Continuing my blog series on Dynamics and CDS Best Practices, Understanding the Technology.

One of the biggest downfalls to any software solution is not always the solution itself, but the team, department, or company's understanding of that solution. You could have a perfect solution or application that fails miserably. Or, an imperfect solution that thrives. It all comes down to aligning the application to your users' experiences and expectations, as well as documenting your solution as you go, so anyone can step in to maintain it or get up to speed quickly on expected functionality.

Power Apps has shortened the development life cycle of many projects due to the quickness with which you can get connections to your data up and running, no matter where it's stored. But that doesn’t mean you should throw typical software development processes to the wayside when building your apps.

We've recently helped our clients build applications quickly during these times to communicate crisis management news and updates, report on resource utilization, and facilitate work from home solutions.

If you are starting build or in the process of evaluating your next need, keep these important steps and milestones in mind when building your next app, whether it’s a Crisis Management app, or the Sales App that has been in the backlog since before Covid-19 happened.

Power Apps is an incredible tool allowing you to rapidly build low-code apps quickly and easily. In this demo, I will show you how to build an equipment tracking solution with SharePoint lists as a data source and a Power App user interface for ease of use on mobile devices.

Last week, Microsoft announced four new products for small and medium-sized businesses:

The time might come when you’re building a Power App and you need to embed a video from YouTube or another source to easily play when clicked on. For instance, you are creating an app for employees to track maintenance and you need to add a quick demonstration video to pop up on the interface along with the line item. Or, you’re creating a physical therapy application for your clients with a checklist of exercises, and you want to provide an instructional video to make sure they are doing the exercise correctly. The options are limitless. 

Most people know that you have been able to add Power Apps to individual channels within a team. And you may also know that from the Teams Admin Center, an Administrator can create policies that update the left hand Teams navigation to include Power Apps.

You may be wondering what are all these acronyms mean, so hopefully by the end of this blog you will have a better understanding of each of these concepts and how to apply them.

While companies are dealing with the current crisis in a variety of ways, a vast majority of employees are now working remotely, at least for the foreseeable future. We’ve been hearing similar questions and themes from our customers about leveraging Microsoft Teams to improve organizational communication.

This blog is the first part of the series: Dynamics 365 and CDS Design Best Practices Blog Series. We will cover in brief detail: