>> Hey, welcome to the Powerful Dev show where we talk all
about Code First Integrations with the Power Platform.
I'm your host, April Dunnam.
I'm a Power Platform Developer Advocate here at Microsoft.
With me today we have a great guest, Bryant Boyer.
Hey, Bryant, how are you doing?
>> Hey, great. Happy to be with you April.
>> Bryant, your Twitter handle there is @TheFlowHawk.
I need to know more about this,
where did you get that name?
>> It's a long story, but I first started out with Power Platform
with Power Automate which way back then was Microsoft Flow.
Obviously the hairstyle little bit plays into it.
But the flow hawk came together.
Some friends started calling me that.
I have a genetic disorder with the FH gene, which is crazy.
For me it was like FH flow Hawk is a perfect match.
>> Wow, cool.
That's one of the most interesting Twitter
handles that I've heard about for sure.
You're a bit Slalom, one of Microsoft partners.
Tell us a little bit about what you do there and what
your experience with Power Platform has been?
>> Yeah, for sure. I'm a Power Platform consultant at Slalom.
I've been with Slalom for about a year and a half,
but way prior before that,
probably four years ago was when I met
the Power Platform and I came from the citizen developer mindset,
just somebody in the business trying to get their work done.
But for me, it really all
turned on when I had the CIO come up to me and
say that he needed
a resource scheduling application
to be rolled out enterprise wide in three days.
He had a whole Dev team,
but he didn't want to divert resources
and get them out of the focus they were in.
Waned on me as a Citizen developer and I used
the Power Platform to make that
happened with Power Apps and Power Automate.
That changed my mindset and brought me into more of
a Power Platform focused career, honestly.
At Slalom now I help
Microsoft's customers tackle the biggest problems
that they're facing today.
>> Pretty cool. I hear you're going to be talking
about Power Apps portals today.
Can you give us a little bit more insight
in what you have to show for us?
>> Yeah, for sure. When it comes to Power Apps portals,
I first heard of portals when they were
dynamics portals from Dynamics 365.
But they're just another one of the apps
within the Power Apps Suite.
You've got Canvas Apps model,
driven apps and portals.
Portals are really meant for external use.
That's the key when you're trying to think of
which app to use when it comes to portals is,
do you need external people to
access your applications in your data?
We've got a bunch of data stored in Dataverse.
How do I surface it and give it to our customers to interact,
see their accounts, and perform actions on that data?
We've got these portals and we
need to secure the authentication portion of it.
How do users create their accounts and log in and
see the data that's right for them?
That's where we lean on Azure B2C as
the more secure method to make that authentication happen.
As we go through portals,
there's a lot of different providers you can use,
and Azure B2C is one of the more secure ones that we can use.
>> Yeah, totally. That's an important distinguishment there.
A lot of people ask me, ''What's the difference?
When would I use a Canvas App,
a Model-driven app, or a portal? ''
Portals, as you said,
a really great fetch for
anonymous or external phasing applications
that you need to build on the Power Platform.
With Azure B2C, can you try a little bit more,
what some of the benefits of using
that in portals for authentication?
>> Yeah, for sure. Out of the box,
portals generally uses the local sign-in
and that will store all your users
credentials right in the Dataverse.
Obviously it will hash or obscure the password.
But sometimes security compliance,
all of that does not allow you
to store that stuff within the Dataverse.
It's going to be generally more
secured to put that into place like Azure.
As well as if you want to leverage
your authentication for more than a Power Apps portal.
We allow users to come in and register within Azure B2C.
We can connect our Azure B2C to any of
our custom applications within our organization
or give access to APIs or all of that.
Azure B2C is also highly flexible when it comes
to what that authentication experience can be like,
what you can capture during it,
as well as what providers you can leverage,
a Facebook logins, Twitter login, Google, Microsoft.
It's got a lot of different capabilities and we'd like to
link right into the other Azure services as well,
including MFA or things like that to secure the portal.
>> It seems like a more holistic in
seamless experience for sure are using Azure B2C.
I think you've convinced me on that to use
that in the portals that I'm building for sure.
That sounds really exciting,
super interested to see a demo. You've demo of this to show?
>> Absolutely. Let me show you what I'm talking about.
Here I'm in the Power Apps Maker portal,
make.powerapps.com, and I have here my Flow Hawk customer portal.
This is the starter portal.
You can see it here, just the out of the box starter portal.
When it comes to the authentication piece,
if you go in and to the settings and authentication settings,
this is where you'll continue all of that authentication piece.
It's got a lot of different providers that are shown here and
you can add many by yourself as well.
Azure B2C is going to be listed and you can
set it up by clicking this and hitting edit configuration.
I did want to point out the star
and this whole process takes a super long time.
I have recorded a video,
thrown it up on YouTube for anyone to see,
start to finish how to set this thing up.
But if you do it through the Maker portal,
you have these different fields and it may be
confusing what to put where.
I do recommend using make.preview.powerapps.com,
which has in it,
a wizard like experience for this B2C connection.
If I similarly go to settings, authentication settings,
if I want to configure the Azure B2C piece,
here in the preview,
it will walk me through an entire wizard experience.
It's going to look the same from here but it'll step-by-step take
you through and it'll actually create
all of the Azure services for you.
Somebody coming from a Citizen Developer mindset,
Azure was a scary word for me.
This can take you-all the way into the Azure,
create the services for you without
even stepping foot in there as long as
you have the right access and permissions in there.
But once you do all that,
you are on the portal, come to sign in,
you've got the experience that you would normally see,
which is that local sign-in,
and here what you're seeing is instead of the local
sign-in we're seeing the Azure B2C experience.
I can set up a company logo,
I can change the background.
I have the ability to change what these words
are in a low code way.
Then it can lead me all the way through the process,
and during this process,
these are called User Flows,
I can capture information such as
if I want the user to, during registration,
give me the name of a company
and then in the background I can spin
up their account and everything like that for them.
I can also facilitate
password resets and do this all with MFA included,
all without writing a single line of code.
You can also leverage
all coding languages in here and do a custom HTML page,
do JSON and CSS as well.
It does have that flexibility to it.
From somebody who's low-code,
no-code, this is the perfect way.
>> Even for Pro Developers,
Canvas developers, that's a huge time-saver,
not having to worry about custom coding on,
just being able to plug it right in there and have it
work easily is a huge time savings for sure.
>> Absolutely. In the toggles that you'll see within Azure,
here's my Azure B2C tenant.
If I come to the User Flows,
I can have any number of
these User Flows and they're made right out of the box.
If I open up the sign-up and sign-in
User Flow that I have currently connected to the portal.
It does give me a lot of the flexibility to support languages.
I can go to languages and in the properties,
here's where I can configure my MFA to be
conditional or always on or even do e-mail or SMS.
I can choose all of that as well as when do
these tokens expire for the portal.
It actually brings a lot more features to
authentication in the portal and when that session should expire,
then you'd had previously as well.
>> Very well. That's super
important for the applications we're building to make sure that
they're secure and having MFA turned on for the utmost security.
It's super cool to see how easy it is to
set that up in just few clicks and you're done.
>> Yeah, for sure. This just blew my mind that how
simple it is to integrate Azure B2C in PowerPoint.
>> Nice. This is fantastic. Anything else?
You mentioned earlier that you had
a video that walk through the whole process.
You have any other links or how can people go to watch
even more on how to integrate
Azure B2C and perhaps portals and all that?
>> Yeah, definitely. I don't
have the most robust YouTube channel,
but I figured if I went through this and it
was a learning experience for me,
others might appreciate it as well.
I've got some videos up there and I'll give the link to you.
April, I think you can put it in the notes or something there.
You can also search @TheFlowHawk on Twitter,
follow me there and I'm posting stuff
about this stuff. I'm always happy to help.
When I first got started, I tagged April.
You probably don't even remember but four years ago,
I was tagging you in every
one of my questions and you were helping me out.
I'm happy to do the
same for others who are starting their journey.
>> Yeah, I remember.
I've been following you on Twitter for awhile too,
so that's cool to see you start getting into
portals and all this
great stuff and being able to have you on the show.
Thanks for coming and sharing your story.
This has been a great episode.
Thanks everyone for watching and see you
in the next episode of Powerful Devs.
>> Thanks April.
>> Thanks.