>> Hello everyone.
We have got a treat for you.
We have got the wonderful Emma D'Arcy.
She's going to show you how to choose your own adventure.
There's possibly some cats involved and a hub. Stay tuned.
[MUSIC]
>> Hi everyone.
Welcome to Less Code, More Power.
I'm Sarah and I'm joined by my co-host, Dona.
>> Hello.
>> We are joined by our amazing guest Emma D'Arcy,
and you may see a few cats as well.
Emma, we're so stoked to have you on the show today really.
You've got an amazing story in terms of how you
really have been working with
the Dynamics platform and all of that,
and then how you're getting more and
more into the Power Platform now as well.
I really want to talk about the Dunder Mifflin show,
I've got so many things that we can chat about.
But before we do,
please go ahead and can you just
share with the audience who you are,
your passions, what's important for you?
What's going on for you right now?
>> Yeah, sure, thanks. So I'm Emma D'Arcy.
Firstly, thanks so much for having me guys.
I'm really stoked to be here too of my absolute favorite people.
This is really exciting.
I've been in the Dynamic space for
almost 10 years now and that makes me feel so old, it's crazy.
But mostly I've been active in
the community aspect for probably the last year or so.
How I actually got introduced to
the Dynamics community is really fun.
I had a half of the degree in
IT and then I run out of
money and never actually finished my degree,
which I think is actually fun.
So at the time,
I really needed a job.
I was like, "I'll just apply for anything and see what happens."
This job for application specialists came
up and I was not qualified in any shape or form.
I was like, "Look, I'll just give it a go and see what happens."
So I applied fresh,
went for the interview and it went really well.
They gave me this logic test to do and they literally said,
"This is not a trick quiz,
just see how you get on,
just go through the flow, see how you do."
So I went through the logic flow and was like,
"The answer is 42," and they were like,
"Yes, this is amazing. You passed.
Brilliant." On your resume or your CV in Ireland,
a lot of people tend to put their hobbies down.
One of my hobbies is playing a lot of video games.
So at the end of the interview,
the person interviewing me was like,
"So you play video games?"
"Yeah." "How many times in Prestige in Call of Duty?"
I was like "Twice."
He was like, "That's amazing."
We talked a little bit about changing DNS settings on
our Xboxes and that actually got me the job.
They were like, "You know what a DNS is?" I was "Yes".
So they gave me the job on the spot
and I started working with Dynamics AX.
So working with AX4 originally, which is interesting.
Working with a lot of accountants and inventory.
As I got acquaintance with AX,
they started to ask me to look at using,
it was called Dynamics 365 CRM.
It's had like 17 names.
>> It was called so many names.
>> So they asked me to implement a service desk using CRM.
I basically gave it a go.
I did a customization configuration course
and absolutely loved it.
That was nine years ago and here I am,
still plugging away in the customer engagement worlds.
>> That is amazing.
>> This is such a good lesson and do not be gated
by your degree or lack of degree or what you studied,
because humans hire humans.
That's who they hire.
It's who you resonate with,
who you feel like can do the job.
I'm such a big fan of people who've made their own path
in the world just based on their own interests and skills,
rather than "I have these qualifications or I
come from this level of nepotism family,
or I have to have these accreditations."
You've made your own way in the world
through your love of video games.
>> Yes, honestly.
>> Just chasing your curiosities and saying,
"I think I can figure this out."
Then that level of confidence makes your employer feel,
"I think she can figure it out."
>> Exactly.
>> I don't know Call of Duty level Prestige thing even is.
So I would be like,
"Yeah, that sounds complex and hard."
>> Just shows my very dedication to
something I'm passionate about, is that's what it shows.
>> Exactly, and has hand-eye coordination,
which I do not have,
so I appreciate that.
>> Absolutely. Yeah.
>> So cool. So tell us,
what are doing now? What are you working on?
>> So I work for an ISP called ClickDimensions,
they're a marketing solution for the Dynamics 365 platform.
I am a Senior Product Consultant there.
No, not product consultant.
I was a product consultant. I'm a Pre-Sales Engineer there.
I get that confused all the time,
but I've been at Click for
about three and a half years now
and I'm super passionate about what I do.
They basically let me have free range across
the entire Power Platform and led me
to build things to help extend our product,
to help assist our customers.
So that's what I'm doing at the moment.
>> That is amazing.
>> Can you tell us about the harp in the background. Is that harp?
>> It is a harp. Yes. So obviously I'm very
Irish and I live with my sister here in Philadelphia.
She actually plays multiple instruments and this harp
just tends to be in the background of all of
my meetings and I don't play harp,
but people are like, "Do you play harp?"
>> I love that. I love that you're always using
it as a [inaudible] for your meeting.
>> It is. I am extra Irish.
>> This is amazing.
>> [inaudible] but I'm actually Irish we're like, "We know."
>> Exactly.
>> That is so cool.
>> I love that you've done a few roles in ClickDimensions.
But in terms of especially being around for the 8-10 years,
you've seen the platform change considerably.
You're looking at CRM 2011 days to then what is
now the Power Platform and obviously
then Dynamic 365 being a first party app.
How has that influenced your path?
Because I definitely resonate with what
Dona said in terms of I love that you would just like, "Screw it.
I haven't got all the things I need for this job or whatever,
I'm just going to go for it," but also the platform
has changed so much and a lot of people struggle with that.
A lot of people struggle with the change.
Even in a technology industry,
it changes over time and we know it.
But when we're on the wrong side of change, it can be really bad.
How has that impacted you in your career with ClickDimensions?
>> It's really expanded my horizons.
So back in the day, I was only working with
Dynamics Customer Engagement because everything
was so isolation, so siloed.
Now with the introduction of the Power Platform and
the Common Data Service and Power
Automate and Power Virtual Agents and Power BI,
the list goes on and on,
I'm now able to bring in
data from different aspects and actually put
it all together and marry then make
some beautiful applications for my clients.
So things that I couldn't solve even a year ago, two years ago,
I'm now able to do with simply putting
together a Power Automate that might take me 30 minutes.
If it can make somebody's life that much easier or
make a task just happen that much faster, it's just fantastic.
Time is probably our most precious commodity in life
and being able to give that back to
some people, it's just amazing.
>> I love that.
>> That's such a good line where
it's you are not helping customers with tech,
you're helping them reclaim time.
It's the thing you can never buy more of.
>> Exactly.
>> Such a powerful statement, I love that.
So you've got to choose your own adventure situation.
>> Yes. I do.
This is something that I'm actually really excited about.
Myself and a good colleague of mine,
Mary Thompson, came together,
we were working on Power Virtual Agents together and she
is out in South Carolina and has a child and
because we were all in lockdown at the moment,
we were thinking, what can we do to try
and help them get through the day,
help them with this education, all that kind of thing.
We came up with the idea of building a choose
your own adventure story completely using the Power Virtual Agent.
When you use Power Virtual Agent,
everyone's going to see the functionality as more
of a shop assistant or a help boss or something like that.
The fact that you're able to pick
different paths and branch off path and use
conditional logic and store variables
and return images, all that kind of thing,
really made me think that it could be used as more of
a choose your own adventure type tool, and of course,
being a gamer, I really enjoy the aspect of being able to,
what happens if I click on this button,
what happens if I insert this piece of text, that kind of thing.
So we put together a prototype
of a choose your own adventure that we are currently working on.
>> We can't wait to see this.
Let's see this, show us the demo and show us what you've built.
>> Sure. The way we kick off this adventure is we basically
just started off with that standard greeting
or standard trigger phrase.
So I'm just going to say hello to the bot.
The bot's going to respond and be like,
"Hey, are you up for an adventure?"
But it's firstly going to ask you for your name.
So this is an example of where we're taking an input
from the end user and we're going to
use it throughout our actual story.
I'm going to put in Emma, and it's going to say,
"Hey, it's lovely to meet you.
Let's get started."
This particular story is,
because our days are so not normal,
they're not in their traditional routines,
we wanted to simulate what it would be like as an
eight year old or a nine year olds in regular life.
In this case, you're
being told that you can hear your alarm clock,
but your decision here is going to determine
whether or not you're going to get breakfast.
In my case, if I click,
"Get up immediately," it's going to tell me,
I'm smashing the alarm button and now I actually get to choose
breakfast because I got up immediately
instead of waiting later on,
which mean that I wouldn't be able to get breakfast.
In my case, I'm Irish,
I don't understand the obsession with waffle,
so I'm definitely going to make a cereal.
To bring in a bit of an educational aspect of this as well,
we decided to incorporate some standard virtual homework.
A lot of kids were studying from home, that kind of thing.
So we take a look at these different selections that we have,
we have Math or ELA.
If I pick the Math option,
it's going to be like math is super fun,
but it's also going to return this really cool image that
allows the child to actually click and enlarge,
to actually take a look at
their mathematical homework that they
can then go ahead and complete.
That was done using
Power Automate just to pull out an image from Azure Blob,
which is really, really simple but really effective.
Once we've completed our math homework,
we then have the decision to say,
do we want to do more if you're a bit of
an overachiever or if you're
like me and you want to slack off a bit,
we can pick the "No more homework" option.
Once the homework is done, this is
where the adventure get started.
You can decide, do you want to stay
indoors or do you want to go outdoors.
In my example here, I'm probably going to pick
the outdoor because we've been cooped up for so long.
I want to get outside for a bit.
It's going to say, do you want to go to your friend's house?
Do you want to go to a pond?
Our plan is to eventually add even more options to this tool,
but we've kept it pretty simple for
now to flesh out the proof of concept.
If we go to our friends house,
there's actually a really nice little bit of
conditional logic in here that decides,
did you get up on time to have breakfast?
If you had breakfast,
tell your friend what did
you have for breakfast and display that back.
So it's nice little bit of just taking those variables in.
If we decide to place some Xbox,
it'll then move on to that little topic,
which actually relates into the indoor activities too and
it allows us to then decide
what kind of games do we want to play on Xbox.
If we pick the Forza option,
we can either race with our friends or work on our car.
If we work in our car, it actually displaces
back the different things that we worked on our car that day.
Then when we get to the end of the adventure,
it's really cool because it will be like,
what did you do today?
You get to tell your mom
exactly what you did for the entire day and relay
the whole entire adventure by starting it
again or just completing it here by clicking on the end.
We intend on going a lot further with this by implementing
methods of gathering all the different variables
that you've selected, not the end.
Being able to build out this entire adventure story in
a Word document that the child can
then print out and go to their parent like,
"Hey, look at this really cool adventure that I built or
this really cool adventure that I went on and
it was all digital and all indoors."
So yeah, that's a very short example
of the choose your own adventure pop
that we're currently working on.
>> This is so cool. I love this.
Especially from my kids perspective, the fact that they can go.
Do you know what my favorite part was the whole,
I mean, I love homework.
I'm a bit weird like that I guess.
I will definitely pick,
by the way, the other homework, the extra homework.
I love that you're using Azure Blob and I'm bringing that in,
like from an extensibility perspective.
You can actually really structure
this and bring even more homework in.
I loved it, you're making it fun,
but you're actually make it educational
as well without them really knowing it.
>> Yeah.
There's just so many different possibilities for those tools.
This is like just one very simple example
and our plan going forward is actually
to reach out to a lot more children and
actually teach them how to build their own bots.
So there's a lot of work going around with
Power Apps and teaching kids how to build your own Power Apps.
But teaching a child how to build a PVA or Power Virtual Agent and
getting them to be creative and build
their own story is something I'm really excited about.
>> What I love about that is first of all,
that is the most fun PVA I've ever seen,
and I've seen maybe like 2,000 PVAs,
but by far the most fun.
The most fun PVA award goes to you and Mary.
But second, kids will love to build their
own because they had built-in interaction right there.
It's not like go find someone to use my app.
I can just talk to this machine and have so much fun with it
and have this bot sound as
funny or as ridiculous as I want it to be.
Yes, that is fantastic. I love that so much.
>> I'm working on a more adult version
where it will allow you to pick your own,
it's going to recommend a type of beer to you
depending on your flavors and choices.
I only like very specific kinds of beers.
This is our new cocktail.
PVA can be used like, do you like white?
Do you like multi? Do you like sweet?
Being able to then like,
here is a selection of beers so you could try.
We can implement that even in a business scenario.
If you're like a wine and beer store for example,
it would be a really great way of recommending products to people.
>> That is the most Irish software engineer solution.
[inaudible] I love that.
>> A lot of people are doing Friday evening sessions as well.
From an employee perspective,
it's like a networking session and trying to get,
from a human perspective,
trying to get to know their colleagues and stuff like that,
especially from a mental health perspective and all that stuff.
This, again, could be used in that scenario as well.
>> Yeah, definitely.
>> We never let our guests go without assigning
homework to our lovely viewers. So what you got?
>> For me this week, I've had a couple of things on my mind.
Since we've all been in this quarantine position right now,
I think and you actually lead into this really nicely,
Sarah, mental health is such an important thing.
There's been a lot going on in the world around us lately
and my homework for everyone is to check in with your friends,
check in with your community members,
and just make sure they're doing okay.
For me personally this week,
I've actually had quite a lot of
anxiety and I've been quite overwhelmed.
But I've had people check in with me,
go through things with me one by one and just
really help me reset and get back in that same mindset.
So that's my homework, is to check in with your friends,
check in with your family members,
check in with your communities, your colleagues,
just make sure everyone's doing okay because you won't
actually realize how much of an impact that
can happen to someone until you just reach out and say,
"Hey, it's really nice."
>> There's a great PVA idea right there.
Make a PVA to check in with people
and send the link to a bunch of people in your life,
and just keep an eye on what your people are saying,
because you can't track analytics in the back.
Often it's easier for a person to tell
a bot that they're not okay than to tell a person.
>> Exactly.
>> Because I think that would be amazing.
Take Emma's homework, take what Emma has done,
and choose your mental health status or state.
That would be amazing.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Emma, for being here with us today,
and lovely viewers, if you haven't tried Power Virtual Agent,
oh my god, you're not listening to us.
>> But where have you been?
>> Come on, you're like
the last person on the planet now who's never tried PVAs.
Eight-year-old kids are building PVAs,
you need to build the first PVA.
Definitely go to Power Virtual Agent, look it up.
It auto generates a bot for
you and you just start modifying your existing one.
Thank you so much, Emma, for being here with us.
>> You're welcome.
>> Thank you, till next time. Less Code.
>> More Power.