European Power Platform Conference 2024 Recap: Preparing for data integration and AI

In mid-June, Power Platform users from across Europe gathered in Vienna, Austria for the European Power Platform Conference. With a diverse range of updates and plans across Microsoft’s applications and services, participants came away with lots of information and guidance to make sense of. MSDW spoke with Microsoft MVP Lisa Crosbie, an Australian technology expert at Barhead Solutions, about low code development, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and her takeaways from the event. 

Crosbie was busy at this year’s conference, presenting three different sessions. In one session called “Dynamics 365 Sales in an Hour,” she profiled how the app compares to trying to use a tool like Excel for your CRM. In two other sessions “The Ultimate Guide on What to Use When” and “Don’t Get Knocked Out on Licensing Costs,” she explored model driven vs. canvas apps and when to use Premium licenses rather than building with SharePoint. 

The Dynamics session was interesting because it’s a Power Platform conference, but the organizers asked for Dynamics sessions as well…More than half of the people weren’t beginners and were mostly consultants, [making it] a very different audience than the rest of them. There were a lot of questions: how are you selling Dynamics Sales right now and how are you pitching it relative to Salesforce and Copilot for Sales? How is AI working? How do we get past [resistance from] organizations banning or blocking AI? 

Questions varied widely between sessions, Crosbie recalled. Many users asked about scenarios that favor continuing to build with SharePoint during her What to Use When session. Many attendees were intrigued by a calculator she presented with fellow MVP Luise Freese as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of Dataverse and Premium licenses to executive management. 

Many didn’t realize they could calculate so much stuff. How long does this process take? How much does this error cost? How do you calculate the risk especially in Europe of not being compliant with GDPR? [You can determine] the value of a solution over three years. People often pick one app and freak out about the licensing cost, versus considering [the costs over multiple years].