Category Archives: The notorious riders of lost rum bottles

Final Delivery

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We are a pirate agency that tracks down ships along the coast of Norway, rate them by estimated loot value and plunder risk before selling them as targets to pirate crews in that area. To get the ship data we use power automate to import ships from selected locations using Kystverkets public api into Dynamics 365 https://acdc.blog/waken/krakens-masterpiece/

Some of the challenges during this process is that many of the ships are in constant movements and can disappear of the map at any time. Therefore we update our ships often and delete the ones outside the desired areas.

Our pirate sales team use Dynamics 365 to get an overview of the ships imported from Kystverket, processing the most valuable first.

We have been training the ai behind the lead scoring by feeding it leads qualified and disqualified leads with different combinations of risk and estimated loot value by ship type in order for it to determine the ones most likely to be targeted.

Stakeholders are automatically added to the Ship based on what pirate crews are located in its area. Based on the lead score and whether the ship is arriving or departing a harbor in the area, the pirate sales agent from our organization will determine if the ship qualifies to become a target or not.

By qualifying a ship, it becomes a target and some of the vital ship data is copied to the target. Stakeholders are copied and the first thing we now must do is to make a few phone calls to them and ask who is interested in this target.

When we have determined the pirate crew who gets the target, we now have to discuss the offer. By default a product line is added to the target stating that we take a 25% cut of the estimated loot value. Sometimes this is all we need to complete the offer, but other times the Captain of the crew has a shortage of crewmembers. Instead of him declining the target, we can offer him some assistance for the plunder to come. By adding additional product lines for Captain, First Mate and Crew member (depending on his need), we now have the chance to earn even more from this deal.

The offer is now accepted and we close the target as Won. This will trigger a Flow generating a pdf document with the details of the target sent on email to the captain.

The contract must be signed and sent in return. The captain must pay a deposit up front before we give up the ship location.

Beside selling targets to other crews, we also keep some of the best targets to ourselves to plunder. To secure better chances of plundering, we have developed a canvas app loaded with nice features when out on a raid. https://acdc.blog/waken/the-pirate-assistant/

The Pirate Assistant

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This is every pirate’s best friend and a must have!! Loaded with awesome features this killer app should be installed on the mobile phone of all pirates in your organization.

Targets

Get a quick overview of your targets. Once a ship has been become a target in Dynamics 365, you will be able to see it in your mission overview. This is perfect when you have a long day of plundering i front of you and need to know which ones to do next.

Rumglasses

Have you ever been too deep in the rum bottle and close to do something stupid with what you believed to be a mermaid out on the seven seas? Or maybe you actually did and are now in for a hard time facing your mates with humiliation and regret?

Not anymore! Rumglasses let you take a picture of your believe-to-be mermaid and tells you if you are right or not. By training an AI to recognize and distinguish manatees from mermaids you can now relax.

My Ship

A map showing your location when out on the seven seas. You will se both your ship on the map and all other ships in the area. This is how you know you are close to your target when out on a plunder. The best part is that military or law enforcement ships will occur on the map as well so you can wait until the right moment before attacking the target.

Bottle Mail

Communicate with your mates by using bottle mail – a feature for sending email when you are on the fly. It suggests recipients in you address book or you can write to a pirate outside your organization. This way, you don’t have to switch to another app (email client) to send messages to your crew.

Pollybot

You are not a real pirate unless you have a parrot. Unfortunately (or luckily) there are laws about how to treat your animals today that did not exist in the old glory days. It might not be appropriate to bring it with you on a raid :/ This is where Pollybot comes to the rescue! Your own digital parrot who you can talk to, ask questions and keep you with company. As a real parrot, it sometimes answer your questions, but most of the time you will get an insult or just nonsense in return. But that doesn’t matter! Where a real parrot will fly away to save itself, Pollybot will always stay close.

Mayday, Mayday

When Jack Sparrow was stranded on a desert island, he managed to escape by tying his back hair together and catch a couple of sea turtles who gave him a ride back home. As fun and comfortably that sounds, not all pirates are equipped with back hair that long. However, most of us got their phone in their pockets at all times!

Whether you are stranded at a desert island, your ship is about to sink or you are stuck in a safe full of treasure, this feature will save you.

When using the mayday function your coordinates are then sent to a email address monitored by you crew so they can come and pick you up. If your mates prioritize your request is however another matter.

Because of the fancy design, the use of AI and the huge amount of useful features in this app, we hereby claim the Glossy pixels, Existential Risk and Feature Bombing badges. We also claim the Power user Love because the app is created in Power Platform 😀 #ProCodeNoCodeUnite

Kraken’s Masterpiece

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As we have mentioned before, our ship data comes from Kystverket. We expect high data quality and in the early days of pirating this was achieved by importing excel lists where the pirates had used much time to track down the ships in order to maintain accurate positions. Now this work poorly as the amount of ships has increased and the time used to maintain the lists resulted in ships sailing to the next city before we could even detect it. In other words, the ship had sailed. Therefore, we had to make a more efficient way to load the same data and keep it consistent with Kystverket. By using power automate we created a flow that contacts their api and fetches data from premade bounding boxes around the Norwegian coast. It deletes ships out of range and updates the location of those who remains. If new ships occur in our areas, they are created in Dynamics 365 and we will know!

By making the data collecting process more efficient for our pirates using data from other sources, we hereby claim the Go With The Flow and Dataminer badge!! Argh 🙂

The dirty way

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The idea of a map integration for our ships is pretty cool. We are already loading ships from Kystverkets api where we get the ship ids and store them in Dynamics. These ids can be used to lookup the specific ship and we have added an iframe to the lead form to generate the correct url. As it turns out, kystverket is not allowing us to show their website because… security 🙁

Nasty hacker to the rescue!

We discovered that you can add a chrome extension to ignore x-frame headers. By adding the attribute is="x-frame-bypass" to the iframe html element, the iframe now bypasses the X-Frame-Options: deny/sameorigin response header from kystverket. The result:

By this we claim the Nasty Hacker badge! #rocksolidgeekness

Awesome Team Spirit

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Some times things just doesn’t go your way. So far we have experienced unexpected restrictions regarding the public apis we are using, the Dynamics 365 environment we are editing is constantly locked for changes and one of our team members had to leave us for the day.

It is in times like this we must push through and never give up! Thanks to my fantastic pirate crew that still keeps an awesome team spirit 🙂 The ship will turn, I’m sure of it!!!
#bestbuds #happyteam

By this we claim the Remarkable Teamspirit badge! Yarr 😀



UPDATE!!!

This morning we plundered nearby islands and the reward was great. Our camp is now in better shape


We hereby claim the Happy Camper badge.

The Basic Idea

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We will be implementing PRMS (Pirate Raid Management System) in which we will fetch data from NAIS – a service providing ship type and positioning in real-time, in order to determine what ships to plunder. The ship data will be fetched and stored in Dynamics 365 as leads and from there we will qualify the ones looking most interesting with regards to a risk analysis done by Sales Accelerator.

Leads with high value and low risk will be qualified to opportunities (Targets) and from there our sleazy sales pirates will contact the pirate kings in the desired area to sell them this plunder target. Where will be sent a contract to sign and we will demand a deposit up front. When the pirate king has organized and performed a raid, we will take 25% of the loot.

In addition to PRMS, we will offer our pirates a Pirate Assistance app developed using PowerApps. This will guide the pirates to the correct ships in heavily trafficated Norwegian fjords.

In case of meeting a mermaid a pirate might choose to use his Rumglasses feature where an AI will help him detect if the mermaid is real or a manatee through image recognition. This might spare a drunk bastard for ages of humiliation.

For any HMS questions, Pollybot – a pirate’s best friend virtual agent, will make stupid answers to real questions by repeating your question 70% of the time.

With this plan, sketches and business idea we claim the Early Delivery and Show and Tell badge. Ahoy!