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The Rise of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in the Real Estate, Property and Housing Market

I have recently published an article on MS Dynamics World discussion the rise of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform in the Real Estate, Property and Housing Market. I also discuss the reasons for this and why other old-time established vendors are unable to compete. Keen to hear everyone views on this (no swearing!).

The post is inspired by our own firm’s experience (TechLabs London) in the Dynamics 365 platform and in the Property and Housing Industry through our solution (iProperty Cloud)

Here is a link to the article – feel free to comment below or on the article itself:

https://msdynamicsworld.com/story/rise-dynamics-365-real-estate-property-and-housing-market

 

 

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Join my YouTube Channel and win a competition!

I don’t think many of the Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform community is aware of my YouTube channel. I currently have few videos including my sessions at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando. You will find videos talking about AI Chat Bots, Azure DevOps for ISV, Power Platform Vs Dynamics 365 and Building a Cloud strategy.

As many of us are now home-bound due to Corona virus outbreak and since my typical hectic schedule of flying to speak at events has now been reduced to 0 (can’t complain really), I have decided to do few Live Webinars and Recorded Videos then post them on my YouTube channel.

However, I would really like to be sure that my Video content will actually benefit the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform community.

Hence, I will much appreciate it if you can please subscribe to my YouTube Channel so you can get notified about my new videos.

Competition:

Moreover, the first 100 subscribers will have the priority (if they would want) to join me as guests on my first 25 Live sessions and Recorded videos and get 5 votes on which videos I should do first. All you need to do is just take a screenshot of your subscription showing current number of subscribers. Basically something similar to the screenshot below.

Subscribe to Mohamed Mostafa YouTube Channel
Subscribe to Mohamed Mostafa YouTube Channel
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Using Microsoft Azure Functions instead of Dynamics 365 Plugins, Custom Actions and Custom Workflow Activities

Microsoft Azure has a multitude of Services that are offering a significant number of features and capabilities that can help you extend your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Solution, built on the Power Platform, in many ways.

If I were to follow each and every one of these, it would easily take me hundreds of pages/posts. However, there is one service that if you are not currently already using, then you are genuinely missing out. This is: Microsoft Azure Functions.

Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand serverless functions that extends existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in Azure, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Power App or any third party service as well as on-premises systems.

There are many things to cover on Azure Functions alone, but the main point I want to cover in this blog post, is how Azure Functions are now literally replacing Power Platform / Dynamics 365 plugins, custom workflow activities and custom actions. This is not an official Microsoft guidance, this is more of a personal conclusion.

If you are a seasoned Dynamics 365 CRM developer, you will remember how we used to build console apps and windows services to do a variety of things for us inside Dynamics 365 (or Dynamics CRM as we called it) but in a complete isolation outside of Dynamics 365 Platform.

Remember all these console apps that would update or insert data inside Dynamics 365? Remember the windows services that would run every 5 minutes to pull data out of Dynamics CRM or insert/Update data in Dynamics CRM? In the old on-premise world, these were prominent ways of running apps or code components in isolation from Dynamics 365 for very good reasons. Nowadays, in the Dynamics 365 world, these can (and should) be done as Microsoft Azure Functions.

Azure functions can act as a webhook, be triggered by an event or setup to run at certain times/dates or ever set intervals. Azure Functions can dip into your Dynamics 365 instance securely, and do all the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) actions you want it to do. Azure Functions can connect and integrate your Dynamics 365 solution with any other solution including on-premise solutions. Azure functions have no depth like plugins do and are do not have maximum 2 minutes execute time like plugins. There are many more points of comparisons, advantages and differences but I’ll leave that to future posts.

Hence, if you are not using Microsoft Azure Functions in your Dynamics 365 Solutions today, then you should start now. There is a whole world for you out there that you haven’t explored yet.