking of how, products evolve naturally in the cycle of things and how it was in its infancy versus everything that you can do with it now and how many companies are using Power Apps for business-critical applications and everything. It's amazing to be part of that journey and just see how much it's evolved. Do you recall your first Power App ever? What was your first app you built? Yeah, it was really stupid, because I just wanted to see how it worked. So I just created an application to, you know, credit inventory in my shoes. Like, just to see how it worked, you know, like basic data entry stuff. Because that's the best way to learn these things. It's just like something that'd be actually useful for you. And then, of course, I convinced my clients to start using it. And I did some, like a timesheet application. That was one of the first ones I did, like an inventory app and a bunch of stuff since then. And may, I guess the second that was, uh, making the inventory of those figures, uh, on your wall, uh, my, my phone calls. Yeah. Like I need to do that. Well, cause now in power apps, you can do NFC tagging and I think Funkos have NFC, so you could probably really go all out with an app to track those already in them. Yeah. wow, huh, that's cool. Things are happening. I mean, when we are speaking about good old days and about that, a trivia, the first article on MSDN about extending power-ups with custom APIs was written by Tony, Paul, and me. Was there MSDN? Time flies. I mean, I like, If I, like it was yesterday, writing that thing together with Tony. It almost feels like, you know, like when Power Apps came out, MSDN was already out, but apparently it wasn't. No, no, no. MSDN was still in. Microsoft Learn came a few years after that. MSDN was still. Wow. MSDN blogs, you know, and all the stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was all still there. I was trying to find that article just for... Nostalgic traditions, like maybe half a year ago or a year ago, but I couldn't anymore. Archive.org. Yes, but I think all of that was ditched at some point of time from the Microsoft website. I think this time perspective kind of like shifts because of those two years when April couldn't come to ECS, for example. Those two years kind of extended the period of everything. So basically you cannot tell what was ten years ago, what was fifteen. So what MSD and Microsoft learned, who knows? That's for sure. But from back then to now, and now I'm touching Valdek's favorite topic, computer intelligence. April, just for you to know, we all need to say in each of our episodes, computer intelligence once altogether, because there's a reason for that. Our friend, our member of the content team for the Cloud Summit, Lee Stott, who is an advocate on the Cloud side, He literally hates when we say computer intelligence, which is precisely why we are doing it each time. Because we love Lee. I feel like I need to preemptively apologize to Lee. Lee is a friend. I kind of touched the topic when I was announcing, when I was talking about tutorials for the European news episode. But the topics of AI cannot be ignored, should not be ignored. I mean, this is omnipresent. And we see that Microsoft and not only Microsoft, basically everybody is today about utilizing AI and utilizing agents and thinking what else can be done, how can we use technology. But you know, when you think about that, A lot of people, at least in my surrounding, they immediately see things from Matrix, like green letters going up and down, and people walking their way to artificial intelligence. The truth is, everybody can do AI. Everybody can make an agent. You don't need to know coding. And one of the important ingredients of that is actually Power Platform. at least when we speak about Microsoft's ecosystem, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's really kind of become the forefront of how we democratize building, you know, the AI with Copilot Studio, building your own agents. I mean, like you said, you'll have a tutorial on that with Daniel really kind of walking you through how to build agents, but I mean, even things like being able now to start with a PowerApp. So I'll cover this a little bit in my PowerApp session, but you can create an agent from your application. So you don't have to do anything else. If you have an existing app that you want to be able to kind of leverage that data and create agent from, you can. It's just point and click, you know, don't have to know the ins and outs of creating any models or anything like that. It's just baked in AI builder, same thing. We have tons of prebuilt models where you can start interacting and augmenting and adding different AI capabilities to the apps we build and the automations that we build with low code, just with the prebuilt GPT models that we have. I think I am interested in, because in my work, I talk mainly to devs. So these are technically inclined folks. They are pro-dev folks who know how to go no tech. in your work, April, like you talk to a broader audience, you talk to makers who sometimes are business folks, like people who have a non IT work, and they tend to, you know, have the skills to build things. What's their take on the wave of AI and how welcoming versus hesitant are they given the fact like, well, yes, they have like more powerful tools now, but are they embracing it? Is it too much? Is it easy for them? I mean, from what I've seen, I mean, totally embracing it. And that's what I love about my role in the product that I get to speak on with the Power Platform, because I get to talk, like you said, to business people, maybe with no technical background whatsoever, that are able to use some of the co-pilot capabilities to build an app that they never thought they could build before, all the way to professional developers as well that want to integrate with the platform and capabilities. I've been seeing, especially with that business user audience, just really helping them get up to speed with the tools much more faster. Because we think about traditional barriers to entry, Power Fx, which is a low-code formula language for Power Apps. A lot of people, you could get started building an app really quickly, but then you get stuck when you need to be able to have to write some of that. additional logic. Now we have co-pilot capability to help us with that too. So it's just helping people get unstuck. And then with, you know, AI builder as well, helping them be able to do things and add functionality to their solutions that they never thought was possible without knowing how to code. That's cool. That is so cool. I'm sorry, but this is like beyond insane if you ask me. I mean, it's... It's... We might not have flying cars that we have been promised forty years ago. But everybody, really everybody can learn how to make AI agents and to utilize computer intelligence without really knowing how to code, and without even really understanding some more technical models of the large language models and stuff. Yet, you've got an idea, you know what you're trying to do. And you can have all the tools in your hand to start building AI apps yourself. I mean, I find it beyond awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. You know, I wish I had some of this when I was first starting out, you know, like building applications and getting started out in tech. I mean, that would definitely be, you know, game-changing. That definitely is. But while the... Before, we know that April has a hard stop on this one, so we won't be dragging this along very much. We need to respect each other's time. April, thank you for being with us. We always do. Now you make it sound like we don't. No, we don't. i don't know what you're alluding to alice why am i even doing this why am i even doing this but valdek told one because i i was actually intending to ask april one thing uh with all the changes happening to power-ups or and power and power uh power automate and uh in the past ten years First we see the virtual agents, now we see the co-pilot and everything. What is a typical PowerApps or Power Platform developer profile right now? If there is one in the first place. Because I also use that. Sometimes I think, okay, this is a great tool for professional devs to get something done really quickly. We usually speak about business apps, hence the BizApp Summit, the name of the conference. sometimes i see people who never who never have been making any software trying to play with that and then we also see challenges with that no question about that because those people are not used on the concept of the software likes uh development life cycle uh releases and everything so we uh and or maintaining the software in the first place so we see that and now ai is coming in everything what What is a typical or what is the ideal profile? I mean, is there one? This is just me wondering the thoughts about that. I don't think that there is a typical profile or honestly even... maybe even an ideal, because it is just so broad. A, just like the platform as a whole is so broad, right? You can't say that you're a typical Power Platform developer, because you can have so many sub-specialties, right? You can specialize in automation, you can specialize in apps, agents, reporting, and all that. So there's that whole thing. But then, as you mentioned, you know, this is something that is really beneficial as well to professional developers that want to build something really fast or that want to tack on and integrate with some things that citizen developers, low code makers have already built. So there's that whole thing. So I think if you were to think about maybe the ideal kind of skill set, I mean, obviously now, like knowing how to prompt developers, But then, you know, AI and Copilot can only get you so far. I think knowing, having that foundational knowledge as well of the tools and, you know, knowing what it suggests to you is actually good and knowing the whole, you know, ALM and all of that kind of thing and not just building siloed tools, I think is probably like the ideal where you want to go and building, you know, modern enterprise, secure, scalable applications, right? With the platform. Yeah. I need to say, last year in Texas, and there we are, speaking about Texas again. April just popped into my session about ALM with Power Apps. I hope it was decent enough. It was amazing. Thank you. Now, jokes aside, all of that what April has mentioned, join us in Dusseldorf. We will have tutorials on all the AI cool stuff. We will have ninety plus sessions about everything that we have been speaking here. We will have all the, really, but all the Power Platform Legends and beyond Power Platform. There is one thing I'm totally, totally proud of. We are our Microsoft Partner Conference. Microsoft is our headline partner. But one of the key speakers at BizApp Summit this year is going to be Global Vice President of SAP, telling us how BizApps work in this data ecosystem. Let's try to look a bit on the other side of the fence. What color of the grass is there? We are still Microsoft Conference, Microsoft Partner Conference, but I like some of the perks we have this year at European BizApp Summit and all those Power Platform Legends that you know from the past ten years now. He'll be with us in Dusseldorf. Isn't that awesome? Isn't really that awesome? April, thank you very much. We are one minute over our time. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for being with us. And I'm personally very happy that you finally made it possible that April comes to ECS, the European BizApps Summit this year. And I think it's all going to be awesome and we are all going to have a lot of learning and a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm excited to finally make it there. So really looking forward to it. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Thank you, folks. Bye-bye. Bye. End recording.