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.