Hi and welcome to this video about connecting Microsoft
Dynamics
365 Business Central and PoweApps and Flow.
My name is Arend-Jan Kauffmann and in this video
I will explain how PowerApps and Flow can empower
your business.
We will first start with an overview of the Power
Platform and then look into how Business Central and the Power
Platform are connected.
After that, we will look more in detail into Power
Apps and Flow and then finish with an overview of
opportunities for you.
Let's start with an overview of the Power Platform.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud
ERP system. True, but it's not where your business opportunities
stop.
It's where they begin. Business software used to be all
about supporting your daily chores while allowing you to enter
sales and purchase documents to print shipping notes and bills
to keep track of your inventory and to handle your
financial operations.
Microsoft Dynamics has enriched standard operations by providing deep vertical
functionality,
developed and marketed by the partner ecosystem for almost every industry.
But the real added value of integrated cloud computing lies
in generating workflows and leveraging and
mining the rich data at hand in a cross platform
and cross application way.
In the last 30 years we have moved from isolated
electronic support of manuel tasks to integrated
business solutions and we are now ready to make
use of the full digital transformation.
Microsoft Power Platform provides the ideal tools and scenarios to
take your domain expertise to the next level.
The Microsoft platform consists of PowerApps, PowerBI and
Microsoft Flow, connected to Dynamics 365, Office 365 and even
apps outside the Microsoft ecosystem.
Let us more specifically look at PowerApps and Microsoft
Flow and what you can achieve by implementing them, and
which opportunities they open up for you to grow your business.
PowerApps allows you to build powerful applications without needing
lengthy development to do so.
In fact applications can be put together within a matter
of hours and it can be done by consultants or
trained end users.
This is all about adding value to your offer and
empowering your organization and your customers to achieve more in
less time and to make better use of the tools
and solutions you provide them with. PowerApps uses Excel-
like expressions to model business logic.
It´s easy to learn and understand and it lives in a
context that most software uses on the planet are familiar
with and,
like to play around with.
The apps that are generated can run on tablets or
smart phone devices using iOS or Android as an operating
system.
In the days of complex integrated processes, cross platform
workflow automation is the silver bullet to increase efficiency and
safeguard against issues that result from lack of timely information
or coordination.
Microsoft Flow integrates workflow automation directly into your application. It is
not limited to Business Central but works out of the
box with hundreds of existing apps and services such as
Office 365 and SharePoint and Outlook or
OneDrive or Dropbox or Twitter,
LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram.
JIRA or MailChimp or OneNote or Common Data Services´. Also
Skype for Business,
or DocuSign and Yammer, YouTube or Zendesk and
a lot more.
It is especially useful in combination with PowerApps.
There is no coding necessary to set up a
workflow,
which makes it an ideal tool to empower end users
to implement their own Flows or adapt templates that you
provide.
Let's have a look at how the Power Platform connects
to Business Central.
To get you quickly starter is the Power Apps and
Flow,
Microsoft has provided a total of 12 templates for approval
processes on different documents. You will also find the
template to start an action when a record is created
in Business Central. These templates can be used as a
start and can be customized to your needs.
Flow can be used to design the complete workflow process
for Business
Central. There are 3 connectors supported for Business Central online
and on prem and for Dynamics NAV.
These connectors provide actions read data from Business
Central into PowerApps and Flow and to work together with
the workflow engine inside Business Central.
Business Central has over 50 APIs exposed to read and
maintain data.
These APIs can be used in PowerApps
and Flow to read data and write data. All business
rules,
including permission sets will be fully respected when using
these APIs.
You can even write your own APIs to expose custom
data from your Business Central apps.
Within Business Central online you can even manage your Flows
directly without leaving the Business Central client.
This empowers you even more and delivers are completely integrated
experience.
Let's look a little bit deeper into the connection between
Business Central and the Power Platform.
Data is exposed with OData
API endpoints. The standard connectors for Business Central use these
APIs to read and write data into support business functions.
These connectors are available in both PowerApps and Flow. Data
connections
you create with a connector are shared between PowerAppse
and Flow. On top of that you will find templates that
are based on those connectors,
which you can use as a starting point to create
Flows.
That's not the whole story.
You can also create custom connectors to make data connections
to your own custom
APIs by creating your own triggers and actions and even
with creating your own templates.
You can completely tailor the PowerApps and Flow experience
to the needs of you and your customers.
Let's now look a little bit further into PowerAapps.
To build a PowerApp
you need to follow these steps: First you use
one of the existing connectors to create a connection to
your Business
Central data or you define a custom connector first and
then create a connection to access data that is not
provided with a standard
connector. Then you continue to create a new app.
The canvas app can be used to create apps for
mobile devices. In the app builder
you use the connection from step one to add data
to your app and then you can start with building
the user interface.
With the app designer you can build a pixel perfect app and
completely
taylor the user experience to your needs.
When you have finished building the app,
you can choose to share the app with your colleagues.
Or even to export the app and import it in another
environment.
Here you see an example of a PowerApp that combines
data from base fields and from some extension fields.
As you can see it is perfectly possible to combine
both into one PowerApp.
And this is just one screen showing data from Business
Central only. It's also possible to combine data from other
sources and present them on one screen.
Let's now move onto Microsoft Flow.
Creating Microsoft Flow starts with the same steps as with
PowerApps. Create a connection to your Business
Central data by using the standard connector or by creating
a custom connector.
Then you can start with creating a new Flow based
on one of the provider
templates or start from scratch with a blank Flow. In Flow
you always start with defining a trigger that starts the
Flow.
Think of it as an event that can happen inside
Business Central, like creating a record or requesting an approval,
but it could also be an email that arrives in
an inbox or a file that is created in SharePoint
or OneDrive.
Or maybe a new Twitter message that mentions your company.
It is even possible to start with a trigger that
has its own URL that you can call from Business
Central so you can manually start to Flow.
After the trigger, you add a step that you want
to perform when the defined event from the trigger
occurs.
You are completely free, in what actions you want to
do. For example,
send an email, create a file, create a new record
in Business Central or start an approval.
Or maybe you want to combine it all. Think of
it as a set of actions that will be executed
one after another.
Together, the Flow forms a microservice that will automatically
start when an event occurs or when you trigger it
from code.
After defining all the steps you can test it and
then save it.
It is also possible to share the Flow with colleagues
or to export it and import it again in another
environment- And finally when the Flow is active,
it will automatically start. You don't have to look after
it, but all runs will be logged,
so you will always have complete control over what happens.
The Flow templates for approvals work together with the workflow
engine in Business Central.
After you have created a new approval flow with one
of the templates,
you will find a new workflow in Business Central there
is automatically created and linked to the Flow.
By using the workflow engine Business Central can notify Flow
when an approval has been requested and at the same
time place a lock on the record until Flow
has finished the approval process.
And like I already mentioned before, it is possible to
manage your Flows directly from the Business Central client.
So what are your opportunities with the Power Platform?
With the Power Platform, you can very quickly create integrations
between systems and platforms without the need of developing all
pieces yourself.
It's just clicking pieces together.
Apps can be created to support mobile scenarios,
and did I already mention you can integrate with mobile
hardware like barcode scanner and screen captures?
Customers see and feel the benefits of PowerApps and
Microsoft Flow very quickly.
It only takes a few quick demos to provide a
proof of concept.
This gives you a wealth of opportunities to easily add
value to your offering, to upsell and to grow your business.
Think about how to pre configure
workflow automation and device app support to reflect requirements,
which are typical for your industry and line of business.
Build up an integration story between Microsoft Dynamics and Office
365 using PowerApps and Flow.
Sell packaged consulting and trainings to enable end users
to build their own apps,
which are specific to their company,
or some very deep segment of their business and go
beyond pure.
ERP and operative handling and provide intelligent connections of
all available data and resources.
The Microsoft Power Platform combines all sorts of data from
different sources into one Common Data Model.
There are many ways in which you can use this
capability to expand your business and to add value to
your customer implementations.
You don't need to invent anything new to do so.
You just need to connect already existing data in an intelligent and
easily accessible way.
Thank you for watching this video.
