Here’s the scenario. You’re a CEO, and you love seeing new sales orders stream in. And you love the beach. You want to see these orders visually appear in your system while you are sitting on the sand.
Now imagine being able to achieve this today, without anyone having to write a single line of code.
That’s what Microsoft has made possible with the new cloud based automation service called Flow, together with Dynamics 365 and Power BI.
You can see this working in a demo I built in the video below. Let’s walk through how Microsoft made this happen.
Firstly, let’s talk Cloud. Microsoft has done what we’ve been waiting for for a long time. It has created cloud-based ERP and CRM that ties in with its cloud-based productivity suite, Office 365. Being in the cloud provides us with the usual advantages such as access-anywhere, subscription-based, scalable services. However it also allows Microsoft to provide an infrastructure to connect these systems together, as well as connecting other 3rd party cloud-based systems such as Salesforce, Jira, etc.
That’s what they’ve done with Flow. Microsoft built a cloud automation tool with the goal of connecting different systems very easily. It’s something I’ve been dreaming about for years, and the pieces are now in place.
To demonstrate the powerful capabilities of Flow working with Power BI, I built a demo. The only code I wrote here is to simulate a large number of sales orders with random dollar amounts entered into Dynamics 365, so we can see data streaming in real-time. That’s all the code involved. I then use Flow to connect Dynamics 365 to Power BI as a real-time streaming service. In Power BI, I have a new dashboard that displays the streaming sales orders as they are entered.
With the Power BI smartphone app, I also show my smartphone displaying the data in real-time. So, if you’re a CEO and you just want to watch those orders flow in while you’re on the beach somewhere, you can do just that.
For more details on how to actually set this up check out my post here.
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CARL
