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First Few Days at Geoson 

A reflection on my first few days at Geoson, including how I got here and how I want to grow. 

Hi, my name is Ethan, and I’m a Computer Engineering student at the University of Alberta. I recently joined Geoson as a co-op student, and over my first few days, I’ve already had the opportunity to dive into new tools, workflows, and ways of thinking about real-world software development.

My academic background has given me a strong foundation in programming, problem-solving, and systems thinking, but one of my main goals coming into this co-op is to bridge the gap between classroom learning and industry application. Early on at Geoson, I’ve been working through Microsoft Power Platform learning paths, including Power Automate and Power Apps. This has given me hands-on exposure to building automated workflows, monitoring and troubleshooting flows, and developing custom Power Apps components using the Power Apps Component Framework. Going through these modules has helped me better understand how low-code and no-code tools can be used to build scalable, real business solutions efficiently.

Beyond the technical onboarding, I’ve already started getting familiar with how teams collaborate in a professional environment. Seeing how documentation is structured, how tools are used to manage work, and how problems are approached from both a technical and business perspective has been extremely valuable.

Throughout this co-op term, I’m hoping to gain deeper experience applying my technical skills to real projects with real users. I want to continue learning industry tools and workflows that aren’t always taught in school, improve my ability to communicate ideas clearly, and grow more confident contributing meaningfully to a team. I’m also looking forward to learning from experienced professionals through mentorship and feedback and gaining clarity on the types of roles and technologies I’m most excited to pursue long-term.

So far, my experience at Geoson has been welcoming and engaging, and I’m excited to build on what I’ve learned as the term continues.

At Geoson, we’re increasingly integrating AI into our daily Power Apps development to deliver smarter, more efficient applications. Within the Power Platform, AI capabilities generally fall into several key areas;

📄 Document Processing: Automated extraction and handling of complex documents.
✍️ Text Analysis: Understanding and deriving meaning from unstructured text.
🖼️ Image Recognition: Interpreting and extracting data from visual information.
📊 Structured Data Interpretation: Enhancing insights from existing business data.

We achieve efficiency by first leveraging Microsoft's prebuilt AI models for standardized, high-volume scenarios. This provides immediate value for common tasks like basic text recognition and general document data extraction.

However, to meet specific business process demands, we design and train custom AI models. This tailored development is essential for increasing accuracy in specialized, real-world data capture—for example, fine-tuning image-based data extraction to handle the unique layouts and fields found on specific vendor invoices or proprietary internal documents. By strategically combining these out-of-the-box and customized models, we streamline data workflows and significantly improve the precision of data capture within Power Apps. This dual approach allows us to build intelligent business applications that accurately reflect and automate complex, real-world operational requirements.

In today's digital age, keeping a website fresh and engaging is key to attracting and retaining visitors. Recently, I made some exciting updates to my website to improve user experience and functionality. Here's a look at what I've been up to: 

Recently I have been tasked with updating Geoson Solutions very own Contract Management extension. This task required me to learn the new and exciting tool D365 Business Central (BC) and programming in AL.

During the past 2 weeks at Geoson Solutions I got to finally wrap up a project I have been working on since joining. This involved adding some last-minute additions and changes that were requested. It has been a worthwhile experience and I’ve learned a lot. It will be nice to finally have the final version out there.

The Challenge

When dealing with email integration in Dynamics GP, we ran into a client concerns which was the inadvertent modification of email fields. Once an email is successfully populated in GP, we wanted the integration to no longer change the GP email field, so in other words to lock this email field.

This week required me to put all the skills I have learned in my past month here to the test as I tackled new features and various bug fixes. I continued developing a lookup feature followed by setting default values when the form is launched. As we began to put the form into production, I also received bug fixes and other small tweaks that I would need to resolve.

The highlight of my week had to be finally meeting the team. After meeting virtually with them for weeks it was quite nice seeing them in person. The camaraderie built will not only help us enjoy our time working together more, but also help us be more effective as a team. I cannot wait to meet with them again next month!

Recently, I have been working on implementing a filter on a Visual Studio Integration Toolkit (VSIT) Custom Form in Microsoft Dynamics GP as well as solving an underlying bug that would delete the first row of the form’s scrolling window whenever a user clicked on it. The filter would only show data that was matched and another filter which showed if the data had been submitted. The difficulties faced with creating this filter stemmed from how scrolling windows function inside of GP. While it is straightforward to set up a scrolling window for data to be manually entered and saved, importing the data, and modifying it on the fly was fairly challenging.

In the fast-paced world of business, efficiency and automation are key. This week, I delved into the intricacies of eONE SmartConnect to enhance our business processes. Specifically, I successfully created an integration that updates the Salesforce Status field when the corresponding field has been imported into GP. In this blog post, I will walk you through the step-by-step process of how I accomplished this task.