Simplify Your Deployments

This guest post is the third in a series exploring the capabilities of WEBCON BPS by Microsoft Regional Director and Office Apps & Services MVP Christian Buckley, CEO of CollabTalk LLC.

A few years back, while attending the SharePoint Conference in Los Angeles, I overheard an interaction between a microsoft executive and an attendee as the executive was leaving the main stage. The attendee was detailing the complexities of his SharePoint environment, and voiced his frustration at the thought of having to rearchitect his solutions to be able to move to the latest version of the platform. As the executive listened, he provided a very short and concise response: “Reduce your requirements.”

The attendee was stunned by this response, and as the executive walked off into the crowd, the attendee shared his frustration with the people in his immediate vicinity, voicing his concern that “Microsoft just doesn’t understand how people are using the platform.” However, this executive completely understood how his customers were using the platform, and his feedback was spot on.

Don’t over-build your new environment. What the Microsoft executive meant to say was, wherever possible, adapt your requirements to what the platform actually provides. Furthermore, I would interpret this to mean organizations should understand what they have to work with (what is available out-of-the-box), have a vision for what the future system should look like (have clearly defined outcomes), and then work with their end users to build out the solutions that they will actually use.

One of the things I really like about the WEBCON application is the fact that it is a single deliverable, not a complex mix of components that must be deployed in succession — each with their own management overhead, each of them providing an additional point of failure.

For example, you might employ a Power App as your primary user interface, which writes to SQL Server or a SharePoint List, with Power Automate providing some logic to send notifications, capture responses, and record approvals. The problem is that you’ve created three maintenance points at the UI, the data repository, and the workflow. Any time you need to adjust your solution, you may need to touch all three. Now multiply that by dozens, if not hundreds of solutions across the organization. Even if your IT team is staffed with veterans, that’s a lot of old-timey plate-spinning for them to balance.

As I outlined in the first article in this series , change is hard, especially if making a change requires you to make changes to multiple components and testing at each step. If you make a change in a Power App, you’ll need to adjust any Flows you’re using accordingly. The same goes for any schema changes to CDS entities. And if you rely on Azure functions, Logic Apps, or other components, well, that’s out of scope.

Any application built with WEBCON BPS contains:

• the workflow,
• the forms,
• the data schema,
• the business rules,
• the data source mappings,
• the reports and presentation layer,
• everything.

Managing the digital transformation of your business is complex enough — your BPS solution should lighten the load, not add to it.

WEBCON was designed to simplify your deployment and change management experiences. When you deploy a change to a WEBCON BPS application, it contains only the updates. These changes are applied in a non-disruptive, non-destructive fashion, warning you when a proposed change would be disruptive – and blocking it by default. You can even register distinct connection settings for development vs. test vs. production environments, and as you deploy, the changes will take effect gracefully.

You may not be able to “reduce your requirements,” but you can reduce the complexity of the solutions you deploy by using WEBCON BPS.

Read more about how WEBCON simplifies your BPS deployments in the eBook “Top 10 Reasons Why a Power Automate Builder Should Look at WEBCON BPS“: