Public side well that went away right and so my in my mind i was like well what is microsoft's answer to taking that away is there something else coming and then powerapps portals came out um it was great but i i think it would require a little bit of extra tlc to make it work um but when i saw the power apps power pages come in i think that is the ultimate answer but um you know we'll let the the the audience decide that uh but that was my whole story is that you know it all kind of came up to this point from my.
Perspective which is why i'm really excited about that because now we finally have a good answer to that question but that's my story absolutely and i think looking at the comments i think there's a lot of excitement to learn about this i think we've probably we've got the best numbers on the show so far we're already at 150 plus and growing so uh thank you everyone i see a lot of folks joining in from all over the world nigeria india it's like 11 30 out there almost midnight so thank you thank you.
Everyone who who've joined us we really appreciate you all being here on the show now uh dan and i started with power pages what is this yeah we may not know everything about it it's brand new but we do know someone who knows everything about it and and works day in day out uh on that specific uh product so without wasting any time let's uh call the man on the show the person whom we all are looking forward to which is.
Which is and i'll let dan introduce him oh well so the man of the hour is and drum roll piece it is delete saying i mean that is the principal product manager of the uh the power pages um and you know who better to explain to us everything about this then i think i'm gonna hashtag him mr power pages maybe i don't know we'll see how that flows we'll see how that flows but uh the good time for resign me to shut up and delete you know take it the floor is.
Working on this for almost like six seven years now um like i kind of started in microsoft back in like dynamic crm 2011 days that's when that was my first job out of the college and started as a pm in dynamics customer service team worked on several things uh refresh of ui in 2013 which was pretty big 2015 we totally revamped it made it dynamics 365. that's when i actually started working.
On portals that's when um we had acquired adx studio and essentially uh launched it as an online service back in 2016. uh where our name was portal capabilities for microsoft dynamics crm online 2011. so very very little short name so uh since then i think it has been like a long long journey we moved uh to power apps portals uh became like an app type and powerapps um so i've seen tremendous growth in last.
Couple of years especially during covet time we realized that this could be a very very easy tool for governments across the world for organizations across the world to be able to connect with their customers to be able to connect with their citizens and that was the need of the art because pretty much all physical interaction is seized you have to go digital you have to go online and you have to do it very very fast because requirements are changing like almost every day.
So that's where uh local noko tools like kind of uh made their day like they made their presence felt and powerapps portals was uh getting tremendous like visibility at that point of time in usage so we realized that hey this is this is a very very important part of the whole digital transformation story uh and as you rightly said uh once sharepoint had left the space microsoft had like a huge blank space there right like how do you you can do everything in collaboration.
You can really make your uh employee life simpler by using power apps and by using sharepoint and by using all of m365 but anytime you have to go and connect with your customer you have to start from scratch like you have to go ahead you have to go as your app services you have to go azure static web apps so you have to start from scratch there was nothing accelerating it so that's where we hope like we are able to make a difference with the power pages and we are able to allow uh people to be able to.
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Like put their ideas to fruition and like take it all like live it right over it and all in like a simple rapid manner
So that's that's like the whole aim of the product got it no thanks thanks for that that history right because that's some of the things which we don't really get on the microsoft documents we get we get to get straight that hand from you so they leave the floor is yours you know go ahead and walk us through this is new to all of us plus our audience um and you know take it away.Awesome uh and i'm gonna do a very quick presentation of uh just talking about it what this whole thing is and then we'll uh we'll try to build something uh i think that's the most important part reza has reminded me like 50 times that if you don't build something that we are never going to invite you back so we'll try to go and build uh like a site on the show and something which is uh which is actually a real world problem i'm trying to solve um like as we have launched like this week so with that um.
Let me quickly share my screen and see that everything starts working [Music] all right so the leap is presenting on dynamic portal slash power platform portal slash powerapps portal slash microsoft pages let's go yeah exactly so what we're going to be talking about is power pages today um and like just to give everyone an.
Overview if you uh pretty much have heard the term first time power pages is uh the newest member of our platform family so we used to have like four things before powerapps power bi automate and power virtual agent solving various critical problems of your organization and now comes power pages uh which is all about building uh all like external facing websites which are data rich which are interactive and all in like a low code no code manner so.
That's where like uh power pages uh capabilities comes into existence um one of the most important thing we are going to be talking about today is um like we always start with low code no code like that's the whole beauty of the platform that's where power pages is uh like essentially uh doubling down on uh compared to our power apps portal software uh but we are also uh connected with a full enterprise great hosting platform which is the most important thing uh like one.
Of our um one of the interesting thing which we learned uh during like last few years was um a lot of the organizations we are working with a lot of like we work with a lot of government organizations and we work a lot of like enterprises and their need of r is that uh anything they use should be highly highly scalable it should be very robust it should be very scalable it should provide them all the control so right from like the security requirements they have to accessibility requirements they have like it should be a complete platform.
Where they are able to go meet all their obligations especially when it's external facing because that's where their branding matters that's where the most important thing is to cater to a large variety of audience so that's uh like one of the things which we strive for and which we try to ensure that our platform is able to meet all those requirements um one of uh like very interesting thing you would have also seen and especially like um.
In like last few years as we are learning in the low code no code world like how uh people are gonna work together uh how like uh professional developers can come and contribute like one of the most important terms which you'll see everyone uh in like power platform family talking about is fusion teams and what are these fusion teams i think like that's like one of the things uh which i do want to take like a minute to explain especially in the context of uh power pages like the way we see fusion teams is uh.
Essentially three personas so there is our low code website maker this is the person who has enough technical knowledge not a lot he has a little bit of technical knowledge he understand pages he understand website uh and he is able to go build uh like problems very very quickly then we have our pro developer persona and this is the person who essentially uh is the i.t developer in your organization he's the person who develops uh like c sharp code he's the person who.
Develops like apis he's the person who develops uh fancy ui controls like all
Of that work is done by this person and then last but not the least is your site administration a site administrator who is responsible for everything like who's responsible making sure everything is secure who's responsible for making sure everything is compliant who's responsible for taking like admin actions like setting up domain names setting up ssl certificates like all of that is done by that person and our aim is to ensure that we are.Providing amazing experience for all of these persona so that's where for a low code website maker um you see we have a new uh design studio and we're gonna see like a lot of that today uh we also to get them started to get their ideas flowing we start with templates up where we provide a lot of outer box templates where they can get started with power pages there's a whole learn hub section which is kind of common for all like all the personas where they can learn about various aspects of website building.
Through power pages and then a very very easy data modeling tool and data modeling is always like a very interesting term because it depending on the organization it could be done by pro dev or low code uh maker but our aim is that uh we democratize it so anyone can do that so that's that's what we are striving towards then for our prototype persona we have tried to ensure that um these are the people who are familiar with a wide variety of tools like they use various ides and we don't want to take them out of that and like throw.
Them into a brand new tool and then basically start that whole learning cycle again so that's where our aim is to go into where the developers are so we provide an amazing vs code extension which allows them to go develop the website within visual studio code we provide them uh with github and azure devops integration to set up their ci cd pipelines and then uh for quick like edits we also provide them with our inline code editor so that they are able to make like uh code edits like very.
Very quick and uh for like anything immersive they go into vs code experience and then for site administrator uh again we provide a bunch of uh low code tooling within our like maker studio experience and then uh some of the new capabilities which we are offering uh like cdn support for portals uh for adding custom domain name all of that uh is part of our power platform admin center uh experience okay so my so my portal can have a.
Custom url that i that i specify yes and that is something we actually recommend that you should always have a custom url so that it's your brand uh it's your security as well like you only get cookies which are developed like which are your domain specific so that is like a very very important part of power pages experience great awesome so we'll um.
I'm gonna quickly go to our low code maker experience like quickly breeze through it and then we're gonna see the real thing uh but i still want to give some overview of hey what all capabilities are there and then move on to uh building a live site so now starting with our low code maker experience so it basically has a few important parts um first and foremost is our home page uh so this is essentially because power page is its own product now so we have our own uh landing page or home page uh you.
Might say so it's make.powerpages.microsoft.com so that's where uh once you land you are able to view all your sites so it's familiar experience if you have used like uh power apps or power virtual agent or power automate uh there's an environment selected at the top you select uh one of your existing environment in power platform and then it will show all the sites which are present in that environment and one of the important things there uh if you were using portals before if you were using powerapps portals.
All your powerapps portal sites are also going to show up and i'm going to cover like uh this part later why like how we are thinking about powerhouse photos and power pages together how they're going to come together like i'm going to cover that in the end but uh one of the most important thing is all the sites which you have created like i created a site like six years back it still shows up in my uh experience so our aim is to make sure everything which you have created till now just works like you don't have to do any sort of migration and that's a great point because there.
Were a couple of questions on this is what happens to my existing portal so they are portals are going to be ported over to pages let's put it that way yeah and uh to be honest it's not even porting over it's like it's just a brand name change uh for you like how when we move from dynamics portal to powerapps portal no one had to do anything it was just a branding change similar experience we are striving for.
That for all customers like when we go ga you just have a brand name change from powerapps portal to power pages and all your existing capabilities all your existing portals just keep on working with new tools as well four five cool so the next um important experience and this is something uh which is which we feel is very very uh interesting and unique is um.
They're like so many aspects to website building uh like you have to think about so many things and uh it's very hard to go um like first organize your thoughts into what all i have to think about and then like go search relevant like content for that so that's where learn hub originated our aim was that uh we are able to uh learn from our customers on how they go about website building put figure out like what are the relevant like documentation for each.
Step of that website building and then are able to share it with our customers right within the product so they don't have to go hunting for it so that's where that's what learnhub does it essentially provides like various aspects of your website building uh documentation all in like one place and within the product so you don't have to go outside of it ultimately it takes you to a doc site like because that's where all the magic is stored but like uh the aim is that we are able to uh provide that information right within.
The context so that you don't um have to think about hey so i want to do permissions like should i go to documentation and search permissions i don't know what they call permissions so all of that like get obfuscated just by providing that uh like within our learn hub experience and then uh another very interesting thing is template sub um so basically the aim here is uh there are like so many things you can do with your portal there's so many examples there's so many like uh ui options uh.
Which you have and especially like layouting what you can do so um how do we tell people that hey this is possible and yes this is also possible and yeah like your use case is also possible so that's where we thought about um like templates and uh if you have uh stuck around with portals for some time you'll know that templates have been like a big part of portals uh always like we had templates with dynamics 365 services uh we had like some of those blank.
Templates so that's what we are expanding we are essentially providing a lot more of templates uh which are like pre-built uh scenario driven things like we have taken a real-world scenario and try to build it out in portals uh used like pretty much all the capabilities uh not just like the low code experience not just pre-built components but you'll also see a lot of pro dev stuff in it so you'll see web api usage you will see a lot of code component usage all of that is present uh inside these pre-built templates uh we're starting with three right now um but eventually like uh the aim is uh.
Go into like hundreds and hundreds of these templates um in the fullness of time to quote stephen um and uh that's where like uh if you guys have an idea in mind uh if you think like there's a template which is gonna benefit like a lot of people uh there is a feedback link right within template hub uh you can uh go and request your new template for future uh and we'll uh be sure like triage those like every week and our aim is that we are able to crowdsource ideas for templates uh as.
Well delete are there any plans for like a template hub within the organization itself so we can create templates of existing portals users can leverage that yes so that is a very good point so yes we do have plans for it um i'm not gonna go into details of it because i'll steal someone else's thunder uh but there is definitely uh like that's the next evolution we are thinking about that how as an organization you build it once and.
Then you share it with everyone within the organization so that they can just reuse that in their projects okay then the next uh essentially is our design studio uh and that's the that is the biggest thing we have revamped uh so we started like if you remember adx studio right like uh pretty much all the configurations are in a model driven app like uh everything is modeled as a custom table and then all the configurations happen from a model of an app which still exists um but uh in 2019.
With powerapps photos we started on this like designer experience and our aim was uh like that was our first step into low code no code journey that how do we make it very very simple for you to be able to create website uh like pages of the website add components to it and how do we make it very simplified um now what we realized over time is um like we learned a lot from that experience especially the website designer experience which exists today um and then uh that's when we reimagine like power pages our first step was how do we make.
That website experience even more powerful like that creation experience has to be the key uh because that's what bring value uh to our customers like they are able to prototype real quick they are able to build their pages real quick and then go live with it like even more faster so um that's where like all the design studio experience comes in it's completely redone from scratch provides a very nice experience for creating pages managing your pages uh even some of the pages which used to be.
Uh not available before so things like uh access the night pace things like 404 page like those are also available uh to be editable in our um design studio and over time our aim is that hey even like some of the pages like login and profile you also make those editable uh through design studio so uh that kind of like closes the loop and allow people to edit those experience very very fast the next step.
Around same design studio is actually the styling workspace like um and as everyone like knows external facing website means the styling has to be on point it has to meet your organization it has to be really really great uh it looks should look professional um so that's why like styling works the workspace drive um to basically provide you control over a lot of elements of your website so you are able to change our styling for your headers and footers and buttons and.
Fonts uh all of that uh we also provide a bunch of pre-built themes or you can like save your own theme so that's uh something we do uh aim at uh like providing through styling workspace and in case anyone has a question the custom css stuff is not gone it still exists okay um like these are your question oh no oh that was my son on the background cool.
He got excited about the custom styling thing awesome uh yeah so custom css is still there uh it just has moved into pro drive experience for now and eventually our aim is to bring it back uh through this experience as well uh because custom css is something which uh power pages definitely supports so we're able to go into nitty gritties of stuff with styling workspace might not provide today um but eventually our aim is styling workspace you are able to do like 100 of your site uh and uh.
You only have to resort to custom css if you are going into very very very fancy domain uh in which case like uh css would always be a better option and then last but not the least is our data workspace so that's uh that's essentially an experiment uh we are trying to do uh we realized that uh end of the day all the websites we are building are all about data right so how do we bring in all data verse data because that's a primary data source.
Become make it very very easy for people uh to interact with it like to be able to create tables to be able to use existing tables to be able to create like views and forms uh which can be reused in portal like that's what our data workspace stripes for and uh this is a brand new experiment we are trying out on how do we make like data driven experience very simple for people to understand and this is where we are looking for most feedback like what worked for you what was nice what was not nice uh because over time you'll see.
That this is one experience we're going to be focusing way more than anything else because once we solve data problem for you once we make data modeling and visualization very very easy that brings out the value of the product because all these websites are essentially data driven like they have to be uh all about your business data [Music] then let's quickly talk about product experience and uh like i'm not gonna take too much time.
Into that uh keeping in mind that we still have to go build a live site so they're like three important experience for products so there's an inline uh code editor like write within pages workspace so you can see all the page code and if you have to make like some change which is not available as a component you want to directly edit html you can just do it like right there there's also a full fledge vs code extension which we provide um so this is where you can see all of your website content it's the same content which you're seeing uh in the studio so which.