M365.FM - Modern work, security, and productivity with Microsoft 365

Microsoft Fabric explained in plain English – this episode is for people searching “What is OneLake?”, “Fabric Lakehouse vs Warehouse”, “Delta vs Parquet in Fabric”, “unified data lake Fabric”, “shortcuts OneLake” or “no-code Microsoft Fabric overview”. If Microsoft’s naming roulette around Lakehouse, Warehouse and OneLake has left your team arguing over slides instead of shipping data products, t...

Power Pages, VS Code, GitHub Copilot Chat and JavaScript validation – this episode is for people searching “Power Pages VS Code Copilot”, “Power Pages JavaScript validation”, “Power Pages GitHub Copilot setup”, “Power Platform CLI Power Pages” or “debugging Power Pages forms with Copilot”. If you’ve ever stared at a broken Power Pages form while error messages feel like “404 Brain Not Found”, this...

Copilot vs SOC team is basically Mortal Kombat with data: on one side, an AI assistant surfacing everything a user can already touch, on the other, security teams trying to keep overshared and mis‑labeled files out of the spotlight. In this episode, we walk through what actually happens when your first Copilot alert hits the dashboard, why it feels like a glitch, and how Purview Data Security Post...

Here’s the story behind that one button: a data science team trained a model, everything worked fine—until the dataset quietly doubled, and their R pipeline started crawling for hours. The problem wasn’t the algorithm, it was compute context: they were running in local compute, dragging every row out of SQL Server and across the network into laptop memory instead of pushing the script to run where...

Imagine queuing up for raid night, but half your guild’s game clients are patched differently—that’s what cloud projects feel like without Dev Containers: chaos, version drift, and endless “works-on-my-machine” bugs. In this episode, we start from that pain: Azure projects where every laptop runs a slightly different toolchain, CI builds randomly fail, and onboarding new devs means days of reinsta...

Imagine rolling a D20 every morning just to see if Business Central will behave. No telemetry? That’s like rolling blindfolded. In this episode, we start with that reality: admins and consultants trying to keep environments stable using only helpdesk tickets and vague “it’s slow” complaints, with no real visibility into sessions, deadlocks, or performance patterns. You’ll learn how to connect the...

Ever wish Business Central actually did the boring work for you—like reconciling payments, drafting product descriptions, or cleaning up messy workflows—instead of burying you in extra clicks and late‑night Excel? That’s the real promise of Copilot in Business Central online: it’s built in at no extra license cost, but most admins and partners never move beyond the canned demos Microsoft shows on...

Most bots are just fancy parrots: they sound smart, but when you ask about your real tenant—policies, projects, finance—they hallucinate based on internet mush, not your SharePoint, Dataverse, or ServiceNow data. The fix is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): search plus LLM, where the bot first looks up content in your tenant and then writes an answer grounded in those documents and your access...

Picture this: your lakehouse looks calm, clean Delta tables shining back at you. But without partitioning, schema enforcement, or incremental refresh, it’s not a lakehouse—it’s a swamp that eats performance, chews through storage, and turns your patience into compost. The uncomfortable truth is that many “working” dataflows are actually hanging by a thread: they refresh today, then silently fail t...

Admins, you saw the title and asked the real question: is Fabric’s Digital Twin Builder finally the fix for our messy, siloed data—or just another data swamp wearing lipstick? In this episode, we start from that tension: the feature sits in Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence, lands its twin data directly in OneLake, and promises a clean semantic layer on top of chaotic IoT feeds, ERP tables, and expo...

You clicked because the title called Azure AI Foundry a trap—and in a way, it is, but not for the reason most people think. Foundry itself is a powerful platform; the real trap is treating it like a magic box instead of an engineering system that needs clean retrieval, hybrid search, and constant evaluation. In this episode, we unpack why multimodal apps and agents fail in real companies: models g...

Picture this: your boss asks you to “just try” Copilot Studio. You think you’re spinning up a polite chatbot. Ten minutes later, it’s not just chatting—it’s booking a cruise and trying to swipe the company card for pizza. That’s the real line between a copilot that suggests and an agent that acts. In this episode, you’ll see how agents cross that line, where their memory actually lives, and the fi...

Here’s my challenge to you: can your BI team trace every change in reports from dev to production, with approvals logged and automation carrying the load? Quick checkpoint before we dive in—this session assumes you already know PBIP basics and Git terms like branch, commit, and pull request. Here’s the roadmap: we’ll cover GitHub PR approvals, automated checks with Actions, and deployment pipeline...

Every day, roughly two billion new documents land in Microsoft 365, and without automation they don’t just “pile up”—they bury your teams under tagging, searching, and manual fixes. In this episode, we break down how SharePoint Premium (the new home for what used to be called Syntex plus SharePoint Advanced Management) turns SharePoint from an expensive filing cabinet into an active content engine...

Your tangled web of tables isn’t a data model—it’s digital spaghetti, and that’s why every new slicer makes your report crawl like a floppy drive in 1995. The fix isn’t another DAX hack, it’s the shape of your model: one or more slim fact tables in the center (sales, visits, events), surrounded by clean dimension tables for who, what, when, and where. In this episode, we walk through how star sche...

Power BI alerts feel like Clippy in 2025: “It looks like you’re trying to stay informed…” while forcing you to build dashboards you don’t want and card visuals nobody uses. In this episode, we start from that admin reality—alert fatigue, dashboard clutter, card‑only restrictions, and fragile PowerShell workarounds—and walk through why Fabric Data Activator is a fundamentally different model. Inste...

Power BI deployment: in this episode of M365.fm, Mirko Peters replaces the "publish and pray" approach to Power BI with a structured deployment framework that turns chaotic, inconsistent report rollouts into a repeatable, governed process. He opens with the familiar disaster: a report that looked perfect in development, broke on refresh in production, showed different numbers to different users, a...

Everyone treats SQL like it’s some kind of wizard spell, but it’s closer to an IKEA manual—basic pieces that snap together once you know the pattern. In this episode, we take you from blank‑window panic in SQL Server Management Studio to running your first safe SELECT: read‑only queries that give you business answers without touching production data. If you can wrangle pivot tables in Excel, you’r...

Your SharePoint lists aren’t “lightweight apps,” they’re often where critical processes secretly live—approvals, requests, inventories—all glued together by views, filters, and a lot of wishful thinking. The problem is that once those lists grow up, nobody can see the full picture: performance tanks, permissions get weird, and reporting devolves into hacked‑together exports. In this episode, we wa...

Everyone loves to clown on Model-Driven Apps—“old-school,” “boring,” “Canvas does it better”—but when you need a secure, schema‑aware app in production fast, they quietly win. In this episode, we start with a plain Dataverse table and show, step by step, how it becomes a real business app: fields, relationships, forms, views, roles, and automation all wired directly into the data layer instead of...

Look, we all joke about Microsoft licensing being a Rubik’s cube with missing stickers—but Dataverse isn’t just that headache, it’s the moment you admit your SharePoint lists and SQL leftovers can’t carry “version 3.0” of your app anymore. In this episode, we start from exactly where most teams are stuck: business‑critical processes living in oversized SharePoint lists, half‑documented SQL databas...

Picture your data as a swarm of goblins: messy, multiplying in the dark, and definitely not helping you win over users. Drop Copilot into that chaos and you don’t get magic productivity—you get polished wrong answers: outdated contract summaries, conflicting numbers, and “confident” nonsense that looks like it came from 2017. The fix isn’t another slide deck, it’s hunting those goblins before roll...

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: without CI/CD, your beautiful Medallion Architecture is just a very expensive CSV swamp wearing a Gold badge. In this episode, we start right where most Fabric teams are stuck—Bronze ingestion scripts living in notebooks, Silver transformations hacked in prod, and Gold dashboards patched at 3 a.m.—and show how GitHub or Azure DevOps becomes the actual control plane....

Here’s the catch Microsoft doesn’t highlight: Power Automate’s run history is time‑limited by default, tied to your plan and license—and once that retention window passes, your approval trail is gone as if it never existed. That’s fine for Microsoft’s storage bill, but terrible for audits, investigations, or basic accountability; designing without permanent logging is like deleting your CCTV befor...

Most organizations quietly assume Copilot is under‑used—not because people hate it, but because the dashboards leadership is staring at are counting the wrong thing. In this episode, we walk through the “gym card swipe” problem: Entra and app sign‑in charts look impressive in a slide deck, yet they only prove that people opened Word or Teams, not that anyone actually used prompts to get work done....