James Connelly’s Post

Check out the key takeaways from Microsoft Ignite in Softcat's latest blog ➡️ https://okt.to/vfS0L7

Realizing the true potential of your development teams goes beyond just measuring productivity. Nicole Forsgren and Brian Houck are covering the holistic framework in the context of developer experience..

🔥 Exciting Updates from Microsoft Build 2024! 🔥 Couldn't make it to Build 2024? No worries, we've got you covered with the top updates to Microsoft 365, Copilot, Power Platform, and more! Let's dive right in. 🖥️ **Copilot+ PCs**: Imagine boosting your productivity tenfold! Microsoft is integrating generative AI and Copilot with Windows 11, introducing features like Recall to revisit past activities and enhanced art creation with Microsoft Paint. While the benefits are enticing, some are raising eyebrows over Recall's security implications. What's your take on this feature? 🧠 **GPT-4o**: OpenAI's new model, GPT-4o, is now available on Azure AI Studio. It can process audio, vision, and text in real time, offering a more natural interaction with software. The potential applications are mind-blowing, and I can't wait to see how this enriches our tech landscape. 🐙 **GitHub Copilot Extensions**: One of my personal favourites! These extensions add context by integrating with Azure, Microsoft 365, Docker, and more. This new functionality, along with Power Apps as YAML, opens endless possibilities. Curious to see what innovative solutions the community will come up with! 📂 **Copilot in SharePoint**: Enhance productivity by creating custom copilots from your files and content wizards with a few clicks. This feature democratizes AI to make everyday tasks more efficient - imagine the time saved! 💬 **Team Copilot**: Acting as a team member, it facilitates meetings, takes notes, and collaborates on projects. While there's debate on its role titles, I believe it complements our skills, freeing us to focus on strategic tasks. 🚀 **Microsoft Teams Updates**: New slash commands, collaborative code editing, and inline designers are here to elevate your teams' collaboration game. Have you tried any of these features? Share your experiences! 📱 **Power Apps Enhancements**: New Copilot features for relational data schema building, in-app copilots, and co-authoring. Also, native Git integration promises to streamline development workflows. So, there you have our favourite Build 2024 updates! What announcements excited you the most? #Microsoft #AI #TechUpdates

🚀✨ Exciting News! ✨🚀 Microsoft just announced a new Learn module: Use service principal authentication in custom connectors. Perfect timing for me :) as I was planning to design a custom connector with Graph API in a project! 🔧📊 In this update, highlighted by Daniel Laskewitz, you can use service principal authentication even in custom connectors. 🌟 Dive into the new functionality and hands-on learning now via Microsoft Learn, #PowerPlatform #PowerApps #CustomConnectors #GraphAPI #Automation #MicrosoftLearn 📚🔍

When I initially released my #PADFramework and started talking about it in the community, I quickly noticed an issue with the approach I was proposing. 😰 My approach was to have a dedicated DEV environment for the framework and then have it as a managed solution in all other environments - including normal DEV environments for all other solutions. This is because the framework should only be used by developers and not modified. 🤓 And then most of the flows in the framework were supposed to only be consumed, with only the FlowTemplate being copied whenever a developer started working on a new flow. 🧑💻 However, there was a bug with Power Automate Desktop where the console would not allow users to either open or make a copy of certain flows. And FlowTemplate fell under those certain flows. 🤦♂️ So, we weren't able to make a copy of the flow that was supposed to be copied. At least not via the PAD console - it was still possible to do it via the cloud flow, which was a workaround, but not very intuitive for sure, and not very easy to use for makers. 😵💫 I reported this to the product team at Microsoft, and they acknowledged it and promised to look into it, and then I never heard back from them again. 🫣 But now purely by accident, I noticed that it's fixed. 🤯 And it's actually been fixed all the way back in the October release. I just completely missed it, as I was so used to just making copies via the cloud portal and not being bothered with trying to do it via PAD. 🤷 But this now makes it so much easier for makers and business users to use the framework, and I'm really happy about that. 🥳 Having direct communication with the product team has got to be the best benefit of being a Microsoft MVP! 🚀 Follow me and the company I represent at Definra for more insights into #RPA, #automation, #processimprovement and #digitaltransformation. Hit the 🔔 on my profile to get a notification for all my new posts.🙏

Microsoft Build 2024 Key Announcements Day 1: * Phi-3-vision is now available in Azure * A new Real-Time Intelligence within Microsoft Fabric * Copilot Studio to empower developers to build copilots * GitHub now has its first set of Copilot extensions * Microsoft introduces Team Copilot * GPT-40 now available in Azure AI Studio #Innovation #AI #Azure #Build #New

Unlock your dev team’s potential! 🔓 Discover the secrets to boosting developer productivity in our on-demand webinar and gain actionable insights to take your team’s performance to the next level. Watch the webinar in partnership with Microsoft here 🔽 https://hubs.li/Q02_TLMH0 #DeliveryOptimisation #SoftwareDelivery #DeliveryFramework

⭐️⭐️⭐️API Catalogue or Documentation: A Comprehensive Guide ⭐️⭐️⭐️ API Catalogue or Documentation serves as a valuable tool for organizing and facilitating easy search of APIs. It plays a crucial role for organizations, providing insights into the available APIs and enabling the reuse of existing ones. Additionally, it assists consumers in subscribing to APIs and listing all the subscribers. Furthermore, it offers detailed descriptions, endpoints, versions, and payloads for each API. The market provides various API Catalogue tools, each with its unique features. Some popular options include SwaggerHub, Redocly, Postman, and DapperBox. Ultimately, the choice of API Catalogue tool depends on individual preferences and requirements. Happy Cataloging 😀 #API #APICatalogue Image generated by Microsoft Copilot 😀

GitHub CoPilot as a template for future workflows In this weeks earnings call, Satya Nadella laid out Microsoft's plan to use the learnings from GitHub CoPilot to inform extensions of CoPilot into additional workflows. "The GitHub design system and the GitHub Copilot workspace design system, which now, for example, you start with an issue, you create a plan, from a plan, you create a spec, or you create a spec and from a spec, you create a plan and then you go operate across the full repo. That’s effectively the design system that is getting replicated inside of even the M365 Copilot." As one of, if not the most, adopted AI tools on the market, GitHub CoPilot represents a strong foundation on how to view workflow extensions. In my latest edition of Infinite Play, I wrote about how this may play out with simple examples in customer service, finance, and marketing. Link below

The Truth about Developer Facing Products - Part II Part I - https://lnkd.in/gcqsE9wJ Fast forward to my first project as an engineering manager: building the Marketplace Subscriptions APIs for integration with sellers’ automation platforms. Since developer adoption often lags due to the integration effort required, we drew on past lessons to improve our approach: 1. Engage closely with potential customers to align on needs. 2. Carefully analyze the data to be shared, making clear one-way versus two-way door decisions. 3. Review everything meticulously with legal to avoid roadblocks. 4. Plan the launch in detail to ensure seamless execution. This proactive collaboration paid off—our customers had engineered their systems to consume the data flow immediately upon its release, ensuring a smooth adoption process. Another interesting lesson in the exercise was, we worked with solutions providers (ISVs) who were serving thousands of sellers and their integration meant our reach was a multiplier, not one at a time. Other key learnings were: 1. Observability is critical to understand diverse use cases and troubleshoot effectively. 2. Future-proofing: Plan from get go on how adoption of future updates by existing customers is painless ("one-way-door decisions"). 3. Dog-fooding : Use your own product to learn as much without having your customer as guinea pig. It's too late if you heard from your customer first, for basic scenarios. 4. Tight feedback Loop: Have an external highly engage-able discoverable forum where customer feedbacks can be seen and responded to by the product owner, from the get-go for a tight feedback loop. We are working on a new offering at Microsoft and these thoughts bubbled up as the team was very particular about how do we ensure the success of the product beyond engineering. Engineers don't want to work on something that may not see the light of the day for reasons beyond their control, and rightfully so. The beauty of working on anything new is also the challenge uncertainty brings in and when we knock the ball off the park, the joy it brings to everyone involved is insurmountable. That is itself worth more than the fear of failure.