Creating Outlook Events from a OneDrive Excel spreadsheet

Last Friday, while working with one of our clients on an integration issue between Dynamics and the Microsoft Exchange global address book, he asked me if there was a way for them to have automated creation of events (calendar items) in their Microsoft Outlook calendar where the source of the data was an Excel spreadsheet in OneDrive. This is a short post, but might help someone out who needs to implement this.

AI Builder Business Card Reader

I have started working with AI Builder recently and yesterday I finally took a look at the Business Card scanner. I decided to check how this works in the different apps, both Modal Driven as well as Canvas Apps.

I ran my tests using 4 different types of business cards and wanted to see how well this works. The results overall were pretty good, but not perfect. It is still hard to expect perfect results, as not all Business cards are created equal.

T-SQL Endpoint for Common Data Service

Since the announcement by Microsoft at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit last month, and even before, I’ve been eager to take a look at the new SQL Connection for the Common Data Service Endpoint. What this means is that we can not write and execute SQL queries against the entity data.

Showing page status of multi-page forms in Power Apps Portals

Creating navigation in a Power Apps portal application is straight forward, and can easily be done using Web Link Sets, but how about showing to the user where they are in the process and modifying the style of each element once the user has finished entering the data for that page. We have done this a few times and this involves the combination of liquid and JavaScript code on the different pages.

New Features in Form Processing for AI Builder

Over the past year, I played here and there with AI Builder, and particularly form processing, but have found that it was somewhat cumbersome for some of the forms that I wanted to build, especially when working a lot in the government space. Yesterday, May 4th, Microsoft announced some new changes to the AI Builder Form processing that allows recognition of undetected fields. I decided to test this out, and in order to implement this, used the IRS W-9 form, which is not such as easy form to implement.

UCI Grid Filtering and Search improvements

Over the past couple of years, since the release of Unified interface, one of the biggest pain points for most customer was that features that are available in the web client are not available in the new Unified Interface. There were a lot of improvements in the Unified Interface with the responsive client, custom controls and more, but when you are used to working in a certain way, taking away features is sometimes hard to get used to.