A few years ago, I wrote a blog about LDD – Licence Driven Development. You can read it here and hear the CRM podcast with George Doubinski discussing the concept here. It covered my thoughts at the time about how our development practices on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform should be influenced by the Microsoft licensing guidelines. Re-reading it now, some of the conclusions seem out of date, so it seems like a good time to revisit it.

With that in mind, and based on some of my adventures in the past 18 months, here are 10 things you should consider when considering Dynamics 365 and Power Platform licencing.

There are a myriad of new features being released to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform right now. It’s tempting to try out new features and, perhaps push a new feature through to production if you or your customer is willing or agile enough. For some larger organisations however, there’s more of an importance placed on standards and governance than ensuring the continued agility of getting new features and new applications quickly to production.

But how do, or how should Enterprise Architecture standards apply to those of us who have invested our time in these newfangled Power Platform based solutions. How can we ensure an organisations approach is both agile and structured?

Continue reading “Power Platform Enterprise Architecture” →

A lot has been said and written about ‘Portals’ since Microsoft bought ADX Studio in 2015. If you are unaware of the background, ADX Studio at the time was the de-facto market leader and default solution for building portals to front and expose data from Dynamics CRM.

With the ADX Studio product being built in a configurable way, it seemed like a good acquisition from Microsoft. This was a departure from earlier acquisitions of  technically different products which had to be integrated to Dynamics – see Parature (cough) or Marketing Pilot (splutter), which have since died a slow death. ADX Studio was a product that, on the face of it, could more easily integrate and slot in to the new approach.

Since 2015, Microsoft has been on a journey to integrate and extend this old ADX codebase onto what has since become Dynamics 365 and, more recently, the Power Platform. ADX Studio in its old form – a .NET website and configurable code framework – is now effectively dead* – the Microsoft shift to the cloud is nearing completion, with new features being added regularly. Continue reading “PowerApps and Dynamics Portals Design Decisions” →