The Townsend Report

Low code solutions such as Microsoft Flow and PowerApps offer faster development of some types of software solutions.  These products allow non-developers to create solutions or apps for functions such as approvals, routing or even integrating data for multiple systems. Writing successful solutions, even without coding, requires quite a bit of knowledge and experience.  Here are some of the fundamental areas which are prerequisites: Understanding business processes . If you do not understand your business process, you cannot automate it.  This means a solid grasp of the data, the steps in the process, and how exceptions and errors are handled.  Normally this knowledge is in the domain of a business analyst.   Understanding data modeling . Most solutions involve some data storage, so you must understand field types, relationships, and concepts such as normalization to come up with an efficient data model.  Mastering the low code tool . You must thoroughly understand the pr

Grants Manager Plus is one of InfoStrat's most popular solutions and is geared toward the needs of grantor organizations.  InfoStrat recently released a new version and also new editions. Last week two new videos were published to help customers understand how Grants Manager Plus works. The first is background information on the concepts and design goals behind Grants Manager Plus, as well as the architecture of the solution: The second is a demonstration of the grantee portal in action, explaining key functions and features used by grant applicants and grantees. For more information on Grants Manager Plus, see my blog posts including these: 5 Ways to Ensure Compliance with Your Grant Management System 6 Things to Look for in Grant Management Software Estimating the Cost of a Microsoft Grants Manager Plus Implementation Extending Grants Manager Plus Flexible Grant Management Software: Long Term Considerations Grant Management for Community Development Block G

InfoStrat has earned the new Microsoft Gold Competency for DevOps as part of the Microsoft Partner Program.  DevOps is a key part of cloud computing, and helps organizations close the gap between software development (Dev) and operations (Ops). The DevOps Gold Competency shows a commitment to mastering cloud tools for DevOps which relate to Microsoft Azure, not only Microsoft products such as Service Fabric, Visual Studio, Teams and GitHub, but products from other vendors such as Slack, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Chef, Terraform and others. InfoStrat's clients are moving toward DevOps along with the transition to Agile software development methodologies.  Microsoft has not only maintained a position of leadership with its own offerings, but the openness of Microsoft to other vendors is fostering a strong DevOps ecosystem throughout the industry.

NOTE: Since this post was written, Microsoft has updated pricing.  For current pricing, see  https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing Next month marks two years since Microsoft announced the preview of its Flow workflow automation product.  Since then, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow have been gaining in popularity. We at InfoStrat are receiving more questions from customers on how PowerApps and Flow are licensed by Microsoft.  This is a brief overview with links to authoritative Microsoft resources with all the details. What are PowerApps and Flow? Microsoft  PowerApps  is a framework derived from Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) that allow you to build apps either with or without a form interface.  PowerApps works with Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Flow is is a cloud software tool to build automated workflows that connect to many Microsoft and non-Microsoft systems and services.  For instance, you could write a workflow which would create a record in Dynamics 365 whe