Power Platform Release wave 2 2023

Again is that time of the year where Microsoft delight us with the list of new features and hidden gems for Power Platform and Dynamics 365, as I always say I’m very glad it’s only twice and not three times a year.

The following is my top feature list about the Power Platform. I know it’s a bit of a long list, but I couldn’t left them out in this blogpost.

I’ve used the new experience to dig into the release wave documentation, so go I highly recommend it if you haven’t started using yet.

Before we go any further, it’s worth mentioning that everything in this list is subject to change and the following images are the same ones that Microsoft has released as part of the feature wave, including the quality of them.

Without further introductions, let’s get started.

Power Apps

Set the solution context for customizations

Currently, updates made to objects including apps and tables are automatically added to the default solution in Dataverse. Moreover, Dataverse uses the default publisher in that solution, which is named CDS Default Publisher.

Now I think this is a big step forward for a healthy ALM process, because as of October 2023 using make.powerapps.com, we will be able to change where we want to automatically store all the customizations by default, meaning we will be able to select any other unmanaged solution as the active solution context. This will also mean customizations leverage the solutions’ publisher prefix when creating schema and unique names for the solution object.

Makers can take advantage of the whole make.powerapps.com experience and have customizations land in the appropriate solution ready for successful application lifecycle management (ALM).

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Oct 2023

General Availability : —

Resize and reposition the Power Fx editor within Power Apps Studio

To some people this feature may seem like nothing or a very small improvement, but I’m really happy to have this one because I have always had problems when I have to create/update large formulas in a Canvas App/Custom Page.

Currently the Power Fx formula editor in Power Apps Studio is fixed at the top of the window and has a limited amount of sizing options which can be challenging. Now in the near future this feature will allow makers to have more control over how the Power Fx editor in Power Apps Studio can be sized and positioned. For makers with large monitor real estate, this feature will provide additional options to position the formula editor so it’ll be easy to view both the Power Fx formulas and the canvas app at the same time.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Mar 2024

General Availability : —

Use Copilot to build and edit apps in Power Apps Studio / Write formulas from natural language or examples

This release wave is all about AI, we have heard a lot about copilot in the last months, and since its release, Microsoft has incorporated further capabilities to enable Copilot to build apps based on natural language input. This will simplify the app development process and increase the chances of success for low-code makers.

This means that in the near future makers will be able to use Copilot to build and edit apps using natural language. Makers will have the ability to execute tasks, such as adding screens and controls, modifying properties, and linking to data.

A few examples of a straightforward prompts, could be:

  • Add a button to my header
  • Change my container to align center
  • Change all my labels to have font size 18
  • Make this label bold
  • Connect my gallery to my Account table
 

In the same line writing Power Fx formulas sometimes can be time consuming and difficult even for pro developers. With Copilot, AI will help write your formula.

Makers can now use Copilot to write formulas using natural language or by providing examples. This functionality was previously available through Power Apps Ideas and will be updated and combined with Copilot to provide makers with a consistent and unified experience to increase their productivity.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Oct 2023

General Availability : —

Power Pages

Use admin security and analytics views

It’s good to see that with each release wave we get new insights, either in the management portal or in Power Automate or in Power Apps.

Now from https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/, we will get the security view, which will provide admins the necessary information to audit and monitor the websites created in their tenant from security angle. It will also provide them the usage metrics for tracking product adoption and website usage needed for planning capacity and tracking maker engagement.

As a service admin, you’ll get a quick snapshot view in one place for tracking security needs and get runtime analytics for your websites.

The security view will provide details, such as:

  • Website security scores
  • Websites with anonymous data access enabled
  • Authentication methods used (to understand alignment with organisation policy)
  • Phishing sites detected on tenant
  • Other details
 

The analytics view is planned to provide metrics, such as:

  • Website authenticated/anonymous monthly active users and daily active users
  • Service errors
  • Other metrics
 

Additionally, both views can be filtered at tenant, environment, and website level.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: —

General Availability : Oct 2023

Use Copilot to create a website

And again we have AI features making life easier for low-code makers. This feature empowers makers to use Power Pages Copilot to seamlessly create a website using generative AI. Just think it, describe it. Power Pages will build it.

This is similar to a feature I already listed where you can describe what you want and Copilot will create the app for you. Well in this scenario is about creating a Power Pages site, meaning that once you’ve entered your description, Power Pages will use generative AI to determine the sitemap and generate homepage layout variations and site theme.

Once these are assembled together, you can continue to use Copilot inside the design studio to modify and refine the website.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Oct 2023

General Availability : —

Dataverse

Create a table and import data from a file

This one for me could be a game changer, because it could push us to think first about data modeling before start creating anything in Dataverse.

This feature will enable seamless data connectivity for Microsoft Dataverse, and it’ll allow us to create new tables in Dataverse by importing data from a file using the upload or drag-and-drop features.

This means that we will be able to start building a solution with just a simple copy + paste of our data or link to our data source like Excel, SQL database.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: —

General Availability : Mar 2024

Associate activities with multiple related records

How many times do we come across with requirements where we have to relate an activity with multiple records?. I personally struggled with this requirement many times.

Well with this feature, users will be able to associate activity records with multiple related records, such as a phone call or meeting related to multiple cases or opportunities. For instance, associating a meeting or phone call to multiple cases or opportunities.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Aug 2023

General Availability : Oct 2023

Experience enhancements to formula columns

Maybe all of us have heard about formula columns by now, personally I’ve used it just a couple of times because I think it’s still a half-baked feature in Dataverse. Maybe will finally convince me to use it more often.

Formula columns use Power FX, so this feature gives you the ability to define more calculations inside the formula columns that the legacy calculated field supports.

The goal of this feature is to address calculated columns capabilities that aren’t currently supported inside formula columns. Formula columns will eventually replace the classic calculated columns feature.

Here are some of the known gaps that formula columns don’t support today:

  • Creation of currency columns.
  • Support for date and time with user local and time zone.
  • Support for choice columns.
  • Ability to set precisions for decimals.
 

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Sep 2023

General Availability : Dec 2023

Use Power Fx to define column level rollup logic

And again Microsoft is leveraging Power Fx in columns, but this time to improve the rollup feature, this will enable makers to define low-code column level rollup logic using Power Fx.

In this feature, Microsoft will address the aggregation of rows within a table. A rollup column contains an aggregate value computed over the rows related to a specified row. This includes regular tables and activity tables, such as email and appointment. This feature will be rolled out in phases. First, Microsoft is going to address the current parity, followed by future support for sync rollups.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Jan 2024

General Availability : Mar 2024

AI Builder

Iterate model version and rollback model state

Personally I haven’t worked that much with AI builder, but I consider that be able to handle multiple versions of the same model, will allow us to fine-tune it in terms of performance.

Supporting multiple versions of the same model enables you to compare the performance of different models for the same scenario. This facilitates enterprise adoption for production processes that require fine-tuning models based on new data.

You can iterate on different versions for the same model and control which version of the AI Builder model you want to deploy to different environments. Moving trainable models across environments is supported with data set versioning. You can also rollback the model state to a previous version to restore the state of the training data and republish the previous version.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Mar 2024

General Availability : —

Transcribe speech to text automatically

I foresee this one to be highly used in contact centers. This feature will allow you to build automated processes that for instance transcribe audio files or audio logs or meeting recordings in contact centers, allowing the user to analyze the generated text to extract insights and summarize key action points.

This feature will quickly transcribe audio to text in more than 100 languages and variants. Customize models to enhance accuracy for domain-specific terminology. This enables search or analytics on transcribed text that facilitate generating insights and actions–all in no-code.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Mar 2024

General Availability : —

Power Virtual Agents

Use Dataverse and internal SharePoint content as a source for AI-created generative answers

The following are benefits to the stakeholders when using a Microsoft Dataverse or an internal SharePoint store for generative answers:

  • Bot makers: Reduced time to create or update chatbots from days to minutes
  • System and bot admins: Reduced data loss prevention and data exfiltration concerns. Keep your organization’s data inside the organization.
  • Support center and helpdesk: Improved deflection rate
  • Bot users: Get answers directly from your organization’s existing knowledge
 

The generative answers capability in Power Virtual Agents lets you specify existing internal and external sources that a bot can use to answers a bot user’s questions. The capability uses recent advancements in natural language understanding (NLU) and large-language model (LLM) AI technology to intelligently create a fully conversational response to a user’s query – without your bot makers first needing to manually create individual topics for every eventuality.

In this release, Microsoft is expanding the breadth of sources that your bots can use to generate answers, including Dataverse search and internal SharePoint sites as a source. With the addition of Dataverse search, your bot makers can leverage indexed content in your Dataverse environment, meaning they can create a dedicated knowledge base that your bots can use to generate answers.

The scope of indexed content in Dataverse also means bot makers can directly upload documents from within the Power Virtual Agents app that your bots can instantly use.

In the same context, when a bot maker connects an internal SharePoint knowledge source to a bot, the bot can retrieve information from the following types of content within a specified SharePoint directory, site, or library:

  • Content on web pages hosted on the SharePoint site, such as wikis
  • Word documents
  • PowerPoint presentations
  • PDF files
 

The bot will only generate answers from information that the bot user has access to, enforced with Azure Active Directory authentication.

Early Access: —

Public Preview: —

General Availability : Oct 2023

Power BI

Create and run DAX queries with Query view in Power BI Desktop

Even though I don’t use Power BI much anymore, I’m happy to see that now Professional BI developers can write and run DAX queries natively within Power BI.

Previously, a BI developer would have needed to use third party tools in order to run DAX queries, well not anymore.

DAX expressions are used to define any measure, calculated column, dynamic format string and even row level security on your model.

This powerful way to interact with your data model is now available in the new DAX query view!:

  • Quick queries in the context menu of the Data pane tables, columns, or measures gives you a head start by creating a DAX query to preview data or show summary statistics to help you understand the data without creating visuals and for DirectQuery you no longer must go back to Power Query to see some sample data.
  • Right-click in the Data pane to get the DAX expression of all measures or a specific measure in a DEFINE statement with an EVALUATE statement to run as a DAX query and add any additional columns.
  • If you modify a DEFINE measure from the model definition, a time saving option to save to model can overwrite the current model definition with your changes – you don’t have to copy paste it back manually.
  • If you use DEFINE to create a measure not in the model already, a time saving option to add to model can be used to add this measure to your model! Again, saving you the step of going new measure and then copy pasting the DAX expression over.
  • If your measure references another measure, you can define the measure and all the references, meaning all the measures DAX expressions are visible on one screen! Now you can see the full context of how this measure is calculated from the source columns.
  • Performance Analyzer already lets you copy the visual DAX query. Now you no longer need to take that DAX query and use another tool to view and run it – simply run the visual DAX query in Power BI.

 

In any visual or even a single data point in a visual in the Report view, you can right-click to see and run that visual DAX query in the DAX query view.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Mar 2024

General Availability : —

There you have it, these were my highlights for this release wave on Power Platform. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

Here you have the documentation of it, go and read it because probably you will encounter other ones that are more interesting to you.

Hello there! Welcome to my blog!
My name is Wilmer Alcivar and I’m a Power Platform fan

I’d love to share my knowledge, so please do not hesitate to connect!

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