When plundering and sailing keeping track of pesky DM’s is no job for the captain or crew. This’ why we summoned the services of Power Automate and Power Apps to do our bidding: Enabling our ship to run smoothly and commands being forwarded at the correct time to the correct people.
It all starts with the Consumer of Data “Power Automate” who collects data from all our different intelligence points. Working in the shadows, this ghost can be attached to any workflow. Currently, since it thrives on human flesh for its operations, we started by attached to our crew log. Whenever Power Automate smells the fear of a new deck hand, laddie or lassie onboard it goes to work!
On a new pirate record Power Automate does two things:
Creates an Adaptive Card in teams and posted it to the ships group chat
Sends a welcome e-mail to the fresh pirate, explaining how they need to obey or walk the plank (all pretty standard pirate stuff).
Current Dataverse Tables the flow can write to and read from.Power automate flows that creates and updates records, when records for pirates are updated we trigger a Teams Integration.
Making the Captain’s work Screen Agnostic
We further improve the Captain’s life with Power Apps connected to the Power Flows. The Power App sits on the users phone, implemented via Teams or as a standalone app, and enables the Captain to administrate the crew roster, so any stowaway can be added to the crew and receive the required e-mail package with plank rules and NDA’s. This mobile approach lets the captain be in full control even when venturing away from his cabin and the desktop computer therein.
Screen snippet showing Power Automate triggering Teams Adaptive Card on new shipmate record.
The convenience of having the Power Apps in teams means the captain can manipulate his Ship, The Raids and roster from any surface, be it mobile, desktop og even tablet!
Screen snippet showing the Power App integrated into a Teams. Notice the responsive nature of teams adapting to any viewport.
Using Power Apps means we can also simulate raids adding new test data on the fly, without it needing to come from our Power Automate flow.
User generated Raids in the raid table, created directly within Power App.
In Summary, for Sleepy Pirates:
The Power App enables our users to directly manipulate our data storage.
The Power Automate allow other sources and application to remotely access our data.
In Teams, on a device with a large screen, all the information (profile picture, name availability and skills) is displayed in a row.
But what will happen if you switch to your pirated iPhone? Lo and behold, by the power of flex-direction: column and CSS media queries – your content is now structured in a column, for your viewing pleasure!
Pirates love talking trash, and where better to spew out all the fun than Microsoft Teams?
As a pirate you don’t have too many tools at hand at any given time. The same is true in 2023. Why learn something new when you have your trusty old swiss army knife at hand?
This time around we’re stealing from our own team mate, Mikael, taking one of the most powerful and mis-used plugins of all time, the PnP Script Editor Web Part, and we use it to easily embed our “Pirate “Capture a pirate” canvas app into Teams.
Teams App Admin
It’s as easy as rum and grog, add the Teams Tab, configure it with and <iframe> tag and you’re all set. Because everyone knows iframes as it has been a trusted valid tag for over 20 years now. Who knew you could embed and use a PowerApp within Teams????
Script editor web part – iframe
Once set up – it works beautifully!
Canvas Apps in Teams – such a novel concept
The beauty is that it even works on mobile! Pick the tab and embrace.
Capture a pirate responsibly on a device
And for some extra fun, here’s PirateGTP pirate in SVG – well hidden 😁
The inputThe output
Badges and why – because why not
Client side salsa – Everyone knows teams tabs are browser tabs, and iframe’s are all about browser love. No monolithic front-end used, only simple and easy html and scripting.
Thieving bastards – We stole and borrowed the open source PnP script editor web part solution, even though inception was involved. PirateGPT is our API on crew mate generation, and Stable diffusion (via automatic1111) is our image pirateer solution. And not free I tell you as we had to purchase a used Nvidia RTX3060 gfx card to get this going.
Chameleon – What can we say, Teams, stand-alone, browser, native app, what not – you will not get away from being onboarded with out solution. It adapts portrait, landscape, even black and white. PirateGPT will get you!
Plug’nPlay – We stole it with inception, it plugs into anything SPFx plugs into. Showcased in Teams as we just love the purple.
Power User Love – All stored in Dynamic, all surfaced in Teams and SharePoint – we love ya’ll!
The Capitan has his own Native app with a useful set of tools to manage the crew and the boat. The App is made in React Native and prepared for mobile phones and tablets.
Features:
Weather forecast
A captain needs to monitor the weather before departure because it can greatly impact the safety and success of a voyage. Dangerous weather conditions such as strong winds, high waves, storms, fog, and ice can affect navigation, visibility, stability, and increase the risk of damage to the ship and crew. By monitoring the weather, the captain can plan a safer and more efficient voyage.
Counting the crew when boarding
A pirate captain would need to count their crew before departure for safety, morale, planning, and order. It helps ensure everyone is accounted for, tasks can be properly allocated, and order is maintained among the crew.
more to come.
The code can be found at: https://github.com/TheBastards-ACDC2023/Bastards-NativeApp
Recruitment is an important, and integrated part of Pirates 365, to acquire the best talent for our crew. To help us with this we have developed The pirate recruitment terminal(PRT). This solution provides us with a visually appealing and an engaging experience to gather new recruits.
Illustration of the Pirate recruitment terminal’s place within the Pirate 365 Recruitment module, along with the other modules.
PRT User flow
Since pirate recruits normally aren’t that familiar with modern interfaces, we have chosen a living parrot to help and guide the user and provide a smooth user experience.
When a pirate is detected, our engaging parrot approaches the pirate and presents the sign-up option. We collect personal details and complete the process by taking a picture. The collected data is then sent into the platform for future processing.
Sign-up formPicture capture
The Pirate recruitment terminal technology stack
PRT The app is running on the vue.js progressive javaScript framework with Pinia🍍 for state management. For the 3d animated parrot🦜 we are using three.js and TroisJS with WebGL rendering. For AI vision👁️ and object detection🤠 we are running tensorflow under the hood. If available the model is running on GPU, if not we fall back to CPU.
Images, 3d model, fonts is stolen captured on the internetsea.
We came into this Hackaton with the idea that we could make the Onboarding process a lot less manual, a lot more secure and reduce the risk of human errors in the process significantly. And we’ll be honest, we are extreamly happy with the solution we now are traveling home with! The best thing you ask? It works like a sharm, every bit of it! We have tested it several times, and everything flows exactly as described! You can see the full solution under here, but we’ll start with a summary of why we think we should get a lot of points in the four different main categories:
Excellent User Experience:
Lets start with the help this will give to the employees already working in the company: – HR now will have a veary streamlined process for Onboarding, where all tasks that can (and should be) automated are just that. They don’ need to spend time sending out agreements, follow up with signature, enter a lot of information regarding the new employee in the system, follow up on other employees that forgets the tasks they have in an Onboarding. They don’t need to notify IT about a new employee coming it and wait for creation of user and access to systems. All of this happens automatically. Nothing is forgotten, no sensitive information is sent in emails or seen by someone who shouldn’t see it. – IT never needs to think about a new employee coming in anymore. Everything is automated and just happens. Isn’t that the best user experience? When you actually don’t have to do even one click, and the process still works? – Other employees in the company having tasks regarding a new employee coming in will be reminded of their tasks and make sure nothing is forgotten. Automated and nice. And, if they complete their task, no notifcation will be sent, it really is as easy as it sounds
And then, to the candidate starting. If the company implements this solution, everything will be ready for the new employee when he has his firsgt day of work. He can even get information about the company, his team, his manager and more in the Onboarding Portal before he starts, so we can keep up the good energy people feel when they are about to start working at a new company. The new employee will also feel that this company really takes care of their employees, and that they really are up to date in the digital world we’re living in.
Most Extreme Business Value:
The value for companies here are so high, that it’s almost difficult to know where to start. But, first of all, this saves a lot of time for the HR department. And, we really mean A LOT of time. Not just that everything is automated so they don’t need to do as much as they have to now to register a new employee, but they don’t have to push and follow up everyone else that hasn’t done their part and they don’t have to correct human errors that’s been done during the process. They can spend their time on something that is much more valuable to the company, and that is to make sure that all the employees already working here gets the best environment possible to do their job as best as they can! Lets face it, this is what we want the HR department to do, we don’t want them to spend time on entering data into a system. The IT department will also save a lot of time witht this solution, that they can spend on other things as well. Not that I work in our IT department, but I assume that creating users and assigning licenses and access aren’t the most fun task they do at work. So I would think this will actually make their workday more fun! Let’s just do an approxemently calculation of time saved. Create a contract for the new employee, upload it for e-signature, send it for signing, recieve it, ask the employee for more information so that it can manually be put into the system. Let’s say this totally takes 5 hours at best. Then someone needs to tell IT to create user and access and make sure that it have been done, a total of 1 hours. Then someone needs to follow up other employees, to make sure everything is done and ready for the new employee. This is maybe the most time consuxming, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say that this takes at best 8 hours in total during the time between someone signs and their first day of work. This means that time saved for just this one onboarding process is at least 14 hours. One of our customers typically hires between 10 and 20 employees every month, and this means that this solution will save them between 140 and 280 hours. Each month! To have an other example, an other customer of ours plans to hire 1.500 employees by the end of 2023… You do the math here!
Rock Solid Geeknes:
There are so many partws in this solution that works perfectly together, we almost can’t believe that we actually made this work as good as it does now. We seriously din’t think that we would be able to automate that many parts of the process as we have done now.
Killer App:
We have created this as a total solution, so that everything can be uploaded and used by all companies using Dynamics FO og Dynamics HR. With only a little personalization to make the wording, logo etc. fit the different companies, this can be set up quite fast. And, of course, each part can be implemented by it’s self too, if someone don’t want the whole solution. But, we know that this will be an easy solution to sell to our customers, as we know that a lot of them already really wants this!
The solution:
And now, finally, let’s go to the solution. You have been through a recruitment process in your company, and you have picked a really awesome candidate you want to send an offer to. This is what you do:
1: Create the candidate in Dynamics, and fill name, startdate, email address and phone number, and connect him to the position:
2: Use the App we have embedded in the Personal Management workspace to send an Employment Agreement to the candidate (for Dataminer and Crawler, we have here used GeoAppify address lookup to autocomplete adrees input from search):
Like magic, the candidate resieves an email to view, update and sign the agreement. The Agreement is automatically filled with data from Dynamics before it’s sent out for signing, done through an API we created with OneFlow right here at this Hackaton:
The candidagte fills in the National ID number, and signs the Agreement using Bank-ID:
3: Agreement is signed by the company as well:
4: You Hire the candidate in Dynamics with two clicks, and assign the onboarding checklist that should be used for this canidate, and ticks the checkbox to create a user in Azure AD for the new employee:
This triggers a PowerAutomate that first create a work email for the new emplyee, sets this new email as the primary email address on the Employee workspace in Dynamics and creates the Azure AD user for the new employee and assigns group and licenses to it, and ends with sending the login detail to the employee with SMS, together with the link to the Onboardig Portal:
And, of course we have created a PowerAutomate that will remind the employees in your company about the tasks they are assigned regarding the onboarding of the new employee if they don’t follow it up by themself:
Now, the employee can log in to the Onboarding Portal (that works on all devices), and enter in more information about himself. When submitted, the data is automatically updated directly in Dataverse, and then becomes visiable in Dynamics within seconds:
And, last, but absolutely not least, the night before the new employee has his firs day of work, a PowerAutomate runs and imports the user to Dynamics, connects the user to the correct employee in Dynamics, and assigns the security role Employee to the user so that the new employee has accsess to the Employee Self-Service workspace in Dynamics:
And, to end it all for now, we have automated the process for email signature, so that is is automatically put on every one of the emails you send out. Now they finally will lokk the same for the whole company:
The signature itself is created with HTML-code, after a rule is created in Exchange
Ved hjelp av litt css magi får vi et reponsivt bilde og en responsiv tabell. Vi har blinget opp appen vår og fått en overskrift i ekte gull! (24 carats baby!) Den lyser opp hverdagen til en hvilken som helst appbruker.
The Field Service mobile app was chosen as the main application for turtles in the field because it draws on the same database as that of the operators by default. Another reason for this choice is the fact that it has a host of functionality readily available for use without the need to build an app from scratch like we had to do for the public distress call app.
One of these features is the built-in map in the application that allows turtles to check locations, check directions and plan ahead while rushing from one emergency to the next.
This particular turtle had to rush home to take care of the family in a very real Covid-related emergency, so as you can see he is currently operating out of Vestby. Dispatchers were not aware that he left crime central, AKA. Oslo, and booked him to respond to an armed robbery in Sandvika:
Realistically speaking, Donatello would have phoned in his absence so that dispatch could manage it, but for the sake of argument let’s say Donatello decided to respond to the robbery. Tapping the location pin in the mobile app brings up quick information about the event; the emergency reporter and the nature of the emergency:
From here, Donatello taps the direction arrow symbol, and is taken straight to Google Maps with the destination coordinates already filled in. Tapping “Start navigation” brings up the navigation interface we’re all so used to seeing:
Petition to have Google add “Turtle” as a way of transportation anyone?
PowerApp Portals might not be your first choice as a pizza landing place, but it is what it is. Using retro technology like bootstrap.css it will present pizza pies in the most delightful way.
