By Ed Staats
This is our third installment of enhancements that Microsoft is doing for 2024 release Wave 2, which runs through March 2025. In this piece we will be focused on the technical improvements within the Power Platform as there are some very useful enhancements that makers of applications will be interested in.
For those of you who are not technical, here is a quick summary: More robust tools are available to manage user security, AI can be utilized within development, AI models can be created to help process documents and images (through native object recognition), and Power Pages has improved usability enhancements.
Security – Small Changes for Big Wins
The security enhancements in the 2024 release Wave 2 provide better controls over user access and data security. These provide makers of applications and administrators of Power Apps environments with a more robust foundation for the future.
Views no longer have to be shown or hidden from everyone. Views, like forms, will have access managed by security roles. This will prevent the need to create multiple apps just to limit the views that a user group needs to see. This tiny, yet very significant change will greatly improve user experience, training, and maintenance. This is one of my favorite release items in the 2024 release Wave 2.
Microsoft Purview provides customers with a holistic view of security throughout their organization. Customers that utilize Microsoft Dataverse and Purview will be able to protect and monitor data usage throughout applications to enforce regulatory and compliance requirements. This provides a consolidated view of security vulnerabilities.
Managed identities are provided to system administrators so Power Platform can allow publishers of Dataverse plug-ins to securely connect to Azure resources without having to store or expose credentials. This means that secure credentials can be managed by IT without providing these credentials to developers. Developers will simply access permissions to utilize the manage identities which will reduce security vulnerabilities.
In a similar vein to managed identities, users can be delegated limited admin capabilities rather than providing full admin rights to an environment. This allows the business users of Power Apps and CRM platforms to have access to parts of the application they can easily manage without exposing them to security risks. Some examples of how this can be used are assigning users to Teams or managing data on a user’s record within CRM.
Power Pages – Setting the Stage for More Interactivity
Power Pages is built on the foundation of Power Apps Portals and provides a new low-code maker experience and out-of-the box templates to design modern business sites. Power Pages is integrating AI capabilities to simplify development and tools to limit security vulnerabilities. The user interface for users of Power Pages and Power Apps Portal is also getting enhancements of drag-and-drop functionality and AI search capabilities.
Copilot support is being added to help write Power Fx formulas and will simplify building complex formulas. Power Fx can also be bundled up into reusable components across Power Pages and these formulas do not have to be tied to a specific data source. This makes the formulas easily portable to different environments, which provides a more relevant data-driven end-user experience.
In January 2024, Copilot will provide the ability for a user to describe in their own words what they wish to develop on a webpage within Power Pages. This will help business users and Power Page developers take advantage of AI to reduce the time it takes to prototype webpages.
Power Pages admins and developers can migrate and modify their existing sites to Bootstrap version 5. This provides a Power Pages portal that will be up to date with the latest industry standards for displaying websites on mobile phones, tablets, and desktops.
Power Pages will be gaining tools that scan the platform for security vulnerabilities, and anything found during the scan will have advice on how to remediate issues found. This will improve the site’s security by protecting it from possible attacks and providing a safer online space for users.
The users of Power Apps Portals and Power Pages will get usability upgrades as well. Drag and drop functionality is provided for files and files can be uploaded straight from a user’s camera.
AI search capabilities will be added to Power Pages, which will provide users with more contextually relevant search results. These AI search models can be refined and fine-tuned over time as needed.
Like Copilot for Sales, summarization of long documents or community forums via Copilots will also be available in Power Pages. This provides end users with a better experience by seeing summaries of threads rather than delving into the details of each thread one-by-one.
Power Automate, Copilot Studio and AI Builder – Integrating AI into Automated Processes
The flexibility of Power Automate has become a favorite tool of many makers of Power Apps. Power Automate can handle a variety of technical challenges from connecting discrepant data sources, integrating cross-application tasks, and managing data within Microsoft Dataverse, which has earned it a valuable place in the Microsoft ecosystem.
One of the items that has been lacking in Power Automate is a consolidated dashboard for admins. In the 2024 release Wave 2 admins will be able to see success and failure rates of flows, understand why errors are occurring, and monitor cloud and desktop flow usage. This will provide better controls over Power Automate flows which will lead to enterprise-wide governance strategies that can be implemented and enforced for Power Automate.
AI will now generate a description of a flow which enhances the meta data available about Power Automate. This will help any users trying to understand a Power Automate flow that has not been summarized or documented well.
Like Power Pages, Microsoft is investigating the ability to create flows using natural language models. This will allow a user to explain, in terms relevant to them, the steps that they want to achieve via the Power Automate flow. This can then provide a framework to begin development of the flow and like Copilot in Power Pages, will most likely provide a starting point for development and not an overall solution unless the requirements are straightforward.
Copilot Studio is a solution that provides the ability to develop Generative Pre-trained Transformers (commonly known as GPTs). This provides different capabilities to a business from creating interactive chat bots to streamlining document analysis. Our Part 1 review of the 2024 release Wave 2 covers Copilot for Sales, which provides several examples of how Copilot can be used.
AI Builder is a platform and toolkit that can glean insights from data or automate business processes and is currently integrated with Power Automate and Power Apps. The steps to successfully utilizing AI Builder are as follows: Choose the model you want (you can create a custom one or use a pre-built model), connect data that you want the model to be trained on, tailor the model to your needs, train the model, and then utilize the model. Some examples are a predictive scoring model if incoming marketing communications is spam or the likelihood that a customer requires intervention based on email communication.
Copilot Studio and AI Builder will enhance the already available object recognition available within Power Automate. This capability can be combined with GPT-4 with Vision, or GPT-V, and will provide the ability to create models that can intelligently scan documents and analyze images. This will include items such as text recognition for forms, charts, and infographics. The capability will provide many companies with a way to adopt processes that can be used to create metadata about documents and extract relevant information that could be stored within a database accessible via Microsoft Dataverse. This functionality is targeted for March 2025, but more than likely may slip to release Wave 1 2025. However, this is one piece of functionality that should be on most companies’ radar.
The 2024 release Wave 2 brings significant enhancements to the core technologies as AI models are being used to enhance the Power App ecosystem. One area that we expect to see continual growth in 2025 is Copilot Studio and AI Builder to enhance the development of Power Apps or improve an end user’s experience. Companies will be able to incorporate models through Copilot Studio and AI Builder in real-time for their business process to provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace. An example of this will be the ability to analyze documents and images quickly and with accuracy through Copilot Studio and incorporate these models in Power Automate. AI Builder will also continue to be enhanced and provide value throughout the Power Platform ecosystem.
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