hello everybody and a very warm welcome to our broadcast today and very happy new year as well we would like to talk about project for the web and power automates we are here peter and me christina from the project and portfolio team here at proactiv and we have a lot to show and tell today peter he will be the one guiding through the session and showing live how to set up several one flow in power to me we're gonna look at a bunch of things yeah exactly take it away peter thank you very much christina all right so uh power automate and practical photo web so so first off i just want to for you new viewers who doesn't know much about proactiv we are a leading microsoft partner we have several gold partnerships partnerships good one and we've been lucky to be nominated to uh to partner up the year um a couple of times i think it's four or something it's uh it's pretty astonishing and um and yeah so so we're pretty proud of that um 2020 we just came out of it crazy year what a year i think everyone thinks that it's over as well but it had some yeah definitely definitely so but some good things did happen as well and um if we look at this slide um this is one i'm particularly proud of we became the um the partner of the year in in project portfolio management and that is that is huge it's not just denmark but it was worldwide winner so yeah what happened there so crazy but good crazy good so project for the web um around a year ago i was standing here as well i was talking about the microsoft project online it was built on sharepoint it was to to capture projects and project work and um a lot has happened since so project for the web came out it's uh microsoft new kid it's built on um the power platform it's it's uh based on the dataverse as a platform or formerly known as common data service or cds and so that is the new project offer from microsoft and just to tell you just a bit about the the features of the tool or maybe what's what's different is we we don't anymore have chicken check out in projects we now have kanban boards we have business rules we have pcf components that help us visualize what we want to do better and there's a huge speed boost because it's uh on the dataverse now and yeah there's just a ton of things that that they did right with this uh with this new product so a lot more easy as well for the project managers it definitely is so it um they they said in their uh broadcast that it it it was for the the new upcoming workers millennials etc it was cleaner and nicer and faster and everything was looking for but as with anything else they gave it gave us the minimum available product first of course and then they started pushing updates up to it so so for for many of you who have seen the tools when it was first released well that was a first edition of it and and many updates has been been applied since then um so these microsoft tools what we're going to focus focus on today is is this modern tool set which consists of project for the web it's not just the tool planning part of it but it's also the power app so the the the where we can specify the the custom fields we can have the stage gate so for for you who have been in and just got gotten on to project.microsoft.com and and tried the schedule it's not just that it does a whole lot more and and it's really in the power app where we can do all the the nice magic and where we get the portfolio and the customizations as well and i know my customers have been really been getting all the benefits of this tool this year especially 2020 with the kovit being able to sit at home and and still collaborate and management can still focus and see the portfolio overview and um yeah so it has been crucial to have that tool this year especially yeah and and like many else working from home became widely public acceptable and [Music] when you don't have colleagues near you you need some kind of tool to uh to to find your together and of course teams is a huge player in that and practical web is just connected to that you will maybe also show how how you can actually visualize your projects and teams exactly so it's it's fully connected and we can show the schedule and we can collaborate etc but also power automate is there so what is power automate and that is that is a tool that that helps you focus on the things that you need to focus on so it can automate tasks that you um that you you yeah normally do and and it can help you work faster and smarter so but we'll come back to to power automate but those are the two main tools that we'll be talking about today all right so i've set up a small agenda so what i want to do is i want to i want to do something with bass lines so for you guys who have been working with with project online or microsoft project or maybe maybe another project you know the functionality of setting a baseline today out of the box that is not something that you can do in project for the web it is on the roadmap for microsoft but i thought why don't we just do that today and that is actually what we've been doing all the time with project for the web so so it's it's i i think you mentioned it to me earlier like microsoft gave us this vanilla and then together with the customers we define the taste that they need and then we build it so i kind of like that expression so we're going to talk about baselines we're going to set up a flow to set that baseline and we're all also going to show in in power bi where we pull that data out to see what what does baseline do to to a project when we use that we're going to focus a bit more on power automate as well we're going to talk about um pulling maybe a power bi report out sending that to an email on a scheduled plan that is something that is completely new microsoft released it i think a month ago and we're going to look at that and also i have two things more it's it's notifications so project for the web right now out of the box do not have notifications but i have two flows that can get you going with that so you're saying there's no no unnecessary noise there's no unnecessary noise exactly so as a team member i can set up notifications for myself if i want to and we're going to look at that perfect but this let's let's talk about baselines so i write baseline 0 here and the reason why i write baseline zero is for all you guys who have been working with project who knows well there's in the standard old option baseline zero to baseline 10. we're just going to focus on one baseline today that that gives us the um yeah the the picture that we need we don't need to do 10 baselines so so let's just focus on the one um but using baselines is when you're doing project management and project planning um if you don't have anywhere to set the dates on like fix uh the dates in and lock them once you start working with them maybe things get pushed maybe is sick who can't complete the task within the deadline and so forth well if you have a deadline you can or a baseline you can really see how that affects your plan so that's a basic project management principle you can see exactly so pmo can go back they can they can measure performance are we good at running projects no we're com we're always um yeah uh not delivering on time etc the baselines really gives us the visual of that so i think that's a pretty neat thing of course getting into baselines once get going with that you need to think on other terms as well because then the whole estimation of a plan becomes super important because if if if the estimation is wrong well then on the first task that you've estimated wrong well then maybe your delivery goes away so when you do baselines you should consider adding in buffers like estimation buffers risk buffers when you do a risk assessment and then you start and use of that buffer instead of moving your entire plan you can you can adjust those buffers and then keep the the baseline and keep the delivered agreement yeah so let's get into it so baseline zero what we want is something like this so this is power bi and what i can see here is um it's it's my schedule from project flagship and um what i can see here is the light blue line that is my my task from the schedule and the dark blue line that is actually my baseline zero and here i can see that there are several tasks that is straying off course but if i go to the very last one the task 7 i can see my my deadline is is not affected and that is because those tasks that we have up top they're not on the critical path so it doesn't change my finish line so we're all good still um even though that these are not following the the baseline so all is good so we want to end up with something like that in regards to baselines where we can really visually see how's the plan progressing this is also of course a huge impact on your resource planning exactly if a sub delivery is delayed for instance yeah yeah and we can go back and we can track why was this resource not allocated here or over allocated and yeah yes let's go on to the hands-on sessions [Music] and i'm just going to exit this slideshow and so first up i want to add the um the baseline finish and the baseline start so i've navigated into uh to my solution in practice for the web so this is this is the powerapp part you can see it says powerapp at the top of the window i've added two new columns and yes this was previously called fields recently microsoft renamed that to columns and that's completely fine so now we have columns and tables and rows where we had records and entities and fields maybe not in that direct order but yeah rename is good so we have these two new fields what i need to do is you can see it's on the project task entity that i have here so what i need to do is i want to create a view for myself where i can see these two new two new baselines so if i go to my view i've created a new view called tracking task view and i've simply just dragged and dropped these two new baselines in and saved this view that makes it accessible in in in my project for the web entity so these are the start and end dates yeah so that's the baseline start and baseline finish in this view here we can see they're blank they're not set if i navigate to project photo web this is my my project flagship um in my project flagship i have my tasks and right here i can actually see all my tasks and it's loading just like so what i've done is i've actually created a duplicate of this project sometimes when i'm running projects or or want to run a new project i want to run something that is similar to to the one that i've maybe just completed so what you can do is you can say click copy project and you can get the entire plan onto a new project and i actually just did that so let's navigate to my new project called baseline and it's right here and if i go into tasks i can see all the similar tasks that i had before right in here so what i'm looking at here is i have my start date and i have my my finished date listed here and what i want to do is i want to i want to capture that so i can see that and if i just navigate to the detailed version of this in in the in the power app i can go to project tasks and i can go to my tracking task view so it's actually showing the exactly the same tasks but here i can have several custom fields that are enterprise the other view where i had i can i can create some custom fields as well but they're local these are enterprise so i can report on them so here i can see my baseline start and my baseline finish and what i need to do is i need to create a flow that captures all these start and finish dates so they get copied to do these two new roles and i've already just like in a cooking program exactly uh went ahead with that what you can see here is this is this power automation let's just get one go one step back so what is power automate we've already talked a bit about it it can help you be more effective in your work and if you go to flow.microsoft.com on the very first page you you get you meet you can see that it has some suggestions for you so if i look at top picks i can see save office 365 email attachments to onedrive for business so every time i receive an attachment in my email i can define that that gives get saves to get saved to a folder or i could get a push notification when you receive an email from your boss well that's that's pretty useful um so i kind of like that and it's just click and and and and connect and it creates that flow for you not for the entire organization but just for you and then you can share it with others if you want to so i kind of like that so what i did is i created a new flow and the way i created this when i went to project for the web i can see that there's a flow button up here if i click on it i can click create a new flow and that is exactly what i did you can see that there's a set baseline down here and so let's let's go to that flow it's called set baseline and what it does is it recognizes that i have selected that button and what i want to do is i want to get the current project that i'm in so i'm using a get record it's the first one up there that's a trigger everything else that's actions in your flow so this is a typical developer to ask you so i'm not a developer um i've i'm i see myself as a citizen developer that means low code and these are all just drag and drop actions and and the same goes for for for projects for the web most of it um so yeah in regards of maintenance of this on on the back end when we've done an implementation is it's easy for the customers we always do that admin training where we learn how to set up these different things and you don't need a developer to um to to um to take over so once you've created it for me i can adjust it myself of course yeah yeah definitely let me just show this with action so if i click the plus here on my flow i can add an action and i can choose from i think it's 400 different actions or maybe more more of that 400 services i believe and then there's a whole lot more actions so in here i can choose what i want and what i did below was i i got a record from cds or now known as dataverse and when i click on common data service i can see what can i do within cds and i selected to get a record because what i want is i want to get my current project which i do here and best practices when you do these steps in power automate go ahead and rename those this was called get record before now it's saying get current project and then when you hand that over to somebody they can they can read the actions without necessarily going into the flow that is especially necessary when you um go in and you do era seeking um and then there you just need to um to know what you're looking for so yeah best practices rename your steps so they fit with the current action all right so i'm getting my current project you see i'm looking for the entity called projects and there i'm looking for the project id the next that i do is i set a variable so i want to pull out that project id to a variable so i initialize that and then i'm gonna get all my tasks and this one is called list records i just rename it to to get all project tasks because that is exactly what it does it i define that it should get all the tasks in in the project task entity and if i go down here i can i have an apply on each i rename that to set baseline on each and then i select the value from from get all the projects up here and i go ahead and and i update a record so update a record it was saying here and i renamed it to set baseline on task so when you're looking for those actions well you might have to look back at this broadcast but but still you can get the actions so here i'm i'm gonna select my project tasks i'm identifying each proj each task id and then if i go to advanced here you see i have my baseline finish and i base my baseline start those were two fields i created when this began and here i'm simply just saying it should stamp and finish and it should stamp in the current start dates and that's it when you do these flows some can become very long and complex it says here it's it's actually saying here already your floor's ready to go we recommend you to test it before execute a flow try and see if you can break it down into steps and maybe while you're doing it um because i'm just going to show you an action because the first action i'm doing here is actually getting the project id so what i want to do is i don't want to run the entire flow i want to have it terminate after it has gotten my my project id so i just write terminate here so the search is really helpful when i look for functions that i want to do so i just write terminate and it finds my my control here and if this on top here is successful i want it to terminate right there so that's true yeah yeah and if there's any developers out there they would know that this is a break in the code so it breaks out there so yeah it's really good as well when doing the flow but also when doing these error testing make it break where you want to check the values and then you're good to go so break it into sections and once you're confident that your flow runs the way you want it to well then go ahead and remove those terminates and then you're all good to go yeah especially useful when when dealing with sending out multiple emails maybe to the company regarding there's new tasks or something so you don't send it to an entire corporation when you need to all right good so we've now set the baseline and if i go back here you can see i have my tracking guide if i go into flow i can now click set baseline i'm going to run that flow clicking done and this this takes a minute so remember it find my project and it runs it through and if i just go back here i can see that flow actually running it has already succeeded 12 seconds ago so if i go back and just refresh this page i might need to navigate to to that let's just do that practice tasks go to the tracking task view you can now see it has perfectly captured all our new baselines so all of that i can capture in in in power bi and see that visual i've already have that power bi of course so if i navigate to that a props up to xvis for creating that visual it's it's the only gantt chart on on in power bi that can actually show baselines but if i refresh this let's just do a quick refresh refresh now just like so refresh the page i should be able to see those baselines underneath each each task i haven't moved any tasks yet so they should be just online but when i move something you would see that it moves accordingly yeah and and i think the power bi helps you to to visualize in a much better way than just looking at the the pure numbers and yes the table which of course is if you want to pinpoint to a specific task it's a very good and precise one it is because when you just look at the numbers so the numbers are in it has been refreshed we now see that that these are my tasks and when when they move they move accordingly so a great visible way to to see it and when when i'm in practice for web i this doesn't really give me the same feel as the visual does good so there's a few more things that i wanna the time is running really fast today but when you're having fun as you said um there's a new feature in in power automate that i really love and i know a lot of you guys are using power bi and one of the things some of you are doing still is taking those power bi reports and maybe sending it off to portfolio managers or stakeholders etc this new feature added to um to power automate you can do a recurrence so once a month i'm gonna export a file for a power bi report and what you can see here is i've selected a project called project flagship but that's actually a workspace i i'm selecting my my my tracking get that's the power bi you saw before i'm exporting as a picture and i'm gonna send an email uh with that attachment so now you no longer have to go in save it as a yeah a powerpoint or something like that i can do that directly from the flow and then email it directly and don't need to think about it that i've done it with a tracking guide that could be a status report that could be whatever you would like so i really like that feature the only but on that is you do need a power bi premium license all right so this is automating a lot of your project management it is yeah so we've talked a lot about practice for the web and power automate um what i'm using all the time is it's this page here it's the tech community where i follow the the project blog and uh recently they came out with updates are coming all the time and we find them here this is where you find all your updates but what they also do is they help you enhance the tool so right here it says new flow templates for project for the web and if i navigate into that you can see that right here they give you for free these new um recipes for for nice floats to run so the two flows that i had my agenda like sent email notification when i'm ascended i signed a task in in a project that's right here i can just click on it it takes me directly to flow and i just need to to click on the connect or continue button down here once it finished loading and that flow is actually set up for me the same goes for for the other reminder uh task that is reminding you of late tasks etc great yeah everyone can just take it from there actually accept themselves yeah they can go ahead and they can set up notifications for themselves good um yeah i think we're well over time though i don't know if there's been any questions on from you guys out there but that is is power automate and then project for the web seamlessly working together and and helping you doing some awesome work yeah maybe just on an endnote all this is of course connected to teams i'm showing it right here so i have all my project details this is where i do my collaboration i have my schedule i have that tracking gantt and yeah it's just working all together great so my team can also see it there for instance exactly yeah so great yeah if any of you guys are interested in hearing more or maybe getting that solution that i showed earlier that we call it our ppm pro well you can just navigate to this screen and get that qr code and and you're on your way you can get in contact with us exactly yeah thank you peter that was really inspiring i hope so yes yeah cool cool yeah thanks and thanks for everyone joining today and stay in touch if you have any questions reach out to us bye