Building
a customer portal can be tricky. In the heat of the dot com bubble, I
was a consultant working on the telstra.com team - Telstra’s first shot
at a one-stop-shop for customers. I was working for Accenture at the time as a Manager in the UAT team. It was a goliath of a project, with SSO being a major part of that.

Power Pages has been in general release since Oct 22,
and provides simple way of providing portal experience, and is the
revamped version of the old Power Portals. It’s a low-code way of
opening up your organisation to the world in a really secure way.
Pricing starts at $5 an authenticated user (based on unique Dataverse
contact IDs) and $0.40 per anonymous user (based on cookie ID) per month
- colume discounts apply. Spin up a free trial (up to 60 days with an
extension) here. Most impressive is the Building Permit application template - a fully fledged application portal complete with workflow that ready to go OOTB. And its data is saved in the Dataverse ready to be consumed by other apps!

I was a big fan of Dr Who when I was a kid, and I guess I am still now - worlds of possibility visited via the TARDIS. That’s what a portal is supposed to be I think - a window into another world. Tom Baker was the best Doctor - feel free to debate me on that one.

Across the Industry

Recent Government Tenders

Microsoft News

That’s all for this week! Send any topics you would like included in next week’s newsletter to olivia@charlie-mac.com or forward this email to a friend.

Learning in my uni years was fun and not because of the lecturers or the material, but more so of the antics we got up to. Engineers with too much idle time and all that. In an auditorium full of people, a group from up the back launched a massive paper plane (I reckon 5ft or more in wingspan) when the lecturer had his back turned. It hung in the air and made it to the second row before hitting a guy in the back of the head - ouch! Then, some bright spark put sheets of paper in an overhead projector to block the light from the bulb. The lecturer turned on the projector and wondered why it wasn’t lighting up. Then a fire broke out.

Sleeping on desks, cramming, getting electrocuted, and social experiments at the Student Union were all part of the learning process.

Learning should be fun, and eLearning should be no exception.

In a previous newsletter, I mentioned Learning Pathways and Viva Learning and how they are low cost eLearning options with heaps of features. I wanted to provide more details on how this could work for you.

All learning material we create (from internal how-to guides, to policy) is stored as Markdown in a git repo within Azure DevOps. This means that all learning material we create becomes code. It can be forked (we do this for sharing custom material with our clients), version controlled, and programmatically morphed into other formats (eg HTML for consumption by SharePoint and our Dynamics 365 knowledge base).

For our clients, we deploy a Learning Pathways instance and upload the fork we created for them in the git repo. Then, we integrate this repository of learning material with Viva Learning, and voila - another fully functional LMS is born.

We are deploying this eLearning architecture for NFP clients in Gippsland and LGAs in other corners of the state. Sing out if you would like to know more…

And just like the advice given to John Kimble in Kindergarten Cop (the original): “You Know, Kindergarten [your learning community] Is Like The Ocean. You Don't Want To Turn Your Back On It.”

Across the Industry

Recent Government Tenders

Microsoft News

"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ Points" 
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