PL-900 Microsoft Power Platform – Other Power Platform Topics

1. 28, 29, 30. AI Builder

Hello. Well, in this course we have gone through Power apps, power Bi, power Automate, and Power Virtual agents. So in this section, what we’re going to do is look at everything else that’s on the PL 900 certification. We’ve had a look at the main sections, let’s see what is left. And we’re going to start off with the AI builder, move on to administration and security and then look at the business value of extending business solutions, other packages that you use.

So first of all, the AI builder. On the left hand side, you can see that in addition to chatbots, which is a way of bringing your chat bots into power apps, we’ve also got the AI builder. The AI builder allows you to use artificial intelligence in power apps. It uses the Microsoft Azure machine learning and cognitive skills.

Now, the advantage of using AI in PowerApps, and it’s a separate license and a separate cost. If you did want to, there’s no need to write code, there’s no need to create machine learning models, which often is the case in Microsoft Azure. Without using AI builder, that would require a high level of computer skills. So if you don’t have a high level of computer skills for AI, some of these might be exactly what you need.

Now, these are different models and there’s a model for each function. So let me go through these different functions because it would be good for the exam if you had knowledge of these different models. First of all, we’re going to start with form processing and we’re not actually going to go into any of these models in any depth. We’re just going to show what they do and how you would do it. This extracts text from images, the form processing model.

So this works on JPEGs, PNGs and unprotected PDF files. If you’ve got text embedded PDF files, that’s great because the text is behind the actual graphics. So to do this you need some fields. So various fields and tables with columns to be extracted. Now you would need some documents which have got the same layout.

So the computer can look at those and find out, okay, what exactly am I trying to extract? So this five or more documents, the same layout, they’re called a collection. The computer then analyzes your collection with the same layout and detects the fields and tables. But then you need to tag the documents, tag the fields, tag the tables, tag the columns to say what exactly are you trying to extract and from? Then you can train the model, publish and use it.

The business card reader uses the form processing model as well in a much more specialized way. It reads an uploaded photo picture and if it’s a business card, extracts the required information, no configuration required at all. And you can see, you can use these in Power Ultimate and some of these you can use in Power apps. A prediction model? Will something happen based on past historic data? So it could be a yay nay, a yes no binary prediction. It could be that there are more than two outcomes. This would be a multiple outcome prediction, or it could be a numerical prediction, I think so. And so we’ll buy three of these. So you need 50 or more rows in the table. Obviously more is better. And you have to have at least ten rows with each outcome.

So at least ten yeses and ten nos. So after it has been trained, then AI Builder will give you a grade of how good the training was. From a best to D, something is wrong. The next model is the object detection model. So this identifies objects from uploaded images and counts the number of objects included. So when you’re using this, first of all, you’ve got to select the domain.

The domain is the use model. In other words, what is it you actually want them to do? You could have objects on retail shells. So these are products densely packaged. So you can imagine a box of Conflicts of a cereals are available next to another box of cornflakes, next to another box of cornflakes. So powered products, really densely packaged, those are objects on retail shelves. Alternatively, you could have logo detection, that’s called brand logo.

And then you’ve got another domain called common objects. So that’s anything else. So are you in the supermarket? Do you want to look for logos or do you just want to look for objects? You then provide object names. There can be up to 500 per model and you can enter it directly into AI Builder. Or you can select the names from the database. You then upload the images from local storage SharePoint or Azure Blob storage. And then you tag the images and you need at least 15 images per each object name. So you select the domain, provide the names, upload images and then tag them. The text category classification categorizes text by meaning.

So you select the text. So you select the table and the column where the text is stored. You then select tags. So which column are the tags stored in? Select the language and select Train my AI. So the Tags category classification model could be used for sentiment analysis. So in other words, is this text positive text, negative text, neutral text? Or is it mixed? Could it be for detecting spam? So if you get a lot of text in, some of that might just be people just trying to spam you. Or is it for where customers should go to next customer Request Routing or Customer Request Routing? So there are quite a lot of models and some of the pre built models so that you don’t have to configure include the business card reader, the key phrase extraction model, the language detection model, the text recognition model.

So this is Optical Character Recognition or Cr, but it’s also getting handwritten text from images. There are other models coming in from time to time. For instance, there could be a text translational model, translating it from one language to another and so forth. Now for the exam, you do quite to see how these Power apps and Power Automate can consume the AI builder data. And the answer is Power Automate can do the lot. These are all written for power automate. Additionally, the business card reader can also be used in PowerApps Canvas and PowerApps model driven apps. And then a few of us like receipt processing and text recognition.

The form processing and the object detection can also be used in Power Apps canvas. So all of them can be used in Automate, some of them can be used in Canvas and only one of them, the business card reader, can be used in PowerApps model driven. So if we go over to an app in PowerApps Canvas, you can see that in the insert section we’ve got AI Builder and we can use these in there. Similarly, if you go to Power Automate in the AI Builder, we also have the build section and you can use them from here as well. AI Builder is an add on and its cost is about $500. It says per unit per month. But the unit actually represents quite a lot of work. It’s a pack of 1 million service credits pulled at the organization tenant. So maybe you can have an AI business for your organization and then lots of people could use it.

So, in the notes this course, you will have a list of all of these AI models and you should get acquainted with what they are, roughly what they do, how you set them up, and then which ones maybe are pre builds. So which ones require no additional configuration and which ones like the form processing do require configuration. And that is the AI builder. And hopefully you can see from all of this description the business value of it.

So imagine being able to read your forms, your invoices that are being sent in, without having to manually type in the values. So imagine looking at a lot of text and seeing whether it is positive or negative. How much time could this save you? So, what we’re talking about here is clever analysis, automatically done possibly a huge amount of text or pictures or that sort of thing. And then that frees your workers, your employees to be able to do the analysis based on its classification. And as I said before, a lot of these do not require any configuration and none of these require a high level of computer skills. They are all person friendly. And this is the AI builder.

2. 10a. How Power Platform can consume Azure Cognitive Services

Now as an alternative to AI builder, there is Azure Cognitive Services. In this video we’re going to just describe what Azure Cognitive Services are. Now, they can be consumed by power apps, power Floor and Power Bi with a premium capacity. Now it is quite difficult to implement, but it gives you a lot more flexibility and power. So for this exam, all you need to know is what the Azure Cognitive Services are. It allows for general purpose pretrained machine learning models.

However, this is a lot more specific. The Azure Cognitive Services are classified into several key categories. First of all, there are decision services. So this allows for personalized recommendations. You could moderate content, you can detect anomalies and you can predict behavior. So that’s decision services. Language services process natural language. So this is when we have the translation functions or the text analytics.

So detect sentiment. So in other words, is what people saying positive, negative in between, that sort of thing. So that’s language services. Then there are speech services such as speech to text, text to naturally sounding speech, and the translation of speech into your apps. And then there’s vision services. So this can get ideas, for instance from pictures and videos.

Now you’ll notice there’s a fifth category here, web search. Ignore that. This isn’t part anymore of Azure Cognitive Services. So Azure Cognitive Services can be used using APIs, that’s application programming interfaces and it can be used in just a few few lines of chord. And it doesn’t require the expertise of a data scientist at all. As I said, you can just use it in a few lines of chord. So Azure Cognitive Services, it uses general purpose pretrained machine learning models for decision services, language, speech services and vision services.

3. 12. Power Platform Security

In this video we’re going to have a look at how Power Platform implements security. Now you won’t be required to know a huge amount of actually how it’s done but let’s just have a look at the environment because the environment we have this data vs or CDs common data service and the environment uses therefore secure settings based on the database. So if we go into Settings and Admin Center, we get to Admin power platform. Microsoft. com I’ll click on my Environment and then click on Settings at the top. And if I go to Users and Permissions you can see that we can go to Security Roles.

Now there are a lot of different security roles here but it will be helpful for you to know just a few of them. Now why security? Well, in Microsoft’s own words microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards, conformance and regulatory compliance. Microsoft’s broad suite of cloud products and services are all built from the ground up to address the most rigorous security and privacy demands of our customers.

So we have previously seen that the database can contain, for instance, lots of tables, some of which have got personal or sensitive fields or columns. The way that security is organized is using security Roles. These are a collection of privileges which allow you to do things. Roles can be assigned to individual users or into teams.

All users must be assigned to at least one security role. Remember these give you privileges. If you didn’t have any privileges you wouldn’t be allowed to do anything. So the most basic privilege is that of being able to run apps and to be able to create, write or delete records that they own and that is a basic user. The delegate privilege allows you to act on behalf of another user.

Sysadmin is the top privilege. It allows you full permission including viewing data. Customizer is similar but you can only view data in tables that you create. Environment Admin, which you can’t see here, which has been assigned to me as the creator of the environment, gives me right to all administrative actions including adding or removing users from the environment.

Admin or Maker roles, provisioning the dataverse database, managing all resources and setting data loss prevention policies. We’ll have a look at what data loss prevention is later on. And then there is Environment Maker. This allows you to create new resources in an environment including apps, connections, gateways and floors. So it’s environment maker. It’s not the maker of the environment, it’s not the provisioning of the environment. It is making things within the environment. It doesn’t include accessing data in an environment. Now another security setting or specification that you should be aware of is Azure Identity Services.

You remember when we were looking at various products like for instance portals and the virtual agents and we mentioned that authentication was possible. Well, one of the possibilities of authentication is by using azure Identity Services. So Azure Identity Services. Microsoft Azure. It’s their version of the cloud. Huge number of services that are available, over 200 of them. And this is not the calls to go into this. If you are interested, then the certifications AZ 900 and DP 900 are more suited. AZ for Azure in general, DP for the data within Azure. But one of the things about Azure is there’s a lot of security. You have got to log in, right? And that is why there is an Azure Active Directory, which you may have heard me mention a few times in this course.

So this provides enterprise quality identity service, including single sign on. So I can use one sign in to get lots of different features and multifactor authentication. And as you’ve seen, we’ve made a few references in PowerApps to active ad. It is indeed another way of being able to interact with some of the aspects of Power Platform. So Power Platform, it has security at its core. It uses various security roles such as system administrator, system customizer, environment maker, environment administrator or admin all the way down to a basic user which allows you to run apps and write your own records. So this is a brief look at security in Power Platform.

4. 13, 15. Manage apps and users, and where to perform specific admin tasks

In this video we’re going to have a look at how to manage apps, users and specific administrative tasks. So, to start off with apps, well, we’ve already had a look at how to manage apps. We go to Apps on the left hand side and we can click on an app and go to Dot or Dot. So Share is probably one of the major management roles apart from editing of awesome playing. So we’ve already had a look at Sharing. We can add individuals, make them co owners, so they can use Edit and share the app, but not delete or change the owner. And you can say what security role they have. For instance, Users is the default view and use, but not change.

Now, what users can actually use a particular environment for this we would go into the Admin Center where we will be spending a little bit of time finding this out and other things. So first of all, if you click on the environment and go to Settings and then in Users and Permissions, we have a look at Users. You can then manage users so they can access data in this particular environment. So I can add users refresh, or if I click on a User, it will open up Dynamics Three Six Five. So it allows you to give more information about this user.

However, this is not really where users information is managed. Users information is managed in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, as you can see here. If I were an administrator of this, I could go to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and have a look at users and what licenses they’re using groups, resources, billing, support and settings. So basically setting up the licenses and everything that’s necessary with that. So users are necessary with licenses because you assign the licenses to users.

Groups are necessary because they are groups of users. Billing is necessary because you pay for the licenses and so forth. Looking at the rest of the Power platform Admin Center, you may see quite a lot of references on the Internet to things like the Power apps admin Portal, the Power Ultimate, Admin Portal, the Business platform Admin Portal and the Dynamics 365 Admin Center. What the Power Platform Admin Center is there to be? All of them. It allows you all of these different centers in just one environment.

So environments this allows you to see what instances of the database you have. So we can see here operating system, device type, that sort of thing, and entity or table usage in the data vs. Power Automate. This has tabs for the number of runs, the usage, the location errors, service performance and connectors report.

As we’ve not been using Power Automate that much, there isn’t anything actually here. And then Power Apps again, we won’t have any data in here, but it will give us runs. So by day by week, month by month, usage, different types of flaws and use when created, errors shared and connectors. In addition, we have resources so we are able to look at the capacity, for instance, Dynamics 365 apps and the portals that are in use. Then we have got data integration. This adds and monitors predefined connections using the data first. But there’s nothing to see here on this particular environments and settings data policies. So which data connectors can be used with the database? And we’re going to have a look at data loss prevention or DLP policies in the next video.

And then we’ve got a link to the Power Bi admin center. Now, these do change fairly frequently, so what you’re seeing on your screen might be a bit different from what I’m seeing on my screen. So in summary, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center allows you to administer licenses and things from licenses. So users, groups, resources, building supports and settings. If I go into a specific environment, I can go down to an individual user, which I can see using Dynamics Three six Five. Everything else, however, used to be in separate places. It’s now been all brought together into the power platform admin center.