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Shane Young Discusses Cutting Third-Party Costs With Power Apps, The Opportunities Within Copilot, And Future Possibilities.
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Matt James Davis (00:02.926)
So we have an extraordinary guest with us today. This is Shane Young. Shane is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has made a significant contribution to the Microsoft ecosystem over the years. Currently, Shane serves as the principal consultant for Power Apps 911. It's a consultancy and training provider. A role he's held over the past six plus years, I think I'm right in saying. And Power Apps 911 provides consultancy and training for Power Apps, Power Automate,
Power BI offering everything from quick fixes to full -scale project support and an ever -growing range of training courses as well. Additionally, Shane is a principal consultant and founder of Bold Zebras, Microsoft Cloud Consultancy firm that specialises in SharePoint Office 365 Azure. For the past eight years, Bold Zebras has been helping clients with Cloud assessments, installations, setups, upgrades, governance and more.
It's great to have you.
Shane Young (01:08.078)
Thank you, Matt. That's a quite the introduction, so I appreciate it. I was like, I'm learning new things about myself here. I felt like you were so thorough there. So very cool. Thank you guys for having me. David, you as well.
David (01:19.857)
Well there's more though isn't there? I think previously you owned SharePoint 9 -on -1 which was a major force in the industry and that was acquired by Rackspace and you've also co -authored several books around SharePoint so your achievements are remarkable and you've been an MVP for 18 years.
Shane Young (01:39.598)
It's yeah, right. I started when I was 13. So I'm still only like 30 years old, right? That's the way I like to think of that. But yeah, since 2005, right? I started SharePoint 911 in 2004. Yeah, I've been in this Microsoft SharePointy space since before it was cool. And then I guess after it was cool. I don't know. Is it cool again? I forget.
David (01:59.409)
It is cool, yeah. I think, you know, the 161 ,000 YouTube subscribers would indicate that it's cool. And 20 million views?
Shane Young (02:08.718)
Yeah, I spend a lot of time on YouTube. I like to talk to myself. I sit here in my basement. I stare at the camera. I just talk like this. And thankfully, people enjoy watching because it takes a lot of work to make. I think I'm just shy of 500 videos now.
David (02:25.937)
Wow. Well, we're thrilled to have you here to share your insights and your journey with us. So could you tell us a bit about how you found yourself here, starting from the beginning?
Shane Young (02:38.222)
Goodness yeah. So really I mean I guess we'll just say I was a SharePoint guy how about that. So I was doing the SharePoint I was loving that and I found out that like people really just needed help right they just needed some quick you know I kind of stuck on this problem with that problem. I like helping people fix their problems and so that was kind of the evolution of SharePoint 9 -1 -1 was it was literally just helping people fix problems. We got to about 20 people.
We were acquired by Rackspace in 2012 and that was different. So I went there and they were a big hosting provider. They were doing this cloud thing, when cloud was still kind of like, will we, won't we? And so they did a lot of that where they would host, basically host your on -prem infrastructure, but in the cloud, in their cloud or in their network, we called it cloud at that point. So we got to see a lot there, learned a lot, spent a few years with them. And then I came out and I was like, all right, what am I going to do with my life now?
I didn't really want to do SharePoint again. I kind of thought about it. And actually, I kind of ended up getting into PowerShell for a while. And so PowerShell is real interesting. It's a very technical tool. It's for IT pros and such. But PowerShell really helped me reaffirm logic. I could see stepping through the process. I've never been a traditional developer. I've never written C Sharp. But.
PowerShell kind of gave me a lot of power to do things with SharePoint that I couldn't do previously. So made some PowerShell content. I actually have one PowerShell video that's coming up on 2 million views all by itself. So yeah, if you want to learn PowerShell, the first video everyone watches is one of mine. But the problem with PowerShell was no one wants to pay for help. No one wants to pay for consulting on PowerShell. So it was kind of hard to feed your family with PowerShell.
For me, it was anyway. I mean, I know there's plenty of people who do it, so I don't want to dismiss their work. And so I went to a, I don't know if we called them, I think we might have been calling it TechEd then. It was the very end when Microsoft transitioned from the TechEd name to the Ignite conference name. I ran into an old friend of mine named Richard Riley. He was a SharePoint product manager that him and I wrote a book together, 2008 maybe, a long time ago.
Shane Young (05:04.11)
I'm like, hey, what are you even up to? And he's like, well, I'm going to do this Power Apps thing. I'm like, cool, I'm bored. I'm going to do it too. So I literally got into Power Apps because why not? Jumped in there, found out I really liked building apps using low code, no code. And the rest is history. That's probably the only answer you wanted, but that's the whole story.
Matt James Davis (05:26.382)
Yeah, no, that's brilliant. So you achieved a distinction of becoming a Microsoft MVP. Can you show us the journey that unfolded for you with that? We did some research on it and we found that there's just over 3000 MVPs worldwide, which so it's quite an exclusive group. And I'd probably argue that you're one of the most prominent ones in that group. So yeah, if you want to just explain your journey of kind of how you got there.
Shane Young (05:52.814)
Yeah, so to be clear, being a Microsoft MVP is really, it just says I have a big mouth, right? That's the main message that comes from that. I have a big mouth. I like to talk. And what it takes to be an MVP has changed. I'm sure you don't have to know what I'm about to say, but I got my start as an MVP by contributing to what was called newsgroups.
NNTP newsgroups. I would go into the Microsoft Power Apps newsgroup and I would answer those questions, kind of the whole genesis of SharePoint 911. And so the year that I got put in as an MVP for that user group, or that news group, I had answered like 380 questions. The next closest person was like at 40 or something. I just fell in love with doing it. And that's always been like one of the ways I've learned is, you know, I...
And I learned a little bit. And I'm like, all right, how do I go from here? And so I go to Forms. That says the same thing, Power Apps. And I just find other people's questions. And I'm like, that interests me. And I just go solve the problem. And it gives me a real world scenario to learn around. So anyway, that was kind of how I first got in. I wrote all the books. I used to speak at all the conferences. Once upon a time, my most famous speaking session was me and my buddy Todd took stage right after Bill Gates at one of the mic.
conferences along the way. Like, yeah, Bill Gates is my warm up act. I did not get to meeting though. I was very sad about that. But yeah, so speaking kind of helps, you know, community contributions, whether it's YouTubing, posting the forums, answering, you know, stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn, like, it's just about being a good, positive presence in the community. You know, so that's kind of how you become an MVP. But it's always very important to understand is like, yeah, it's...
It's not a technical word. Microsoft's not saying I'm a smart person. They're just saying I'm a loud person.
David (07:48.593)
Thanks, thanks. As you know, we're really interested in smaller businesses and smaller and medium sized enterprises. Can you tell us about the types of businesses that you work with and in particular, whether those sectors who are interested in apps and automations, whether those have changed over time?
Shane Young (08:11.022)
Yeah, so that's a great one. I would say that we have the fortune of we work with people from solo entrepreneurs all the way through literally the biggest companies in the world. We kind of run the gambit, right? That's kind of back to us having a YouTube channel with 20 million views. You get a little bit of exposure. We've built apps on every continent except for Antarctica. So if anyone is in Antarctica listening to this and they'd like an app built, I will build it for free just so I can finally say I've built it on all seven.
So, you know, we do kind of run the range, but one of the big changes, I think that's a great question for you, one of the big changes is, you know, if you think of my SharePoint 911 days, it was all IT, right? 100 % of the people that came to us, it was IT or SharePoint IT, like it was people that were really technical and that was their world. With the Power Platform, it's been a very big shift, right? So I would say that when I spoke at the last SharePoint or Power Apps Conference, goodness, I get the...
When I spoke at the last Power Apps Conference, I kind of asked the audience, like, hey, how many of you are IT and how many of you are not IT? And it was a pretty close 50 -50 split. And this is one of the most empowering things about the Power Platform is that 50 % of the audience is not IT. Because the bar has become so low between just the premise of low code, no code. But now we've got co -pilots even lower the bar further, like,
My mom can build an app, right? You go in there and type in some words. Go to an app to follow up with my Beanie Baby dolls, and boom, Power Apps will spit out a Power App for you. So that audience change has been pretty seismic. On the industry front, I would also say it's all of them. I know you guys are into education. We've helped a lot of universities are using it now. Because they've all got the M365 licensing, and so they're starting to realize that a lot of those, you know,
Point and click things they do in Excel or Access today are really easy kind of first power apps. So we're seeing a lot in university. High schools are a lot of times it's not student facing. It's more like one teacher kind of falls in love with it and he or she then creates some apps to kind of help the different teachers do stuff. So here in the states, or at least in the state that I'm in, here in Ohio,
Shane Young (10:34.446)
We have what's called educational service centers. So they provide consulting almost to the different schools within the county or the districts. And so they are also embracing the power platform because they are a consulting company at the end of the day. And so adding a lot of mechanics there. So yeah, we're seeing a lot of it in the education space. We're seeing it. Construction is another industry that was right for disruption. They were still very much pen and paper. So construction is another one. But.
You name the sector and I bet you we have a customer.
David (11:07.953)
I think certainly over here in the UK, education is a wide user of Microsoft 365 and Teams. And so, you know, a lot of the people that we speak to, they're already licensed for this stuff and they get it cheap. So it's a really easy thing for them to expand their automations without any real significant extra cost or maybe even reducing costs delicense products that were sitting outside of that ecosystem. With regards to the smaller businesses, though, it strikes me that if a lot of the drudgery of business admin can be offloaded through automations or AI driven automations increasingly, then I feel that kind of small businesses are really going to thrive with that because they have the ability to offload a lot of the tedious kind of stuff that really drags them back because they don't have that HR department, you know, they don't have the finance department and yet, you had a lot of that drudgery can actually be put to one side. Are you seeing some small businesses kind of view the world in that sense?
Shane Young (12:23.63)
I think the small businesses, I think you hit both of the ways that we're seeing it. So one is what licenses can we get rid of? One of my favorite examples is a construction company. And so they were spending a small fortune on a yearly license for one of the very big players in the inventory, IT asset management space. And so one of the challenges of using a packaged tool like that,
is that you have to make your business follow whatever the tool can do. So they go, the tool works the process this way. We now work the process this way. Boo. So we sat down. We built them a Power App. It was the cost to build the Power App, I'm not clobbing off, but it was roughly a third of their yearly costs they were paying for these people. And so it was a one -time cost. And now they have this Power App where,
They said, hey, here's how we want the business process to work end to end. And we made the Power App do what the business wanted to do, right? Instead of the business doing what the software wanted to do, the software did what the business wanted to do. It was just a total game changer for them. Now they have a custom tool that does exactly what they want to do. And it's cheaper than not even at the end of the day. It's cheaper than three months into the process than it was ever before. So I think that's one side.
The other side, though, is a lot of your small businesses, I've started multiple in my life. In the beginning, you're just trying to get by. You're just scraping and scratching and whatever you got to do, whether it's pen and paper, it's an Excel spreadsheet, it's a whiteboard in the office. We've seen all of it for small businesses. And so helping them, once they have a process in mind, say, hey.
You would be better off, right? It'd be more efficient, faster, you're going to lose all your stuff if the wind blows sticky notes off the whiteboard, you know, getting into a app and Power Apps because it is so Excel like, and it's functioning like a lot of these small businesses are building themselves. You'd be surprised how many people the title CEO show up at our doorstep and like, Hey, you know, no one else would.
I work company of 50 people, but no one else had time for it. So I went and watched a bunch of YouTube videos and learned PowerApps so I could fix this business process.
David (14:47.089)
Where does the Dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics 365 fit into that? Because obviously a lot of the stuff that exists within the Dynamics infrastructure can be done outside of that. Dynamics maybe leads people in a particular direction whereby if you kind of free flow it and create the app on its own, that might more closely match the business requirement. What's your views on that?
Shane Young (15:11.982)
So we don't run into a lot of dynamics. Occasionally, we will get someone who just needs help extending it. But from my understanding, so I am not a dynamics expert, so I could be totally making all this up. But my understanding with a lot of people the way dynamics goes is they decide, hey, we want to do a CRM. Are we going to do Salesforce or Dynamics?
Both are very expensive. Both are very big, large undertaking. Your mom and pops aren't doing this. These are your mid -market and aboves traditionally. But the problem is wrong. The challenge is that when you come into it, none of them ever stand it up on their own. Nobody says, OK, I'm going to roll out Dynamics 365, and they just go grab some licenses from the admin center, and boom.
They end up having to engage with a partner. They end up paying $400 an hour for all these fancy customizations. And that partner is going to be there for five years. And that isn't our business model in any way. And so we just don't see a lot in that space. I don't know. Maybe there's a different dynamics world that I don't know about. But everyone that I know, like for us here at Power Apps 911, we're 30 people. We just opened up Power Apps one day and Dataverse, and we wrote ourselves a CRM system. You could argue that Dynamics could do it all. That's $100 per user per month, and it was just easier, cheaper, better.
Matt James Davis (16:43.502)
So we're saying here that like businesses have the ability and education providers have the ability that, you know, they've got the, the Microsoft 365 licensing, but do they truly grasp the power of Microsoft and how it can save money, improve processes? Arguably, it will always be a better approach than a third party application, or is it still a select few? Like for example,
We recently launched a Lobby app, which is a visitor management solution. We build it with PowerApps and Power Automate. It outperforms many of the visitor management software options that are available on the market. And they normally cost thousands of pounds, when we're saying actually you can do this within your Microsoft costings already. So do you find that businesses really understand that potential? And do they approach you to say, look, I need your help to build a solution?
Or are you kind of having to approach them and say, look, there's a whole world here that you're not understanding or grasping fully.
Shane Young (17:46.254)
Say that it's usually someone in the business understands. So to say that the business itself, not that a business is a person, but business is a living entity. A lot of times the business, I would say, does not understand how powerful, how much it has available to it because they've invested in Microsoft 365. I don't think that that light bulb comes on. But what you find is little pockets of people have it and then go and champion it. And that's typically how it comes in. For us, our business model is we don't find ourselves selling anyone on the Power Platform. People have decided they want to do it, and they're coming to us and saying, hey, we need either just a little bit of help, just break fix this 30 -minute engagement, or we want you to build the whole thing. And you can see Power Apps. So we have customers for 30 minutes up to multi -year.
The most expensive power app I ever heard of. It wasn't ours. It was literally a million dollar contract to build a single power app. That sounds dumb and absurd to me, but I know that it happened. I also don't think it was successful. But I didn't say that. But yeah, so you kind of see the range. For example, one of the people that came to us, gosh, that's probably been five years ago. He was a mechanic for one of the largest car manufacturers, right? So take your pick of one of the Japanese brands. He worked for one of them. And basically, this mechanic out in the West Coast region, he was tasked with when a new model would roll out, and he started getting repetitive reports about the steering wheel falls off randomly, right? He was the guy that would go and investigate and try to figure out, do they have a larger problem, or is it just
These people were just all bad drivers. They all ripped their steering wheels off. It's a really bad example. Anyway, so it was paper and pencil. This guy sat down, watched a bunch of my YouTube videos, and built a power app for himself to track these incidents. And then his buddies found out, so they started using it. Then the manager found out, so then different regions. And this app ended up going national. It was literally written by a BLEEP.
Shane Young (20:10.57)
And that's, especially in the early days of power apps, that was a lot of the big success stories was it wasn't this planned awesome thing. It was just a guy or a girl who just was really passionate about fixing the problem that sat down and said, Hey, I can solve this. And they did it right. Whether they're a mechanic, a security guard, a janitor, or the CEO of the company. It was just a person that on their own went and solved this problem. And then kind of people's eyes started opening up, well, what else can we build power apps around? And now that car manufacturer has got tens of thousands of people building power apps and it's a major investment. All started with whatever, I can't think of his name, I would use his name. But that one guy out on the West Coast.
David (21:01.041)
That's really interesting. I think, you know, from my perspective, you know, I've got a business that's in hospitality and retailing. And what I find incredible is that not only the abilities of PowerApps, et cetera, not necessarily being widely understood, but even just teams. You know, the number of times I speak to people and, you know, I have everything managed for my staff in Teams, you know, they're all frontline. So the, the licensing is really cheap. they do all of their checks on there. You know, they do all of their clocking in and clocking out. The number of people who I say, you know, who don't even know that shifts exists within Teams is incredible. And yet, you know, these, these are no cost functionalities that don't rely on power apps even. So there's no development expense at all, but people just aren't aware of it. And I find it, I find it surprising.
But increasingly, I guess, people will become aware of it and then that gap will close. And the more people that use things like shifts in the marketplace, the more people become aware of it.
Shane Young (22:12.078)
You know, yeah, right, Shifts are a great one. I've never touched that one either. I know it exists, but I've never used it. You guys used Bookings to set this up, right? Like, that's one that we kind of play with from time to time. But we get sidetracked, and then we put it away, and we'll come back to it again a year later. There's so much in the ecosystem available. Forms is another amazing tool that so many people don't use.
I started using whiteboard, if you ever used whiteboard, right? That's in there included for free. Yeah, there's so much value to be had, but someone's got to sit down and figure it all out.
David (22:50.289)
Yeah. Maybe it's a co -pilot. Maybe that's who should be advising people.
Shane Young (22:57.678)
So I don't know if you've seen it. So I've been using Microsoft 365 co -pilot since like literally the first five minutes it went live to buy. A guy sitting there, refresh, refresh, buy. So pretty well versed in it. But one of the things that they've added now, so if you're on office .com and you click create, one of the options now is you can just type in, I need to do this. And then it'll take and process your request and say, here's how you would go solve that problem in forms. Here's how you go solve that problem in Excel.
And here's how you solve that problem in PowerPoint. I think that's to your point. That's kind of the future, hopefully, of this whole AI world is I don't need to know all these tools. I just need to say, hey, I got to handle my scheduling. well, here's how you do it in shifts. And I've already set you up a beginner schedule. That, I think, is the very soon AI revolution, right? Is this idea that I have to know less to get started.
David (23:57.041)
You did a great video on this actually, not that long ago, probably only a week or so ago, wasn't it? After the Microsoft Build conference. Yeah, really, really interesting. And yeah, we've used Copilot Studio and it blows you away, doesn't it? When you think about what it is possible to do using it. Do you think that, if you future gaze for a bit, where do you think we're gonna be in say a year's time?
Is it slightly overblown in the sense that it's still only going to be getting us 70 or 80 percent of the way there? So it's a time saver rather than a complete solution.
Shane Young (24:39.31)
That's a good one. So I think if we look a year out, all right, let's put me in a year, so this time next summer. I would think that you're going to have, it'll be a combination of both. So they're going to continue to refine the different tools. So adding AI to Excel and Word and PowerPoint. So those are going to continue just to be iterative, help me save some time, but not probably.
I do think though you're going to see that where the life -changing stuff is going to come out of a couple places. Copilot Studio, right? So if I was a betting man right now, Copilot Studio I think is going to be the hub of the Microsoft AI world. So I think if you're like, hey, what should I be doing? How good are you at Copilot Studio would be my first question to you.
But then I get interested. So you mentioned Build. And so Build, they announced what they called AI flows. So the idea of an AI flow is that you say, hey, here's my inputs. Here's the output I want. I don't care how you get there. And you let AI solve the problem. You never even look at it. Today we have describe it and design it, where you say a bunch of words and it puts pieces together haphazardly, 80%. And then you kind of got to go wire it up yourself. Right?
The idea of an AI flow is I would never see the pieces. I'm just like, hey, here's the end. Give me this out. You do your thing. And it could potentially even solve the problem a different way each time. So AI flows are in the Cloud flow space. So those are the flows that kind of run in the Cloud a ton of space. We also have this concept of desktop flows, where you automate things on your local PC. So with desktop flows, one of the things we're going to do there is we're going to add a new recorder.
Today it has recorders, but it just kind of tracks my clicks. All right, Shane clicked 217 by 86 and pressed the mouse, right? It's a dumb recorder. Literally, what did Shane do? The new recorder, I'm going to be able to do my clicking, but at the same time, I'm going to talk to it. I'm like, hey, I need to now print, and so I'm going to press this Print button over here to cause the print action to happen. So then it's going to take and it's going to build a desktop flow following.
Shane Young (27:00.046)
my words and my actions. But because it will understand context, and context is the key to being successful in anything in AI. Because it understands the context, say that my vendor moves a print button from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen three months later. So three months later, my flow is going to fail. But the flow is going to say, hey, Shane, you're trying to print. The print button is not here, so your flow is failing. I see a new print button on the other side. Would you like me to update the flow to click the button on the right instead of the 0?
Yes I would. Boom, my flow is back and running. Because this flow is going to have context of what I want to do. That I think is where to your point we're going to get away from just saving me some time to actually bring some intelligence in here. So that's my long -winded answer of what I think we'll see in a year.
David (27:51.025)
Now that's really interesting, that kind of idea of self -healing technology, I suppose, and the ability to identify an issue, fix it, or suggest a fix. But you also mentioned something quite interesting at the beginning of that about the fact that it might find a different solution each time, potentially. And then do you think that there's the possibility that there may be a...
an inbuilt constant improvement, a kind of iterative process whereby it will constantly look for ways in which it might improve the process by which it achieves something.
Shane Young (28:29.742)
Talk to Microsoft about this, right? But in my head, the way that that works, if you think about today, when you talk to chat GPT, right? Like if you ask it the same question five times in five separate conversations that don't have any memory turned on, you're going to get five different answers. Right? That's probably the same, right? If you ask me the same questions next week, I get different answers. Like, that's a very human characteristic, which surprises people that I feel like that's a positive, not a negative. But you know, those five different answers.
So I'm imagining what's going to happen as these AI flows mature, that basically every time it runs, it's just going to say, it's going to reanalyze the problem, and it's going to solve it however it sees fit on that particular day. Part of me thinks that might be a negative. Today, how I'm successful building cloud flows is I need perfect, repetitive, ironed out answers.
And so this idea that in the future it's going to, maybe one day it's going to use this action, another day it's going to use this action. I'm guessing that'll end up being a positive, but it's real easy to sit here right now and go, crud, I don't want that. That's how.
David (29:42.545)
Yeah, that's a very interesting point. Besides, you know, the way I was thinking about it, my background is actually as a data analyst. And one of the things that you covered in that podcast was that, you know, it will, co -pilots can create data models now. So you can throw a few tables at it and it'll find the relationships and so on and so forth. And one thing that struck me was, you know, with the background that I have, probably protecting my own expertise, actually, probably nothing to worry about at all, but you know, I was thinking, well, actually, you know, the key thing when you're, when you're, when you're working as a, as a data analyst is to estimate the result to cross check and to really know your model and know when things are going wrong and know when the answers that are coming out aren't right. And if we're, if we're letting, you know, co -pilots design our data models, design our measures, design our reports, it'll be very, very tempting to kind of say goodbye to, you know, that take technical data analyst and say, well, this is what this is what is telling me this this clearly must be the case. And is it you know, is there a business risk where there isn't a kind of an independent verification of the result outside of those AIs? Or do you just employ multiple AIs and and trigger against that?
Shane Young (30:58.926)
So think about a largest company today. So you were one of 10 data analysts, right? There was a whole bunch of you. And the reason was because we gave David a hard problem, and he went and sat in the corner for a week, cried a little bit, and then solved the problem. David's a crier. We can tell. So the way I see that problem facilitating itself is over time, it's not just the problem. It's the problem instead of there being 10 Davids, now we're going to have five, right? Because they all have got an AI that, once again, maybe getting them 80 % of the way there, but is making them more efficient, right? And eventually, yeah, right? Maybe there's only one or two, right? But I don't think there are ever zero data analysts in that particular scenario. But I think the number that you need does come down. And so then people are like, AI is going to take our jobs. But let's face it, right? I mean, if AI can, if what AI spits out for data analysis and you spit out the same, what value did you provide? So you've either got to be the super smart David, who does cry in the corner, or you've got to find your next thing where you provide value. Providing value that a machine can do it. If you don't outgrow that, then I don't know that I feel bad for you that you give me part of this title.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's interesting. Maybe, maybe, you know, we, you know, as, as tech, as technical people, we become more operational. And so you are operational managers. And if you if you're an operational manager, then part of that is to really understand your data and be able to make those estimations of whether whether the answer is you're getting it right or not, but you have to be operational in a different way and someone's got to prompt it to create these complex data models, right? So maybe you're the smartest person in the work room at, you know, taking the business inputs and putting them in, you know, words that AI produces, right? This is one of the problems we have today with the chat GPT's. Anyone who ever says, well, I tried it once. I got really dumb answers, right? Like it's not a chat GPT's fault. It got really dumb answers. It was your dumb prompt, right? Like.
So the people that spend literally hours every day trying to craft perfect prompts and iteratively talking to these things, we just have more skills. So the data analyst who is the best at saying, hey, yeah, I know just the right way to talk to Betty, our data model producing AI, to get her to spit out exactly what we want to be that person.
Matt James Davis (33:47.918)
I feel like there's like a whole other episode that you could dedicate just to prompts. What do you think about PowerFX? Do you think it's going to be obsolete like DAX and when the natural language is just processing, generating or generating the code for you?
Shane Young (34:06.766)
I think Power FX has got a long, it's got several years left in it for sure. Because if you look at Microsoft's investments, one of the things they're working on is maturing Power FX so that they can make it the centerpiece of Power Automate. We know Power Automate has its own language today. So Power FX, they wanted to get it there. We know that Power FX just in a build, just showed up, they're going to add that to Power Pages.
So I think Power FX is a solid language to continue to bank on. It's also open source, so there are third parties that are using it to build their own things. So knock on wood, this is back to being like David here. I'm a little worried about my job. But I feel like Power FX has got some meat left on the bone for a ways to go yet.
David (34:58.641)
Yeah, it's not my job anymore, Shane. I do real work now, so.
Shane Young (35:05.838)
Nope, sorry David, you're just in the corner crying looking at data models. Matt, I'm expecting you to carry this theme of David crying through all the episodes all season.
David (35:26.129)
Just a question then on low code development. You said at the very start that you really got into that and the idea of not being that deep dev who's writing difficult, impenetrable code, but actually looking at what requirements are and building these quickly. Do you think that kind of low code citizen developer mentality is going to dominate the field now?
Do you think there's really, in the longer term, do you think there's actually any room for anything other than that?
Shane Young (36:02.062)
I think you're definitely going to see a continued push to low code, no code being the default answer. And I think there's a couple reasons for that. One, I mean, obviously, the main one is AI. Anyone now can hop in there, use some words, hop off an app, and then go and talk to ChatGPT about it and be like, hey, what do I need to do? What am I doing wrong here? How do I make this thing better, more awesome? How do I fix this for me?
That's already here. So I had this conversation with one of my guys yesterday. He was talking about, so he's also not a pro dev, never been one. But he has been doing a lot of Python lately. And he never took a Python class. I know anything about Python. He's just been working on his prompting to ask, insert AI tool here, how to write this code. So I think that's kind of part of the evolution here is,
Yes, low code, no code was going to do more and more and more and more. And I think it's the gateway for anything AI. So if you believe AI is coming to the business, I think low code, no code is going to be how it is, not pro code. But then you're going to continue to see that pro code is going to become less this impenetrable force. And it's going to become more and more people.
Chat GPTing their way through it. Now, don't get me wrong. There are still going to be devs needed to write really big, hairy, complex things. I'm not in any way saying that my low code, pro code tool is going to build the next ChatGPT. Not delusional. But there are a lot of business apps out there. A big security company we did work for a couple years ago, they came to us and said, hey.
We want to do a Power App. They already have a lot of success with some Power Apps. And they wanted to build a Power App to solve some specific sales problem. I don't know what it was. So we went, we looked at the requirements, and we quoted, and let's say, I don't really know. Let's say we quoted 200 hours of low code, no code to build this app. So that was one option. And I don't remember the number. But whatever the number was that we came back with, what that would cost, here you go.
Shane Young (38:19.598)
They went to their own internal IT and said, hey, we want to build this tool whatever way you guys do it, which was going to be in C sharp, you know, the whole lifecycle management, like a real pro dev. The number that internal IT quoted them to build the same thing was 4x the number that we quoted them. Whatever the numbers were, it was, it was a 4x number and it was going to take like 18 months at a minimum. Yikes. In the day, they decided, you know what? We're just going to build ourselves and so they're like, you know, because using us to build it would have went faster. But they're like, you know what? We're just going to put our heads down. We're going to assign this woman over here to lead the project. And she is just going to work on this for the next six months. And they did. Rolled it out. It was all successful. And I think that's just an important story. So we had low code done in -house, low code done with a partner, or pro code done in -house. They were very different numbers and prices. But the.
So the cheapest was to do it yourself. The fastest was to do it low code, no code with us. And I just like to see money catch on fire was to use traditional IT.
David (39:31.665)
Yeah, so where you have, for example, some very common challenges apply across a complete sector. Say, for example, I'm creating a coffee shop and I'm thinking, I'm going to run this coffee shop. Now, many, many coffee shops all with the same kind of challenges, the opportunity to say to possibly a co -pilot and say, hey, just create me an optimized business model. Set it up how I need to run things. And that's a very important thing.
That has been done many times before. So extensively, you'd say that Copilot would have at its, as a resource, all of those models potentially, and could create an optimized business model without reference to any local developer at all, because it's an existing business that exists many, many, many times. Can you see that kind of idea where there may be just optimised business models sitting? kind of on the shelf, ready for people to pick up the news.
Shane Young (40:33.87)
Yeah, so we've talked about this slightly different internally here, like trying to build templated apps. Everyone needs a timesheet app. Let's build a template for a timesheet app. What happens, though, is everyone has the same 80 % to 90 % requirements. But everyone wants it to be just a little different. We just want a little. And so I think that the same problem we have with trying to do a templated app for those scenarios, I think you'd have the same problem if you try to have a templated business model.
I like, yes, this framework is right. Yes, it's this, but I need someone to help me fix tweak that last 20 % to make it our business model. Right. Every. And I just, I don't know. I think that that's for the foreseeable future is still always going to be a challenge is even if, you know, even if what the tool spits out is exactly what you actually need, you feel like you got to go put that 20 % change on it.
Matt James Davis (41:36.686)
So what trends are you seeing in the industry? So what are businesses reaching out to you for the most? So, you know, power app, is it power BI? What type of thing are you seeing more and more come through the door?
Shane Young (41:49.422)
Pages is the latest and greatest one that people are starting to ask about. Power Pages shows up on that home screen of Power Apps. People are like, it's just the same thing. Power Pages is quite a bit different than Canvas apps or model -driven apps. It's a whole other tool. I think it's a stretch to call it low code, no code, because every project we've ever done has ended up with some pro code in there. Microsoft continues to make that better, but it happens.
Power pages is probably the number one trend that I've seen. So much so, I just added a Power Pages 101 to. So we have a, on my training site, we have a free 101 Power Platform class. We added hours of Power Pages content. And in July, we're going to run a Power Pages jumpstart, like a live session for a couple days to teach people how to do it, because we're seeing so much interest in that. So that's it.
That's probably the number one, if you're really looking for what's actually changing right now, is a lot of interest in PowerPages.
David (42:52.529)
And is that for use internally in large organizations or any of those externally facing? Because I think when I've looked at Powerpages, I've found the licensing model quite difficult to understand and potentially quite costly if you misread what you're doing.
Shane Young (43:10.126)
So all the ones that we're seeing are external partner -facing. So not public websites, but some type of authenticated web portal. And the licensing, it's confusing. But really, and they refined it probably six months ago -ish. And really, you're just going to pay per view. So the challenge, I think, is that the initial cost is high. I think $200 a month is the minimum.
get in there, but you get an awful lot of page views for $200 a month. And so for most people, I don't see that number changing. I feel like that $200 number for a lot of people is going to be it. Whether they, you know, when they first kick off all the way through, what they see is they're, you know, we were crushing it scenario that $200 number is still going to hold them tight. So.
Yeah, it's kind of like the power apps per user license. It looks really expensive if you think about it from the standpoint of one app. But if you think of it as an ecosystem of apps, it's like, this is pretty cheap.
David (44:20.433)
So in terms of business to business, the business to business of Power Pages is where it's at.
Shane Young (44:26.734)
That's what we're seeing. Yeah. I mean, some of them are even doing business to consumer, but it's mostly, yeah, it's business to business, vendor portals type of stuff.
Matt James Davis (44:39.95)
Could you share with us a favourite project? I'm sure there's hundreds that you've worked on. Can you share with us one of your favourites? What was the request and what was the end result and why does that stand out to you?
Shane Young (44:53.39)
I will go with a woman in the southern part of the US. So she used to be an access developer. Got out of that, and she became a home inspector. So if you're going to buy a house, she goes in there and says, hey, there's a hole here. Your air conditioner is going to blow up. We do home inspections here in the US. I'm sure you guys do them there too, but it's a very common thing. Anyway, so.
She wanted to build a power app to do these home inspections. She got a contract to do it for a new builder who was building a neighborhood of hundreds of houses. So she was going to literally be, of course, for a year inspecting a couple hundred houses, all reporting back to this one builder. So we built her a mobile power app to do the inspections. It ran offline. So that means it would work without internet because these new neighborhoods out in the boonies didn't have reliable internet coverage yet.
So I had to work offline. But so she would, you know, it was very tailored, right? Once again, back to exactly what she wanted to do. So capture the information, capture the pictures, do the inspections. She had a point system she had developed. So like if you painted the wall the wrong color, it was point for points off or whatever. So we built all this for awesome, right? You got all the data. But what was really the real reason I love this project was because what it empowered behind the scenes. So now she did the inspection, as soon as she finished it, it emailed off a report of a PDF of the whole inspection to the builder. So they were getting real time notifications of, hey, here's exactly what's going on with this point system we've agreed to. So exactly what the builder wanted that he had never had before. And then because we were putting all the data in a database under the hood,
Once a quarter, she would go in there and we wrote Power BI reports so that they could analyze the data. And so now they could be like, look, we had a lot of paint problems. We should probably get rid of this paint vendor, right? Or this carpet vendor has never had a problem. Man, we should probably pay him more. We're not going to, but we should. They had this whole system, right? All driven from one woman's vision of, hey, instead of doing some pen and paper and taking me to the office, I'm going to build a Power App and automate all of this. It is just spectacular, right? Like, totally changed that entire little ecosystem of the world one person's mind for one woman company.
Matt James Davis (47:20.526)
That's brilliant. Yeah, that's a brilliant one.
David (47:23.953)
So we're coming to the end of our time. Final question for you, Shane. If you could give one tip to smaller, medium -sized businesses or education providers to kind of future -proof their operation, what would it be?
Shane Young (47:37.934)
Use AI. You've got to use AI. The whole way that I started SharePoint 9 -1 -1 way back in 2004, this sounds mean, but I was better at Google than people. They would post their problem, and they'd be like, I don't know what to do. And I'd go to Google, and I'd type it in, I'd read some stuff, and I'd be like, all right, here's your answer. That was my whole, I was literally, I started a business that I later sold for, I did good. So AI is the same way. You have got to be talking to AI. You need to use ChatGPT, Copilot, Cloud, Llama, whatever AI tool you want every single day. And if you're like, but I don't have any business use cases, great. Ask it about your personal stuff. Ask it about your finances. Ask it about your home improvement project. I don't care. The people that are going to do the best in the near to immediate future are the ones that are best at prompting.
The trick to being in prompting, take a training class for me, is going to be practice. It is just, I ask it the dumbest questions all the time just to see what will happen. And I ask it the same question a month later just to see if it changes the answer because that's how I'm becoming good at prompting. I'm getting in my 10 ,000 hours. Get your 10 ,000 hours.
Matt James Davis (48:54.062)
Really interesting how you're saying about how you got your start with SharePoint 911, because I guess as a hobby now, I still find myself going into the Microsoft Community forums and answering loads of questions. And you're quite right. If I don't know the answer, I tend to just research some stuff on Google for five, 10 minutes and then have the answer to go back to. So yeah, I totally agree with you there. Shane.
You've been brilliant. Keep doing what you're doing. We need you as do companies and individuals like us who aim to get businesses and education providers to maximise their potential of Microsoft and grow into market leaders really. So I can tell it's more than just a more job, more than just a job for you. It's a passion like it is for us. So thanks for joining us on our first ever episode of Mastering Mondays.
Shane Young (49:44.494)
Thanks Matt and Dave for having me. It was a lot of fun. Good chat.
David (49:47.889)
Thank you.
Matt James Davis (49:48.142)
Thank you.
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