Presenting Common Data Service data in a professionally formatted Microsoft Word document using Power Automate

As a follow-up to our previous blog, in this blog, we focus on the digital transformation of the last, but a very critical step in the release plans process – presenting  data in Common Data Service in the form of a professionally formatted Word document utilizing Power Automate. As an example, we will walk through the flow of how we generate Word documents for release plans within Microsoft.

The need for automation

Hundreds of people, including product managers, product marketing managers, and content developers, come together to generate content for over 35 products consisting of hundreds of features in the release plan. This massive task creates a need for a humungous manual scrubbing process to ensure that:

• Product stakeholders are reviewing the release plans in a format the customers will receive
• The content presented in a structured and consistent flow such as product overview, a summary of planned features, followed by individual feature detail and their respective images across every product

This process takes over several days for every review with the product stakeholders. When the content is revised over time with additional details, it requires review with the stakeholders again. These circumstances led us to believe that automation was imperative to scale.

Dynamics out-of-box report generation through Word Templates

The first option that we considered for document generation was the out of the box (OOB) document generation functionality that existed within Dynamics 365, Word Templates. Here, we can create a word template and apply the same template to the content in CDS. While the functionality allows to easily export the content into a Word document for offline review and generates the document at a fast pace, it currently has some limitations specific to our  business scenario.

• Lack of custom filters. The Word Template functionality helps to generate a word document for the entire release plans for a product. We needed to output a subset of release plans based on a set of criteria (e.g., for a specific release wave, based on flags such as ready to disclose, reviewed by the teams, etc.). As an implication, this led to a follow-up activity of manually removing sections of data that should not be a part of the review.
• Inability to organize content by sections for easy readability.
  • For the release plan, we needed a vertical hierarchy of headers and sub headers at various levels to arrange the content and render the large amount of information easily consumable. The OOB capability offered straightforward tabular formatting of data for repeated content. To exemplify, we could generate a table of all release plans for a product. Still, we could not create different sections with a summary and a table for each product.

• Product Managers enter the content in Markdown format, and it will appear as same in the Word document with no possibility of converting to HTML. This limitation required additional time to clean up the content before showing it to the executives.
• It does not support images. Images such as screenshots are very critical for the creation of walkthroughs of features. These images had to be manually added after document generation.

Generation of Release Plans through Power Automate

With Power Automate, we can generate the release plan at one click and in a way that overcame the limitations that we experienced with the out of the box document generation. Following were some features which applied very well to our scenario

• Applying custom filters. The Power Automate based document generation could set the parameters and flags to determine what data needs to be published in the report.
• Organizing content by section. As shown below, the release plan is organized by sections for each product for easy readability (this example pertains to one product only)
  1. Product
  2. Exec Summary (overview)
  3. What’s new and planned (capabilities)
  4. Table of specific features for the capabilities
• Formatting of summary content. The bulleted list enabled effective communication and helped to identify key points efficiently.
• Images: Images have been incorporated in the feature walkthrough for more intuitive and rapid absorption.

 
 
Operational use-case

The product stakeholder can easily create a subset of their release plan document for a specific product, timeframe, or any other custom filters. This approach helps the product stakeholder to generate a near-final look and feel of the content for a thorough offline review.

When one of the options (All features/Features ready to disclose) is selected, the system will show the following prompt, and the requestor will receive the document over the email.

 
Limitations with Power Automate

While Power Automate enabled us to get very close to our destination, the following are some limitations that we encountered, specifically with the release plans. These do not apply if you don’t have a lot of images or need to deal with text format conversion.

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• Due to limited functionality with the Microsoft Word connector, we relied on the SharePoint connector to store and retrieve the document. The Table of Content is generated manually once the document is generated.

Things to know

• The Power Automate generates the HTML content as a Word document, and that gives the flexibility to use polished custom templates.

Looking forward

For the broader community, we plan to publish this Flow as a template along with our release plan solution in GitHub.