Hi. And welcome everyone to the hundred
ninth episode of Si rocks.
Today, we had Scott Sew from Microsoft to
talk with us about Microsoft Fabric
and what that is in the context of
power platform,
So that's me, Marcus Samuel and Molly Martin.
Yay. Hello.
How are you doing today? Yeah. I'm just...
Yeah Yeah. We're so sitting here. I can
hear out already.
How are you doing today what it. Good.
Getting ready for vacation and every everything. Like,
Norway is completely closed in July. We don't
work July. Alright. Which is really good.
Then you know when vacation is at least.
Yeah yeah. So. What's your marketing minute today,
Merlin?
So
customer tech team, they they have changed
the release
cascade or whatever it is, so they... The...
The things come to marketing once to month,
and a lot of things have been pushed
lately because they're working on some big stuff.
But also some new things have suddenly
appeared.
So this is 1 of the new things
that appeared in
mid to, like,
June in marketing, and that is
control how fast customers can enter a journey.
So that is something called a rate limit
where
you can wait and say that, oh, I
have this group of thousand people, 10000 people.
But I only want to let through let's
say, 10 or a hundred every day in
this journey, and that way,
customer service on the other end isn't drowning
in people who has gone through this journey,
and it just makes it a smoother ride
for for everyone. So that is
something that's coming in public preview in July,
so that should be hopefully right around the
corner when this episode airs.
And it looks to be a good good
surprised. That was all of sudden there in
the release notes. Let's good.
Nice.
So you're listening, Lucas us up on Facebook
and Linkedin, so we're here rocks dot com
and Your favorite project has player as well
and let us introduce. Scott Sew is passionate
about helping users gain insight and value
from the date birth data with the incredible
Microsoft fabric suit date of data tools.
Sweet suits. Yeah. Depending where
In his role as principal program manager of
Microsoft, he leveraged he experience in fabric, Power
bi and Dynamics 3 65 to deliver solution
that enables state driven decision making
and digital
transformation for customers across various industries and domain.
Welcome back Scott Souls.
Thank you very much. Thanks for the invitation.
It's a great to talk to you again.
It's you guys have been on a long
run here, and just... It's so cool to
see how much you're sharing with the the
community and how you're pouring the information about
that so much is going on we were
talking about earlier. It's... There's no way to
consume at all, But you guys help dis
instill that and really make it accessible for
the community and thank you for doing.
Think you're as well. I mean, traveling
around
everywhere and
delivering the fabric message.
It's been a journey. We've had some...
We're coming into a time where we're really
trying to get the message out.
We've got a mature
feature that we're available as well as the
community really
embracing it right now. So I was... Did
a
community conference in Denver,
and I was in Norway, and then I
was also in the Uk and then Belgium
at events,
and I've got some coming up in the
fall, Vegas and some others. So excited about
it as well as the the
the the
Nordic summit in
September. Yes. That's gonna be good ones. Yeah.
Looking forward to it. Yeah.
Good. What's your guilt pleasure, Scott? Guilty pleasure.
I don't know that it's that guilty, but
it's lately
my wife and I've been cooking it. We've
been, like, trying to get new recipes for
dinner. Just just and and cooking something unusual
for dinner. We chicken take you the other
eye some, you know,
It's been fun, but we wanna up sit,
fixing it up and then
talking the whole time, so it's been that's
been a pretty relaxed pretty chill, but it's
been a lot of fun. Nice. Yeah. I
could see her smiling on your face when
you talked about it it so you definitely
enjoy it That's good
Yeah. It's it's it's low key, but it's
a it's a nice
a nice... At the end of the day,
sometimes, it's nice to have something that you
get started, and you have a completion, and
it's a completed project entire, you know, the
dinner is a complete project.
Yeah
And there's no there's no change orders halfway
through your anything.
It's been good.
Hopefully not. Hopefully not yeah.
How did you get into Microsoft?
Well, I joined
Microsoft... It's our in terms of Microsoft joining
Microsoft proper or into the space?
Yes.
Okay.
But so
what's rewind
back in the old days.
I started working on Well, I was working
working with a a friend of mine who
had a Crm...
It was working with Crm from another company,
and I was helping them do installations, and
then they picked up Microsoft Crm 1 dot
o. And I joined them
and helped amp help them implement Crm 1
dot o crm 1 dot 2.
Back in there that would have been
right at 21
years ago.
And so we we installed it. We would
go into the server closets and set up
sequel and last spent a lot of time.
You know, installing an exchange after and, you
know, trying to get the,
the networking
correct and get the sql working correctly and
Ie and all the pieces and then
down to the laptop setting up the laptop
version of it.
In in the... Installing it into outlook and
the offline client, holy smoke.
So yeah. It was... It was a lot
of You spend a lot of time.
Yeah. There's some... There's some flashbacks there, but
there's some you spent a lot of time
configuring all the plumbing
before you even really had a chance to
configure it to what the customer needed. So
a lot of our effort was around that
sort of the the the Mundane
getting the software installed and running. So that
was the first bunch years
of working with Crm, you know, Crm 1
to 2 and 3 and etcetera as it
gradually moved online.
About 6 years ago,
but about actually about 8 years ago. I
started demoing the
a friend of mine had encouraged me to
look at Power bi or what was power
pivoted at that point.
And I... There was a conference
somewhere I forgot where it was. But I
thought
I'll throw a demo up, and I'll just
do a demo of Power Bi with with
Crm.
And that's where I built that first version
of my titanic that where built out Power
bi showing off the passengers
crew of the titanic, which I'd put in
into into dynamics
or the Crm as
contacts and,
categories, etcetera. So it's a lot of fun
to do that but I kept finding that
more and more, I got excited about the
combination of Power bi and and Crm.
So blue later than that had joined Microsoft
and
kinda took off on that on that tangent.
That path. So was good. I started... I
started with Microsoft on the Gb
for dynamic sales and and customer service. So
that was my focus area. And then
2 years in, I do switched team that
I joined
team.
Gb is global black belt. Global black belt.
Sorry. Yeah. Thank you Global black belt,
which my nephew was really imp my net,
my Mean, your old Nephew, he was really
impressed that I was a black belt. Was
like, yeah. Not 1 of the...
Not 1 of the adventurous type white belts,
but just a what our tech black But,
you know, and then... But I joined
moved over to the Power bi
team. But my focus area it even on
Power bi is focused back on to dynamics.
And so even though I'm on the Power
Bi and now fabric team, my entire
area focus is is empowering the dynamics commute
with it. Awesome. And what's more now?
Now you're a
Well, it... It's Microsoft. So 3 letter acronyms
P.
Who's what program answer? Yes. Yeah. So what
it what what what does that the person
do? What's your needs for.
So first, so there are think about their
product managers.
And then there be program manager. So a
product manager makes more sense as to you're
focused on a product itself,
so some feature or software, something along that
line. The product,
you're focused on. Program managers sit alongside them,
but are focused on, we'll say efforts. And
I don't know how to not use the
word program, but think of program not in
a sense of software,
but in the in the terms of a
plan or an effort or some sort of
work that helps
move the message out. So part of my
responsibility
is
is around all the programs we do to
try to help empower users to take advantage
of
the dynamic makes sense and
and fabric
connection. So you'll think about program manager, my,
our team is the cat
customer advisory team where we look at customers
and help them advise us on what they
need.
And we're that's that's the program we run
is that advisory program
as opposed to product where you're actually building
a piece of actually responsible for code itself.
If that helps clarify the sorta of dis
dis.
Yeah. But yeah. Absolutely the it's ultimately whatever
whatever my lead says, hey. I need you
to work on this. Okay? What that's what
program manager still do now.
Always... I mean, it's it's it's good because
there so many, like, in the markers of
the world, there are so many different.
Job titles and job roles and acronyms
from here to eternity, and it's it's kind
of hard being on the outside. Okay. So
you're this person that. Okay. I I understand
the words in your title, but I have
no idea what to do.
Yeah, so from a standpoint of what I
actually find what I do now. Is,
it, like I said, it's it's kinda focused
on that empowering
the community
to take advantage of it. That's gonna be
a combination of
of education, putting out videos and materials and
say, here's what we can do.
Working with our largest
customers that do use the products together and
trying to say, find out what are the
blockers that they hit.
What what are the challenges that make you
know, inhibit adoption on the product,
and then trying to feed that back into
our our pro our product teams, Know, a
lot of times, 1 customer might have 1
off, oh, they have this 1 weird strange
thing that they've gotta do. Okay. That's 1
thing. But you start seeing...
Eighth, you start also seeing blockers that multiple
customers have and start trying to aggregate that
and say,
okay. These 5 customers have said they're blocked
based on this particular use case. Is there
something we can do that would actually unblock
all 5.
As opposed to just, like, 1 off 1,
you know, throwing darts at that features. So
a lot of that's is what I focus
on. Some of it's gonna be edu vacation,
you know, obviously, speaking at conferences.
The video, the...
And then just being... Honestly, just part of
it's just being an advocate for
What do we need to do to unblock
and and make more and more customers take...
Be able to take advantage of fabric
with their dynamics data?
1 of the biggest... I think 1 of
the biggest blockers is... I don't know if
how to necessarily say it, but it's almost
like imagination. It's almost like the confidence to
say, hey, there is a another step out
beyond just configuring Crm or configuring date birth
there's another step out to say, how do
we take advantage of the data that's in
there and
making it a a clear and straightforward approach
to say, here's how you can step into
fat into a Power Bi and fabric to
start
pulling that data out and
understanding it in an interesting way. I know
from my own experience,
sometimes it takes me actually seeing how somebody
else has done it. And go, oh, I
get it now. And then I can take
off and run and do my own thing.
It's not... Not that I have to copy
them. It's just like, I kinda get a
conceptual
framework that I can understand your work in.
So that's really what I'm trying to do
is provide that, putting some, you know, putting
some assets out there that people can look
at that report that I some reports that
I built and say, I like that. I
don't like that. I was just gonna steal
this. I'm gonna ignore that great. Yep. So
if you heard Power Bi before, but never
heard Microsoft fabric, what would you say that
Microsoft fabric is
Yeah. So so let's... So rewind it just
a little bit to... When it was just
fab... Power bi. So Power bi came out.
It was both a desktop
application and a service.
And really to fully take advantage of it.
You're fixing your report up on the desktop
and then pushing it into a service. So
that's how most of our customers take advantage
of it. And it was just a service
in the sense that you, you know, you
signed up and you published it and, you
know, depending on how much
how you wanted to use it If you
provide a credit card and do whatever and
you roll with it. You didn't have to
install servers, you didn't have to install plumbing
or anything like that. And so that was
Power Bi. But Power bi was really focused
on kind of this basic tooling of
the Power Bi reports and the the tools
that took to get data into it. But
there's a lot more that goes into data
than just the report engine. There's, like, the...
How do you get data
at scale into data warehousing, data lakes and
Etl tools like,
data factory getting those in. And all of
those were
When you stepped out a Power bi, you
had to go over to Azure and spin
up individual services,
register them and then connect the dots to
get them all to work together. And the
idea was, let's take this at the simplicity
of Power bi, and let's bring those tools
from Azure
into the service
so that again, it's... You
started up, and
you don't really focus on the plumbing of
pulling things together. Are the installation or the
the under grid below that? You really just
focus on the use case? What is it
that the customer's trying to do How do
I solve this and and be able to
build it. So fabric really is an extension
of Power bi to include more than just
analytics or porting. Includes the data warehousing, real
time intelligence and, you know, whole whole list
of things in addition.
To make it much more much more accessible
and easy to use.
You know, I, earlier a minute ago, we
was talking about the starting off in dynamics.
And going into server closets and setting up
and spending up a bunch of software
just to get to where you could start
adding value to the customer.
That's kind of the way it was with
business intelligence.
You know, Power Bi and and, so our
Crm and the Power platform became this real
service that you basically turn it on, and
then you configure it to make it sure
it's what the customer needs.
But then when you moved over to business
intelligence,
there was a whole... You know, there's a
whole galaxy of things you had to configure
before you could actually tune it to what
the customer want needed for their use case.
That's where fabric is kind of following that
same model of the power platform.
And so now all these tool, all the
integration or the infrastructure
sort of falls down below the surface and
Microsoft just takes care of it. And you
just focused on what kind of report do
I wanna build?
What kind of,
where do I wanna pull data from and
you build it. It's... It really simplifies the
process
tremendous... In a tremendous way. So That kinda
answer your question is to, like, fabric fabric
is like the power platform of business intelligence.
Please don't tell anybody on my team that
I said that. But
But what It really is in that pattern
of, like, let's turn all this into a
service
to make it easy for customers to take
advantage of. That's really the same idea that's
happened with all these business intelligence tools.
They've come together as a service called fabric.
Of which Power bi is a cornerstone of
that service.
And now it's it's available for customers take
advantage of it. Awesome.
So
Lastly, Y. We talked a little bit about
Asha synapse
and how we could get data from
data
into that workspace and then
towards
power bi and and using it that way.
So that's basically
included now in the fabric.
Yeah. So we have can I have 2
different approaches now?
The version that we talked about last time,
where where we brought the data out of
data dynamics
or out of data version and put it
into Azure storage and put some some apps
in front of it. That was kind of
this infrastructure...
Platform is in as a service where you
basically still had to wire a bunch of
stuff together. And it was... I I loved
it for the fact that it allows you
to get massive amounts of data.
But I was also challenged by the fact
that you know, especially in the Smb space
where we have a lot of customers who...
Wanna take advantage of it, but they just
don't have the resources to allocate to to
spinning up that kind of tooling.
That's still in place. It's still available, and
it's still is supported and it will continue
to be a supported approach, but where
that now has...
Taken bullet... Now we have this... That... We
have the version where we spin it the
data out to,
Azure and we put synapse apps in front
of it to to read it. We've also
built a separate version, I say separate. It's
kind of a different path. It's the same
engine behind the scenes. That creates a Delta
lake inside of date verse or inside the
date birth security zone and makes shortcuts available
fabric.
In both the synapse version and the version
that's built into date verse. At the end
of the day, they both create,
what we call a Delta lake, which is
just a way of storing data in a
in a file that's easy to easy to
consume.
Both them create that and both of them
do the same thing in terms of making
a shortcut to fabric. And III wanna highlight
the fact that it's a shortcut
and not a copy of the data,
the data sits either inside of the date
of birth security zone or inside of Azure,
and fabric just knows
once you told it, hey, there's data sitting
in these places for you,
you... It pretends like,
the... As if the data is already loaded
the fabric. Without having to
Etl or copy it over to Yeah. Firewall.
So it's it's the difference between query the
data and importing the data. That's correct. That's
exactly right. Just like you have a shortcut
to a document on your desktop, And that
document could be sitting in, onedrive.
Yeah.
It's just a shortcut.
The Yeah. It just is right there to
use. You don't worry about the fact that
it's not stored on your desktop.
You just know that you have a point
to it, and you go grab the data
when you need... So same kind of a
scenario there. So so it... It's
trying to make it easier for
for people like me, not developers,
you don't have to be so super technical
to understand and to use it and everything.
Absolutely. And and I I'll I'll say, I...
Sometimes, I I try to pretend like in
my developer, but I'm really not. I really
am not.
I come from like I said, I started
implementing Crm. I was a low code guy
before low code was a thing.
And my my code my coding that I
do now,
tops out at writing sql statements. I mean,
writing select statements, that... That's the extent of
my coding that I do. The rest of
it is just point, you know, click and
drag and drop and connecting the dots between
the 2.
Occasionally, I'll write a little bit of a
formula into a report just to, like, capture
year over year or month over month sort
of changes, but that's pretty minor what I
do. And, honestly, I've I actually just
a query that create check with
with bing or c copilot or whatever else,
whatever unnamed service I I happen to use.
And grab seeing example like, I want something
almost like that. Let me fix that and
I'll that'll will work. Yep. But, yeah, It's
it's really intended to kinda lower that lower
the barrier
of having to figure out how to configure
all this stuff and say, okay. Jump in
and just focus on what your customer needs
to see.
And we'll we'll help you work through the
rest of it pretty easily.
You still kinda have to take a data
mindset to it.
It it still takes a little bit... It's...
I, it's still a learning curve, but the
learning curve is really focused on
getting value... Getting right to value as fast
as possible. That's the that's the intent. So
we've seen a lot of connectors in power
Bi before that you can connect to date
and import data from there. So are the
connectors? Still there Still staying in fabric.
So inside of fabric or inside of Power
Bi,
which is part of fabric. But inside of
Power bi, you can still use and and
I still encourage the use
of the what we call the Td endpoint.
Where you can write a sequel statement inside
a Power bi, and it will send that
directly to to date of diverse.
And date of birth will take that sequel
statement. It actually converts it into x Fetch
xml, ask the data from Sequel
and then converts it back into a sequel
like tab
data format that's sent back to the report.
That's the Td that tab data stream.
That approach is still absolutely valuable and usable
for a lot of use cases.
Specifically when you need to have a report
that's filtered
to just the 1 individual's security context.
So think about if you have
a team of salespeople.
And those salespeople,
each 1 is allowed to see the work
that the the report... The... Sorry. The opportunities
they're working on, but they're not allowed to
see the person next to those
opportunity. Obviously, it's
A simple thing you can configure inside of
Crm.
If you use the Tedious endpoint with a
direct query,
it will and it will basically return the
data according to that person's
security profile inside of Crm.
And if I share a record with somebody,
it all of a sudden shows up in
that person's Tedious,
point. So very useful from that. Is also,
when I run that, it asked the data
immediately, what's what is happening right now. And
returns that information. So it's low latency in
that stamp. So it's it's, you know, that
sounds wonderful, which is great. It is it
is a wonderful
feature The downside of it is because it's
doing all that
scalability
into big datasets sets is not really there.
Scalability into when you get into
hundreds or hundreds of thousands or millions of
records
it's just... You're pulling it... You're pulling a
whole lot of data through a really tiny
straw.
You're trying to ingest a lot through a
really complicated
pipeline,
and that's where
the fabric side of think comes over it
fabric allows you to grab massive amounts of
data very quickly and pull it through.
It does not have the
advantage or burden, however you wanna describe it
of having to pull it through the user's
individual security context.
It is secured. It's secured as a whole,
not as an... On an individual user by
user perspective. But that's, you know, I I
had a a customer
couple of years ago where
they they built a report and they had
it filtered to each individual user
and the the managers and the Ceo saw
that report said, I wanna open that. And
when they opened it because they had access
to tons more data, the report just fell
over sideways.
And so what we did for that you...
That use case, we said, okay. For these
frontline workers that have really tightly scripted
data data boundaries. We'll set them up with
this, you know, version with Td.
But for users who already have permission to
all this data, we'll set them up with...
Our approach much much faster for them at
scale.
And so you kinda get the... You've start
working out. What is the... What's the use
case? And what what do we wanna do
with this data?
And and that's kind of the the approach.
But, yeah, The the connector still there.
And
it continues on. It will... And it and
it should continue on. It's a it's a
strong
feature for specific use cases.
Absolutely. And I I do know that there
are some places
where you have to use fabric if you
wanna get ahold of the data. So I
know that customer inside journeys that the
1 of the ways of getting the information
there. I don't know if the... That is
out of preview or still in preview. I'm
not sure. But There. Believe it. I believe
it's still preview for those Ci... The Ci
side of things. The nice thing is this
is this approach fabric approach
is
capable of pulling in all the data front...
And it's in date birth. Plus it's also
set up in parallel to work with
of
F and o, the finance and operation tool.
So anything in that which those tables my
goodness. Yeah, they can be huge.
Yeah. And
and for those... The customers that need that
kind of data, they're way off the scale
in terms of in comparison in terms of
volume of data that they pull in. Even
for a even for a mild user of
it,
and it's it's a pretty large
footprint. So it's really it's really valuable to
them right off right from the beginning.
So those are those are placed. The...
But, yeah, It's it's
it it it continues to grow and continues
to
be surprising how how valuable the tool is
for people. So what What's the newest and
coolest thing you're working on right now. Well,
I mean, that is public knowledge and you
can talk about
sure they're some release notes right from reorder
and a lot of cool new stuff going.
Yeah. So I think the thing that I'm
excited about right now is the ability
to
complete the loop. I... I've been excited about
the process of getting data from dynamics,
on data of birth into
fabric for
reporting purposes.
But there's now there's additional loop of being
able to take the data from
fabric, which could be... Data being pulled in
from
completely different sources,
non non dynamic sources. Fabric can have pointers
to data that's in even competitive products to
Microsoft.
Have pointers to that data, and you can
start consolidating it there or building views of
that data and provide that back to
dynamics as a virtual table,
1 way, also
with the real time intelligence
pieces.
And there are a lot of the tools
where we've been listening to Iot devices or
systems downstream,
doesn't have to be Iot It can be
other systems that just create alerts and say,
by the way, so and so
pipeline has exceeded
exceeded their total amount or somebody's doing more
than 90 days past their due their
their expected payment window. And those kind of
alerts can start happening
and within the real time intelligence and built
into fiber
we can then take those actions and feed
it back either as a... The simplest ways
are, like, sending up Teams message or an
email. The cool way though is
it actually is linked directly to power automate.
And so power automate can then be the
the trigger that actually takes advantage of that
thing.
These real time intelligence have these really neat,
triggering mechanisms like, you know, paramount... I mean,
lot tools are easy to say, okay. If
it goes over a million dollars
fire.
Okay? And so it goes over a million
dollars, and it goes over a million dollars
or stays over a million dollars How how
often do you fire it?
What about... But the the the real time
intelligence has a neat approach to say, well,
maybe it if it bounces above a hundred
degrees, but it's only there for 5 minutes,
and then it comes back to normal. Don't
worry about it. But if it goes above
a hundred degrees,
and it stays there for more than an
hour, then alert somebody or
If it goes above a hundred degrees and
comes back down, but it goes back up
and it comes back down, it goes back
up again. If it goes back above that,
more than we'll say 3 times in a,
in a 15 minute window, then alert somebody.
But if it's just once or twice here
or there,
it's
it's fine. So it's kinda there's really
more elaborate
triggers that it can listen for and say,
we're not gonna just, like, blow up every
time anything happens. We know that... Yeah. It's...
It... Maybe it happens occasionally, but only if
it starts to become a problem, that's when
we wanna address it.
That was my my challenge with some of
our some of the power automate that I
built originally early on was that they fired
way too often. Yeah. And it became, you
know, it's like the the the thing you
you probably experienced this. You know, everybody wants
email
notifications
until they start getting them. Yeah.
Yeah. And at that point, they go, turn
to spam off. I don't wanna see this.
But they really... What they really want is
to be notified when something
starts to look... Starts to go
way out of compliance.
Get that. So that's kind of the areas
that I'm excited about. Is that feature pulling
the data back in.
But I'm also just excited about seeing more
and more people
take advantage of the data that they have.
You know, there's so much value
sitting on the table
in a lot of these date of birth
implementations. There's so much value that businesses can
take advantage of if they have somebody who's
willing to step in and go, let's let's
kinda look at this data. Let's look at
what's happening, see if we can find some
patterns here that help us understand the business
better.
So... Yeah, I'm excited about that too. Yeah.
He's still too. I kinda get excited about
a lot of things, But
actually, data du
decisions and everything.
Nice. Yeah. It's cool. And making it actionable.
That's cool as well so yeah. But power
bi is power of power platform,
and the Power bi is also
part of Microsoft fabric, but that's not part
of power platform. Yeah. So so it's it's
kind of...
We'll say it still has the power in
the name.
It's... Yeah. It's a
We'll, we'll call them cousins to the power
platform.
It's looped under this larger data
conversation that's there.
The
and, of course, as long as I'm in
the in the mix,
Power bi and power platform are gonna be
are gonna be in the conversation. Because there's
so much value there. But yeah. I mean,
I I think it's just the difference in
which team is responsible for creating and managing
it. Okay. So how do I buy fabric
them? It's credit card. You basically can go
in and sign up and spin up a
environment? You don't even have a credit credit
card to set... Set it up and run
it. You basically, you go on log on,
you can get a 90 day trial
really easily not to spin that up and
run it. But it's not part of the
Power bi
pro or premium
subscription. It's a different canon subscription. Right. So
Power bi Pro, Power bi premium per user,
Those are really individual user by user kinda
licensing.
Yeah. Fabric becomes more of an organizational license.
And saying we're gonna create a capacity, and
that capacity sits on this on the on
the service.
And you spin up a capacity and
decide how much of it you wanna use.
You think back to... If you were comfortable
or familiar with Power bi premium
Power bi premium is it was a capacity
for just Power Bi, but now really with
that same capacity,
you get all the fabric features too. So...
And it depends on what you use it
for and how much you need it. You
know, the different they capacities are really small
that would be fine for if you just
need to run a report every so often.
All the way up to very, very large
ones with massive amounts of memory and compute
behind them that for really, really intense workloads
that you know,
the the largest organizations on the planet. Right,
close. There's something for Edward 1. Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah. That's good times.
Awesome. So so what are kind of the
examples that you've seen with
power platform, Power bi and
date
lately then. Yeah. I think most of the
examples that I'm seeing are around...
Look, we think about the power platform is
fantastic for,
transactional
type usage.
I'll call transactional data. I'm... Now, obviously, you
know me, I'm a a huge advocate for
how valuable the power platform is. But think
of it in terms of it's really... Its
focus area
is completing
transactions and saying, here's a pros here's something
that happened
or a, sales opportunity or a service case
or a work order or something like that,
that needs to be somebody needs to do
something to a complete it, and then it
goes into this history of what's happened. Yeah.
So it's kind of that
transactional focus
of things. But as those transactions happen,
they create this history of
records that of past transactions. And that history
is now a valuable
asset that should be taken advantage of.
That history can be mined for
what are we seeing in trends? What do
we see going forward? How do we... How
does this change month over month?
And those... You know, when you're dealing with
you know, 10 or 15 or 20000 records.
You can just don't let... You can just
export it excel and look at it. That's
fine.
When you're starting to deal with hundreds of
thousands of records and you're dealing with
related tables between them and you're dealing with
different kinds of conditions
you know, excel not really the tool for
that. Excel, I mean, you really start looking
and saying, I wanna... I also wanna see
it not just in tables. I wanna see
Show me some pictures. Show me some visuals
on what's going on. And so a lot
of what I'm seeing in terms of value
is really where people are looking at what's
happened
and saying, let me trend this out and
say, can I do predictive against this? Can
I use things like the key influencer to
run regression analysis against it? Without having to
write any math or code. Run that, we
show you what my allocations look like, had
a customer the other day that would just
a simple simple simple example was they wanted
to see month over month change to the
data.
Inside the data verse, we can show a
you know, pattern, like, how many how many
events happened
each month. But they wanted to, like, a
month over month compare they wanted to see
what month did they see big spikes are
low or drop offs? And they then they
wanted like how did the pipeline look this
month last year?
Now. Exactly. And look at ways in which
they can say,
can I identify what led to
some of these changes? Or can I at?
Can I allocate some of that change to
different parts of the organization? As well as
how do I... You know, for instance, you
know, 1 of the things that's interesting is,
a lot of times, those of us who
were... Have worked in in the power platform
directly.
We get really comfortable with just looking at
the, you know, views and, you know, change
it up a view and filtering it that
way, and we can see a lot of
things because we just kinda get this kinda
like the matrix. You're looking at this screen
of data and you just are absorbing it
and interpreting it because we're so close to
it and we under and we understand what's
going on. But then when you wanna turn
around and communicate that to your leadership, or
communicate to that to the stakeholders,
you really wanna be able to show it
into a
a much richer format, like like a Power
bi type. Or You wanna be able to
show the Power bi data
in
combination with data from outside of date birth.
For instance in my in my own organization
within Microsoft, We have it... We use a
power app. And when they ask us to
build a power app to track, you know,
this this thing we're tracking.
I was obviously gonna sign up. I was
like, yeah, I'll do this. And I spent
all this time configuring it, and making it
just real, you know, lining up the things
and just making a power app that just
really, you know, hide the fields and just
really focus on making it really easy to
use because I was gonna show all the
skills that I'd learned over the years. Here's
how we can do this.
And I did that, and the... There was
a collective yawn
users.
I was like,
okay. And and mostly used because when they
saw it, all they saw was it was
asking them to do work. Yeah. It was
not something that they saw immediately
that it would help them in their conversations
with their customers. So moving forward a month
later, we started incorporating
additional Power bi reports.
Into this power app, where if I am
gonna sit down and talk with
ac...
Ac
Corporation
and I go to the Ac Corporation account
record in dynamics.
I see the things that are stored in
dynamics.
Good. But I also see a a Power
bi report embedded on that form that pulls
data from outside of dynamics.
It pulls data from other systems, multiple systems
together
to give me the bigger picture of what's
going on. So I have this immediate context.
So if I'm gonna call up and have
a conversation with
with somebody from Ac
Corporation
I see that. I have the context of
what's gonna happen. And and while I'm there,
I can just enter the notes from what
the conversation is.
And it becomes as really valuable tool. And
so now it really changed the whole dynamic
from within my team to say,
Instead of this, as James Phillips call it
a system of oppression.
We're just, like, all you had... All it
was asking for is for you to enter
data. And it really changed to a system
of empowerment where now this is a tool
that gives me a the context of the
data that I need
in the easiest format.
And so Power bi plus power platform or
Power app became this incredible tool that we
got other people in the organization knocking on
our door. We're having to, like, limit who
we bring in because we have to trade
them it and get them, acclimated. But it
but it changed the dynamic of what's what's
going on. Nice so it's pretty exciting stuff.
Yeah. Cool. Well, you you mentioned training. So
who are the people
in
in in the companies that should
be learning fabric or who will be the
the people who will learn it the fastest
or easiest.
Mh.
Well, anyone who's who has has responsibility for
the data itself and and understanding what's going
on in it? That's a that's a natural
part. The other natural part is there are
people who just have an affinity for data.
There are people who just go Yeah. Kinda
interested in how that trend works or what's
the average of that or? What's... How do
we... What if we what if we grouped
things by this? There are people who have
that affinity for it that can really accelerate
their own internal careers
using it.
I... And I I'll put myself on the
lot as a first example. Somebody who came
from a pure Power Bi. I mean, give
me a pure power platform perspective,
but my experience and my excitement was around
I get excited early on about writing
import jobs and getting data into dynamics,
through imports, and for us and could... Some
a little bit about integration work there. I
got excited about the data going in and
out of the application. More so than I
was excited about laying out the forms on
the front end. Right? So I was excited
about that, and then I kept finding that,
oh, look, I can start... I can as
as excited I was about what was going
on inside of the power inside the application,
I could really get other people excited about
it as well by showing them the some
charts and graphs,
starting off with a really simple charts and
graphs that our end dynamics,
and then moving further into the Power bi
side, So anyone with an affinity of that
that wants to kinda move into,
an even higher value kind of a role
they'd be a a perfect candidate for it.
You don't have to start with some deep
knowledge of of all kinds of data science
or anything like that. Again, like I mentioned
earlier, my coding level is at kinda peaks
out at sql statements.
You know, And if you're comfortable to seat
writing us you know, select statement off of
this and,
select and filtering out what you don't need
and picking out the records you need. Then
you got all the skills you need to
be
to jump in with it. So that's kind
the that's kind of the area that I
I love and on excitement. Awesome. So
everyone who loves data, fabric is for you.
Absolutely. Yeah. And you're just if you're just
curious about data,
you know, we Well, that times we...
When we're on the sales perspective, and when
we're selling dynamics,
to customers.
At least back from my my dynamic sales
day, my Gb days.
I knew that I could show the... How
did the power platform works.
To the people who would be actually using
it, who would be hands on every day,
and I could show how easy it made
those transactions.
But at the end of the day, there
were somebody sitting in the corner of the
room that was gonna sign the contract for
us. And could be honest, that person was
never gonna go into dynamic. And create records.
Yeah. And it was when I started saying,
okay. Let's... I could show the people who
are gonna be using it how valuable it
is, then let's also take a look at
the data that's being accumulated
and processed. And let me show you
what that what that what how that helps
you see what's going on inside your business
in a visual way.
And see it in ways it that aren't
obvious just looking at a bunch of numbers
on a screen.
How does that solve your problem as well?
That's when we, you know, just kept accelerating
the the the people would realize, that this
is a does a true value for. So
across this these 2 tools. 1. Yeah. Again,
I get excited about it I get wound
up. Yeah.
Like with titanic.
Yeah, I get to go to the Titanic
museum
Like, when I was in the Northern Island
went to Belfast, and there's a titanic museum.
We gotta walk through it and
I was really excited about that. Yeah. I
mean, you've done so many talks with
titanic data as the demo. Right? It was
was a lot of fun. That was just
a It was a... It was 1 of
those that I built 1 weekend. I was
sitting at home and
I was trying to think of how am
I gonna present these 2 tools together. It
was for a focus, a dynamics focused conference.
Years going 8, 09:10 years ago. Got excited
about it. I thought, well, I try to
think of this and And I had seen
somebody do a machine learning demo on the
the titanic,
the passenger list of the and they did
a machine learning demo on it. I thought,
what? Maybe that that data is available and
we try. And so I'd put it into
dynamics and created a Crm
application with the passengers and crew and created
you know, attributes like, what, you know, their
first class passenger, a crew, etcetera. And then
ingest all the data the Power bi,
And
the whole thing was kind of a... It
was a little bit of a silly. I
mean, it's a little silly of fun. You
know, kind of fun. But the fun part
about it was
customers would
set aside trying to keep track of all
the product names I would admit. They kept...
They could... We could all... We could ignore
the names of the products and just talk
about the the solution and talk about the
information. And
it helped lower the... We could just focus
on what we have. And then we... Once
we got through the process,
And I would build a, mobile app for
it so you could check in and see
whether you...
And if you were a high risk passenger,
machine learning would flag you, and they would
give you additional instructions, all this kind of
fun stuff that we would do.
And at the end of it, we could
just circle back and say, you know, here's
how we did all this, and here's the
tools we use. And these are the same
tools we're talking about using for your business.
It's just a different use case.
And it was fun to do. But now
I realized that last time I demoed it.
I demo to a group of college students
And I realized that the movie came out
before these college students were born.
Really.
Oh, anyway. It a good time.
If Of the episode. Yeah. You're all we're
old.
We're old. Yeah.
We're?
So where do I go if I wanna
learn more about
Microsoft fabric?
So there's a there's a tremendous amount of
learning material learn dot Microsoft dot com. Standard
bees, places that that location would be the
place. If you wanna know more about
how fabric and dynamics work together.
I've got a few pages in learn, but
I've also got some Youtube videos that I
focused just on this particular topic. Really just
trying to break it into small nugget sizes
and say, here's how you configure it. Here's
how you can use this Or here's how
you can do this type of little trick
with it. And so you can go to
my Youtube. I'm not a Youtuber, but I
do a few things here and there just
to keep it. Honestly, because some of that
Microsoft documentation gets a little dull trying to
read it all. So I thought I would,
I would liven it up a little bit
and create some short quick videos.
That... Then if you wanna know more about
it, you can go read about it, but
at least get you it. Awesome. We'll, we'll
put everything
all the links in the show notes. So
Peter. And Okay. I've put some stuff on
on, Linkedin pretty fairly regularly.
And if you wanna connect with me in
Linkedin, I do have it set so you
need my email address, and my email address
is just Scott that su at Microsoft dot
com. Just put my email address in and
connect with me, and I'm happy to do
but I was getting a lot of spam
at first. So I thought, I'll put that
with that. It just doesn't... It's not not
that big a secret. You can figure out
my email address pretty easily.
Yeah.
But I'm happy... And if you have any
good customer cases or challenges as well, That
would be good to get you.
Love it.
Do you have any public speaking scheduled?
So I've got a be at the Power
platform Conference in Vegas?
And we're gonna talk about the
this data act activate, the real time intelligence
loop. Nice Bringing that in. So I'm gonna
have that,
in Vegas. And then
I think the the following week is
actually between...
Okay. It's gonna be crazy wait. I saw
Vegas, and then I fly out of Vegas,
and I get a I need to go
to stockholm
for the fabric conference,
and I'll speak at fabric conference for a
day or 2 and then fly over to
Oslo for the Nordic Summit.
And this is all in a period of
2 weeks. So it kinda all over the
place. But, yeah, That's those are my upcoming...
That's what I'm looking at right now. I've
also got 1 here in the states at
a, tech conference in,
Saint Louis, which will be a pretty wide
spectrum of people from a lot of different
technologies, but I'm gonna try to help you
know, get them excited about the power platform
and how to... How cool it is and
how they can really take advantage of the
data that's in it. Nice.
Do you have any recommendation on a future
guest on this podcast?
Oh, goodness. She caught me off guard.
Always love talking to Joel Lin, but, you
know, the... He's around.
There's a lot of folks that are on
the on the comp... On the
in the community that I I just get
somebody... There's This... I love this community.
I love this community because there's so many
really good and interesting fun people
that all have
something to share, and are all passionate about
sharing it. Yeah. But it was all about
Program and creating more Mvp p's for Yeah.
The longest time. So, yeah. He's I would
be he's still active in the in the
space.
Yes, sure. Gotta dial back the Mvp... The
Mvp side of the things.
But I'd tell you that I... I've had
a text chat with Joel,
and with Ben Walmart going for about 8
years, I think, or 10 years. We've had
this chat this chat going on. It's been
pretty hilarious.
My wife goes,
she'll hear something it'll ding, and I'll start
laughing. As goes from Joel and Ben. I
was said, yeah.
Yeah. It's a it's a there's a lot
of good folks in this community that really
have,
both have good information and knowledge, but also
a real heart to just be helpful to
other people. Excited about. Absolutely.
Yeah. Thank you for participation in Serum Brooks.
I enjoyed it. Thank you for the conversation.
I've enjoyed sharing with you, and and
it's a it's a fun space to be.
Yeah. So that's how the guests can reach
Scott su molly and how can they reach
us? Yes. They can go to Facebook and
search for serum Rocks or they could go
to Linkedin,
also serum rocks, follower page or you could
find us where you listen to me pot
casts.
Yeah. So thank you for listening and see
you next time on sam him rocks.