Turning a new page

Wanted to write again, and let everyone know what I’ve been up to. I ended up taking a break through most of 2021 and 2022 simply resting, recovering, and doing light work from home.

2023 resumed with a big bang, I found motivation and drive to dive back into the many projects I’ve temporarily shelved in the last two years. I’ve also became pretty handy with a bunch of home DIY projects. It was a big change to the old me that only knew how to do digital projects but not physical projects. Perhaps more on that in a future post.

Flow Studio

We’ve had several Flow Studio fixes in the last two months

  • there was an API pagination fix since the API no longer accepts 250 records at once and restricts us to only 50. (That means more pages and API call takes longer)

  • API auth fix relating to Power Apps is in-progress.

  • There’s a second API skip/continuation token fix.

  • We’ve also tweaked the way trail is applied when anyone wants to try Flow Studio pro - you can sign up and trial will be available for two weeks - you can cancel the subscription before the trial end date to avoid being charged, if Flow Studio isn’t suitable for you.

Clarity / Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise

We’ve had renewed interest in Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise (Clarity) through the last few years.

  • Flow Studio for Teams will be tweaked to focus on monitoring critical flows and alerting users when their business critical flows fail. This will be priced simply and does not offer governance capabilities.

  • Flow Studio for Enterprise will be focused on the turnkey Power Platform Governance story, adding new features to scan more areas of the Power Platform, and integrate with CoE starter kit.

  • So far this year, we’ve added BYO Azure Storage. There’s been a lot of fixes to API breakages in Power Apps area this year.

Contract Work

I started a regular part time contract work in Sydney CBD, so if you are local, hit me up for a coffee.

  • I’m working with a lot of Power BI reports

  • There’s a lot of Power Automate doing the heavy lifting as well.

  • We are also talking about adding some Power Apps visuals to allow executive comments to be collected during a report presentation.

Community

Several of the meetups, conferences and events that I used to participate in are becoming active again. I hope to see more of the community not just virtually, but physically as well. I hope to be able to grab a coffee with you soon.

Power Studio Update April 2020

I wanted to share our most recent newsletter for Power Studio (previous Flow Studio) and Power Clarity.

It was supposed to be monthly, but everything’s gone crazy, so now it is irregular.

Power Studio Update April 2020

Irregular Newsletters

We hope everyone's staying safe, be kind and taking care of each other, this is an unprecedented time in our generation, and it'll take love and perseverance to get through this.

In Flow Studio Solutions (the company behind Power Studio and Power Clarity) - we've taken on a mix of side consulting in addition to the online products.  While the progress may seem a bit slower, it ensures we have the runway to keep continuing for the future to come.

Since our newsletters has unfortunately become irregular, this is a pretty long email, we have several months' catch up in one big read.

  • Too Many Emails?

  • YouTube channel on extreme Flow techniques

  • Inspirations from Power Platform product updates

  • Flow Studio becomes Power Studio

  • Power Clarity progress

  • We are further apart, but we are also closer than ever before


Too Many Emails?

Many of us are finding unique challenges working from home.  Emails and chat messages are replacing previous physical conversations.  Some of us are finding our inbox overflowing.

If you are feeling overwhelmed with emails, and if our particular email doesn't spark joy.  If you are not getting value from our email newsletters.  If the email is sent to your service account but you'd like to read it on your personal account instead.  If you've changed roles and no longer work with the Power Platform.  If any of these sounds like you...

It is our sincere hope that our newsletters will bring you joy.  And if we aren't doing that, please, feel free to let us know and unsubscribe (link at the bottom).  Take care of yourselves first - you can always find us and re-subscribe later, if you like.

Unsubscribe (this link doesn’t work here on my blog)

YouTube channel on Flow mastery techniques

Over the last few months we've published several advanced flow techniques on our ever growing YouTube channel.

Learn techniques with Select

Many of these techniques combines advanced concepts such as Select, Filter Array and advanced expressions

Inspirations from Power Platform product updates

There are several major updates to the Power Platform in the 2019 Release 2 and the upcoming 2020 Release 1.  Some of these features have already been released in preview or made it to general availability.

We wanted to point to a few big items, but also share some inspirations about the type of applications we can now build with these updates - which were difficult to build in 2019

  • Power Apps - instrumentation

  • Power Apps - Microsoft Teams app integration

  • Power Apps - external users

  • Flow - Adaptive Card improvements

  • Flow - Assign approvals to O365 Group (roadmap)

Inspiration 1

Power Apps instrumentation for monitoring and governance.  When we add a simple instrumentation key to application insights - we can now easy track users as they use business critical applications.  This provides a far easier way for makers to build usage dashboards, far more accessible than previous methods of reading Office 365 Audit Logs (which maker may not have access to).  We also have far better detail that we can add to our instrumentation logging messages.

Inspiration 2

Power Apps external users support now allows any external users to use Power Apps.  They would need their own license, or be assigned one through Azure AD.  An external invitation link can be generated via Power Automate, allowing any external users to request and be granted external access with the flow talking directly to MS Graph via Azure AD guest invite, as well as ensuring correct permissions are assigned to the datasource - CDS or SharePoint.  This is one of the most perfect scenarios for allowing users from a different tenant to instantly access existing Power Apps applications without switching logins.  The end user experience is seamless with simply a browser link.

Inspiration 3

Adaptive Card updates to Flow - particularly "Send Adaptive card to channel and wait for response" now allows the Microsoft Teams integrated FlowBot to send media rich adaptive cards - and wait for users to provide custom response - including complex form fields.
This superpower allows flow to contact a user on demand to request for additional details that may be missing in the original data source.  Either as form data completion, or within an advance approval scenario.  It can be run on demand mid-process to quickly request for additional details or decision making.  We predict this to be one of the hottest new flow patterns in 2020.  Best of all - this functionality can run great on the standard Office 365 license.

Flow Studio becomes Power Studio

There are several major updates since our last newsletter for Flow Studio.

  • We added monitoring for Power Apps in the freemium tier, and now we can quickly see all our Power Apps as well as Flows.  The list of apps shows the latest commit message.

  • Since we added Power Apps - we decided to rename Flow Studio to Power Studio.  This turned out to be really fortunate, since Microsoft Flow was renamed in November to Power Automate.
    Both Flow Studio and Power Studio links will work.

  • We added a developer build to test new features, if you are keen to see what's baking, here's a link to the test server for all the wonderous and dangerous new experiments.

  • We added a toolbar to make some of the common actions more visible.  We've realized through testing that many users don't realize we have a contextual menu where a lot of the hidden gems are hiding, so this is a way for us to begin to surface these functions.

  • We've given Export to Excel a major update - this was previously in preview and didn't work well (many of the columns were blank).  So finally we've fixed export to Excel.

  • We've also deployed our latest update for generating a Mermaid markdown for flows.  This is a special markdown for flow chart documentation usable in JIRA and Azure DevOps.  This can be exported to SVG, PNG or Mermaid markdown.  This feature remains in preview - please give us feedback.

  • We had two UX regression bugs with Save button missing in Edit JSON and Migrate plans new button not working, thanks to so many of you reaching out we had this fixed quick.

Try Power Studio

Power Clarity Progress Update

We began our work on Power Clarity in earnest over December 2019, and has hit several development milestones.  Our goal is to have all our Power Studio customers being able to sign up and trial Power Clarity.

Power Clarity is our turnkey, automated monitoring and governance solution for the Power Platform.  We took what we learnt from Power Studio, and ramp it up to do continuous scan of the entire company.  All our Power Platform environments, Power Apps, flows, connections, makers etc, and from that collected metadata, we return reports, tools and automated policies to help you manage and maintain your Power Platform assets mapped to the best practices in the community.

We are really excited to show you Power Clarity soon.

Grain Clarity of your Power Platform

We are further apart, but we are also closer than ever before

We were hoping to meet so many of you in person, but the current crisis has made us all separated from each other.

But in a way, we are probably closer than ever before.  So many of our user groups are now virtual, which means John would love to present at your user group, or if you'd like a call just to chat and catch up.  Let us know.

Catch us presenting at



Power Studio will always be a freemium product. So there will always be a free tier with access to see your existing Apps and Flows.  We hope you will leave us a comment about a feature that you would like to see in Power Studio.



Power Platform Governance with Power Clarity

Clear the FOG - let there be Clarity

Clear the FOG - let there be Clarity

Some asked me recently how does my SaaS product Power Clarity work with Microsoft’s Center of Excellence kit.

We can look at this from two directions:

  • Turnkey Governance with Power Clarity (running without CoE)

  • Enhanced Governance with Power Clarity (running with CoE)

  • ALM with Power Clarity

Center of Excellence kit (CoE)

I’m a big fan of CoE built by Microsoft and the community. I love that Microsoft acknowledges there is a need for governance, and the community rises to build tools to help. CoE starter kit is a collection of resources that will be a template to create your own Center of Excellence kit.

Power Clarity is a turnkey solution - you grant your credentials, it starts scanning. You get dashboards, forms and reports and workflows. I want to stress that Power Clarity is an enhanced version of Flow Studio - something I’ve been building since 2018, so it was developed in parallel to CoE, there are similarities, which leads to how they can be used together.


Here’s a list of roadmap on our first year (2020).

Turnkey Governance with Power Clarity (running without CoE)

If you are a company using the power platform and has not developed or deployed CoE - then Power Clarity can be used as a turnkey starting point.

If you don’t know where to start, or how to build one, we will get you started quickly to help you uncover the platform.

If you don’t have a power governance solution, and need one in 15 minutes, we are your… service.

  • No install - we manage it and keep improving it.
    Power Clarity is a SaaS service so the constant improvements are baked into the subscription. (In my opinion, we aren’t very expensive either).

  • Add one or many concurrent scanning accounts

  • Use accounts that are not administrator accounts - Power Clarity can scan with or without admin permissions, or operating in mix mode between different environments. If you have environment admin - you can see everything. If you only has environment maker - you can still monitor assets that you own.

  • Power Clarity performs hourly scanning, because it’s an incremental scanner and very light on API access. We understand at high API throughput - both source and storage can get upset. Power Clarity incremental scanning of a tenant of 1000 (flows/apps) is typically less than 3 minutes.

  • Power Clarity does not require premium accounts

Enhanced Governance with Power Clarity

If you have CoE deployed and already has CDS entities - then Power Clarity can be used to greatly enhance that data collection exercise.

You no longer need to worry about ‘how the data is collected’, but can keep customizing your reporting and utilization of that data to drive your governance outcomes.
In fact, we give you more events, signals, and policy actions you can perform.
We want you to have clarity.

  • Writes to Azure Storage Table and CDS Entities (use Power Clarity to collect data instead of CoE’s admin sync flows)

    (Note: CDS write requires the scanning account to have Premium license for CDS access)

  • Deep API reads into Flows - runs, run actions, run errors and remediation

  • Recall run metadata beyond 30 days

  • When events happen - you can get an email report, or get a webhook call so you can handle it yourself. Power Clarity provides complete tenant flow error reporting without try/catch pattern. Since it’s inception, Power Clarity is a Flow monitoring service as well as a Power Platform governance service.

  • Advanced detection of cross tenant resources

  • Advanced detection of flows utilizing premium licenses

  • Advanced count of flows utilizing API rate limits

  • White and black list filtering of resources (domains, URLs) and connectors

  • Clash detection of flows and DLP policies

  • Clash detection of flows using deprecated actions

Application Lifecycle Management with Power Clarity

Because Power Clarity maintains offline granted access, it can perform advanced active actions to the Power Platform on your behalf, actions that don’t currently have an connector.

  • Flow Studio’s migrate feature (which lets us copy, switch connections and deploy flows), can be invoked from Clarity API call

  • Call Power Platform management cmdlets via Power Clarity API.

  • Continuous backup of flow definitions and Power Apps snapshots

  • Power Clarity provides an advanced GraphQL view of the entire data set available within its stores.

  • Read and reports on managed and unmanaged resources in Solutions

  • History of changes across the entity tracking

See it for yourself

Send me an email john.liu at flowstudio.app to get started.

True Governance of the Power Platform

track-2.jpg

It’s very early Sunday morning and I’ve just returned from an red-eye flight home from a week spent in Perth with Paul, Ashlee and Terrie Culmsee, meeting their many clients, participating in Perth App in a Day, and talking about PowerApps, Flow and Power Platform Governance.

It is testament to Paul’s nurturing of his clients that every company that I talk to on this trip have the same forward thinking mentality.

Many of the companies I had talked to online, or here in Sydney also shares these same traits. They want to implement proper governance of the power platform.

You might be on the same journey - I wish you the best, and I want to support you in this quest.

True Governance is about creating a partnership

The scenario is the same, over and over and over. Business wants agility, they want applications that traditional IT struggles to deliver.

IT already struggle with supporting existing applications created by Business - they worry this is yet another thing they need to support - these “citizen developed apps” will fall into their laps, not following best practices, not documented, and yet highly business critical.

Power Platform is an opportunity, to ride this wave and fix the partnership problem in your business.

True leadership, are the managers seizing this unique opportunity to (re)engage Business and IT

Because traditional IT has become the department of “No” - modern business units and IT doesn’t really want to talk. And in the last few years, many businesses rode the Microsoft Power Platform submarine to get applications developed under the radar to reach critical mass first. Always easier to ask for forgiveness than blessing.

In this paragraph, I want to speak to you - the business. You must understand, there is an virtual ceiling you are about to hit. Let me explain.

See - your empowered citizen developers are learning as they go, their first apps may not be that fantastic, while they solve critical business problems - there may be bugs and we see there will always be more incremental improvements needed.

As the number of Power applications you create increases, your limited number of citizen developer will reach capacity. Without being able to properly support these apps, they can’t make more apps.

You still need more apps. But your citizen devs’ hands are now full. Worse, what happens if they take a role elsewhere? Who can support these apps?

The correct answer is, business should take a cost code to IT and ask IT to support these apps. IT should be paid to build internal capacity to understand, administer, and govern the Power Platform.

Ideally, someone that understands the Power Platform should lead this team and effort. They are the bridge that talks to Business and IT. The ultimate navigator that will unite the business and IT.

Look across to any successful enterprises now scaling to hundreds and thousands of Power Apps and Flows. This pattern is the same. Over and over.

IT must realize that part of governance is this great opportunity - go talk to your business. Find the super maker that is helping with adoption, and able to put together business plans that will include a maintenance support fee to IT. Stop being “free support” (see my previous blog post) and start being part of value generation in your business.

An emerging trend is that the internal super Power Platform maker joins the IT side of the business to be that navigator. Governance and adoption tools (I have a list near the end) support the quest of this navigator. Business pays IT to support and maintain more Power Apps and Flows.

Do you think this is not possible? This is a fairy tale? I saw these relationships, these bridges forming everywhere. Is this not your experience? Have a look around.

If you are an IT manager, rather than look at the Power Platform with fear, close your eyes, and reopen them and see it as the biggest opportunity you have ever had in the last decade.

A low code platform the Business wants, with tools and reports for IT to properly function and support this platform. Don’t squander this and drive your business away to some real Shadow IT platform and now you can’t even monitor that.

Governance tools are available - but true governance is People willing to talk

Business and IT not talking to each other is a problem. Here, is an opportunity to solve that. Take your off-shored IT back in-house. Be part of value generation.

If you want partnerships, I will help. There are many in the community that want to help you. Many Power platform champions are literally living this reality and working in this role. Borrow their job template and make it yours, initate the conversation - take it to your manager in business or in IT and say, hey, let’s do this.

I wanted to list a series of tools available. Some has (custom) tag and would need self assembly.

Build tools, build bridges

Disclaimer - I build Power Studio and Power Clarity. The point is, there are tools to provide governance on this platform. This is FAR better than choosing a different tool that IT has no means of providing any meaningful governance.

It would be somewhat easy for me to run purely on fear and say buy “my tools” - they will lock everything down and give you governance. Build a wall. You need a wall. Buy my wall.

If some snake oil salesman comes to you and say that, I want you to understand, real governance is not a wall. There is already enough of a chasm between business and IT.

Real governance is an opportunity to take this platform and transform your apps, yourself, your business and the relationships in your business. It’s hard, potentially very rewarding work.

What do you build your governance for?

Today, governance is a word thrown around without a care of what it actually means. We need to do governance - for what? No that’s all, we just need to do governance.

I wanted to share an article from Paul Culmsee. Those that sees governance as the goal, and not the means to an end, there’s something we all have to let go. Why do we implement governance? What outcome do we desire?

https://medium.com/@paulculmsee/how-to-doom-office365-governance-over-and-over-again-9feede8ef14a

If you have never thought about why you are implementing governance, and you don’t know what your end goal is, then take this quest:

We build governance, because our IT and Business must form a partnership. Our entire governance strategy is to make that partnership work.

The choices are yours, but I think you shouldn’t take forever to think about them

Do the right thing. Chances like this don’t come that often. Don’t look back and think, ah, I didn’t take that opportunity and initiate that conversation, and a decade later, I’m still only a cost center, still fighting shadow IT, and the board still wants to offshore my team.

That’d be unfortunate.