PowerDocu and the Art of Managing Multitenancy in a Global Powerhouse with Rene Modery

This episode will be focusing on the Power Platform Multitenant Environment and we'll also do a bit of a deep dive into a specialist documentation product for your solutions that you build on the Power Platform . My guest today is from Singapore . He works as a Power Platform Technical Lead at WPP .

He's more than 15 years experience in IT , with major focus on the Power Platform and Microsoft 365 . You can find links to his bio , social media etc . In the show notes for this episode as well as , if we refer to any resources , you will be able to find them linked in the show notes . With that , welcome to the show , renee .

Hi Mark , we're glad to be here . Good to have you on the show . Before we kick off and talk about Power Dock U , as well as this Multitenant Environment , which I find very interesting and something that I've been doing a bit with myself in this past year , tell us about food , family and fun . What do you do when you're not working ?

I'm in the process of creating my own Mandalorian armor . I bought a 3D printer printed stuff , sanded , painted stuff , working on it so in the next few weeks I should have that ready . So that's the next big thing for me right now that I'm really spending my spare time on .

And obviously there are a couple of brands , couple of models that are usually generally recommended by people . So I wanted to make sure I get something that people are happy with , don't complain about . Then I just pick which one was convenient for me to get .

So it was really I wouldn't want to say a very deep dive process , but they're just snaring it down to a couple of models and saying , yeah , I'm just going to pick that one before I spend too much time figuring out which one might be the best .

Didn't quite work most of the time because I made mistakes , printer was interrupted , funny stuff happening . So you learn a lot actually in the first few months of using it . But then things get quite stable and so , yeah , right now is , you could say , printing nonstop . So I print stuff for the kids , for myself .

Yeah , there's always something that you think , yeah , I could print that If Christmas around the corner started printing Christmas ornaments for the tree and yeah , it's quite a lot of fun actually .

Most of it has been prepared and is ready , nearly ready to be worn , but still a couple more weeks to get everything done . Yeah .

So , yeah , hey , singapore is in Asia , but they speak English . That sounds good , because I didn't want to go somewhere where I could say that the language would be something completely different or something like that . So I didn't really know what to expect , obviously being young and never having lived abroad for a longer period of time .

So I thought , yeah , singapore sounded good , came over here then for that internship and obviously I had my culture shock at the very first night and the first few days and weeks , but then I started to like it more and more over time .

So at the end of the internship I extended the internship and decided also , I want to come back to Singapore quickly , run back to Germany , finish my studies and came back to Singapore and to really start working . I thought , hey , I'm going to just stay here as long as I like it . If I ever don't like it anymore .

Then I can just go back to Germany or see where else I could go or something like that . But yeah , that was a long time ago , as mentioned . So I came here in 2006 the first time , so nearly 18 years ago , and I'm still here . I still love it .

So , yeah , that's how I got here , that's how I got to say for the love of Singapore and why I'm still here .

And what are your thoughts from living there ? And just , it's like a place you can't really fault . It's almost like a utopia in a way in how they've created a society that seems to benefit everybody , that allows everybody to grow , but of course there are some rules in place too To enable that to happen .

Obviously , that felt a bit like a bit of a concern for me , thinking , yeah , all in all democracies you've got a range of different parties , etc . But over time obviously I don't want to say my opinion fully changed here , but I can see obviously that the government here is , as you said .

Basically it's not really like a very pure , restrictive kind of ruling party , a ruling system etc . It is still obviously meant to benefit the country overall . You could say , obviously we could discuss for hours in terms of , hey , if they certain policies it could , or bad , I'm not going to say everything is obviously perfect .

I mean say utopia , obviously , being here , we see all the so to say bad things as well . But obviously I know that the stability that we have here overall I would say is a very positive thing .

And while there are definitely you could say policies or comments or actions , for example from politicians or the ruling party or so that I might say , no , I disagree with it , I would also say , yeah , I can obviously complain a lot about Germany as well , regardless which party we look at or which who's currently the chancellor or anything .

So obviously expectation is no , there's never a perfect system , there's never a perfect government in place , etc .

And obviously my hope is that and that's my constant hope is that it's not just that , yeah , there's a strong , good ruling party , but also that the opposition obviously then is also getting better and stronger , because you want to make sure that nobody gets complacent and thinks , yeah , everything's awesome , we'll just leave it as it is .

But obviously there's that constant we call it the constant review to see how can we do even better , potentially , yeah , yeah , obviously . That's roughly my views in the nutshell . Like I said , we could talk about you , talk for us , but yeah , yeah , yeah I always liked constraining myself not to go down a rabbit hole .

So we've got more than 100,000 employees worldwide spread over very large number of operating companies . So it's not just WPP , but rather there are a range of operating companies under that big WP umbrella . So that's , for example , crew BAM with 35,000 employees or so globally . Even crew BAM consists of multiple agencies like WaveMaker , essence , mediacom , others , etc .

So basically it's quite large overall the setup . What that means for us . Really , we work , as mentioned , media and advertisement industry . Our clients are then usually the big other companies that need to create advertisements , produce something , place it somewhere . Maybe they want to launch some I don't know marketing events etc . Somewhere within the WP company .

There's usually somebody who can help them . Obviously , it just means overdoing one thing , but rather the you know what to call it the full lifecycle of yeah , thank you , we have a new product launch that we need to do and we need to place advertisements etc . We can help there , obviously .

Then what it now means obviously has meant is that the spread across the globe very large , from an organizational point of view , very complicated . I joined , for example , crubem nearly five years ago . Crubem is one of , as mentioned , one of our operating companies and I was within Crubem IT .

Now we've got a centralized city , so now moved up to WPIT , and even right now I feel like we're so big that sometimes you don't even know what's actually fully out there , both from an operation and not from an operation From organizational view , but also from a again from a technical point of view then , obviously , with what we're dealing with , etc .

So , as you know , I mean Power Platform . People usually come either from SharePoint or Dynamics background . I'm the SharePoint guy , so to say , then , and for me it was really Office 365 , had , obviously , sharepoint workflows in there .

There were info platforms in there , and at some point Microsoft said , oh , we're going to deprecate those , and I was then obviously looking at what kind of replacements are there ? And 2016 .

Then Microsoft started introducing Power Apps and that's when I started to look into it a bit and that obviously then became a bit more and more over time , looking more at Power Apps , looking a bit more into Power Automate and any of the other power products in the Power Platform obviously . Then .

So yeah , for me it was really getting slowly started with it as that side activity and then , over time , also looking at yeah , now we also need to look at , for example at yeah , there are lots of apps out there . Maybe you should actually figure out who's creating apps , those kind of things .

So that's when I was working at Krubem and we started to look at , yeah , we should probably introduce some governance and see if you can support other people , and that's how slowly . Focus more on Power Platform and less on SharePoint and off 65 over time .

need I have no idea how many tenants and does make sense to operate on a very large scale across too many tenants . Let's try to consolidate where it makes sense . So that happened then , also over the past few years . So we ended up with what we call the 10 strategic tenants . So really , 10 tenants that we will focus on .

Anything outside of that would likely then be integrated at some point or it's , so to say , out of scope for our core team . So my self , for example , me and the Power Platform team we don't look at anything else besides these 10 tenants . If there is another tenant , yeah , we don't even know about it , we don't have access to it , etc .

10 is obviously still a very large number . Yes , it's actually even getting smaller . Now One of the tenants is just getting , so to say I'm going to say decommissioned . We just started migrating off that tenant . So users moving to other tenants , where they usually should be , could be apps , flow , sharepoint , teams , etc . Everything migrated .

So we are , so to say , already now thinking in terms of , yeah , we only have nine tenants and because obviously it's boring if you don't do a migration and merge it , company also decided , yeah , let's actually merge two of our big operating companies , vml YR and Wonderman Thompson , move them into one big VML entity .

Which means that we now also need to think about yeah , there's going to be a next big , yeah , tenant merger also happening at some point soon . Well , soon , obviously , starting preparation is ongoing , but they are starting . So , yeah , that's , so to say , the overview of what we have . So 10 tenants was the starting point for us . Right now it's nine .

In the future it's going to be eight , but yeah , we are still dealing with multiple .

I was involved in a rail company that acquired three or four different rail companies and we went through a multi-year process of joining them all together . It'd become a single one . At the end of the exercise , the board decided to split the company up and sell off all these individual rail companies . So it's funny how it goes up and it goes down .

Right , it contracts an extra . You know , have you always then ? Was 10 the maximum number of tenants , or did there used to be more than that and you've got to 10, ? What was the really starting point around about ?

Even right now I think there's still a few other tenants , so to say that exists , but , like I said , they're not in scope for us because they might be way too small , maybe getting decommissioned at some point . So other people , other teams look after them . But yeah , so I'm not gonna say 10 was that magic number to be worked towards too .

It was probably just the one that , from organizational and technical point of view , just started to make sense .

It was there because the organization may be running in a very siloed approach to how it did business and the business got their tenant and run their business a certain way and then IT we're like , no , we should be creating segregation .

And sometimes it's an education thing where people are doing multi-tenant because they don't understand in a multi-environment strategy , right , so they don't understand that you can still segregate everything but in an environmental view . And then , of course , one of the challenges that you have with a multi-tenant strategy is then do you have a multi-license strategy ?

Because the licenses don't go across tenants in that scenario and so therefore it creates its own set of challenges . Now I take it the licensing is not an issue for you because nobody would need , theoretically , from a user base , to be in different tenants . Would that be the case ?

Yeah , you could put into one tenant , but there's obviously often a need to have something really company-wide overall .

Now , obviously , tooling-wise , it might mean that there are other things that you think about , but , for example , from just thinking in terms of , for example , scenarios that we had recently , sometimes you might want to really target people across different tenants , not because you say I need people from different tenants , but that's just really because where they are .

What we had very recently , for example , we had a PowerApp that went live in October that was launched by the legal team actually . So they need to ask our global CEOs and CFOs , for example , for declaration . They need to make a declaration saying , yes , my company , my SOX entity , basically that I'm responsible for , are there any conflicts of interest ?

Are there any other potential conflicts from a compliance point of view ? They just need to make that annual statement , something like , oh , my wife is working for a competitor , or my niece is working in my company , something like that .

Basically , obviously because , again , from a compliance point of view , there may be things to be reviewed , because they might be , as you can imagine , obviously they're legally okay , but better to basically get it officially confirmed that everything is properly done , etc . So , anyway , I described the big company setup we've got .

I don't know how many companies , but I know that we targeted around 1000 , then 100 something CEOs and CFOs globally actually . And to complete that declaration , that conflict of interest form , and that really meant they are spread across tenants .

So when you think about , oh , do they need to have a license somewhere else or do they need to access something somewhere else , and you think about , yeah , how do you make that accessible ? And because it's a PowerApp , we then , for example , had to decide , yes , it needs to be centrally somewhere .

Let's not put out an app in each tenant and consolidate afterwards , but rather we want one single source of truth . Actually , and obviously came with a lot of other challenges . Then PowerApps went relatively well .

I say relatively well because we're having an ongoing discussion right now with Microsoft around the licensing aspects , because the documentation says it shouldn't work , but it does work . Accessing a Canvas app with data-verse should not be possible from a licensing perspective unless you have a license and host tenant in the app the tenant hosting the app .

But we are fully licensed , we've got all premium licenses . So that's good , but we don't want to obviously double-license people . So what it simply said means then yeah , if I come from again CrewBam and I access the app in the corporate tenant , then I would theoretically need a license in the corporate tenant . But we realized , oh , you don't need it .

But , yeah , ongoing discussions with Microsoft here , just make sure that things are done properly , working properly . Microsoft was involved , obviously , from very early in the project , et cetera .

I hope there's a lot and it's quite interesting , obviously because , as I described earlier what I wanted to start with , you sometimes really have that scenario where you want to really have an app that is centrally available and accessible to the whole company , not because all 100,000 people will need to access it , but there may be again a reason where people from

across the tenants may need to access something or want to do something with the app .

Of course that's never a best way . We figured out that the way we did it . Right now it's working . We know that there are a range of let's call it identity-related issues , but maybe PowerPages could have resolved that , or maybe not . No idea actually , because again it's described basically .

I mean , you sometimes surface on issues in the technology stack that are not visible until you yourself do something .

We have no insights into who are our top makers and which apps are popular and how many flows do we have all that information ? And , yeah , not possible . You don't want to go into 10 tenants and look at things 10 different times . As a rather idea , you want to have , ideally , a centralized view of things .

So that's why I deployed the series starter kit into each tenant . And then , because it comes with a dashboard , we also then , so to say , aggregated or merged the data from each tenant to a single data set . So , like I said , we don't have to look into 10 different data sets but rather have a single view on yeah , hopefully , everything that basically .

While it should be mostly standardized now , obviously there's never a full 100% guarantee . So , yeah , strategy for us , we're not doing a monthly update . That would be probably I don't know a full-time job being making sure that it's working , that it's tested before we update it and then just start the same thing again . Great too much . I would say .

Yes , we Microsoft , I think recommends doing it every three months , but we realized we focus on every six months unless there's really something absolutely critical that we need to deploy . Six months seem to be like that sweet spot , so that , yeah , we're maybe not as current as Microsoft recommends , but it's an acceptable risk for us .

It means we've got time to focus on other things the functionality that we have . We are happy with it .

Everything seems to be working then , and updates then obviously mean that it's a lengthier activity of a couple of weeks then , because deploying the update is something where we then spend a lot of time testing , reviewing , making sure that things are still working . They were working before on any new things we need to consider .

All of that obviously then flows into that process , so yeah , that's why every six months sounds good for us right now .

Obviously , the only thing that we then do is obviously sometimes you might say , yeah , we need a , for example , a new power platform environment that we then set up in a geographic location closer to its target audience . But we are global business .

Sometimes you know , oh , you need to set up something for , again , I don't know , the US market only , or so then obviously just say , yeah , why not deploy it over there and not have it in Europe ?

So obviously then that means yesterday , obviously also under the respective European laws , then depending on European laws , then depending on the as well . So yeah , from a legal point of view , if there is ever any question that I would have basically , oh , can we actually put something in certain geography or so , or should we not put it in a certain geography ?

I'm not going to make the decision myself , obviously . That's where I then rely on other teams and obviously then say , oh , from a legal point of view , this is the status and that's OK , or that's not the case , etc .

They exist , they run , they work , but they were not fully documented potentially , and once you need to support them , you want to make changes to them .

You need to dive in again to figure out what is actually in there , what kind of environment variables I use , or on which screen is a certain component used , or in your flow , for example , what kind of I don't know connector sign used , all those kind of things basically .

And my idea was I want to get some technical documentation done automatically so that I could simply set and take my app or my flow or a solution with apps and flows , run it through the tool and it spits out a standardized documentation so I see immediately , for example , for an app , how many screens are there , how many controls are there , which controls on

which screen . When I click on this button , what's going to happen , which code gets executed , all those kind of things basically , and yeah , so I decided to initially then just see if that could even be done and the mini prototype was working , the small proof of concept and then I just expanded it over time .

So current status is like I said canvas apps can get documented , flows can get documented , started to document dataverse tables so that I can slowly move towards model-driven apps as well . Yes , goal is still to expand and enhance the tool over time .

I don't want to say constantly , because I took a six-month break now and I'm about to start it again now , basically once my Christmas break starts . But yeah , really want to make sure that more things get added because , as I described basically , I mean there's always that personal or professional need from my side as well .

Sometimes what I do is oh , we've got an app internally and I need to figure out what's actually in there , so run it through the tool , I get my documentation . I can use that documentation then to see what's happening in the solution with the different apps and flows , et cetera , without having to deploy it and looking at it from .

Yeah , really , by opening the flows and apps directly , et cetera .

But I think other people who might have some ideas or recommendations , I mean happy for any kind of feedback or support that is out there .

Before I let you go , renee , is there anything else you'd like to close out with Good ?

There's always a lot more to talk , but yeah , I mean , as we are approaching Christmas period and New Year's period I don't know when the recording is going to go out , but to have us listening , we'll have a happy , merry Christmas , very merry Christmas , sorry .

Have a happy New Year and , yeah , happy to see you and your children also in the New Year again .