Power Platform users may want to take note as Microsoft have announced a new wave of features coming to Power BI, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Apps portals, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and AI Builder, as well as Microsoft Power Platform capabilities for governance and administration, ISV experiences, and data integration.
These new features will be released starting April through to September 2022. Keep reading to find out what to expect.
Changes coming to Power BI
As always Power BI’s focus is to empower individuals, teams and organisations to drive a data driven culture. Here are just some of the ways Microsoft aims to do this.
- For individuals, Microsoft is improving the create experience through the creation of measures using natural language and work sharing for easy collaboration using OneDrive.
- For teams, enhancements are coming for goals focused on enterprise needs, integration with PowerPoint, and new capabilities to the Power BI experience in Teams.
- For organisations, improvements are being made to experiences with big data through automatic aggregations, data protection capabilities through DLP, and providing improved visibility into activity to admins.
Power Apps
New built-in collaboration features will enable teams to work on an app simultaneously as well as merge and track changes for faster and more seamless development. Makers and developers will be more productive over Dataverse by leveraging intelligence to assist development with natural language to code powered by advanced AI models such as GPT-3 and PROSE.
Most importantly, key updates will ensure that organisations can deliver flagship apps across the entire company faster and safer than ever, such as Power Apps mobile apps (allowing packaging of apps to be deployed on Android and iOS) and improvements to ALM and governance capabilities to ensure safe and scalable roll outs.
Power Apps portals
Power Apps portals continues to invest in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code / no-code development as well as for professional developers.
Some of the salient capabilities for makers include converting portals into cross-platform mobile applications, option to use Global search that is powered through Dataverse search integration, enhancements for professional developers to do more with the portals using Power Platform PAC CLI tool as well as for admins to author administrative workflows using Admin APIs.
Power Automate
Power Automate is more accessible than ever before with integrations in Windows 11 and Microsoft Teams which helps in automating tasks no matter where you are in Microsoft 365.
With increased in customer usage of the robotic process automation (RPA) deployments, we are adding features to make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of your users and accounts. All features are increasingly automatable by default (adhering to the API-first approach), so that IT departments can manage their Power Automate infrastructure in whatever way they want.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with commenting, Power Apps Portals integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams, and more.
Power Virtual Agents gives anyone in your organization the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface, without the need for AI experts, data scientists, or teams of developers. A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and ultimately answer a user’s questions.
Microsoft Dataverse
Microsoft Dataverse continues investment in Azure Synapse Link. Customers will be able to unlock deeper insights from Dataverse data using the power of Azure Synapse. Deeper integration with Azure Active Directory will simplify sharing while improving governance and security. Enhancements to Dataverse data modelling will allow customers to build new types of applications leveraging rich and intelligent data types.
AI Builder
AI Builder is adding capabilities around document automation like the ability to process unstructured documents (such as contracts or e-mails). By extracting insights from the semantic understanding of the text in unstructured documents, we’ll be able to extract key information from documents and process them automatically in an end-to-end flow using Power Automate.
Increased capabilities include effectively managing the governance and lifecycle of AI Models. The focus is on building out a Feedback loop process, enabling improvement of model accuracy by retraining models with data processed in production.
Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration and ISV experiences
Organisations will now be able to connect their Azure subscription to an environment and pay for Power Apps and Dataverse as it is consumed across their organisation. For simplified governance, we have enhanced out-of-the-box tenant level analytics, additional advanced Data Loss Prevention capabilities, and information protection policies to manage connectors and Power Platform assets. Lastly, Microsoft is investing in new capabilities like Lockbox for Power Platform to satisfy the new European Data Boundary (EUDB) regulations.
Microsoft Power Platform ISV experiences building on our platform are now able to service their customers at planet scale. Instead of servicing each customer with manual updates, ISVs can now have their customers opt in to receive automatic updates. With this update ISVs will be enabled to be much more agile and ship updates at the same high cadence as customers are used to from our Dynamics 365 applications. ISV studio offers a view into status of updates and how many customers have opted into auto updates.
Data integration
Microsoft aim to deliver improvements in big data performance and high scale connectivity Dataverse, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Redshift.
You can expect several enhancements across connectors, Gateway and VNet. New capabilities will simplify data prep through visual authoring environment and diagram view to create high-scale dataflows to Microsoft Cloud, supporting Power BI, Insights Apps and Power Platform.
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