The Townsend Report

by James Townsend Microsoft has overhauled the portal capabilities of the Dynamics Portal product which was formerly available as an add-on component for Dynamics 365 apps such Sales and Customer Service,  now making these capabilities available as Power Apps portal .  Power Apps portals allows you to build websites with static pages and content as well as, more importantly, forms and views to display data from the Common Data Service. InfoStrat's Grants Manager Plus uses Power Apps portal capabilities to enable grant applicants, grant reviewers, vendors and the public to interact with grant data.  Because Power Apps portal is a website, users do not have to learn a new user interface, and you have control over the look of the site such as branding consistent with the graphic standards used by your organization.  Here are some of the portal pages typically used for grant portals: Authentication . Login and related functions such as forgot password or change password.  These are pro

by James Townsend Microsoft is not only a leader in packaged software products for business productivity, operating systems and accounting, but also in providing the development platforms for creating custom solutions.   The Microsoft Power Platform is a family of products that are seeing rapid growth.  The Power Platform includes Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual agents.  It features capabilities for non-coders to create solutions as well as support for developers.  Many organizations, especially small business and non-profits, do not have developers on staff yet they need to automate their processes to respond to rapidly changing requirements.   Last month, the Power Platform was prominently featured at the virtual Microsoft Ignite 2020 conference.  Microsoft announced Power Automate Desktop , a desktop-based robotic process automation (RPA) authoring solution for coders and non-coders to automate processes across desktop and web applications using a visual work

by James Townsend The benefits of cloud computing are widely known, and most organizations have moved or are planning to move from their on premises data centers to cloud facilities hosted by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google or other providers.  One of the cloud computing benefits is that the cloud provider is responsible for continuously improving the environment that hosts, and that these updates and fixes do not usually require work by the customer.  There is a downside to this benefit, however, especially as you move from cloud infrastructure to cloud solutions. The downside is that you must deal with the consequences of constant change and innovation. Organizations have always had to handle upgrades of hardware and software, but when the computing was inside their data center they had full control of the timing of changes.  They could more quickly with inexpensive changes and patches, and choose their timing for major changes.   Today the cloud providers largely choose the t