How to Apply Multi-Select Filters in Power Apps
Power Apps with Combo Box
In this step-by-step tutorial video, we will learn how to build multi select filters in Power Apps. We will apply multiple filters to PowerApps Gallery including multiple item selections using combo box, multi-select checkboxes and multi select buttons.
We will build these gallery filters keeping delegation in mind (No delegation warning) & work with multiple data sources like Dataverse & SharePoint.
I will showcase how to filter a multi select choice column based on a multi select combo box control.
Trick is to go around the IN non-delegable Operator and use Equals (=) which is a delegable function. I will also cover a new function called “Index” in Power Apps.
This video covers the following:
- Multiple Item Selection based Filters
- Combo box control to filter Gallery for SharePoint List & Dataverse
- Multi select checkbox-based filtering
- Multi select button-based Gallery Filter
- Multi Select Filter on Multi Select Choice Column
- Reset filters
- Delegation Workaround
- Index function
Looking for additional assistance with Power Apps?
Many companies have a problem right now: they need talented IT workers, and the talent isn’t available. The “great resignation” has intensified competition for resources, and the biggest corporations – with the deepest pockets – are willing to pay top dollar to snap them up. Unless you can compete with those major players, it is not easy to find the people you need.
But talented workers are everywhere. They are available not just in the USA, but also in South America, Europe, and Asia as well. In this economy, you have to hire the best people you can find, wherever they are.
Many companies look only as far as the US border when they are seeking talent, disregarding nearshore and offshore resources, and that puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Both for cost and availability, why not look further afield to find the people you need?
Smart people are everywhere: The differences between onshore, nearshore & offshore resources
You can find smart, talented workers all over the world. North America doesn’t have a monopoly on high-tech talent which means organizations have choices:
- Onshore Outsourcing: You can focus on onshore resources from the USA. They exist, and you could find them; however, they will be more expensive than more remote workers. But if you need your people to be located onsite or nearby, and you are willing to pay the extra cost, it’s worth hiring onshore workers.
- Offshore Outsourcing: You can find offshore workers in India or other parts of Asia. Many companies have discovered that, although they tend to be lower in cost, they are just as talented as North American personnel. If your highest priority is cost savings, and the time zone difference is not an issue, offshore workers are a worthwhile option.
- Nearshore Outsourcing: You can find a balance with nearshore resources from South and Central America. Again, these workers are equally as capable as onshore resources, but they are typically half the cost of US resources. They can often work in the same time zones as the USA, enabling them to work directly in sync with your local team. If you want to balance cost and distance, consider hiring nearshore workers.
Why the Blended Resources Option Works
Quisitive is already a leader in providing the proper mix of offshore, nearshore, and onshore personnel. Many clients are finding that working with offshore and nearshore teams is no longer just a good idea, but a must. Finding talent worldwide is a necessity just to remain competitive in the IT space. They are turning more and more to offshore and nearshore talent. If your company is not already working in the blended model, the time to start may be now.
From a cost-benefit point of view, investing in onshore resources is not always justified. By turning to offshore and nearshore resources, you still get a talented, experienced team, and you get it at a lower cost. International workers know they need to be fluent in English to work with American companies, and they already have a high level of IT skill.
Nearshore outsourcing can minimize some trade-offs. They work the same hours as your local office, and with modern connectivity and collaboration tools, they might as well be in the next state — or even at an office down the street. Modern tools make collaboration with your team easy and instant.
No one option is superior, though. Some companies will contract all their external talent from the same location, and some hire multiple teams from around the world. The key is finding the mix of resources that works best for you.
Finding the Best Team for You
You can get the team you need here in the USA, or you can get workers based in Uruguay, Brazil, or Mexico. Their skill set is the same, they work the same hours, and they are all fluent in English. The question is which team, or teams, meet your company’s needs best.
The most important difference between the teams is the cost. You’re paying more – possibly a lot more – for the US-based team, assuming they are even available to you. The math is a no-brainer. Is there any way you can justify paying so much more for resources, just because they are within your own country’s borders?
Quisitive supplies onshore, nearshore, and offshore resources for many organizations, and for a range of different projects. One of Quisitive’s projects in California, rebuilding a large, complex tax system for a major public sector client, has over two dozen project personnel based in South America. Five teams are collaborating with the local client, and the client has found both the results and the price a great fit for them.
Another Quisitive client is using a mix of onshore, nearshore, and offshore teams. The local personnel perform the architecture and design work; the nearshore team does the software development; and the offshore team is responsible for quality assurance, which can happen while the other teams are not working. This provides an around-the-clock development effort.
These scenarios are only becoming more common over time. Smart people are located everywhere; it is important to have a vendor that is flexible enough to find a solution that matches your requirements as they change over time, or from project to project.
Finding the right resources in the right locations can increase the effectiveness and value of your own team and give you a competitive advantage over organizations that are locked into the local talent pool.
Contact us to discuss how we can fulfill your team’s talent needs today.
Manufacturing businesses know that margins are incredibly tight, and efficiency is paramount for an organization’s success. Even small improvements can reap huge dividends in output and profitability. Yet many manufacturers neglect an important part of their businesses: the software assets that they depend on to control and monitor them. Modernizing applications is an important step towards improvements in your production process overall. And whether you take on the challenge of modernizing your applications or not, every sign points to your competitors doing it to find the advantages in production and cost reductions.
What will modernizing applications do for you?
Many organizations regard initiatives like application modernization as an unwanted cost and put it off as long as they can. They might be missing a real opportunity. Although the modernization process might be complex and costly, the return on this investment is often extremely high.
Manufacturers who modernize their applications find significant improvements in productivity, reductions in downtime, and better use of resources. This might result from reducing the effort and cost of maintaining a suite of on-premises legacy applications. It could be from using more detailed data to better control inventory and production. Or it might be from monitoring equipment better to maintain it more effectively and thereby reduce downtime.
In fact, a recent study of the manufacturing sector worldwide by industry experts IDC found significant trends for manufacturers who were modernizing their technology assets. Manufacturers are increasingly using big data, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things (IoT) as they modernize.
IDC’s study predicts that companies in the manufacturing industry will make significant moves towards modernization in the next two to ten years, including:
- Reducing costs by digitizing production lines using IoT and machine learning
- Increasing productivity through supply chain resiliency and AI
- Addressing skills gaps using intelligent robotic process automation
- Using cloud-based innovation platforms for new products and services
- Using IOT data to treat assets as internal customers, reducing downtime by 40% and unplanned downtime by 25%
The trends are clear. The days of on-premises software and siloed applications are rapidly slipping away. Modernizing your technology will soon be not only a competitive advantage but a necessity for success in the industry.
A modernization success story
One of Quisitive’s recent clients, a leading global manufacturer of thermoplastic composite components, electrical and fiber optic connectors, and other engineered components, recently confronted this very reality. With a wide range of customers across the aerospace, industrial, medical, petrochemical, and pharmaceutical industries, they wanted to improve their manufacturing processes.
The organization engaged Quisitive in April 2020, looking for a partner that could assist with their initiative to digitize their manufacturing processes. Quisitive’s analysis identified some key needs for the company. They needed to further develop their data warehouse so that they could accurately report on the entire product manufacturing process, and they needed to use machine learning to identify outliers in sensor data.
Quisitive enacted their On-Ramp to Azure Data program to help the company move forward on meeting these needs. The solution Quisitive implemented enabled the client to consume a wide range of data, whether it was streamed or batched. Using Azure Data Factory, the company was able to integrate their existing code and migrate their data sources. Quisitive also completed knowledge transfer sessions on data integration and provided supporting Azure documentation to ensure a smooth transition for the organization.
With the assistance they received from Quisitive, the customer is now positioned to track product quality and monitor machine parameters throughout their manufacturing processes, enabling them to perform maintenance proactively and shut down production processes before a product quality issue occurs.
Modernizing applications with Quisitive
The idea of modernizing a company’s entire environment of applications can be daunting, even overwhelming. To address this, Quisitive developed its On-Ramp to Application Modernization (ORTAM) process to help clients work through their modernization. Broadly, the steps in ORTAM are:
- Identify applications and dependencies. A full inventory of the applications is created, and groups of applications are prioritized for modernization. For each application, its modernization need – rehost, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, replace, or retire – is proposed.
- Evaluate the environment. Automated tools help to create a holistic view of the environment, including an understanding of the data, servers, databases, and code involved.
- Define modernization waves. The risks of application modernization are minimized by taking it in waves, rather than all at once. Applications are grouped into waves based on similarities in their code bases, complexity, compliance requirements, and dependencies.
- Modernize the applications. Application architects design a modern Azure environment for the small group of applications in a given wave, and develop a modernization plan and timeline for them and then execute the plan, ensuring that appropriate change controls are in place throughout.
Throughout the process, change control and communications are key to ensuring each wave of the modernization effort is a success.
Moving Forward on Modernization
Quisitive has partnered with multiple manufacturing partners to help them modernize their applications, with significant success. Our experience with application modernization, with the Azure environment, and with the manufacturing sector ensures that we can help minimize disruption, maximize effectiveness, and deliver a migration that will be cost-effective and beneficial.
Contact us to speak about modernizing applications with our experts today.
So you’re thinking about using a Cloud Services Provider to help supplement your technology team. You’ve probably looked at the standard offerings that these providers have: their experience, their qualifications, their client list, and their technology background.
There’s one differentiator, though, that a lot of organizers don’t think of, especially if they are going with a managed services provider for the first time.
Where in the world is the provider?
This question isn’t about whether their headquarters is near you or far from you.
It’s about whether they have a blended team, with offices in multiple parts of the globe:
- Onshore: Typically North America
- Near-shore: Lower-cost areas in the same time zone, such as South or Central America
- Offshore: Typically Asia and/or Europe
The Benefits of Blended Teams
Blended teams provide some important opportunities that could lead to competitive advantages in your operations, development, and bottom line.
First, a blended team can perform round-the-clock app development. If your provider is developing a solution for you, they can code in North American time zones all day, and then perform QA work in Eurasian time zones overnight. This can greatly accelerate the development timelines while ensuring that you have a strong handle on what’s being done.
Also, the flexibility of a blended team enables assigning work in different regions to match your cost and velocity demands.
Finally, a blended team ensures better reliability for your infrastructure. The days of a pager waking up a technician in the middle of the night for a system failure are gone. Having a live technical team covering your systems 24/7 is a necessity now, and a global team is the best way to provide that business continuity.
Our globally interconnected world provides new opportunities in the technology sector, and when you’re selecting a service provider, you need to ensure those opportunities are there for you as well.
More from Quisitive
- Explore our Managed Services offering.
- Learn more about our application development services and how Quisitive leverages blended teams to provide top-tier experiences to our customers.
Tech debt. You implemented a suite of applications back when your company required them, and they got you where you needed to be. But is your software still working for you, or are you now working for it? While the legacy investment you made might still provide some productivity, it might not be sustainable.
But modernizing your whole suite—not to mention the platform you’re on, and all your infrastructure—is difficult, disruptive, and, let’s face it, pretty scary. There are a whole host of reasons you haven’t modernized yet.
There’s no sugar-coating it: modernization is not an easy process.
But maybe it’s not as big a problem as you think.
The money you might spend on modernization is an investment, not a cost. You’re already wasting resources on workarounds and maintenance to keep legacy systems running. Updates and fixes take far more time than they should. You’re investing not just in a new application platform, but in improved operations overall.
So let’s look at the most common reasons that decision makers don’t modernize, and why they are really reasons to move forward—fast.
1. Modernization takes forever and we don’t have the resources
Too much time, effort, and resources are being consumed by just having to maintain the legacy applications. So how are you going to find the time to add and refine features?
A common problem with legacy applications is trying to hire or keep people with domain knowledge. This can cause a lack of productivity. Not to mention, the legacy applications may no longer fit the work. Now resources are being used up trying to patch and maintain the legacy application, or coming up with workarounds to make it usable, rather than actually doing the work that’s needed.
Modernizing applications reduces that resource tax and provides a measurable increase in productivity. When employees have applications and technology that fit how and what they are working on, productivity increases.
Modernization doesn’t even need to be the huge, all-encompassing project that many fear it will be. You might have more options than you expect. You might think your only options are to replace or rewrite all of your legacy applications. The key is to find a solution that really works for you, and the proven path that will take you there.
2. Modernization is a cost sink, with no real benefits
Maybe you can see that modernization has to happen, but you’re worried that it’s just a money pit. You need to make a significant investment just to keep from falling behind—but you could burn a lot of capital without getting farther ahead. Maybe all those workarounds aren’t so bad when you compare them to the major spend that a modernization effort requires.
For many companies, though, there are other benefits—possibly major benefits—that can come along with modernizing applications. It’s not just throwing money into a pit. It’s creating new opportunities that a modern platform can provide.
One of the most important benefits companies find when they modernize their applications is the new opportunities to use their data. Legacy applications and their outdated data structures can be extremely difficult to link to, use, and perform analytics on. But moving to a modern cloud platform, for example, could enable you to implement a tool like Azure Data Services, enabling you to unlock and leverage your application data in new ways.
In a case like this, modernizing your applications isn’t just about the applications themselves; it can help put all of your assets, your data included, to work.
3. Employees will Hate It
It doesn’t matter if your staff are the ones complaining the loudest about your old application. They will resist a major change like application modernization. Personnel can be rightly cynical when big changes come along. Lack of preparedness and communication are often to blame, but disrupting their work and changing their processes inevitably cause stress for employees.
When a modernization effort goes right, though, the result is applications that are more aligned to the work that employees are doing. Time is no longer dedicated to annoying workarounds. Applications are no longer dictating how and when the work gets done. Staff will feel empowered and satisfied, and productivity can increase substantially.
So rather than put off modernization because of the disruption it will cause your business, embrace it as the key to a remarkable business improvement and a more engaged workforce. Working with an experienced and effective partner is essential for augmenting a great technical solution with a strong communication and change management plan that increases the rapid adoption and embracing of the application on its new platform. Getting employee input from the get-go, to really understand what they need from the application, and then informing staff each step of the way what is happening and when, can ensure that the effort isn’t just accepted by your staff, but celebrated by them.
4. The disruption will be more than it’s worth
When you start to plan a modernization effort, you’ll find that everyone’s expectations are extremely high. No downtime. No disruption to regular business. Controlled cost. Tight schedule. The top decision-makers are going to demand—and expect—the world in return for spending on modernization.
There’s often very little room, and it’s tempting to take a staged solution. This has its own risks: if you implement an interim solution, you can lose support for stages that are later in the modernization effort. And when that happens, the interim solution may become permanent, while still not solving the bigger issues.
But a modernization effort doesn’t have to happen this way. Cloud technology has matured a great deal in recent years. By employing best practices to move your applications to the cloud, you can ensure that your modernization goes smoothly. Those best practices should include the whole effort, too—not just the technology solution, but the assessment, planning, training, and communications components of the project as well.
With the right plan, and the right partner to help lead your organization through the application modernization process, the disruption can be controlled, and so can the cost and the schedule. When you complete it successfully, the costs will likely pale next to the benefits and advantages of your modernized suite.
Modernization: Your Business Is Worth It
Quisitive has acted as the partner for many organizations modernizing their applications and moving to the cloud. We work to ensure their modernization projects are completed successfully, and with minimal disruption.
To address the specific needs of modernization projects, in fact, Quisitive has developed a practice called ORTAM—the On-Ramp To Application Modernization. This systematic, iterative approach, led by our application modernization and migration experts, is designed to kickstart innovation and avoid the many pitfalls that organizations fear.
As a Microsoft-only partner, Quisitive is uniquely positioned to help customers define best practices to manage the change processes and adopt the cloud successfully.
There might be many reasons why you haven’t modernized your technology resources yet; but you can see that they shouldn’t hold you back from achieving the benefits of bringing your applications to the cloud. Talk to Quisitive and get started on the path to a better technology today.
The Quisitive team recently earned the Modernization of Web Applications in Microsoft Azure advanced specialization. To understand the significance of this achievement we sat down with Quisitive SVP of Services, Steven Balusek [SB] and Director of Technology, Bryan Blain [BB], to gain a better understanding of business impact.
What does this mean for Quisitive?
[SB] While this achievement validates our technical expertise and demonstrates our thought-leadership in this space, the most significant impact for Quisitive will be access to customers and qualified opportunities. With this achievement we now are part of an elite group of partners that Microsoft engages with to jointly pursue customer targets.
How does this differentiate Quisitive within the Microsoft ecosystem?
[SB] If you look at the current Microsoft partner ecosystem of 64,000+ partners, a very limited number of partners currently have this certification, and we join that select group. For our customers this validates our deep product knowledge, extensive experience and proven expertise in migrating and modernizing production web application workloads and managing app services in Azure. As a 100% dedicated Microsoft partner, we are very mindful to structure our go-to-market offerings to map directly to Microsoft sales plays. Our goal is to make it very simple to engage with us to drive customer impact and to increase deal velocity. Having this specialization is one more way to reduce friction and drive results.
How difficult was the audit process?
[BB] Preparation for the audit was a process we began in January of this year; the requirements were steep, and we knew that we needed a well-orchestrated plan to achieve the goal. The team worked weeks in advance preparing and organizing customer evidence. Our level of preparedness was summed up in this quote from the independent auditor… “Quisitive’s performance is one of the best I have seen in an audit, making this one of the most resounding approvals I have given for a Specialization. Quisitive walked the talk and backed its well-orchestrated presentation by demonstrating superior technological and programming skills to modernize applications in Azure.” That quote sums up the amazing consulting talent we have at Quisitive.