Power Platform

Dynamics 365 Marketing is a very powerful tool on its own, but the real power is in the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Power Platform is a collection of low-code tools to help companies achieve more. You can see the different tools in Power Platform in Figure 10.1:

Figure 10.1 – Microsoft Power Platform

We are not going to go through all these applications. In this chapter, we’re going to focus on the tools that have the most impact on Dynamics 365 Marketing. We will go through how you can make changes and customizations with Dataverse and Power Apps. For everything you want to automate, you can utilize the capabilities of Power Automate.

In this chapter, we will scratch the surface of the following areas, so make sure you look through the resources in the Further reading section for a deeper understanding of them:

• Dataverse
• Power Apps
• Power Automate
• Power Pages
• Customer Insights

By the end...

Dataverse

Dataverse is the database that all Dynamics 365 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications are built upon. You cannot have a Dynamics 365 solution built on something other than Dataverse. Dynamics 365 Marketing cannot be set up on-premises. Power Pages and model-driven Power Apps also run exclusively on Dataverse. Dataverse is where you make your customizations to the database, and where you can add specific things that are just relevant to your company. This can be a column on the account where you register a local VAT number, or have your own membership number that you want to register.

In Dataverse, everything is stored in tables. A table contains several columns where you add information specific to each row.

In Figure 10.2, you can see the following:

1. Table name: Account
2. Row: MaCoTra AS
3. Column: https://www.macotra.no/:

Figure 10.2 – Account table

All of your data is stored in tables, and all of your tables...

Power Apps

Power Apps consists of two different tools for creating apps:

• Model-driven
• Canvas

There are several templates you can use when creating both model-driven and canvas applications. These are very good for learning purposes, so make sure you check out the templates and learn how they’re built.

Let’s look at how to use these solutions.

Model-driven

Every CRM application in Dynamics 365 is a model-driven Power Apps app. This means that if you know how to edit and create a model-driven app, you know how to make changes to your Dynamics 365 Marketing solution to customize it to your company’s needs. Let’s start with how you can edit an existing app.

Editing apps

To be able to edit an existing app, you must first add it to your solution. You can do this by clicking Add existing | App, then Model-driven app, as shown in Figure 10.17:

Figure 10.17 – Adding an existing model-driven app

Then...

Power Automate

In Power Automate, you can create automations and keep track of processes. These automations are called flows. There are different types of flows that you can create:

• Cloud flows: These are the types of flows we’re going to go through in this chapter. You can create an automated, instant, or scheduled flow.
• Desktop flows: These are robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities where you can automate tasks in an application or on your desktop. These will not be covered in this chapter.
• Business process flows (BPFs): You can find BPFs in several areas of the CRM applications in Dynamics 365. You can see this in the opportunity in Sales and the event record in Marketing. They are the process bars that you can see on top of the event records. This is where you can add the tasks you want the users to complete before moving to the next stage. We will not cover BPFs in this chapter.
• Process advisor flow: With this flow, you make recordings of different...

Power Pages

Power Pages changed names in the fall of 2022; before this, it was called Power Apps Portals.

In Chapter 8, Managing Events, we went through a bit about Power Pages and how you can fully integrate it with Dynamics 365 Marketing. Power Pages is a separate product with a separate license. In Figure 10.37, you can see the details of a configured Power Pages page:

Figure 10.37 – Power Pages setup

From here, I can make edits and do maintenance on my page.

The fall of 2022 is a difficult time to write much about Power Pages, as most of the editing options are changing. The event template is not available in the new interface. For these screenshots, I’ve selected a generic template to show you how easy it can be to configure the page.

Once we’ve set up our page, we can make edits. By clicking Edit, as shown in Figure 10.38, we can start customizing our page:

Figure 10.38 – Editing Power Pages...

Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 CI is Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP). It will help you, with the use of AI, to get an overview of your customers based on several data sources and in real time. CI is tightly integrated with Dynamics 365 Marketing and can create segments with the use of AI, which you can then use in your journeys.

As you can see in Figure 10.43, a lot of information about your customer is potentially stored in CI:

Figure 10.43 – Customer information

As you can see in Figure 10.44, there are several segments in my CI environment, and any of these can be updated with data from multiple data sources and automatically transferred to Marketing as a segment:

Figure 10.44 – Segments in Customer Insights

A segment coming from CI will always be static and will be updated by CI every time synchronization runs. You should never make changes to these segments. These segments are always created as...

Summary

As you saw, there is a lot of functionality in Microsoft Power Platform. Your marketing solution is built on top of Dataverse, where you can create new tables, columns, forms, and views. This way, you can create a solution that is tailored to you and your company’s needs. With the use of Power Apps, you can either edit your Marketing application or create new applications that are custom-tailored for you. With canvas apps, you can create beautiful applications that help your company with the help of Power Fx.

To make your life easier and to make it automagic, you have Power Automate. This can be integrated into your marketing solution, and you can integrate it with other applications in your portfolio.

We ended this chapter with Power Pages and Customer Insights – two solutions that can help expand your marketing solution and give your company everything they need to have a complete holistic overview of your customers.

We’ve now been through the...

Questions

The following are some questions that will help you gauge your understanding of the topics discussed in this chapter. The answers are available in the Assessments section at the end of the books:.

1. You must bring your own safety to Dataverse.
   1. No
   2. Yes
2. You can only create new Text columns in Dataverse.
   1. No
   2. Yes
3. Model-driven and canvas apps are edited with the same functionality.
   1. No
   2. Yes
4. You cannot edit the out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 Marketing application.
   1. No
   2. Yes
5. In which ways can you create a canvas app?
   1. Blank
   2. From model-driven
   3. From data
   4. Image
   5. Figma
   6. UI
6. What does a Power Automate Flow always consist of?
   1. An action
   2. An app
   3. A trigger
   4. A consequence
   5. Data

Further reading

• Power Platform and Dynamics 365/Customer Engagement/CRM:
  • Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant: PL-200 Exam Guide: Learn how to customize and configure Microsoft Power Platform and prepare for the PL-200 exam: https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Power-Platform-Functional-Consultant-ebook/dp/B08KQKQ22W/ref=pd_rhf_d_dp_s_pd_crcd_sccl_1_1/143-1488019-8399560?pd_rd_w=3V8GJ&content-id=amzn1.sym.cee83ff1-8fc1-4533-a3f5-bf3d998f4558&pf_rd_p=cee83ff1-8fc1-4533-a3f5-bf3d998f4558&pf_rd_r=C5KSYVSFR7139E03J3VQ&pd_rd_wg=dAtDl&pd_rd_r=9a05d0a8-5825-4045-a0ea-828d5664f16a&pd_rd_i=B08KQKQ22W&psc=1
  • Fundamentals of CRM with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform: Enhance your customer relationship management by extending Dynamics 365 using a no-code approach: https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-CRM-Dynamics-Power-Platform-ebook/dp/B08HYWX6VL/ref=d_reads_cwrtbar_sccl_2_37/143-1488019-8399560?pd_rd_w=6rQel&content-id=amzn1.sym.c3636f1d-aab3-4576-85e3-007dd638fbde...