All great things start with an idea, then a sketch. More often than not a terrible one. And so did our design. A quick, simple and dirty sketch made in 30 seconds.
Now the purpose of the design was clear from second 1. It had to contain 4 main functions:
Let the user pick a recipient (or victim)
Set the desired mood
Write the message
And of course send
How much things change and yet stay the same
The interface is clean simple. The user knows what they want to do and they do it easily and fun. The colors are calm, subdued and beige. Inspired by parchment and well worn paper. With gold for the interactive elements (button and slider) drawing parallels to the gold seal from the movie howler.
The design is made in figma. Every element, color and illustration ready for easy development
And of course we had to include a little animation. For the extra panache
The team spirit at an all time high after a long awaited dinner, and ready to continue deep diving into development!
We’re proudly representing Team Sopranova (part of house Ravenclaw), and we’re utilizing all hats available in our inventory!
In addition to great decorations, our team has kept our cool through bugs and caffeine overdoses, and would therefore like to claim the badge Remarkable Teamspirit.
We couldn’t keep looking at Sopranova’s camp, with a sad Harry Potter coffee mug as the only prop to lift the team’s spirits. Since we have been gathering magical decor for weeks, we decided to be good community members and share some of our goods with them!
The look on their faces was a reward enough for itself, but of course – we wouldn’t mind the Community Champion badge for this kind gesture. 🥰
The Golden Snitches going out of their way to help another Slytherin team succeed on their journey of creating some team spirit.
We also went to It’s EVIDIosa, not leviooosa giving them some much needed massages. Providing some nice energy and warm hugs to our friends on competing teams 🙂
Following the spirit of low code development, we wanted also wanted to align our CI/CD to reflect the same concept. As a result, we decided to utilize Microsoft Power Platform Pipelines including the relatively new Git integration feature. The over all business value using these technologies was that it provided us with a easily maintainable ALM solution, while also ensuring that our solution would be compliant, secure and protect privacy. The git integration with our managed solution also provided the transparency between the developers to validate any changes that were made, and do code review.
To begin, we created a dedicated production environment for hosting our pipeline app:
Next, we installed the installed the Power Platform Pipelines Model-Driven App and started configuring our pipeline:
NB. We eventually also configured the production environment and added this to our pipeline.
Once the pipeline was all configured we could verify by checking our solution. As illustrated below, we could see that our solution was connected to the pipeline and that we could initiate the first deployment to our TEST enviroment.
While inspecting the sitemap on the left, we could also see that the source control menu item also was available. At first glance we could see the change log:
Lastly, in Azure DevOps we created a new project with branches related to the respective environments:
To summarize, this approach enabled us to quite effectively setup a simple ALM solution and process to maintain control over our components and changes. It was also an appropriate approach in order to gain more knowledge about some of the new features that were quite recently made generally available.
Microsoft Teams has become an essential tool for collaboration and communication in modern workplaces. It’s where teams come together to brainstorm, discuss, and work toward their goals—whether in a meeting, a chat, or through shared documents. But as with any tool, finding fun ways to keep things engaging and help foster team dynamics can make a world of difference. That’s where our Sorting Hat Plugin for Microsoft Teams comes in.
The Sorting Hat plugin is an interactive, personality-based bot designed for Microsoft Teams.The interface is simple, and the bot runs directly within Teams channels.
All users in our tenant have it by default, but anyone who want to get access to it can get it because it is public 🙂
Point Taken is ready for a super duper Harry Potter themed Hackathon at ACDC 2025 represented by The Golden Snitches. Our team consists of Anna, Cathrine, Elise, Pepe and Kariann. We chose to dress up in cloaks, wearing some nice ties and showing everyone what Dobby really looks like.
We were placed in Slytherin and Cathrine is for sure happy about the Sorting Hats decision. Our desk and station is therefore color themed and dressed in green lights. Everyone also has their own wand and some cute merch to enhance the Harry Potter experience 😀
In today’s fast-paced software development environment, managing infrastructure and deploying new features seamlessly is critical. As applications grow, so do the complexities of deploying and maintaining them. Fortunately, tools like Terraform provide a powerful solution for managing backend deployments in a consistent and automated way.
Using Terraform to deploy and manage the backend of our solution we are enabling seamless updates and feature implementations.
Security is one of the most crucial components of any solution. Azure KeyVault serves as the centralized service for storing sensitive information such as API keys, secrets, and certificates. Using Terraform, we can automate the creation and management of KeyVault, making it easy to maintain and secure our application’s secrets.
Once the KeyVault is in place, the next service we need to deploy is our web app service. This service hosts the main web application of our solution. Using Terraform, we can ensure that the latest version of our web application is deployed automatically whenever new changes are committed to the code repository.
This is the first draft of or data model. Started looking at the Harry Potter Dataset and discussed in detail among us Wizards how the data should look like.
Pasted the tables below and this description into the Power Platform Plan Designer In our Ulrikke Potters Play Chamber environment – this environment is a play environment, because we do not want to use a preview feature in our other environments.
“Hello, we are building a way for wizards to collect Ingredients, and with the Ingredients they can make potions. When they make potions the wizards can go up levels, and spells gets available for them to use aswell. They will use a canvas app to scan the environment on spawn instances that will be created with power automate. The Ingredients will have a 3d model URL that will be used for the spawns. Could you please help me make the data model, below is what we have come up with.”
We also
Lets see what the plan designer comes up with – Scroll to the bottom of the tables.
Table: Contact(users) – Custom columns
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Level
Number
Table: Ingredient Inventory
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Ingredient
Lookup
Table: Ingredient
(1:N)
Quantity
Number
Contact
Lookup
Table: Contact
Table: Potion Inventory
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Potion
Lookup
Table: Potion
(1:N)
Quantity
Number
Contact
Lookup
Table: Contact
Table: Spell Inventory
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Spell
Lookup
Table: Spells
(1:N)
Mastered
yes/no
Contact
Lookup
Table: Contact
Table: Potion
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Potion
string
Main column
Ingredient
Lookup
Table: Ingredients
(N:N)
Effect
Text
Singe line
Characteristics
Text
Single line
Required Level
Number
image column
img
Primary image column
Table: Ingredient
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Ingredient
string
Main column
Rarity
Choice
Image column
img
Primary image column
Model Url
Test
Single line
Table: Spell
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Spell
string
Main column
Rarity
Number
Required Level
Number
Table: Spawn Instance
Field Name
Data type
Data type specification
Ingredient
Lookup
Table: Ingredients
Spawn Point
text/lookup?
– Hva AI builder produserer
Accepted the user stories
The data model that came out of the plan designer – before doing changes.
The contact table should be used as the “wizard” table:
IT made a Contact table, a custom one. So that is a big big fail from the Planner.
Did not want any data in the tables. I asked the planner to remove the data, but it made the tables with the data anyways.
Another thing it did wrong, was to make an image column – it made it an URL column. I stated that it should be a primary image column. – So needed to do a clean up of the image columns in two tables.
Many to many relationship on potion to ingredients was not made
Added a model driven app to configure the Ingredients the potion needs to be made.
NEXT step – Export the solution out of the play environment and get it into or DEV environment.
Ok, so after import to the DEV environment – an unmanaged solution. We saw more problems with the data model. So we decided to Export a managed solution form the play environment and import that into the dev – delete, and do the process again.
Ok. So it does not work the way i want it to. It is almost there, but it can NOT change a URL column to an image column. And it can not use the standard contact table.
