The making of: A successful Microsoft Ignite table talk

A couple of months ago Anna Chu asked me to co-host a table talk at Microsoft Ignite about best practices within the Power Platform.

The team

Together with Karoliiona Kettukari and Geetha Sivailam, I formed a team to host the Power Platform Best Practices table talk.

For these kind of table talks there is some preparation needed and after our initial chats we came up with the idea to do a Best Practices bingo.

We first agreed on the concept that during the table talk, attendees can either tell us about their best practices by opening the mic or put messages in the chat. Then as the different ideas are coming in we can click away the numbers so that the best practices will appear.

So all we had to do is create a PowerPoint presentation to introduce ourselves and then build an app.

The Ignite table talk

Then on 3 November 2021, we were ready! With about 5 minutes to go we had 30 attendees in the call and we were getting quite happy that some people turned up.

And then the floodgate opened. Within no time we got nearly 300 people in our table talk and people were enjoying themselves giving us their best practices.

Suggestions that came from the attendees includes things like:

• Use solutions
• Use service accounts
• Use the Center of Excellence
• Shared Ownership
• Multiple environments
• Custom reusable components

and so much more.

The Making of the app

Time to have a look at how to make the app.

First of all visit make.powerapps.com and login with your credentials. Then Create a new Canvas app. now you should have an empty screen to start with.

Then within the App OnStart code the follwoig code needs to be added:

ClearCollect( colBestPractices, 
{ID:1, Title: "Name your controls properly", Product: "Power Apps"},
{ID:2, Title:"Name your actions properly", Product: "Power Automate"},
{ID:3, Title:"Say no to chaos/Governance", Product:"All"},
{ID:4,  Title:"Consider your databases", Product:"All"},
{ID:5,  Title:"Have a Power Platform owner/leader", Product:"All"},
{ID:6,  Title:"Make apps responsive", Product:"Power Apps"},
{ID:7,  Title:"Sharing is caring", Product:"Power Apps"},
{ID:8,  Title:"Give employees an easy start", Product:"Power Apps"},
{ID:9,  Title:"Embrace 'Test and try'",Product: "All"},
{ID:10,  Title:"Embed Power Apps in Power BI", Product:"Power BI"},
{ID:11,  Title:"Automate directly from Power BI report", Product:"Power BI"},
{ID:12,  Title:"Increase Productivity (e.g. apps where the user is)", Product:"Power Apps"},
{ID:13,  Title:"Share apps across teams", Product:"Power Apps"},
{ID:14, Title:"Error Handling in flows and apps", Product:"All"},
{ID:15, Title:"Add Co-Owners", Product:"All"},
{ID:16, Title:"Get the right licences", Product:"All"},
{ID:17, Title:"Performance", Product:"Power Automate"},
{ID:18, Title:"Design before development", Product:"All"},
{ID:19, Title:"Multiple environments", Product:"All"},
{ID:20, Title:"Continuous deployment", Product:"All"}
);

ClearCollect(colSelected, [0])

The first part will create a collection of Best Practices.

The last line creates a collection that keeps track of which buttons have been clicked.

Now the first step is to add the title to the app.

For my label I’m setting the Text, the Text Size, the Font weight and the Text alignment.

Then I need to add a Gallery and add a button to the gallery and a label.

By the way, do remember on of those best practices? Name your controls properly!

For the gallery, the Items property needs to be set to our collection that holds the best practices.

and the wrap count on the gallery is set to 4. This will ensure that we end up with 4 columns of buttons within our gallery.

Configure the clickable buttons

For the buttons, we have a few things to do.

• Make the number of the best practices appear on the button, so that we can see which best practice is in which place. We wouldn’t want to give any of the best practices away.
• Make the buttons disappear when clicked
• Give the buttons a background colour matching the products.

First things first. setting the Text of the button to ThisItem.ID. This will take the ID property of our collection and make it visible as the button text.

Then set the Fill property to a colour depending on the product name:

When a button is clicked we want to add the button’s ID o the collection that keeps track of all the clicked buttons. Using just the following simple line of code will do that for us:

And to now make the buttons disappear when clicked we just set the visibility to check our colSelected collection.

It is that simple.

Just the final step to go. update the label to show the best practices descriptions.

And the app is ready.

Thank you

Then all I would like to say is a big thank you to Geetha and Karoliina for organizing the table talk with me and a huge thank you to all the attendees for making this table talk a success.