Welcome to my trials and tribulations in the Power Platform.

A little background on how I found myself here.

Like most people who have been around the IT industry a long time, my technology focus has changed with the work that I do.

My first job was on hex programmed switch servers, both coding and maintaining the hardware. From there I moved into Unix and DB2, starting to work with databases and networking.

After numerous years in infrastructure, databases, networking, security and server administration as well as being a MCT teaching windows, office, exchange and SQL , I found myself at QA as a training manager for Unix and Databases. This was the first time I had chance to appreciate all the other technologies that rule our world.

More years on consulting and teaching, I was asked to look at a new product called “sharepoint services ” in 2001 as part of the Microsoft Office stack. The concept was ok, but it was so riddled with issues and we never took it any further than the classroom.

2003 saw the Windows Sharepoint Services released and Sharepoint as we know it today was born. Sharepoint and all its associated servers and services became a large part of my workload for the next 15 years, spawing workflows, forms, data managment, document managment and ever more server managment.

2012 was the first real cloud migration I undertook, redesigning and architecting an entire business system to migrate to a hosted platform, initally on hyperV on dedicated servers and then in time onto hosted VMs. The learing curve of moving mutliple office sites, their services and systems shouldnt be underestimated, networking and security as well as maintenance were a complete change.

By this time Offie 365 and sharepoint online and exchange online had become real and usable and something to be passionate about with customers, working with them to move their busnesses forward.

I had managed to escape much to do with Dynamics apart from reports and integration until 2015, when I had my first CRM project Dynamics 365, which felt like a early sharepoint, lots of configuration , lots of “it cant do that” moments and getting to grips with Entities..

So my Sharepoint , Azure and D365 experince have taken me back full circle to PowerApps instead of info path, Flow instead of sharepoint flow and PowerBI instead if SSRS.

This tool set is definately one of my favourites because of its immense flexibilty , huge number of built in connectors, as well as they fact they can stand alone from the rest of the microsoft family or do what they do best and be the glue that hold all the D365 family, sharepoint and O365 togther.

Hope you enjoy my powerplatform notes and look forward to meeting up at one of the many Sharepoint and PowerApps conferences.

#sharepoint #powerapps #flow