Microsoft Power Platform: 2023 Release Wave 1 Improvements

Microsoft Power Platform enables you to quickly automate data analysis so you can make decisions to drive your business and digitally transform your workflows. The solution comprises four main products (Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents) along with Microsoft Dataverse, AI Builder, and Power Pages.

With the Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1, Microsoft will deliver hundreds of new features across these seven applications. This blog provides you with a rundown of the high-level enhancements that both professional and low-code/no-code developers will appreciate.

Power Platform: 2023 Release Wave 1 Improvements

·     Power BI—For individuals, Microsoft is enhancing the creation experience, bringing more parity on the web and adding the Power Query diagram view. For teams, meeting and multitasking enhancements will help users seamlessly interact with data wherever they work.

·     Power Apps—Your organization can reduce risk with advanced governance capabilities and build easy onboarding workflows. Users can also leverage low code capabilities so developers of all skill levels can be more productive when building apps, managing data, and constructing logic. Users will also benefit from modernized web and mobile experiences, ensuring fast experiences across apps.

·     Power Pages—New features include additional out-of-the-box capabilities to support low-code/no-code development. These include new solution templates in Design Studio. For professional developers, they can perform additional actions and work with code using Power Platform CLI tools and Visual Studio Code.

·     Power Automate—New capabilities simplify creating workflows by describing them in natural language. Other improvements include introducing work queues where automatable tasks can be viewed and managed together as well as providing simpler connectivity to a machine for desktop workflows. This eliminates the need for additional installs and password management.

·     Power Virtual Agents—The new unified authoring canvas is Microsoft’s single conversational AI studio for all bot-building needs. There’s also continuing integration with Bot Framework and Azure Cognitive Services—with a public preview that empowers bot creators to begin building right away. (The advanced authoring canvas will be generally available later in Wave 1).

·     Microsoft Dataverse—Enhances developer experiences by improving app-building productivity, providing seamless connectivity to external data sources, and facilitating data stewardship with tools like Power Fx.

·     AI Builder—Document processing improvements include more pre-built model capabilities like contract processing, the ability to identify personal information, and the possibility to extract field types from documents. Microsoft is also facilitating model governance and licensing by improving the admin interfaces to make it easier to govern how AI Builder credits are used across environments, apps, and flows.

Other new areas in which to look for improvements in the Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1 include governance and administration, professional development, ISV experiences, and data integration. For governance and administration, Microsoft is adding features to support pay-as-you-go metered billing and auto-assign Power Platform product licenses.

Professional developers will appreciate enhancements to the Visual Studio Code extension, GitHub Actions, and Azure DevOps tools, which support building custom connectors and provide deeper integration with Microsoft Azure. For ISVs, Microsoft is making it possible to iterate and sell faster with pay-as-you-go licensing through Azure subscription and automated application updates.

In the data integration realm, Microsoft will provide several new capabilities across <Get Data> and the <Data Transformation> functions in the Power Query Editor. Microsoft will also enhance on-premises and VNet data gateways while also releasing improvements to offer new Dataflows to the Microsoft Data Cloud. In addition, Microsoft will deliver big data performance and high-scale improvements to connectivity scenarios from Azure Synapse, Dataverse, Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Amazon Redshift as well other Power Query connectors.

To Learn More

Each of these improvements will become available over the next six months. To learn more about the entire set of capabilities and the projected release dates, check out the 2023 Wave 1 Release Plans for Microsoft Power Platform. And if you need assistance leveraging the functionality of any of the Power Platform solutions to enable your business to operate more efficiently, Velosio is glad to help.