Mastering the Power Platform and Exploring AI
Antti Pajunen
Jukka Niiranen
FULL SHOW NOTES
https://podcast.nz365guy.com/479
Are you ready to master the Power Platform and take your digital literacy to new heights? Join us as our special guests, Antti Pajunen and Jukka Niiranen from Forward Forever, take you on a journey of exploration and discovery, sharing insights from their personal and professional lives and their work with the Power Platform. From Antti’s tales of balancing busy family life with her love for Salomon and craft beer to anecdotes of chasing after his three-year-old, you’re in for an engaging and entertaining conversation!
Want a deep dive into Power Platform governance? Let's explore together! Our guests stress the importance of customer involvement and digital literacy, offering tips on conducting career state analysis and benchmarking, while also ensuring customer success. They also take us under the hood of the tenant, with an exploration of capacity, license utilization, custom connectors, and much more. We also delve into the challenges and opportunities presented by Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and how cultural norms and organizational maturity can influence its implementation.
As we wrap up this enlightening episode, we take a detour into the exciting realm of artificial intelligence. Jukka and Antti share how they use AI to accelerate their workflows and craft meaningful marketing content. You'll hear about their experiments with tools such as Wombo AI, GPT-3, and the potential of applications like Stable Diffusion. Whether it's creating abstract art or crafting accurate tweets from podcast transcripts, the power of AI is all around us. This episode is a must-listen for those seeking a comprehensive understanding of the Power Platform and the practical applications of AI.
AgileXRM
AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power Platform
If you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.
Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith
Mark Smith: Welcome to the Power Platform show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guests inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guests are from Finland. They both work at Forward Forever as Power Platform advisors. You can find links to their bio and social media etc in the show notes for this episode. As always, Welcome to the show, Antti and Jukka.
Jukka Niiranen: Thank you very much.
Antti Pajunen: Thanks, mark, thanks for having us.
Mark Smith: Good to have you on the show, gentlemen. Antti, I'll start with you. Food, family and fun. What do you? Do when you're not at head down at Ford Forever, or gallivanting around the world speaking at conferences as you do? What does food, family and fun look like for you?
Antti Pajunen: That's a great question. Food, family and fun. Well, family takes a lot of my time. So we have one and a half year old which is consuming with our two other kids, so I've turned into, I'd say, a family man, so that's the bulk of my free time. Then you know that love for Power Platform. Whenever there's time, I try to keep up. How, how can I keep up? How do I keep up? Yeah, how do you keep up? I?
Mark Smith: mean it's.
Antti Pajunen: Can I really keep up? Yeah, now you have to pick your battles. Focus on what's interesting, and for me, and I think for you as well governance has been interesting for the past couple of years. So, trying to focus on what we do in our daily work, because you can't consume at all.
Mark Smith: Yeah, yeah, I mean. One thing that stands out to me was I think I first met you in Sweden at one of the first like in a day events or Saturday type event that was happening there, and then we co-spoke in at the first Scottish summit, which is where I saw your session then again, and you've always been very big on the project side of the BZAP suite. Are you still really committed to that space or are you more transitioned into being a true Bulu power platform person?
Antti Pajunen: I think that the project side is something that's always going to stick with me. So it's sort of, I'd say, partly that hobby side of these things. You know keeping up with where that is, and I try to do some advisory on that front, so not much implementing things, but really advising customers and partners on how that stuff works and how you know where that's going and how those components are implemented. So it's more on that side these days. I'd say.
Mark Smith: Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Jukka, the last time I met you was in the Microsoft office in Sweden, which was a totally different event, and you were speaking then, quite knowledgeably, on and heck this is, this must be 2019, maybe 2018. On, if I remember rightly, it was something like data. What was it? You know the in dynamics, the, the I can't even think what the term was. They'd bought out a whole bunch of back end dashboards to kind of see around interactions and stuff that were happening. I was the word product insights jumps to mind, but it wasn't product insights or products and insights never came to market. It was like customer insights. That's what it was back back there I think you were speaking on. You've obviously indexed heavily towards power as well. Before we go there food, family and fun for you. What does that mean?
Jukka Niiranen: Starting food. So I mean, all the people in the office know that in the lunch I check out the place that has Salomon on the menu. That's what I always default into, and and then I drink several. You know me, I'm big, big, uh craft beer fanatics, so, of duty, I always end on the place that's going to be having the most exciting selection of new beers to try. Finally, why so? I've got a wife and a three year old kid called Alex now, and uh, so during this uh summer vacation time, when spending this with him, I mean he's uh growing up really fast and uh into big, big machines. So have a hard time keeping up with him running behind him when he's pushing his plastic truck there in the, in the parks and like that's well, it gives me health, it gives me one from drinking beer all day, all night on vacation time. So, so that's good stuff. And then the fun part. So I grew up as a nineties, nineties rave, so I still try to keep up with that scene. So when I'm going to chance to escape the family and go out and spend the night in a dark room with a lot of music, then that's where I try to position myself into. So that's EDM isn't it.
Mark Smith: Is that the genre?
Jukka Niiranen: Well, yeah, but I mean it was called the idea back in the days. It was Raven, second one, whatever.
Mark Smith: Yeah, when it all began, Nice, nice, I won't, I won't ask you about the substance that you need to take to kind of stay up and keep going at those types of events and, uh, and you know, being able to bounce all over the room um with it. But yeah, I've always been impressed with the one, the uh, the amount of craft beers that you seem to always be sampling and and the number of um, uh, raves, uh that you seem to be at which um seems to be a regular occurrence. For me it doesn't seem to have knocked off. Do you ever get um? Have people think that you look like any famous DJ.
Jukka Niiranen: Am I Mark Smith, for example, with the hairstyle I've? Seen it out here, the MVP's here.
Mark Smith: I was in the Philippines and someone thought I Well, who is the DJ I'm thinking of? That's his big and medium scene for some time, particularly coming out of Ibiza.
Jukka Niiranen: Yeah, I'm looking at you right now with your glasses and you look like Dave Siemen, who was a long time DJ in the UK on the bookers' posts, and I mean you're kind of spitting each of him at the moment. Nice, nice, nice so just pick up some dicks there in your studio and start doing a different kind of a.
Mark Smith: I've thought of getting dicks which show, or whatever. Yeah, adding them to my bar, but as it would be extravagant and beyond what I need, tell me about. Today I want to really talk to you about the power platform and governance, and the reason we set up this podcast is because I know Microsoft have been getting the two of you to do a lot of educating of partners in Europe around this topic. When you look at pulling together what you're going to train on, what do you aim to cover? What do you aim to talk about?
Jukka Niiranen: Yeah, so if we think about the power platform governance in practice session that we've been doing in Microsoft offices around the Nordic countries, it has really started from what is not actually explained in the official training courses or that's kind of like this tribal knowledge about what is this thing really about. So we've sort of went pretty deep into the actual details of it and also kind of giving people a bit of a wake-up call on how this is different from Dynamics or different from Office or Azure, because we are then trying to really pull in a mixture of people who are, who don't come from the traditional path of this application consulting and that has really been the best part of those courses that we've done for Microsoft and for Arrow and this kind of partner-facing organizations. And, yeah, we are more kind of like telling them what you need to sort of learn about, giving them hands-on examples and challenges about what the life at the customer organization can actually be like, because that is something that you can't really get exposed to that if you are working in the kind of traditional side of where you are a provider of a dynamic solution, for example, or if you come to do a Power App that uses Azure backend services, so those are just all like a single app kind of perspective is so different from the platform perspective, and that's what we would try to then sort of give people a way to experience that reality so that they could better understand that, okay, what is the life there on the customer organization side? And then maybe figuring out that, based on what we kind of now know from this, what kind of services could be offered to the customers, what kind of new competencies should our people be trained in so that we are better equipped for them encountering that reality where there are multiple partners and most of that is also coming from non-partners, so the internal system developers, who are then kind of the real ingredients in the flow code revolutions. So getting the sort of perspective and kind of like maybe tips and tricks that are not gonna be, maybe that are being like relevant more further down the road, but so that they know what's coming there, because that is really something that is not really very well visualized or expressed in any of the sort of official product based training forces that are available out there.
Mark Smith: You raise an interesting point about the siloed and being that all of us on the call today have all come from a very strong, dynamic, crm type background originally and that partners used to come into organizations and they would do a project and they would deliver a solution and they might put some a support contract in post that event. But what I'm noticing is that more and more customers are wanting to have a much greater deal of skin in the game. They're not wanting to the relationship to be with a partner. You come in, you do a bunch of stuff and then you leave. They're really going no, no, this is, it's a. It's a journey that we're going on and we need our staff to get up to speed because we and I use a kind of a 60-40 split 60% customer side involved in a project, 40% might be and sometimes that's 80-20. You know it changes. But our goal from a partner perspective is always to be bringing the skill level, the digital literacy of that organization up so that they can self govern, self manage, because you know it's only there that the power platform truly spreads out in an organization. Right, they've got to own it, it's got to be their journey, not a partner imposed journey. What are you noticing around where you're perhaps going in and doing rescues right, you're coming in after maybe other partners are being involved or you are really getting that governance strategy in place for an organization. What does good look like? Where do you kind of, what do you look at from a baseline and then where do you like to kind of leave them? And you talked about tips and tricks. For, hey, this is going to come down the road. Once you're this size, once these things happen, you're going to be here. You need to be aware of this. What's that process for you? How do you take a customer through that journey, whether it's a rescue or whether it's a brand new implementation? And you're setting the vision for the power platform.
Jukka Niiranen: There's always reason to be a note, kind of workshopping this internally together with Antti and other members in the team, and kind of our offering is starting to be divided kind of into two levels. So we are going to need these kind of public or semi-public courses that are like the ones that we've been promoting there in social media, those ones that are paid by Microsoft for partners, so the ones that are not customer specific. And then there's, of course, the label beneath that, which is going to be something that we do behind closed doors with the customers. But those really need to go sort of hand in hand. It's hard to really do it just as a consulting or advisory engagement or then purely through the kind of running these courses and doing it in a way that's kind of doesn't involve any of the details that are specific to the organization that we're talking with and what we recommend as the path in which we've been following with customers with, I'd say, first, and successfully, in raising their kind of maturity level in adopting the platform. So we always have to start with the career state analysis of what their current use of partner form is there in the organization, and that will then involve also identifying the other partners that are part of that game. Who has been building apps for them, be it in Dynamics or then Pure Power Apps in the office side or something that's kind of spiked by Azure, but running is still on largely on the local platform side. So, really going through that analysis, using the C O start again tools for digging out all the information that the customer doesn't really have any visibility into before we go there, so even if they would have deployed C O start again on their own, then they can't really figure out, like how to make use of all the piece of information that they get on the dashboard, so like what to pay for the attention, what does it mean? So that's where we really need to spend a few days initially and like get people around the same table there and gather data and at the even at that point start benchmarking them against like what are sort of like key items to really fix what are the, what fires should be put out first, but also then kind of look into the future about what could be valuable, relevant for them in like one or two years time, putting it all out there sort of at once, but not going into too much detail yet, but sort of building up the sort of case for why you need governance. To begin with, of course they need to have that ensemble level, that's understanding that they need us before we get to do the work for them, but still, usually it's that has to be done before there's any kind of like path to be built forward about what piece of puzzle are they gonna be laid out there in the in the coming months? And then after that we then usually always recommend that we then do training about sort of the more theoretical part of the platform hard works. So looking at the environments, looking perhaps admin and governance practice for automate, same stuff, licensing, environment strategy and like security, the LPs and all that. So going through the sort of capabilities that are there in theory in the platform which you will then be using in the near future, which are still some something that you cannot like start using today because you don't know the combination or the priority of those things, and from there we then can proceed to build actually the governance framework for work they're going to be actually doing within the organization, after there's the understanding of who are the people and apps and solutions partners involved here and then what is sort of the theoretical building blocks of the platform and then what are the kind of like ability and scope and needs for you to like? What should you do within the next six months time? I think that's kind of like the high level, the model, how we proceed with customers today, regardless of what it's, whether it's like a new kind of environment or sort of a new territory for us, or whether we got to try to rescue them from some prior failed attempt with another partner to kind of do something on the governance side.
Mark Smith: You know, oftentimes when you're starting to work with a customer, you'll ask them around. You know how is the power platform in use and you'll get a mixed range of answers Nah, nobody's doing anything, nothing's happening. Or you know one big project doing at the moment for an airline oh yeah, we've installed the COE starter kit, but nobody knows what what it means. We just had our tech company install it and it's in there. So we're set up, we're good. And when you ask things like you know, how many apps do you have, how many automations are underway, like all this, it's kind of like no idea have. When you first get into somebody's system and they say and you want to get a layer of the land and the COE starter kit, what are the kind of first three to five dashboards that you want to get and understand the truth of what's going on in that tenant?
Antti Pajunen: How bad is life in default? Yes, yes, it's funny. You say that I was just talking to a.
Mark Smith: I was just talking to a Microsoft PM and they were saying they've now set up a dedicated team to deal with their default story going forward and plan. It's a dedicated team now in Microsoft Got for it, anthony.
Antti Pajunen: So I think this is probably something that depends on who's looking at the platform and what people find, as I'd say, actually as personal points of interest. Personally, what I try to look at. You know, the first couple of things are you know where's our capacity at? What are our current capabilities and our theoretical capabilities from just a capacity point of view? So you talk about storage. Yes, storage, basically, where can we go? Where can we go? How do our licenses look like? And from there I mean I personally I do look at default and try to analyze how bad does it look? Do we have custom connectors, unwanted connectors in use, in broad use by anyone? Do we have any DLP policies? Do we have possibilities of data leaking out? Those are sort of the initial things that I try to get an understanding of, because you know the plethora of environments that usually exist. That takes a lot of time to go and you know dig those out and dig for information. What's going on there? Usually it is default. That's the root of all for evil. So that's sort of the, at least for me, the logical place to start and try to get you know my bearings on what the world looks like in there.
Jukka Niiranen: And also, when we talk about capacity, then one aspect that's not part of the SQL Stardust, but so the PPAC-Police, the consumption of the API requests, which is going to be a good indicator of what's really running in there and then, in the near or distant future, actual problem for customers who are going over there inside metal limits. So that is again something that they've always had access to it in theory, technically, but they don't understand why to look for it and what does it mean. So another great example of data that's sort of hidden in plain sight, but so you need to sort of decipher that to the customers and explain that this, actually, it will tell you also where the potential real kind of value is to write from platform, but then also the places where people in guidance or where you have fires burning and you need to put them out before you proceed to any fancier models around your governance processes.
Mark Smith: Yeah. What about ALM maturity? Because of low code, you know, being marketed so heavily and the concept of citizen developers being able to build anything you know on the platform, rigor that you would have in traditional software development is sometimes a miss or a ride. That it's not in play, is that sometimes? Yeah, yeah. So what are you coming across, what are you seeing and what are your recommendations?
Antti Pajunen: Oof, yeah, alm, that's that's. That's always the tough question. You know, sometimes it's tough, even when you do dynamics, which is sometimes a bit surprising. There is no ALM in citizen development, in organizations that are just getting started with Power Platform. You know those organizations that are on a maturity level of 100 or 200, usually those cases that we actually have. You know those, those customers that are in the early steps, in the early stages there's not a concept of ALM, nothing, and I know that some you know some, someone who's listening might be like hey, you know, man, that's that's. That's not true. You know that's not what we're seeing and that is definitely a possibility. So you know, based on what I've extensively talked with with people around the world, I think this is partly a cultural thing of sorts as well. But what we're seeing here, at least in Finland, with our enterprise, is that they are really in. You know baby steps, they're taking baby steps and you know the experience that we've had is there is no concept of ALM. Alm means that citizen developers are building their apps and their flows and whatnot in directly, in default, and you know those apps and flows, you know they might be personal in productivity, they might be organizational productivity, that that are business critical apps and flows, and and ALM, you know it's, that's that's something that comes in as the organization matures and as we get that governance framework in and as we get to teach and train and enable not only it but makers as well on what good ALM should look like. And really, then that's, you know, after that, that's then the discussion of you know, how do we implement ALM? What, what sort of the initial versions and approaches and baby steps of ALM? Should we, you know, do things manually? Should we have automations in place? But that discussion, I mean that's that's something that does come down the line when the bits and pieces for governing platform are really in place.
Jukka Niiranen: Yeah, so I really think you need to find some example of a fire that's burning or something that's obviously not going to scale, and then use that as talk around that scenario, find out, okay, where should this be running? Who's supporting it? Do you have any versioning? Is there anybody tested? So pick a few of these a bit bigger applications that are, to some level, critical, or even high critical if they are, have been using them for many years already without knowing that it's not really in line with how things should be built. So, then, not kind of like overwhelming, then, with the sort of theory about all the hundreds of new apps that you will be producing, like every year, but rather focusing on a few of these and then talking through the story, aligned with this sort of theory of the governance tools that we talked about it on the training side in our offering. So, looking at the environment strategy, what environment should we build for these apps? Where should it land into? What other resources are needed for it? And thinking about, then, security perspectives, so based on the DLP policies that we define for default, for example, then does this fit into that, does it need to be moved out and like? That's again a great example of like why it takes time to really put anything major into use, is that there's so much stuff that we need to clean out from the default or other places before we can enable the DLP policies and block things that need to be blocked. So that will then of course quickly lead to questions about okay, who built this? Is he in the house anymore, is he a partner that's gone away, or do we have any reasons to actually do the work there? So we can run into those kind of questions pretty soon in the analysis and we have to kind of be kind of accept the fact that that's how it's going to go. It's going to go through all these examples and we cannot blame the customer or even the partners who might have been involved in building those solutions about doing things the wrong way. But we need to map out those steps that are so interconnected with one another and kind of reaching the good AOM sort of capability alongside this sort of a, I'd say, a side effect of putting the governance model in place there. So I think it's even actually a lot more motivating, especially for what the IT folks like looking from that perspective, not from the sort of developer productivity perspective, but rather like ensuring that things are under control and that people are not misusing our capacity or exposing data in unapproved ways to the end users. Those are really concrete things to kind of like give out as the outcomes from that, and once you get through that process, then you are already in a pretty good state of the art. Ultimately. Things so in the AOM, in your AOM maturity journey.
Mark Smith: What's your experience like with managed environments? And it's a whole new set of tools that Microsoft are bringing to the fore and they're pretty compelling to give a much higher degree of governance. I was talking to Keith Wotling and he said you know managed environments. You can pretty much save an FTE, you know, inside the organization from a monitoring perspective and admin with the power that you get with managed environments. What's your experience, what are your thoughts and where are you seeing it working well?
Jukka Niiranen: So we think about this on a high level. I think it's very important that there's now an actual sort of a unit within the practice team that is really building product features for those kind of things, so that we're not just relying on the sea waste target elements that are distributed there in GitHub and also non-products, even though they are the foundation for all the government stuff today in the real world. So, kind of having a way that these R&D investments can actually then bring in new revenue for Microsoft, that's a very positive thing for all of us I mean customers, partners and Microsoft. So there's a reason to build a more advanced governance tooling into the actual product itself. Now, if we look at it, then today the state of sort of like the offering from that has been shipped out from that R&D shop. So we of course pipelines are probably the most concrete and interesting feature. That addresses the very big need for having some in-pract AOM capabilities to like at some point reach a state where also ZIN devs can have, I mean, do you have proper AOM? It's really a big thing and well, it probably would exist even if there was no offering call management environments in the suite. But then in practice I mean it's. I see it as today the management environment is not yet like replacing existing. So it's neat new layers there that you are going to be useful once the maturity of the organization grows higher and we can start to use this more structured kind of process for how we direct people to build in the right environments and like how to get them to deploy things in a automated way. But it's still something that it's not addressing the needs for the pro devs. It's not going to replace immediately at least Azure DevOps pipelines and all those tooling that are more customizable, so the pro coders are not going to rush into adapting that. And then for the citizen side, then it takes a lot. You have to have the basic governance model in place before you are mature enough to start using the pipelines, for example, so putting those into use in these sort of citizen environments, citizen sandbox and all those places. So yeah, I mean it's obvious that we need those features and we need a better reporting in the product as well. I mean there's no reason why the CW start-up gets dashboards going to show data that's missing from the products admin orders. I mean it doesn't make any business sense for Microsoft either. It's just been the way that by being not in the product, they've been able to move faster in the CW start-up. So the agility has been there and I think that's going to be the state of things going forward as well. So new things will be still experimented there outside the product and eventually they will be sort of assimilated into the management environment feature set, at which point in time we will probably become very I mean very beneficial for customers and worth the money with the premium licenses. But are we there today yet? Well, it's not a thing to replace another thing at this point.
Mark Smith: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Your favorite topic licensing.
Jukka Niiranen: It's perfect, right what?
Mark Smith: are your thoughts on it? We're at the state of play, you know, for those people that traditionally have defaulted to using SharePoint as their back-end systems often say, it's because of licensing costs, and then those of us that, of course, come from a model-driven world think the licensing is pretty cheap compared to what we used to pay for an XRM solution and dynamics in the past. Right, and so what are your thoughts on licensing in the state of play? I know this won't age well, but at the state of play right now, what are your thoughts?
Jukka Niiranen: Well, like you said, once you understand what you get with the money, then it's really dirt cheap. But then we come to the fact that is the organization broadly mature enough to make use of the premium capabilities yet, which gets us to the issue with how the management environment feature is delivered. So it's not a separate ski of itself. It's based on the per user model, which, of course, is always going to be then a source of frustration for people who are more aligned towards, like the Azure custom dev way of like paying for the developers and not paying for the actual platform per every user. But then I don't see that as a blocker for the commercial success or the broader adoption of PowerFam tools, really at all. It's going to happen same way as share what happened. It's just a matter of time, I think. But what really is then? Maybe? I mean a bigger concern there. Once we do you see that there are bigger, with bigger local apps not dynamics apps, not LOE stuff, but like custom apps built on the platform and we start to, then we have to start thinking about the capacity consumption side of it. So thinking about then the API calls and the storage and all that pricing and especially I mean, do we build the automations in flow or should we take the logic apps and what's going to be the cost impact when we are doing really big things?
Mark Smith: in the back for.
Jukka Niiranen: So it's been such a long time since the intent, the new model behind how the platform is licensed, how it can be, how the resources can be consumed it was announced almost like probably four years ago by the time this podcast goes out, and we still don't have a way to really look at the consumption via the reports in the product or even then like sort of assign resources to the right things that are operating there on the platform, and that is going to be a concern for the IT side once they see that this is a platform for every developer and yet we cannot really then properly control that. Where do the resources go to that we pay for? So everybody hates surprises and it's as if understand why it's really technically challenging for Microsoft to build those sort of dashboards and get the metrics in place to be detailed enough so that they can base their financial transactions on it. It's a very hard problem to solve. I'm sure that kind of the communication around that is starting to be a really big sort of drawback for the local platform compared to then doing it the Azure way. I think.
Antti Pajunen: So just one comment on licensing from what we've seen with customers, licensing is premium licenses are a result of increased maturity in power platform. That's what we're essentially seeing. If you think of customers that are totally unaware of what they have on the platform. They really don't know why someone should have license X, why your Z related to power apps and flow. When we start talking about the basic moving parts and how the platform works and kind of putting in those initial frameworks in place for governance as the awareness increases sort of, the licensing discussion immediately gets a lot easier. That kind of stage gate of how do we assign licenses, premium licenses, who gets them, who doesn't get them that gets easier as we move along. So I think that's one, like Yucca said, that managing environment. You know that sort of down the line when we have the basic building blocks. I think part of that is because that whole licensing scenario is a result of proper governance work and increased awareness. You know, at a customer.
Mark Smith: Nice, nice, so true. Final question for both of you and I want both of you to answer this question is Auntie will start with you is give me two ways that you're practically using AI that you weren't doing in October last year.
Antti Pajunen: I am trying to get emails to write themselves without having to spend 30 minutes on how do I reply to a customer. That's sort of my. That's where I want to save time personally. Nice, I suck at it right now, but ask me in six months Maybe.
Mark Smith: I'll be better, Cool I'll be. I'll be keen to say that Jukka.
Jukka Niiranen: Yeah, so I've been applying the Bija capabilities quite a lot into the marketing content that I'm partial responsible for it for the way around. Yeah, I'm not going to use it to replace my personal blogging content, but kind of like the way how it can provide structure into things that are still draft and like give you variations of what could be a better, better way to express yourself than using that to like sort of especially accelerate people who are not doing that kind of things on a daily basis, or occasional bloggers who should work like technical pros who have the information there and want to put it out there but don't have a yet like understanding of like what would be a good way to format that into a readable blog post, then those tools are excellent for for getting that kind of ideas. And then I've also been playing around with some of the AI image tools how to sort of alter the reality and like how to sort of like accepting the fact that what you see online is never going to be real again. So why should we like pretend that it has to be just? just real photos are real things of like what's goes on there in the application.
Mark Smith: What's the tools that you've played with? What's your favorite?
Jukka Niiranen: Right now I love using the Wombo AI app on my phone because it's so easy to then like.
Mark Smith: Is it Lunglow?
Jukka Niiranen:
One more WOMBO, womboai. So it's great for like take this image and use the inspiration and then create a new version based on some like Steampunk or whatever.
Mark Smith: Yes, yes, yes, no very good, because I've been impressed with what you've come out with, particularly your MVP award. That kind of looks semi-awardish and you know I've been, I've been doing a whole bunch of of that type of thing using mid-journey. I've got a, you know, but as an it's abstract art and it doesn't really like taking exit. Well, it can, but it doesn't. Well, I have not used it effectively. Like if I put a photo of me up and got it re-rendered, it wouldn't look like me, right? It seems to be quite different. Which?
Jukka Niiranen: is a good thing, right, yeah, yeah.
Mark Smith: Stable diffusion, though. Now that's got me interested because that runs locally and I think you get a lot more. It's a lot more set up. Right, you're gonna, but you're round away, you're way round. Github making sure you're on the latest build takes about two gig of storage or something like that, maybe eight gig actually, but some really amazing stuff happening in that space. Yeah, it's exciting times, it's. I think all my tweets now for this podcast since January have all been written via GPT and they are much better tweets because what I do is I hand in the entire transcript from the podcast and then go create me. You know, five tweets for across five days, and the thing is the tweets are meaningful about the content in the podcast. I had this one as an MVP that I was interviewing and she came back and goes I never talked about Raspberry Pi. Why don't you tweet DSA? I did Raspberry Pi and then, before I could respond, she came back and was like, oh my gosh, I did reference Raspberry Pi in my you know I re-listed in the podcast and I did mention it. And of course it had extracted that and talked about her comment on it, and so I've found it's definitely made the tweeting much more accurate to the show, because it's not making anything up, right, it's actually using the transcript. And then the other thing and I've just switched this on actually last night is I've been doing transcripts for some time and they're kind of an overhead to do on a podcast, right, so it costs more. It can look crappy, you know, as in sometimes it's just not accurate. But I just switched on one with my platform last night which is using generative AI to do the transcript rather than the old way transcripts used to be done. So I'm going to be really interested to see if there's a big uptick in the quality of transcription now coming out. I don't know how many people ever look at the transcripts on a podcast. I assume it's more for people that you know need a specialized reader or something like that. But yeah, it's going to be interesting.
Jukka Niiranen: I was looking at them just before the show here, seeing the latest guests on your. I mean because I don't have time to like listen to the audio, but I can scan through some of the big stuff and talk there. So definitely there's so much value to it. That's good.
Mark Smith: Thank you, gentlemen, for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
Jukka Niiranen: So awesome to be here. Thanks a lot. Thank you sir.
Antti Pajunen: Always good to be on.
Antti Pajunen is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP and a Power Platform, Project Operations, and Project for the web Solution Architect with a deep passion for learning cool new things. Antti is a frequent speaker at Power Platform and Dynamics 365 community events and loves travelling the world to meet people from the community in person.
Jukka Niiranen is one of the co-founders of Forward Forever and works there as a Power Platform Advisor, focusing on governance services. He has a background in CRM-related processes and systems from the past 20 years, giving him perspective on how modern low-code tools in Microsoft’s Power Platform fit into the business applications landscape of organizations. Jukka has been awarded as a Microsoft MVP for 11 years now for his community contributions. You can find his writings and social profiles from the Thinking Forward blog at jukkaniiranen.com.