A Glimpse into Microsoft Ignite Power Platform latest announcements

This year’s Ignite conference has once again set the tech world abuzz with anticipation, as Microsoft takes the spotlight to showcase its newest offerings, upgrades, and game-changing solutions. In this blog post, we will go through the key announcements made at Microsoft Ignite related to the Power Platform services.

Governance

New features and updates are focused on Managed Environments:

• Groups and rules for Managed Environments: Environment groups will allow admins to categorize their environments into a group, and rule sets will allow admins to define a dedicated configuration for each of their environment groups.
• Advisor in Managed Environments: It will provide proactive recommendations and actions to govern and secure the environments easily. Furthermore, it will include recommendations to clean up unused applications, lock down those over-shared or add owners to orphaned apps.

Power Apps

In the realm of app development, Power Apps is making waves with its latest news and features, enhancing user experiences and expanding the platform’s capabilities:

• Theming and modern controls generally available in canvas apps: Makers will be able to create elegant, accessible, fast and reliable apps thanks to the new modern controls. Apps’ appearence now can be quickly updated by applying modern themes, which are predefined sets of styles that affect the user interface.
• Mobile Power Apps native UI/UX: With smoother animations and faster performance, this will bring efficiency gains to users running apps on mobile devices, especially on those with high-volume data actions.

Some new features are also added to accelerate Power Apps development, in this case using Copilot:

• Copilot for app users embedded in apps: App makers will be able to create copilots (with Microsoft Copilot Studio) and embed them in any app, so users can use those assistants while using it.
• Copilot for app users as sidecar: With this feature, Copilot will provide answers and insights to users based on the data managed by the app (as long as it is stored in Dataverse), and without the need to configure anything by app makers.
• AI-generated app descriptions: For those apps stored in Managed Environments which are missing their description, it will be added automatically with an AI-generated text. App descriptions are useful to help users find them and IT admins understand their purpose.

Power Automate

New copilot experiences have been announced, spanning into process mining, RPA and orchestration, besides the existing Copilot features:

• Copilot in Desktop flows (RPA): Copilot will assist with desktop flows (RPA) by typing questions and getting relevant information and step by-step instructions from documentation. Moreover, users will be able to generate scripts by describing what to do, and code will be automatically generated.
• Copilot to analyze automation activity: Admins and business users with access to flow histories, will be able to query past runs in natural language across their environments. This will help in monitoring tasks and detecting issues in flows.

Power Virtual Agents

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio, as it is build on its foundations and the AI conversational ecosystem. Makers now can create copilots (chatbots) that connect to different data sources using pre-built or custom plugins and GPTs, create plugins, prompts and models, and manage all of them from one central place.

Power BI

After some time in preview, Microsoft Fabric is generally available, and end-to-end analytics platform which empowers data teams to meet business demands. Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, including the experience for Power BI, will help makers to explore their data, create reports and answer questions faster than ever, increasing productivity and changing the way we work.

Power Pages

Copilot is already present in Power Pages, which allows makers to create sites, web pages and even forms with natural language. Additionally, now makers can develop websites that accept payments, unlocking new uses cases.

Summary

The era of AI and copilots is here: Every single Microsoft product use AI to improve makers productivity. The infusion of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) into the Power Platform ecosystem brings forth a wave of possibilities, catalyzing a paradigm shift in how businesses approach app development, data analysis, and process automation.