Posts

Introduction For over a decade, the “Alert Me” feature in SharePoint served a simple purpose: it told you when something changed. It worked well for a long time, until the way we work became more complex. As organizations grew and collaboration moved faster, these simple alerts became a bottleneck. They were personal, invisible to IT teams, often noisy, and impossible to manage at scale. Replacing them isn’t just about picking a new tool. It is an architectural evolution. We are moving away from isolated file alerts and toward a centralized notification system built on Power Automate. ...

In the rapidly evolving landscape of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), it is easy to assume that if two platforms claim support for the same protocol, they should just work together. In practice, many developers are discovering otherwise when attempting to connect Microsoft Copilot Studio directly to GitHub’s hosted MCP endpoint. This particularly affects architects attempting to reuse GitHub‑hosted MCP tooling from Copilot Studio custom actions. Despite supplying a valid Personal Access Token (PAT) and correct headers, the integration fails with a deceptively simple error: Content-Type must be 'application/json' ...

In the enterprise, the phrase “low‑code” often triggers resistance from Finance, Risk, and Information Security teams—and for good reason. The real question isn’t whether Power Apps can handle financial workloads. It’s this: How do we give the business speed without turning a System of Engagement into an uncontrolled System of Record? As a Principal Solutions Architect, I’ve consistently seen that the difference between a successful rollout and an audit finding comes down to one thing: governance architecture, not tooling. ...

Tired of internal names like field_1? Learn the professional architect’s method to maintain clean SharePoint schemas using Excel Desktop and SOAP-based APIs.

The “91MB Payload” Problem: A Legacy Bottleneck In high-fidelity Power Apps, particularly for visual-heavy projects like Pabba Jewellers, image quality is non-negotiable. However, we recently hit a critical performance wall: a “91MB Payload” issue that was causing “Aw, Snap!” memory crashes on mobile devices and jittery gallery scrolling. Why Standard Controls Fail at Scale The root cause lies in the architectural limitation of the standard Power Apps Image control. Because it relies on a basic <img> tag, it triggers a “dumb” download: ...

If you’re still typing string values like "Primary", "Center", or "Bold" into your Power Apps formulas, you’re working with “technical debt” by design. With the latest ** 2026 Modern Control updates**, Power Apps has officially shifted toward Typed Enums. This isn’t just a UI change, it’s a fundamental shift toward robust app architecture. The Problem with “Loose Strings” In classic Power Apps, we used patterns like: Button1.Appearance = "Primary" As an architect, here is why this is brittle: ...

If you’ve logged into Power Apps recently looking for the classic “Expense Reimbursement” or “Budget Tracking” templates to study their UI or logic, you might have noticed a glaring change: The Template Gallery as we knew it is gone. As of March 2026, Microsoft has pivoted away from standalone “starter apps” in favor of more robust, enterprise-grade deployment methods. If you are an architect or a developer trying to find these learning resources, here is the new map. ...

The “Mexican Standoff” of Managed Solutions In enterprise-scale Power Platform environments, we aim for a modular architecture. We split our logic into multiple solutions—perhaps one for “Finance” and another for “HR.” However, without a strict dependency strategy, you will eventually hit a Solution Deadlock. This usually happens during a Staged Upgrade. You try to deploy an update to Solution A, but it fails because Solution B (already in Production) holds a dependency on a component that Solution A is trying to modify or remove. When you try to update Solution B first, you hit the same wall. ...

In the modern enterprise landscape, Perceived Performance is as critical as actual execution speed. As we scale Power Platform solutions to thousands of users, the traditional “loading spinner” often fails to provide the seamless experience users expect from world-class SaaS products. To address this, I developed PowerShimmer Ultra-Light—a PCF (Power Apps Control Framework) component designed to bridge the gap between heavy data-loading states and high-fidelity user interfaces. The Problem: The “Loading” Friction Standard loading indicators in Power Apps (spinners or progress bars) often create a “stop-and-go” psychological effect. Users perceive the app as “broken” or “stuck” when a screen is completely blank during a ClearCollect or Filter operation. ...

Moving from reactive admin tasks to a proactive ‘Zoned Governance’ strategy for the AI-driven enterprise.