Forward Forever News - Issue #17
Hello and greetings from the FF team! It’s News time again, and in this issue, we celebrate our fourth anniversary. We’ll look at our past milestones, share insights into upcoming events, highlight our latest blog posts, and provide information about our current job openings and other stuff. So go ahead and scroll down 👇
Four Years of Growth, Development and Community
Last month we had a chance to celebrate two wonderful things; our 4th birthday as a company, and the successful expansion of our headquarter office in Helsinki 🥂Today, as we look back on our journey, we've seen Forward Forever evolve from a visionary startup to a beacon of innovation in the low-code revolution.
In 2020, amidst the global challenge of the pandemic, Forward Forever was born from the vision to strengthen organizations with Microsoft Power Platform solutions. Despite the challenges, the demand for low-code solutions grew and so did our commitment to our vision.
The years have brought many major changes in our ways of working, reflecting our maturing operations. Our community has grown, and so has our impact. Last year was a testament to our resilience and innovation. We not only exceeded our revenue targets, but also achieved an outstanding Net Promoter Score of 92, indicating the trust and satisfaction of our customers and the dedication of our team. And we continued our contributions to the low-code community of course.
Read what our CEO, Olli Korpelainen, highlights of our year 2023.
Blog posts from Team FF
We've published 10 new blog posts since the last News issue.
The latest one is about how to collect attachments from anonymous users with MS Forms. Forms is an excellent and very easy-to-use tool to collect feedback, but as a counterweight, the forms implemented with it cannot be edited much. The respondent can attach attachments to the answer only if the form has been published for the organization’s users. With anonymous users, you cannot attach files. Read Timo Pertilä's article how to bypass this limitation in two different ways.
Like we all have heard, the last months have been full of excitement about announcements of various Microsoft copilots. This time, in the context of Power Platform, we will get to know one of their most interesting applications. Microsoft Copilot Studio’s plugin actions. These actions are going to transform the way chatbots are built. But what are plugin actions and how do they work in practice? Read Timo Pertilä's blog post and find out!
Ferran Chopo demonstrated in his last article "Enhance conversational experiences with Power Virtual Agents and Generative AI" the use case of providing external data sources to Copilot and using the Generative Answers feature to automatically answer the user’s questions based on this data. Now it got a continuation and Ferran shows you how to go even further with Generative AI and build intelligent agents in Copilot Studio. Read the whole story here.
Tiago Neves explores how low-code app makers could build something that closely resembles the copresence feature in the Power Apps products. Do you want to learn how to create a copresence feature in canvas apps? 👉 Follow Tiago's instructions.
Here are the other new topics that our team has recently dived into:
- Ever wondered how to send notifications to your app users when specific events take place? Read Timo Pertilä's article and try it yourself.
- How can the modern controls in Power Apps help you create scalable and responsive UI designs for canvas apps? Timo Pertilä takes the Tab List control for a test drive and provides step-by-step instructions on how to implement commonly requested UI patterns: multi-tab forms and tabbed navigation. You will find the tutorial here.
- Rollup columns in particular are very convenient, as they’ll summarize data from related child rows onto the parent row, even across different Dataverse tables. There’s just one unfortunate gotcha: their values are updated only once an hour. Timo Pertilä’s blog post shows how to overcome this limitation with the help of Power Automate cloud flows.
- How to create a simple and useful Power Apps app that lets you see who is online on Teams at any office location? Read Timo Pertilä's blog post and create your own app.
- Are you interested in learning how to create Power Fx plugins for Dataverse? Follow Timo Pertilä's instructions.
Team FF is proud to be supporting Helen’s Power Platform journey 🚀
Helen Ltd is one of the largest energy companies in Finland, founded in 1909. The company produces and sells electricity, district heating and cooling. Helen has been awarded for its energy production, which is considered the most efficient in the world.
Since 2020, we have been collaborating closely with Helen. Initially, we provided a few straightforward Power Apps for them. As our partnership evolved in 2022, our collaboration deepened, and since then we have been actively assisting Helen on their Power Platform journey through various means.
How do we help Helen in practice? Through our model of Empowering, Building & Governing. Read the whole story here.
New members in Team Forward Forever
We're excited to introduce our new Head of Services, Henri and our new Power Platform trainees, Matthew and Konsta! Welcome to the team 👏
- Henri Lähteenmäki is a customer-oriented Service leader with multiple years of experience in providing, developing and leading Services built on Microsoft technologies.
- Konsta Hintsala is a fundamentally curious learner and a problem solver, who’s constantly looking for opportunities to challenge himself in different ways. Konsta has prior experience in Power BI and he is looking forward to expanding his knowledge throughout the Power Platform.
- Matthew Streets leverages his technical expertise to build robust solutions with Power Platform, tackling real-world business challenges and unlocking hidden potential within your data.
Community events
Upcoming events
You will have the opportunity to hear presentations from our Microsoft MVPs at the following upcoming events:
Resco Next - June 4-5, 2024.
European Power Platform Conference - June 11-13, 2024.
CollabDays Madrid 2024 - 14th June, 2024.
Past events
Last month, our Microsoft MVP's, Antti Pajunen, Timo Pertilä, and Ferran Chopo participated in the MVP Global Summit 2024 event at the Microsoft Redmond Campus. The highlights of the event were meeting other Microsoft MVPs and hearing about new innovations.
Power Platform Governance in Practice - training day in Spain. Jukka, Ferran and Antti held a Power Platform governance training day in Madrid. Training day focused on the low-code application platform tools like Power Apps, Power Automate and Dataverse.
Thanks for having us, Cloud Technology Townhall Tallinn 2024! Jukka Niiranen, Antti Pajunen and Lasse Teeriaho want to thank everyone who attended our sessions at CTTT24. It was a wonderful opportunity to connect with community members and experts across the broad Microsoft cloud ecosystem. Hope to see you here next year, too!
Open positions
Are you, or do you know someone who is seeking the next step in their career with Microsoft Power Platform and is in Finland or Portugal? Our team is expanding, and we are currently searching for talented individuals to join us on our exciting journey:
Apply now and become a part of team of game-changers who are driving low-code & citizen development revolution!
