What I wanted to do in this post is give you some food for thought, some things to consider to boost your career and get you into the driver’s seat of your life. I work with the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 and have done for many years. For years I did what I was asked to do on the job, delivering results for other people but not thinking about where I was going or keeping my career in tip-top condition.

Last week at Ignite 2019 Orlando, Microsoft released a brand new app Power Virtual Agents to join the other three apps Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate the app (formerly known as Flow). Charles Lamanna, CVP of the Citizen Application Platform, demoed it live in Satya’s keynote.

I have been pretty vocal about Dynamics Communities Inc. (DCI) in the past. I felt they had lost their way and there was a need for change. I was unsure if the organization still had a fire burning in their belly for technology and this global community that we are all a part of.

Many people ask me how to shift careers from where they are, to where they want to go. Some people are stuck working in On-Premise Dynamics 365 Projects and feel they are getting left behind because they are not getting exposure to online Dynamics 365 Projects or working on the Power Platform with PowerApps, Flow and AI Builder.

In the past couple of months, I have had an increasing number of people asking me to coach them in their careers. Although I have coached people in the past, I have not been coaching for the past year.

First, let me start by saying sorry for this post. It has been boiling for a while, and everyone I speak to does not seem to have the authority to address it in Microsoft.

Throughout my career I have benefited from outstanding mentors and coaches. I was brought up in rural New Zealand on a dairy farm, one of seven children. In our home, the focus was on hard work and not academia.

There are now about 26 different applications that make up the Microsoft Business Applications suite of products. I am not suggesting you need to learn them all, but you do need to decide where will you be focusing.

These are two products that I love; Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn. Back in the day, I wrote a step by step guide on how to get them both working together – long before Microsoft started flirting with the idea of owning their own social network.

Dynamics 365 for Sales has been on my mind lately and the role that technology plays in evolving the sales arena. Over the past 20 years, I have worked with various sales applications including Maximizer, Goldmine, Act! Sales Logics, SugarCRM, Pivotal, and Salesforce.com, as well as bespoke applications built for specific industries such as banking and training.

For years, businesses and organizations have needed custom software applications to carry out day to day business. Applications that are unique to an industry, and sometimes unique to the way a company operates within that industry, are commonly known as Line of Business Applications.

Now that Microsoft has launched the Power Platform with Common Data Service (CDS) at its core, it’s time to evolve how we build line of business applications.

Why choose the Power Platform as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV)?Well, first, let us look at what Microsoft has done with the Power Platform. Over the last 24 months, they have separated Dynamics 365 applications from the underlying platform. De-coupling Dynamics 365 applications like Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing means that the platform now exists as a standalone tool, called the Power Platform.

Dynamics 365 is not a new technology per se, as it was created on the shoulders of Dynamics CRM, which is built on the shoulders of Microsoft CRM. There is a history dating back to 2003 of multiple iterations over time resulting the current product we have, Microsoft Dynamics 365.

I recently returned from a business trip to Beijing, China and was blown away by the massive opportunity for Microsoft Partners wanting to grow a Power Platform or Dynamics 365 business in this region.

I am excited about where Microsoft is moving with Mixed Reality. The Microsoft Business Applications Group has brought Mixed Reality under its umbrella as part of the Dynamics 365 Suite of products. We are moving into a very interesting time where we are able to interact with ideas using technology, as well as overlaying the physical world with digital information.

If you’ve been working in Microsoft Business Applications for more than a couple of years you may be aware that Microsoft moved Microsoft Dynamics 365 to Azure. In the past, this resided in the same data-centres as Azure but did not run on Azure.