Speaker

Nick Doelman

Nick Doelman

Power Platform specialist, trainer, podcaster, and coach

Ottawa, Canada

Nick Doelman is an independent Power Platform specialist, trainer and coach. Nick delivers presentations, workshops and collaborates on Power Platform and Dynamics 365 projects worldwide. From 2021 to 2023, Nick worked as a Senior Content Developer at Microsoft where he worked on skilling content for Power Pages, Power Automate, and other parts of the Power Platform.
Nick has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT).
Nick is a cohost on the Power Platform BOOST podcast as well as one of the organizers of the Canadian Power Platform Summit. Nick is also a competitive Powerlifter and is a member of Team Canada competing at various international events.

Awards

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Power Platform
  • Power Apps
  • Power Apps Portals
  • Power Automate
  • Training
  • MCT
  • MVP
  • ALM
  • DevOps

Introduction to Power Pages

Introducing Microsoft Power Pages, a low-code web application development platform. This session will demonstrate how Power Pages can be leveraged to create websites that enable external users to securely read, add, and update information directly within Microsoft Dataverse.

Crash Course in Power Pages!

Jump into creating web applications with Power Pages! New features and capabilities (design studio, templates, dev tools) have been added to Power Apps portals foundation, making web application development much more accessible to Power Platform makers and developers. Power Pages allows makers to build Microsoft Dataverse-powered web and mobile applications for external users. This session will dive into the new features and provide an entertaining tutorial on how to quickly and successfully build a Power Page site!

Power Pages advanced workshop

This workshop goes beyond the introductory "Power Pages in a day" and is a rapid ramp up for app makers, developers, and consultants who want to learn how to build powerful, data driven web applications that go beyond the basic maker features of Power Pages.

Agenda:
- Advanced extension techniques of building custom web templates and components.
- Detailed tutorials on how to harness the power of Liquid, JavaScript, CSS, and the Web API to create truly powerful and amazing web applications.
- Working examples of how to extend Power Pages with Power Automate, Power BI, and other technologies and services.
- How to plan a development strategy and best practices in using application lifecycle management (ALM) to deploy websites to test and production environments.
- How to best utilize copilots and AI to speed up development without getting caught up in the hype.

This class will dive into Power Pages with lectures, discussions, and hands-on labs to build a working data driven web application. The latest updates, features and roadmap items are incorporated into this workshop.

Using Jamstack and Microsoft Dataverse

What is Jamstack? JavaScript, APIs and Markup. It is a technique to take data from an application, display it as a static web page but allow interaction using JavaScript and existing APIs. In this session, follow along as we live build an application that reads data from Microsoft Dataverse using Power Automate and creates a web page on an Azure Static site. Send info back to Dataverse by using JavaScript to call a Power Automate API endpoint. All in 50 minutes!

You don't need Dynamics CRM. You need a Power App!

I have been building unique line of business applications for years using Dynamics CRM as the platform. It's a little known fact that the technology used for Dynamics CRM and configuration is the foundation for the Common Data Service and model-driven Power Apps. The benefit today? You don't need get expensive Dynamics 365 licenses if your organization doesn't need them, but you can get all the same features and functionalities of the core Dynamics CRM app by building model-driven Power Apps on the Common Data Service (for a fraction of Dynamics 365 licensing costs). Added benefit is being able to extend those apps using Power Automate, Canvas-apps and other Power Platform technologies. Attend this session to learn how you can implement a "CRM" that fits your organization's needs!

Dataverse Data modeling: Don't build that app just yet!

I get it. You have an awesome idea for an app and want to dive in. The tools provided by the Power Platform just make it soooo easy for makers to dive and start building powerful business applications.

But wait, a bit of pre-planning might save hours of refactoring and dealing with technical debt down the road.

Planning and designing your data model is a crucial early step and investing the time early will result in successful applications.

This session goes through the various aspects in properly designing a data model.

Strategies for identifying objects, attributes and relationships of real-world concepts.

Considerations for managing 100s, 1000s or maybe even millions of records?

How is the data being added, maintained, archived?

What kind of app is this going to be? A Power App, Power Pages site, custom? What about offline capabilities?

What kind of crazy automation requirements will your app need? Can Power Automate handle your crazy data model?

Join this session for an entertaining tutorial and maybe a few horror stories that go beyond drawing boxes and lines on a whiteboard.

I will need a white board to draw boxes and lines. (Just kidding).

Crash course in Power Platform pipelines!

Setting up application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities in Power Platform projects has traditionally been both time consuming and complicated. While important, ALM has mostly been applied to larger enterprise projects.

The new Power Platform pipelines feature provides an easy to setup and easy to follow process for admins and makers to follow healthy ALM practices for projects, no matter how small or simple.

This session walks through the process of setting up Power Platform pipelines and demonstrating how easy it is to create and manage a Power Platform solution and deploy it from dev to test, and then to production.

Explore the Microsoft Dataverse

The Microsoft Dataverse (formerly known as the Common Data Service) is a powerful feature of the Power Platform that is more than just a data store option. This session demystifies what the Dataverse actually is and how it works. Learn how Dataverse evolved from its roots in Dynamics CRM to a central pillar in the Power Platform. See how using Dataverse provides security, logic, data, storage and integration features to your Power Platform applications (including Dynamics 365!)

Developers guide to Power Pages

Microsoft Power Pages, formerly known as Power Apps portals, provide a platform for makers to create low-code, no-code externally facing web applications based on Microsoft Dataverse. The available authoring tools provide the ability to achieve a lot, however, in every project there are also special requirements that require you - the pro-developer to get involved and save the day. This session outlines the technology available to Power Pages developers such as Liquid templates, JavaScript, portal Web API, code components and more with real-world examples of working code.

The session also dives into tools such as the Power Platform CLI, VS Code and other community tools to ensure a developer is successful and productive.

Prepare to crack open some code and dive into building advanced Power Pages sites and applications!

Mastermind: Dynamics 365 or Power Apps?

I have been building unique line of business applications for years using Dynamics CRM as the platform (xRM applications). The foundation used to build Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps has evolved into Dataverse and model-driven Power Apps. The benefit today? You might not need expensive Dynamics 365 licenses if your organization doesn't need them (yet), but you can get all the same features and functionalities of the core Dynamics 365 CE apps by building model-driven Power Apps on Dataverse (for a fraction of Dynamics 365 licensing costs). Added benefit is being able to extend those apps using Power Automate, Canvas-apps, Power Pages and other Power Platform technologies.

Presentation:
Evolution of the Power Platform
Benefit of building business apps on the Power Platform

Discussion:
Compliance Issues with Power Apps
Business Apps: Buy, build, or customize?
Start with Dynamics 365 or start with Power Apps?
Microsoft first party apps, accelerators, and industry solutions -> benefits?
Migrating from a Power App to Dynamics 365

Demo (optional)
Build a simple CRM app using the Power Platform

Powering up Power Pages with advanced techniques and AI

You’ve used your low-code super powers and built a functional website with Power Pages, but now you need to take it to the next level. Join this session to learn how your fusion team can build advanced Power Page capabilities using Liquid, JavaScript, CSS and the Web API along with the various AI and copilot tools. You will be amazed of what Power Pages is truly capable of and prepare to amaze your customers!

The good, the bad, and the ugly: Power Platform Copilots

You’ve heard the hype, and you’ve fired up the copilot to help build your next amazing application in the Power Platform only to be left with an awkward pile of digital $#&%. Microsoft said this was going to be game changing, what am I missing?

AI technology is advancing and it’s an important tool to help us rapidly innovate and develop new powerful applications and solutions. However, knowing how best to use these tools is equally crucial for success.

This session will focus on where AI and copilots are truly helpful, how they can help with the tedious tasks, where you need to apply your professional expertise and equally important of where they could result in you going down the wrong rabbit hole spinning your wheels. We'll look at the specific copilots in Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, as well ChatGPT, Open AI and other other tools.

Let’s have an honest and thoughtful conversation about the good, the bad and the ugly of AI tools in the Power Platform.

All new an evolving content! :)

Deep dive into Power Pages ALM

You've built your amazing Power Pages website in your development environment, but what is the best way to move it to your test and production environments, as well as checking in and managing source control?

This session dives into best practices, tips, lessons learned and techniques for applying ALM (application lifecycle management) to your Power Pages projects.

Learn about:
- What makes Power Pages configuration unique
- Power Platform pipelines
- Azure Dev Ops
- Github actions.
- Source control

Ramp up your Power Pages ALM skills in this entertaining and informative session!

Live build a Power Platform solution

This session goes through the entire process of building a simple event management and registration app… in 45-50 minutes.
We’ll start taking the requirements and building a data model in Dataverse. From there we’ll create some simple forms and views and create a model-driven Power App. Next we’ll spin up a Power Pages website and create a registration form. How about some reminders? Using Power Automate we’ll create a flow that sends out an email confirmation to the attendee and a message to the teams channel for staff.
Finally we’ll create a canvas Power App to allow staff to check in attendees on their mobile devices.

This session will show how you can build a powerful working business application quickly using components of the Power Platform.

Power Pages Jump start workshop

The Power Pages jump start workshop ramps up Power Platform/Dynamics 365 solution architects, functional consultants and developers on how to set up, configure and administer a data driven website using Power Pages.

Mixed with presentations and hands-on labs, you will provision a website and begin to build an actual working website project covering key concepts along the way.

Learners will add content and see how to securely expose and interact with data from Microsoft Dataverse/Dynamics 365. Learners will also see how to extend basic portal functionality to address a unique line of business requirements and corporate branding.

After the workshop, the attendee should be able to confidently implement and deliver a Power Pages project.

Prerequisites
Learners should be comfortable configuring and customizing Model-driven Power Apps/Dataverse or Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and understand Power Platform Dataverse concepts such as tables, forms, views, columns and flows. A learner does not need to be a developer or web designer, but some basic familiarity with HTML, CSS and JavaScript would be beneficial.

Learners completely new to the Power Platform should consider the beginner "Power Pages in a day" content available from Microsoft.

Nick Doelman

Power Platform specialist, trainer, podcaster, and coach

Ottawa, Canada