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Debolina Dasgupta Discusses How the World Customs Organisation is Utilising Microsoft and How You Can Too
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David (00:02.382)
Welcome to another episode of Mastering Mondays. Today we have Debolina Dasgupta with us. Now Debolina is based in Brussels and works as a Microsoft expert for the World Customs Organisation, helping clients optimise their business processes using Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform. She also shares valuable tips and tricks with her excellent blog on medium and various social media platforms. Welcome Debalina.
Debolina Dasgupta (00:26.385)
Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Matt (00:29.597)
Great to have you on the show and your credentials, they really speak for themselves. So you've gone from a SharePoint architect and developer to consultant, and now you're a Microsoft expert for the World Customs Organization. So to start, could you just tell us a bit about your journey? Like how did you get involved in systems and then what led you to focus on Microsoft and kind of ultimately led you to where you are today?
Debolina Dasgupta (00:55.169)
Well, honestly, I started working as a dotnet developer. And if you know dotnet, it's like anything you create, the create, edit, update elements of application, we had to start writing code from scratch. And the first time I started working with SharePoint, my reaction was, it does everything automatically. So.
That's a good start. And that is where that makes life so much easier. So you are done with the basic building blocks and then you're adding new stuff on top of it. I think my first project I remember about SharePoint was where we actually installed SharePoint on the Windows 98 machine just to get it started. And
We have to install so many things and from there till today it has come, it has grown so much. And I think the journey has been amazing. And now with Power Apps and AI, we are solving things so fast.
Matt (02:00.573)
You lean more towards, I guess kind of a universal kind of Microsoft expert in your current role. Obviously you came from SharePoint. So, well, I say you came from SharePoint. You came from kind of a SharePoint kind of expertise. How did you kind of come from that? How did you kind of branch out from SharePoint to kind of Microsoft in general?
Debolina Dasgupta (02:25.985)
To be very honest, as I continued working with SharePoint, I realized SharePoint is not, it was just not a single application. It's everything together. So if you are working on a document system on SharePoint or a project management system on SharePoint, you still need to link with the tasks, you still need some planning. And when all the tools of Microsoft comes together, even with OneNote, how you can quickly take all the notes and everything with a new loop where it makes life so much easier to have quick details and align and tasks and everything. So it was a very simple move to start working with the other things which integrate the entire ecosystem together. That's our Microsoft 365 and we have everything together. And I realized when I start working with people, and I try to solve their problems, I realized that some of the Microsoft tools can easily fit in and be a solution. You don't always need to start from the scratch and start developing and creating something new. So that is where the entire ecosystem came together for me.
David (03:40.457)
That's very interesting. Just to get a bit of context of where you are today and where you're working and how those kind of tools fit into your work environment, you're working for the World Customs Organization. Now, I think most people are aware of what the World Trade Organization is in terms of removing trade barriers. Would it be right in saying the World Customs Organization kind of works to make those existing barriers function optimally? And does Microsoft have a place in that kind of process.
Debolina Dasgupta (04:12.129)
Yes, you're right. Our organization makes, we have a lot of member countries which are a part of our organization. The World Customs Organization creates all the processes and policies for the customs and us having Microsoft ecosystem makes our life so much easier. So if we have a lot of projects but...our projects are very different than the normal projects in different organizations. We are not just goal -based. We also have different types of people. They're doing different types of donations. We have different areas of expertise or different kinds of output that we are looking at, which is very different from a normal organization who is looking at profit. So Microsoft technologies, SharePoint, Planner, and everything fits in so well so that we can create things which work for us. So as a different organization, we use SharePoint and we use document management system. We are transitioning from a very older document management system to a new version. And when people use SharePoint, they realize that it's so much easier with all the versioning.
When a lot of people are working together, we know who has made what changes and things can go back to them. So that makes our life a lot easier and that is how Microsoft and SharePoint and Planner and all the other tools loop and everything fits in.
David (05:44.614)
So does your role focus both internally on the Working for the World customer organization and also those members who are looking perhaps to improve their processes and improve the way that they manage their operations?
Debolina Dasgupta (06:00.897)
No, we mostly work, I mostly work on the internal processes and for the organization itself. But when we do have people from different member organizations who are a part of our organization and when they see all the new things that we are implementing that inspire them to go and start something new.
David (06:23.045)
I see. So where you've got member organizations, those that some of those people will work with you because of course you're all trying to work together and that's how the message gets out and that's how you kind of get similar processes that might work and how you can facilitate better processes across, you know, national borders.
Debolina Dasgupta (06:39.809)
Exactly, yes.
Matt (06:43.325)
I love that you've mentioned Planner already because I'm like the world's biggest Planner fan. So that's awesome. I'm interested to know your thoughts on how universal do you find the adoption of Microsoft or Microsoft technologies? Do people generally recognize Microsoft's potential or perhaps they have the licenses and they're not making full use of it or maybe they are making full use of it? What's your thoughts on that?
Debolina Dasgupta (07:09.505)
Well, I think people are getting more technologically, technically savvy. And I, before working with World Customs Organization, I did get a chance to work with a couple of freelancing options as well. And I spoke with some of the small business organizations, like single person business organizations. And they were also very excited to use SharePoint and Planner and all their Microsoft technologies. Because anytime you get an email account, you get a Microsoft 365 account with it. And more people, as they start learning about what are the options or what are the things Microsoft 365 can do, they are really interested to learn more about how everything fits in. And so I think that people are really interested. They like to learn more. They are trying their level best to understand how everything can go in together.
There are some people who I know would still love having their files in the folders and folders and folders and folders. But we have moved. I have worked on projects where we moved document libraries from a folder level structure to a flat architecture. And they have used it and they found it to be amazing.
David (08:29.57)
One point you make there, Debilene, is really interesting about the small business organizations, because in a way, 365, we find kind of blurs the lines between the way that a big organization operates and a small one operates. So you can almost have all of those same kind of support mechanisms in terms of technology when you're a small company as you can when you're a huge multinational organization and you know, the battle is for people to really understand how they can use all that power, and that it's worthwhile investing time in actually getting it right and getting it working for you. And because of course, you don't have that IT department to support you, but then maybe in a bit, we'll get on to AI and co -pilot and how in fact, that might even move things even further.
Debolina Dasgupta (09:18.433)
Yes, very true. And the fact that you don't really need a huge ID setup to get into the Microsoft environment that itself makes life so much easier for all different kinds and types of businesses. So that's a good thing.
Matt (09:36.157)
We currently create, well I say we currently, we create a lot of power platform solutions, particularly power app solutions to reduce third party applications in businesses and educational institutions. What are your thoughts on power, the power platform replacing some of those third party applications? Or perhaps in some cases, maybe even like the world customs organization. Are the applications too niche to fully transition away from third party solutions?
Debolina Dasgupta (10:06.017)
No, I think it's Power Apps. Power Apps itself has come a long way. And I mean, at least given even in last one year, the changes have been drastic, especially in the UI perspective as well. And yes, even in my organization, my current organization as well, we are transitioning to a lot of Power Apps, different applications for conference room management, for creating badge management system with the badge printed with barcodes and with security. So we created an application where all the securities had phones and they could scan the badges with barcodes and that was creating an entire badge application. We did it entirely on Power Apps and SharePoint and the entire development took a week time.
At most with all the testing and everything done and it has like there were at least 200 people going in and out of the entire place. It's so easy. It's so fast. Imagine doing the same application from the scratch or hiring someone, getting a vendor application and then calling their support if something goes wrong. This makes life so much easier. And I think as we go forward, we'll be adopting more and more power app solutions.
David (11:32.99)
One of the interesting points made by Elden, who was our guest last week, was that the ease of creating Power Apps can in itself be a problem in that you find some organizations where they've created so many and they haven't actually got that structure to maintain those apps or to make sure that they're being used correctly. Can you see that being an issue down the line? There's actually a kind of a controlling role that's needed to make sure that
Things don't kind of go out of control where you've got hundreds of apps kind of fighting for the attention of staff.
Debolina Dasgupta (12:08.161)
Yes, that's true. And yes, because apps are pretty easy to make. You can write on copilot, I need an app to do this, and it creates it automatically. We did implement environments in our organization. So we have a production environment, a development environment, and a UAT environment with different accesses and permissions so that when the app moves to the actual production, it has actually been validated by IT to know that this is the right application that gets released. We are also working on creating a center of excellence. So having the COE kit installed in our environment so that we can have more control about who is creating what kind of applications. However, I was also going through one of the case studies of Coca -Cola where they are allowing people to start creating apps and they allow business owners to, they are treating the business owners to create apps.
This is also something that we pitched as a part of our organization that we provide proper training to business users and divide applications into where the impact is. If the impact is on a single set of people or is the impact on an entire team or is the impact global. So we classify the applications and then we divide the responsibilities on who takes care of that kind of application. So that is what I think can be one of the solutions.
Matt (13:35.133)
I'm interested to ask you one more question on Power Apps with all that. The ones that your organization have adapted into internal Power Apps, have they outperformed the third party applications that they've replaced?
Debolina Dasgupta (13:54.656)
Yes and no. So basically most of the applications that we had in our organizations were previously developed and not a third party one. But yes, before when I've worked with different other Power Apps applications,
it was way easier because it was internally handled. It was easy to solve something. If something breaks in Power Apps, you know that's a little change and it's very easy to figure out where the changes. It's an event -based application. So you know which event is causing an issue. We can always go back, fix it, publish it. It doesn't go through an entire process of now you publish it and it goes through a deployment cycle and everything. So that obviously makes life. A lot easier as compared to any third party solutions.
David (14:45.177)
Well, we've already kind of talked about Copilot a little bit, so it was inevitable. We're going to talk about it a lot more now. So, you know, everybody is talking about Copilot and everyone's talking about Copilot Studio and what opportunities there are for sort of low code or no code development. You know, how do you see Copilot and Copilot Studio impacting on your organization and or maybe you're already using them and, you know, in that case, you know, what if they helped you to achieve so far? It's a two early days, probably, I should suspect.
Debolina Dasgupta (15:19.873)
Yes, it is actually pretty early. We started by going through AI training for the internal departments. But we do see that Copilot is something that is very interesting because we do have a lot of documentation and a lot of FAQs and a lot of documents that exist in general in the organization. And to have something which can actually write a, I can write a human question and it replies me back with an actual answer makes life so much easier, especially if this was implemented for our help desk people who receive a lot of similar queries on a day -to -day basis. So if someone says that my camera is not working, a copilot can easily suggest that, did you check if the shutter of the camera is switched off or switched on? And it doesn't have to have a ticket and go through a person waiting in the queue for them to tell you that.
Remember the shutter? Are you sure you switched? You opened it? So yes, that will definitely make life easier. So yes, we do have plans in future, but it's in in cube.
David (16:25.527)
I guess a key moment for you will be when it's available in multiple languages so that you can offer the same element of service to your members in their natural language and it being as consistent, I suppose, as if in any language as it is in English.
Debolina Dasgupta (16:31.649)
Yes. Yes.
Debolina Dasgupta (16:46.049)
Yes, definitely. And especially in a country like Brussels, where we have three different languages. We have Dutch, we have French, and we have English. And sometimes a person who is a French speaker, even though they know English very well, there are some words that get stuck. This word, I don't know what it's in English, but I know the word. And so having something like even now in teams, if I write a word, there is an option to quickly translate, having communication gets so much easier. So, but yeah, with time when people can start questioning in their own language, it will make life a lot easier for everyone.
David (17:24.501)
So that's the impact on them. But as a developer, how do you see your role changing with Copilot's ability to now create power effects, it can create DAX, automations, data structures now, it's going crazy. What do you think the future developer role will be?
Debolina Dasgupta (17:43.329)
I think at some point of time, the future developer role will be more about ensuring how AI can work more effectively for us. It won't be us going back and writing all the code line by line or making sure that this variable is assigned to that variable. But it will be more on explaining that this is what I want and explaining to AI that this is how the exact requirement has to be implemented understood because at the end of the day AI is still a machine and you have to explain the machine what exactly the human is looking for. So the human is looking for a button which will make my life the simplest but AI needs to know how what makes the life for human simple.
David (18:30.996)
Yeah. So I suppose in that sense, you know, it may be almost more of an advisory role. So if you've got your business units actually creating their apps, then they need to know what best practices they need to know the pitfalls. And like you say, you know, the machine will only do what you tell it to do. So you, you, you need to know, you know, how, how things can fit together to actually have an effective app or process bill, even if it's even if you're heavily assisted by co -pilot or another AI.
Debolina Dasgupta (18:59.489)
Exactly. And also to explain end users, because when we started as IT, we went through the entire training of how we started defining an entire process as an algorithm. I remember my first algorithm was how to make a tea. And then I would forget some step and my teacher would say, but your tea is on the floor. You forgot to put it in a pan and then you forgot to put it in the cup.
If I don't, if so, as even as a business user who has started creating an application, that won't come naturally to them. So we have to have that training that, you know, this is what you tell, this is how you define. And those things will come with time and even with AI. Yes, we'll be more advisory, we'll be more training and explaining, but that's going to be a different and fun kind of role, I believe.
Matt (22:08.829)
No worries. Okay, let's try again. So I want to talk about industry trends. What's in fashion right now? Is it power automate power apps? You mentioned earlier loop, which I know is the talking point right now. What's trending and what should businesses and education providers be using?
Debolina Dasgupta (22:26.273)
Well, I think power apps and power automate together is trending a lot. And I think it should because it makes life so much easier. You need a quick little thing. You can create your own app and start using it. I recently started using Loop for my projects because it's very easy to structure them. It's like using Notion. But
in a different, in my Microsoft environment. And it makes me like, it helps me to track and keep notes, just copy paste things from everywhere, like kind of a brain dump place. And then it also allows me to create little bits and pieces where I can sort things around. So yeah, I think both of them are pretty much in the, in the trend.
Matt (23:11.421)
I find it fascinating the way you're saying that you're using loop because I've started using loop but I use it purely at the moment for placing all my different planner plans into kind of one space for me to easily see kind of you know in front of me especially when I'm dealing with a larger team and they've all got their own plans I find it really useful for that and I think I'm still searching for what
Debolina Dasgupta (23:28.449)
Mm -hmm.
Matt (23:40.349)
I can totally see the kind of you know the positives about it and how it could be used so yeah it's great to hear someone else is using it because we haven't spoken about it much at No More Bad Mondays but it's definitely something that has been spoken about and being used widely and there's a lot of hype around it so yeah that's really interesting thank you
Debolina Dasgupta (24:05.249)
Yeah, and even loop has gone through changes in a while. I mean, I remember a year back loop was just something that we would add in teams and everyone would keep on adding and commenting and the table grew bigger. And now it came up with its own portal and with the different options. So it's really useful for planning, for brain dumps, for creating that pre -document before you take everything and put it in a...as a proposal. So I think it's something that is going to be pretty good in future as well.
Matt (24:39.357)
So as a SharePoint expert, going to SharePoint now, do you see SharePoint, Dataverse and Azure evolve in for data storage, especially with co -pilot's ability to create data models? Will Dataverse become the sort of default database for Power Apps, you know, with SharePoint focused on intranet and document storage?
Debolina Dasgupta (24:59.713)
I think it's automatically and already is. I recently attended the European Power Platform Conference that happened in Brussels a week or two back and all the discussions and all the sessions were more about Dataverse and how it works with Power Apps and everything. I think the only challenge with Dataverse that I can think of is that it is paid and SharePoint is not paid. It's a part of your subscription and when it's a small application, you definitely tend to go towards SharePoint because it's fast, quick, easy, you don't have to pay and that's it. And Dataverse is more of a structured place with, it kind of reminds me of SQL Server with everything there and different entities and all the things there. So yeah, I think at some point, Dataverse is going to be more of an option.
David (25:56.586)
And yeah, I'm curious about that because I, you know, I had, I was reading an article earlier this week where it was comparing Copilot studio speeds for different, from different data sources. And one of the key comparators was Dataverse versus SharePoint. And it was interesting that Copilot, that the Copilot was bringing back more information and more detailed information from Dataverse than it was from SharePoint. So, you know, that was curious. And, you know, that for me, when I was building something in Copilot Studio, I was thinking, well, I'm going to do it in Dataverse then, because actually, it looks as if it has an easier time reading those documents and that text from that Dataverse table than it does from a SharePoint document library or a list or whatever.
Debolina Dasgupta (26:50.753)
I'm very true and one of my colleagues from Atnok was also telling me that they work a lot on model driven apps. So with a model driven app, it's always you go ahead and use Dataverse. So if you are having and they are transitioning their existing application to model driven apps with Dataverse as their backend. So with this.
David (27:14.312)
Matt and I have various conversations about the benefits of model driven apps because I'm a database guy, you know, I cut my teeth on SQL and stuff. And so I love model driven apps, you know, it's all about the numbers, isn't it? You know, Matt's going, it looks ugly. I don't like it. It looks ugly. I'm going, well, you can have your custom page, you know.
Debolina Dasgupta (27:36.14)
No, I personally love Canvas applications and now with all the new stuff, like with all the UI changes, now the elements looks nicer and that is so, and you can actually make your application look like a mobile app. So I am a little bit more biased towards the Canvas apps. Yeah.
David (28:04.007)
Yeah, okay. So Debolina, could you share a favorite project that you've worked on? You know, what was the request? What was the end result? And why does it stand out to you?
Debolina Dasgupta (28:24.481)
Well, one of the coolest applications that I worked pretty recently was a meeting management system.
The application is all about creating an agenda. So we deal with a lot of meetings. And even in general, when you have a meeting, you need to create an agenda. And the agenda can come from a lot of different people. And not just a lot of different people. There will be people who will be approving the agenda, who will be approving different sections of the agenda. There is translations involved. And there is also a lot of
Like once it has been approved, there's a lot of versioning involved. Like this version has been approved. If there is a change, it becomes a new version. And the document management part of it is also there. So we created an application which is based out of SharePoint. And then you have this entire Power App which works with the SharePoint to create the entire agenda. Then once the agenda has been created, it goes through a approval process, which depends on the line manager of the person who has created it. So the approval process is dynamic. And then once the approval is there, it creates an agenda document. And once the document is done and everything is all done, we moved it from SharePoint to our public website. So that it gets published and everything is there. So that kind of makes the life of a secretary very easy because they don't have to create a, because before they were creating a Word document and then it was going through the entire approval process kind of through emails and then it was getting published. And on a very personal note, I like this because in SharePoint, in Power Apps, you don't have this option to create an app, create a little box where you can drag and drop items, which we could do in our old JavaScript. And I came through a PCF, which was by Scott, if I'm not wrong. And it has this PCF component. So we took inspiration from that and we created our custom component in Power Apps so that it can mimic the functionality of drag and drop system. One thing that I really love about Power Apps that I can write a little bit of code and make things more customized and it's still a low code solution. So that is, that kind of makes it my pretty favorite and kind of a little bit challenging application, but still my favorite one.
Matt (31:08.861)
I think that's probably my favourite project or story I've heard on the podcast so far. I really love that idea. That's brilliant.
David (31:18.466)
That's because, you know, managing documents, Matt, that's your thing, isn't it? You know?
Matt (31:23.133)
Yeah, no, literally. I want to finish the podcast now so I can go away and have a go at making that myself. No, it's brilliant.
Debolina Dasgupta (31:31.152)
I can show you my application sometime if you want.
Matt (31:35.773)
Honestly, I think that's a brilliant idea. I guess it's like a lot of these power apps where someone does something brilliant like that. I think, why haven't Microsoft done that themselves? Then I think, is that part of the game where they actually go, no, we're just giving you the power to you and you just do the rest for us now, or have they just literally not thought of it? I think that's brilliant. What one tip would you give to businesses and education providers. What's the one thing that they should be doing now within the Microsoft ecosystem that would make a difference to them?
Debolina Dasgupta (32:14.657)
I think everyone should understand how to define their requirements. Once you know what you want, creating an application becomes very easy. So I think it's the first step is to know what I want. Like when we start with a requirement, it can be like, to give a very simple example. Today someone had a number of line items and he said that I need something where my line, everything will come in lines. And I was like, what kind of lines, what items, what are you trying to do? So the conclusion of the discussion was he was looking for some NAT chart or Gantt chart. And he had some start dates and end dates, which...was related to his tasks.
But when he started defining the requirements, it was just, I need some lines because he was probably picturizing that chart as lines in his head. So I think for businesses and for education providers, it's important for everyone to understand how to gather the requirements and translate into actual business logic. Because writing code is not a problem anymore. Now we have GitHub copilot. You just ask, I want to react function to do this. It creates it for you.
So, once we start defining requirements, life gets easier.
David (33:43.647)
So in that respect, you know, like we were saying, perhaps discussing earlier on for a small business, this is all really positive stuff, isn't it? Because you can, you can absolutely be that hyper efficient organization as a small business because you don't have, just because you can't employ, you know, departments of IT technicians and specific functions for HR or whatever, because you're a small business, doesn't mean that you can't perform at a really high level. If you understand your business and you understand what is required of your business.
Debolina Dasgupta (34:16.321)
Exactly. And I was working with, like I said, I was working with some small businesses before. And one of the case studies is this lady lawyer who is based out of the US. She's really good at her job and she literally has articles about her, about the court cases that she has won. So, but she works alone and she has people from different parts of the world working with her to do all the research and that kind of things. But her files are very confidential.
So when I worked with her, we came up with the entire process of using Microsoft Bookings to make sure that she can start having Bookings system is predefined and it's automated so she doesn't have to receive phone calls about someone wants to come or someone doesn't want to come. We removed the entire reception part of it and then we ensured that all his whole files and everything had actual permissions and everything is all set in.
And when I explained it to her, she learned it very fast. And now she manages the entire end -to -end of her SharePoint files, appointments, and everything on her own. And she's really happy about it. So it's good for small business owners as well.
And she loves editing her SharePoint pages. So sometimes she keeps on making some changes and she figured out that now you can change the background. So she keeps on sending me the snapshots like, you know, see, I've made this change. Now it looks different than what we had done before. So yeah, people are excited about it.
Matt (35:54.877)
That's what it's all about is for me is the prettiness of it. So being able to change the background is equally as important as writing some amazing code.
David (36:09.596)
I think one of the things to be taken from that story actually is about the security of information because you said there was a confidentiality to her documents and her notes, et cetera. Well, of course, if you've got everything within the Microsoft ecosystem and as long as you have it configured properly, it's probably the safest place that you can possibly have your documents, I would say.
Debolina Dasgupta (36:18.369)
Exactly, and I like the fact that Microsoft makes it more so flexible. It's not like this folder only this group can access. If there is something inside and I want to have more permissions or I want to take care and remove some of the permissions, I can easily go ahead and do that. So I like that flexibility of how SharePoint has been structured as a content management system as well. And there are so many companies and organizations who are using it as a knowledge management system. So that's pretty good.
David (37:05.53)
Well, Debolina, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been fascinating to hear about your journey and your insights into Microsoft. Again, thank you for being with us on this episode of Mastering Mondays.
Debolina Dasgupta (37:15.637)
Thank you. It was lovely meeting both of you. Thanks.
Matt (37:19.549)
Thank you.
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