[MUSIC]
>> Hi, everyone, and welcome.
My name is Julie Strauss.
I'm the Partner PM Director for
the Power Platform developer and admin experiences.
I'm here with Justin Graham.
He's a partner for local products for the Power Platform.
>> Thanks, Julie, it's really great to be here.
>> The opportunity to help you,
the pro-developer community realize the opportunities
this platform has to offer is really exciting to us.
There's so much potential here,
needless to say, we're both thrilled to be here.
Let's dig in. Every company
is or has to become a software company.
That was a conversation that started a few years back.
But demand is accelerating,
in particular now, that we are living
in a remote everything world.
Whether you're in retail, health care,
financial services, as some examples,
you have to think about how you engage your customers,
not only through your core product offerings
but also how you digitalize your services.
Many companies have realized that they've had
to completely rethink the engagement model.
You have to become a software company to be competitive.
I hope you got the opportunity to listen into
Charles Lamanna's session where he was
covering this topic in more depth.
How Microsoft allows you to
use the various building blocks
of the Microsoft Cloud to
accelerate the software journey.
In this session, we'll dig a little deeper in
particular around the Power Platform.
But let's tease the problem apart for
a bit first to get grounded on
why low-code and
the Power Platform is such a key ingredient,
and why we believe Microsoft is so well
positioned to allow you to
accelerate your progress in this space.
Low-code is important because
the so-called app gap challenge is real.
I'm sure every single one of you
is feeling that pressure already today.
There is an increasing demand for
driving digital product creation faster.
Over the next five years,
more than 500 million apps and services will be created.
The demand for mobile applications is greater than
ever, growing five times faster
than IT departments can deliver.
Where this likely hits home for all of you,
is that 86 percent of organizations,
according to Forbes.com,
struggled to hire the right technical talent.
That developer shortage is demonstrated here by Ncube,
There's no line of
sight to address this challenge.
The Delta between new job openings
and the college graduates is simply too big.
What do you do? You look to alternative approaches.
We at Microsoft believe there are
two core strategies you can employ to gain headroom.
One, you increase the impact and
the velocity of apps and
components written by professional developers.
Two, you create developers from
non-developer cohorts within your company.
These two approaches come together to
form what we're calling Fusion Teams.
A Fusion Team is where you have
multidisciplinary teams of software engineers,
IT developers, pro-developers, and
citizen developers come together delivering apps faster.
You, as the pro developers,
have the opportunity to take
the lead to help your organization scale,
turning everyone into a developer with low-code.
You empower the citizen developers
so you all can deliver apps faster.
That was the second part of the equation.
Turning to the first part of the equation,
the key to increase the impact
of apps and components written by
professional developers is to be found
in using the full Microsoft Cloud.
Because of how the Microsoft Cloud is put together,
we have a common security, identity,
and governance platform in Azure.
We have the GitHub and
the Visual Studio family of
products to help you build and
the Power Platform Dynamics and industry
cloud to not only further customize your SaaS apps,
but also to seamlessly provide you app automation and
industry-specific building blocks that
allows you to go faster.
Why build an industry solution from
scratch if you can pick prebuilt components?
Why spent month building a UI or automate
business process if you can assemble one in
minutes or hours using the Power Platform,
focus your skills where unique IP is required instead.
That is what is so unique to the Microsoft Cloud.
Assuming the Power Platform is
relatively new to many of you.
Let's do a quick overview here
before I hand over to Justin for a demo.
If you look at the Power Platform,
we are talking about four core products.
First, we have Power BI,
which is our local approach to analyze,
explore, and visualize your enterprise data,
think dashboarding and reporting.
Then we have Power Apps,
which is our low-code approach to
building web and mobile applications.
Power Automate is for delivering automation,
whether that is workflow or robotic process automation.
Last but not least,
we have Power Virtual Agents.
This is our low-code approach
to building chatbots, again,
elevated to an experience where you don't need to have
a computer science degree to built solutions.
Underpinning all of these services, we have AI,
which is infused into the platform experiences.
We also have more than 450 built-in data connectors,
which is key to our conversation today,
so more on these later.
Then finally, we have Dataverse.
Dataverse represents the physical data storage of
the Power Platform as well as
the business logic that makes
the platform so approachable.
An example of this is
the common data space schema
that we ship out-of-the-box with Dataverse,
which offers predefined schemas for
standard business entities at tables.
This will not only greatly reduce
your effort to define and built your database schema
but also effortlessly drive schema consistency
across all business apps across your entire organization.
This will eliminate tedious data mapping exercises later.
In essence, the Power Platform
really lets you accelerate
your digital transformation journey,
allowing you to save time using
pre-built standard reusable component.
With that, I think it's time for a demo.
Justin, what do you think?
>> Absolutely, Julie, and thank you.
What you described is really
a set of things we want to help customers solve.
Let's take a look at how Finastra is thinking
of solving this with the Microsoft Cloud.
Finastra is working to provide
loan disbursement apps to their loan managers.
We will see how their professional developers and
citizen developers are working together using Power Apps,
Azure, and Visual Studio.
Let's now look at the loan disbursement apps Independent
Publisher connector developed by
Finastra professional developers.
This is a great example of how
the Power Platform empowers Fusion Teams
consisting of pro and citizen developers
to seamlessly and effectively work together.
Here, you see the Independent Publisher connector
in the Power App Studio,
which starts as a custom connector.
If I go to the Power Apps Canvas,
you can see here how
the Independent Publisher connector is
connected to the "OK" button
for the loan deferment option on the app's frontend.
This independent publisher connector is of
course crucial since it sends a message
back to an API via Azure API Management to update
Finastra's on-prem legacy systems
with the latest loan batch data.
The Independent Publisher connector is
a special Azure API Management connector
and directly exported from Azure API Management.
The connector, based off a custom
created in Visual Studio API
requiring ASP.NET Core Web API project, .NET5,
or as a function.
With the newest version of Visual Studio,
you can import functions into API management.
Thanks to the new open API output support we've
introduced for functions developers using .NET.
Here you can see the custom API swagger code open,
which documents my API
and helps with discovery of the interface.
After looking through my code,
I am ready to publish to Azure
without ever having to leave Visual Studio.
I can import the APIs using
either web API or functions
projects into API management at publish time.
By switching to the publishing dialogue
and clicking "New",
you can see I have many options
of where to target my app,
such as a Docker-compatible
container registry like Docker Hub.
In this instance, I'm going to publish to Azure,
then specifically to Azure App Service.
After choosing my specific target,
I then choose App Service and API Management Resources.
In this case, my team has
already created the resources I need.
Thanks, team, under the Finastra folder,
so I'll use those.
Now, Visual Studio has identified that my project is
an API project which can be
ingested and published to Azure API Management.
My team has already created the API to publish against.
Now, I can deploy directly from
Visual Studio to my Azure resources.
Or even better, I can do something which is a setup of
CI/CD workflow using GitHub Actions
that allows continuous
deployment as we work on our API.
Then Visual Studio creates a workflow for me with
all the necessary secrets to deploy to
Azure App Service and Azure API Management.
I can even see the workflow in my GitHub repository here.
Once the workflow is complete,
I see the API in Azure API Management.
I can get an overall view of
the API and connect it to other services.
I can even test the API in
the test tab by clicking
"Send" at the bottom of the screen.
Once complete, you can see the
200 OK in the HTTP response.
Further, I can export
the API to Power Apps and Power Automate by
clicking the "Three-dot" menu on My Disbursement
Service API and selecting "Export",
and clicking the "Power Apps and Power Automate" button.
Now this API is exposed through
an Independent Publisher connector
to the citizen developers at Finastra.
This is an amazing collaboration
for a Fusion Team and shows
the unique capability of the Power Platform to
seamlessly combine the skill sets of all developers.
To round out an exceptional end to
end loan processing experience,
Finastra is also thinking of
using the Loan Manager app in Teams.
Now, that we have seen how Finastra is using
the Microsoft Cloud to help provide
great experiences to their users,
let's break that down
and see how they were able to do this.
The Microsoft Cloud provides
a great combination of tools for professional developers,
such as Visual Studio, GitHub, and Azure.
We've talked about how professional developers
must increase
the impact of their work to be
used by more citizen developers easier.
Being able to publish an API directly from
Visual Studio to Azure through
GitHub is a powerful set of tools.
The combination of Azure API Management and
the Power Platform is
the glue that allows that increase in impact.
Once the API is available in Azure API Management,
it can be one-click published to
the Power Platform as a custom connector,
then made into
an Independent Publisher connector with little effort.
Let's get into that now.
Independent Publisher connectors is
a new feature we're announcing here at Build,
which allows any developer to
collaborate on a connector and make it
available to all Power Platform users
through our marketplace of
connectors backed by Microsoft.
This is another tool allowing an increase in impact,
given it can be collaborated on by
many and used by anyone.
Let's take a look at how getting one built works.
The first step is to build a custom connector,
like you would anyway,
which can come from being
a published API through Azure API Management.
Once that custom connector is built,
then the owner can submit it to
the GitHub repo for validation by Microsoft.
We will perform some checks to make sure
the connector will work within the Power Platform.
Once those checks are complete,
Microsoft will release it to
production for anyone to use.
Once the connector is live,
you can invite others to collaborate on updates to
that connector alongside you through the GitHub repo,
like you normally would on any project in GitHub.
You can find more information at
these links on how to get
started with Independent Publisher connectors.
Now that those connectors are published,
there was another step to be taken to
ensure maximum usage and impact by citizen developers.
Templates take connectors one step further towards
the use case of users by providing workflows,
tying two, or more connectors together.
There was a library for over
2,000 templates for people to use in Power Automate,
to help automate their tasks and increase their focus on
the most strategic and important projects
which require human creativity.
Once templates are created,
you can now begin to embed
those templates into any app and
experience you create through
Power Automate widgets and embedding.
You can learn more at the links
here on how to get started with that.
Back to you, Julie.
>> Thank you, Justin that was fabulous.
With that, we are almost at the end.
To summarize, you have now seen how you can
build no-code SaaS applications using the Power Platform,
but also how you through one Microsoft Cloud
can leverage not only the pre-built components of
the platform but also the
building blocks from the industry
cloud to extend your Azure SaaS apps and services.
Regardless of your current approach
to meeting customer demands,
you can become a software company.
Thank you Justin. Thank you-all.
>> Enjoy Build everybody.