Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 2 (#36)

See the release plan here: Microsoft Power Platform: 2024 release wave 2 plan

(EA= Early Access, PP = Public Preview, GA = General Availability)

Power Apps

• Select records faster with look-up control EA Jul 24, GA Oct 24
• View and act on your data more efficiently with new grid features EA Jul 24, GA Oct 24
• Use the Power Platform Environment Settings app PP Aug 24, GA Oct 24

Power Pages

• Generate and explain Power Fx formulas using Copilot PP Oct 24
• Use Power Fx in web template components PP Oct 24
• Set up Microsoft Entra External ID with wizard PP Dec 24
• Experience enhanced file upload for Power Pages sites GA Dec 24
• Use AI moderator, search and thread summarization in the Community template PP Nov 24, GA Feb-Mar 25

Power Automate

• Power Automate + Excel GA Dec 24
• Run a cloud flow for more than 30 days per invocation PP Oct 24
• Use generative AI to achieve a process in AI flows PP Aug 24, GA Feb 25 
• Generate flow description using AI GA Dec 24
• Scale faster with Power Automate Process Mining thin client app (p. 56) PP Sept 24, GA Nov 24
• Automation Center notes PP May 21st 24, GA Dec 24

Microsoft Copilot Studio

• Get responses based on uploaded images PP Nov 24
• Add suggested prompts to custom copilots PP Oct 24, GA May 25
• Use IVR with Omnichannel for Customer Service GA Oct 24

AI Builder 

• Add unstructured data knowledge to GPT prompts PP Nov 24
• Try out AI Builder with the Power Apps developer plan PP Sept 24, GA Oct 24 
• Author power cards with GPT prompts PP Mar 25

Dataverse

• Monitor and protect data with Microsoft Purview PP Nov 17 2023, GA Oct 24
• Manage security posture in Power Platform admin center PP Jul 24, GA Nov 24
• Permit or deny guest access to an environment PP Sept 24, GA Dec 24
• Standardize security role and system application docs PP Sept 24, GA Jan 25
• Build faster with enhancements to the catalog in Power Platform PP May 20th 24, GA Oct 24
• Unified experience for Power Platform and finance and operations apps PP Sept 24, GA Dec 24

Links

• Highlight Video for 2023 Release Wave 2
• Microsoft Release planner
• Release plans for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry

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Transcript

[0:00] Oh, hello. Just been reading the 2024 release wave 2 plan. There's a lot of exciting stuff. Hope you enjoy this episode of the Power Platform Boost podcast where Ulrikke and I are going to talk through some of our favorite things that we've seen in this particular wave's release plan. Check it out.

[0:20] Music.

[0:39] Welcome, everyone, to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your weekly source of news and updates from the world of the Power Platform and the Microsoft community, with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk. Hello, everyone. Hi, Nick. How are you? Good, it is release wave day It is release wave day You guys get a bonus episode Because the release waves came out The week after we have our Regular scheduled episodes So this is a summer bonus So you can enjoy while Lying on the beach and getting Tanned and drinking wine On a late summer night, Don't do that Just save it for when you're back to work Yeah Yeah. So where there is like, this is the document we're looking at, which is probably going to be close. The final one is like 100 pages. The cover is a guy in a lab coat pointing to his laptop, which is probably one of the brand new co-pilot enabled laptops. And he's probably showing off to his friends. Hey, hey, check out my new laptop.

[1:47] Yeah, and it's probably AI created. It's created by something. I mean, probably. Exactly. I wonder how many percent of this document that we're reading through that is AI generated and how much is actually written by human beings. Probably. So what do we do? We should just get AI to generate this whole podcast for us and then go to the beach. Even here. Oh, we can just put in a transcript. Luca said this, Nick said this, and then we can use our voices to put the thing together. Oh, why didn't we think of that sooner? Yeah, laughs at all this. Yes. Okay. Right. Jokes and everything. Okay. So we're going to do this my way because that's the only way and that's the way it is with everything. Have you now, this time around, made sure to notice when the PP, public preview or GA dates are, Nick? Yes. And for the most part, I would say 80% of the time it's public preview in July and GA in October. That's not for everything, but that's for most things that I've noticed.

[2:56] Right. So you're choosing the stuff that we already know about and not the new stuff that is actually new. Oh, no, there's new stuff here as well. It's all good. And some of it's about like August is not even, August is next month. So we don't even see it yet. Right. So just by you telling me that, I know that we've chosen different things. So we went through the whole document and for each of the major products in the platform and we've chosen our favorites. And we're going to go through them as they are listed in the document. And of course, if there's some of these that now we're pre-recording that doesn't get that as cut before the release, we have to edit it out. So it's always very exciting for Nick, the few minutes after the release waves are published, going through the hundred pages again to make sure the things that we talked about is actually in the final release wave. So very exciting to be an MVP, you guys. Very exciting.

[3:48] Yeah. Redacting. So let's start off with Power Apps. So first of all, in the document, when they're entering into a new product area, they're talking about, they're writing about their key investments. So for Power Apps, it's co-pilot for makers and users.

[4:06] And to be fair, that's the first one for each and every one of the products. It's co-pilot for everyone. And then it's enhancements to building modern apps using a simplified and responsive layout and collaboration capabilities for users. And also modernized interface and also an enabling of enterprise scale capabilities.

[4:34] It's one of the topics as well. So the studio will receive updates in terms of monitoring and code management tools, etc. So a lot of exciting news. You want to go first to talk about your favorite feature? Sure. So, I mean, there's a lot of features there that some of this we've already talked about, like, you know, collaboration in real time and Canvas apps. We had that in Power Pages for a while already.

[5:02] A lot about the selecting columns downloaded on mobile devices. I mean, again, that's one of the capabilities. They want it to be modern controls, responsive, offline by default. So this kind of goes along with those themes about being able to make your mobile, your offline capabilities a little bit more cleaner and smoother.

[5:22] An interesting little thing that I saw that kind of struck out to me is select records faster with the lookup control. So this is always, I know it's a little thing, but it's always been a bit of a bone of contention over the last couple of years in model-driven apps, the lookup control. They made some changes a few years ago. Like when you used to look up, it used to kind of show you the ability to select records. They changed that a little bit. It was a dropdown. And then all of a sudden, you didn't see stuff. Where did it go? We had to press the enter key. It really wasn't all that intuitive. But I think a lot of people using model-driven

[5:56] apps have gotten used to it now. And you can configure that or what you can see. but here it looks like not only can you press enter but you press enter twice and it will grab that record and populate your lookup um based on the first thing that showed up so hopefully they've made that a little bit smoother i know like i said it's a small thing but it's one of these things that can really annoy people and people get passionate about silly things well i would say silly things but things like this so that stood out to me um the other thing that stood out to me The other thing?

[6:27] Oh, sorry. The other thing. Now, come on. We have strict rules here. There is a system. We have a format. You don't get to say another thing because you're going to say the thing that I want to say. Okay. Well, here's the baton. I'm handing it off to you now. But just a quick question. So when is this going to be released, Nick? Okay. This, about the lookup control, the early access is July 2024, with general availability being October 2024.

[6:57] This whole big thing about, when are the dates? Of course, because people are curious. They want to play with the new shiny thing. And then it's not available until later. But now this is something you can actually play with as of this month. So excited to see that. that popping up in an environment near you any day now. Okay, I also have one for building modern apps. And it's the view and act on your data more efficiently with the new grid features. And this is kind of in the same line as what you're talking about. It seems small and very unassuming.

[7:35] But now you'll be able to group and aggregate by... You can group... Okay, let me step back. So model-driven apps, you have lists or views, and you have your columns, and you have your rows, and now you'll be able to group by a single column, and you will also be able to aggregate one or more numeric columns. And that is another thing than calculated columns, I guess. So there's a new kind of capability that comes in that allows you to aggregate one or more numeric columns. And I think this is going to be similar to what we have in DevOps, for instance, because you have a feature, then you have tasks, and you're able to aggregate the tasks to the feature level to see how much effort, for instance. I read that as something along those lines.

[8:28] Column reordering, the drag and drop move left to right in terms of column reordering. You get updated styling for list mode, which is more in line with fluent styling. You'll also be able to sort in list mode, because now you have to go into the

[8:45] filter, refine, dah, dah, dah, and set your sorting. Now you'll be able to sort by clicking the header, It's the kind of user experience that we're used to from every single other application out there. So that's good. And also command bar for nested grids. So this is a feature that will be GA in October and early access in July. So this is the same as the lookup column control. Did you also notice that in terms of the aggregation, so let's say you do an aggregation on accounts or something, thing, you'd be able to get like a sum of those numeric fields at the bottom of your view, which is pretty cool. Oh, I didn't see that. That slipped my attention. Very good. Smart. All right. So now you get to tell your second one. Did you have a second one for Power Apps?

[9:36] The other thing, well, not actually for Power Apps in general. I was just kind of quickly going through the list. We talked about the grids, source code for Canvas apps. Of course, YAML, we talked about in our last episode. And our good friend Daniel told me that the YAML is very co-pilot friendly. So that's why the big deal about YAML is with the Power Apps. Just a little side note. One thing I noticed, delegation for update if and remove if. Delegation, if you're working in Canvas apps, is the bane of my existence working with Dataverse. Because you can only access 500 to 1,000 records. So this, again, they're trying to make delegation more better. Again, that was actually even announced last June for public preview. So some of that's there already with GA of October.

[10:30] And yeah, so one of the other things, yeah, we talked about collaboration already. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. The other thing that I saw, which is kind of interesting, and this is a little bit of, you see the evolution. Because we talked about in our episode about this things going away and going into the old settings feature within Power Apps, like model-driven apps. It does look like they have something called the Power Platform Environment Settings app, which looks like they've now created an app. But initially, it looks like it's pointing to all the old things. Things um so again it's just like maybe i framed the old admin into the new one it's like okay well and then this is going to transition over time but i mean come on just give that a little makeup yeah so it's just sort of like it's it's they're working on it so i did i did see that.

[11:32] And then so yeah so that was that would be my next thing is this power platform environment settings app it's just it's new but it's not it's so yeah, And with that also comes the ability to hide the legacy app for admins. So first of all, you get a new app, so a model-driven app that you choose in your app navigation so that you don't have to go into the advanced settings to get to it. But it's the same, exactly the same experience, user experience. It's horrible. And then now you have the ability to hide the legacy app for admins. So then you can hide the old experience altogether. together so and it actually what it does is that it's just it's a new way to get to the old experience pretty much and it kind of makes me wonder well what what about that thing is so hard to to modernize what could it possibly be to make them do that i think it's just it's one of those things it just works it there's no one complaining about it um like the aesthetic well.

[12:38] Well, give a junior developer a summer project to make that look better. Come on. All right. Yeah. So I don't think it's hard. I think it's a case of resources, but that's just me. Anyways, I hear what you're saying.

[12:53] So moving on, are we ready to move into this thing called Copilot? Copilot for Power Apps makers and users? Anything in there that jumped out? Nope.

[13:09] Okay well i mean it's again it's it's the it's not not that it didn't jump out it's the same it's the evolution of everything right they're putting in co-pilots now it's going to be in galleries so you can use natural language for searching um and that type of thing so again it's just i mean i think we've seen seen the for the big wave of co-pilots and now it's now we're in the let's make it better phase and enhancing everything like that definitely ai is is still obviously a big thing. But it's just in terms of it being new, it's not so much new anymore. It's just now getting better. And we could just say this now for all of the products, there's a co-pilot section and all the co-pilot news is that it's getting better. Yeah. It's kind of the same thing for every one of the products, really. Let's dive into Power Pages instead. Much more fun. Unless you had more. No, no, no, no. I think we covered everything that's more or less there.

[14:14] Actually, no, before we jump in, there was a little bit something on managing source code for Canvas apps. We don't need the Pax CLI to convert the MPPP file.

[14:23] So again, I think that's another thing. There wasn't a ton on ALM, but I think there was already a lot of ALM announcements at Build. So that's a whole other thing to keep an eye on in the Power Platform in general about the whole ALM story getting better. So there's not a lot in the release plan about that, but, I think that's just another thing. So yes, PowerPages. No, but this is something we talked about in the last episode and episode before that as well. This is public preview in July. So right now, and it's GA in October. And it's, so the new capabilities they talk to, you can store the files in code repositories. You can automate generation of Canvas apps. It's what it says. Refactor Canvas apps without using the designer and also the native Git integration for Power Platform. So it's definitely worth mentioning, but it's also a bit of old news because we've talked about this two times already. Not towards you or anything, but in terms of release wave at this level, I would expect it to be news and not necessarily just stuff that's coming out that we already know about. But that's another soapbox that I'm not going to go into. But our page has got stuff.

[15:37] Well some stuff oh is this how it's going to be you're going to be the positive one to go through everything and get super excited and i'm going to be the so you play i play megan you play this at this time okay okay fair enough um right so for power pages the major investment areas are generative ai which is also not new that you can create your power pages site using um a co-pilot it.

[16:01] You can also edit it and set your theme and everything. Data connectivity, also not new, but improved. You can now connect to and use virtual tables with PowerPages. Collaboration with low-code and pro-code dev tools. We talked about a new, shiny new dev tools for PowerPages in our previous episode. So check that out. And Nick made a video and a blog post about it. So if you are pro-dev with PowerPages, definitely check that out. And there's also something in in terms of security and governance for Power Pages.

[16:34] Is there anything that jumped out at you that you want to mention first? Yeah, a couple of things. Well, first off, we did talk about before Power Effects and Power Pages, that looks like it's getting enhanced with the generate and explain formulas. So that, I mean, that exists in Canvas apps today. So that's just a natural extension into Power Pages. be able to use web power effects and web templates components now this actually what did catch my eye and this is up to interpretation so i might be misinterpreted that it said availability in design studio for web template components now this is something that i have been on the product team's case for a while about web template components first off it seemed like they kind of went hard delivered something and then hasn't touched it since. So I'm happy to see that that's getting a little bit of love. The second thing is, up until now, to use WebTemplate as components today, you still need to add them via code. You need to actually go and add that liquid snippet directly to the code in Visual Studio or however you manage your code within the PowerPages.

[17:50] Now, by saying availability in Design Studio for WebTemplate components, I'm really, really hoping to see a little button that I can begin to add my WebTemplate components. So that might be more of a wish list, but I'm just or maybe just me interpreting that sentence a certain way. But anyways, that's what kind of got me excited, like, ooh, they're gonna give some more attention to web template as components, which I think is very important, I think could be incredibly powerful if they just let it kept it in the oven for a few minutes longer to completely finish it up.

[18:20] Yeah, and I read through it and it actually says support for adding through the designer experience. And maybe this is the reason why they haven't touched it, right? Because they saw that it was half-baked and instead of trying to fix it, they just waited for this. Unfortunately, it's public preview in October. And we know from experience that when something is not GA, when there's no GA date, first of all, in the release notes. So this is something in general as well, just to kind of level set you guys a bit. If there is no GA date in the release notes, please take it with a pinch of salt. If it's going to put a pin in it, it's not always then that it's realized. Then it's usually pushed if something else and more important comes along. So this is a public preview in October. Also, if the public preview or the G8 date is very late, so in March, for instance, then also that's something to jump and dance too much about because maybe it falls out. So we're hopeful and definitely this is overdue in my book. But yeah, if we can get this live and kicking in October for a public preview, that would be awesome. Thank you. Yes.

[19:36] So, yeah, you already touched on the generation and explanation of PowerFx for wireless using Copilot. That's very good. And also I saw that you can now set up, and this is also a blast from the past, set up Microsoft Entra external ID with a wizard. Now, for those of you who haven't worked a lot with PowerPages, we had with the previous PowerPages version, before it became PowerPages, Power Apps portals had a wizard where you could go through the wizard step-by-step and set up your authentication with using Azure AD B2C as an identity provider. And it would set that tenant up for you in Azure behind the scenes without you ever having to touch Azure. It became Power Pages and that wizard went away and you can't use it now with the new Power Pages site. And now they're introducing Microsoft Enter External ID Wizard for prior pages. It is not the same as Azure AD B2C. It's an evolvement of Azure AD B2C, but Azure AD B2C is not going away. So it is kind of the same that we had that went away, but new with something else.

[20:46] Yes yes and also this makes me a bit sad and is a kind of a i just wanted to mention it of course um the experience experience enhanced file upload for power pages site um is also a new thing we get a drag and drop component for power pages that allows us to upload files using the camera they They also increased the storage limits also for SharePoint files. So now you can upload bigger files. It will scan for malware. That's big. Yeah. That is very big. And this is one of those things where we know how big this is. But in the release notes, reading through this, I would have never caught this if I didn't know how big this is.

[21:34] And it's also going to be available through the Design Studio. Now, we've seen a lot of conversations about scanning for malware in relation to PowerPages the last couple of weeks. So this is going to be a huge thing. And also in a previous episode, in our previous episode, we mentioned someone making a PCF component and putting it up on PCF galleries that actually does this, but had security implications. So I'm excited to see how Microsoft decided to solve this. And of course, they will have followed best practices and it would be watertight. And to see how much that differs from what the community created just a couple of weeks ago. So that's going to be exciting. So I can tell that you have an itch to talk about malware scanning. No, I was just agreeing with you because that is something that constantly comes up in forums or even talking to customers about file uploading.

[22:31] About, ooh, what does it scan for viruses or how can we get it? And what happens if there's a virus in the files? And this, so again, I'm glad they're addressing it. The other thing, again, which caught my eye here was to configure file upload to SharePoint in the design studio. So if we had to do file uploads on SharePoint before, we actually had to enable it on the model-driven app side in the forms, do some site settings and some magic there, grid configuration. And then it would surface. So the design studio had no bearing on any of this. The fact that it's there now, whether it's just an enhancement of what already exists in the forms, they're just giving what they're doing a lot of times in the forms, being able to do a lot of that metadata on the front side. That might be what it's at. But again, it's just keeping people more in the design studio. Again, I can't, they're not going to get rid of the PowerPages management app. They can't for at least another four or five years if I was to take a guess because there are so many things in there. I was actually helping someone else in the community the other day on validations and discover and like kind of pointing out like they're trying to do some regex validations. And what's existing in the basic form metadata is just 10 years ahead of what's being done in the design studio. And it actually works through the management app.

[23:56] So anyways, all that circling back to the SharePoint thing. Interesting to see how they implement that. Again, looks like it's going to be GA December.

[24:04] Yes. So that's a bold statement. But yeah, cool. Cool. Yeah. And also to see the conversations that we've seen around the malware stuff as well is more of a surprise that there's no malware scanning for Dataverse already. So it's kind of high time that this comes around. And also just for transparency's sake, there's a lot of AI features coming to the new community template for PowerPages. And I know that they're in the process of making some changes to the existing community sites that we're all using. I was on a call a couple of weeks ago about that. So interesting to see maybe we can be the end users of these new AI features pretty soon. That's going to be awesome.

[24:56] Just take Power Pages out of the equation for a second. The fact you can do an AI thread summary in the community template.

[25:05] I mean, how many times have we gone to a search to, you know, Google search to fix an error or something. And then your only option is to go to the, to one of the community sites. And then there's a thread of like 5,000 messages of, well, here's my problem. Do this, try this, do this. Okay. I tried that. Oh, it didn't work. Oh, do this. Oh, you can't do it this way because of this. And you got to scroll through multiple pages till you finally find maybe the answer there. So if I can see a summary of all of that stuff, that's just going to be amazing. So that's, those are the things that kind of popped out for me, like using AI for good, just making this mess of information and giving it to me in a package that I can consume. So, and it's cool that they're refocusing on the templates because for a while there, it looked like the templates, and I know you're a big fan of templates. I know that they kind of, kind of got put on the shelf for a while. So it's good to see that they're focusing on that again, because I think some of these really could accelerate a lot of projects and get a lot of things going pretty quickly.

[26:07] Yeah, totally agree. So do you want to move over to Power Automate? Yeah, because I think we Power Paged that.

[26:17] Perfect. Yeah. So again, go ahead. Yeah.

[26:23] Yeah, just doing the summary, what to expect, the major investments are, yeah, it's kind of weird. This reads to me a bit different than the actual updates that we're getting, but we'll get to that in a minute. So you'll get an easier experience to build, troubleshoot and manage automations. And that has to do with Copilot, of course, ensuring scalability and privacy.

[26:47] It's an enhancement in terms of governance and privacy controls. Higher scale for process mining so process intelligence capabilities in power automate is going to be way better with microsoft 365 graph based recommendations for instance and new ways of automations and this is a big one and i can't wait to talk about it because this is so cool um and of course now but we say power automate and most of us in the community working on Power Platform, we know about as Cloud Flows. But keep in mind that Power Automate now, of course, also includes Desktop Flows, the RPA Flows, Co-Pilot for Power Automate's one area, Process Mining, Cloud Flows that we already know, and now the new shiny AI Flows. Okay, so you go. You talk about your thing first because mine is AI Flows.

[27:48] Okay, so I can't talk about AI flows. That's fine.

[27:52] No, you can't. Of course you can't. No, no, because I am looking forward to that because I already have a few ideas. There's a few things that I do on a daily basis, which I'm like, okay, I need to create, I should create a Power Automate for this, but I need to figure out the APIs and I need to figure out this and this and the other thing. I can just use generative AI and figure that out. That's what I'm excited about. But I'll let you talk about that.

[28:14] One thing I did notice, CloudFlow's integration with this thing called Excel. So of course, people use Microsoft Excel for everything. It's probably, I would say, probably one of the most used pieces of software in the world. So now you're going to be able to have within Excel, this Power Automate tab. So if you're doing a lot of work in Excel, which I think we all are, at some for various things, even think of my powerlifting coach, Chris, he uses Excel, not greatly, but he He uses Excel and does for all the powerlifting programming and everything. And I know that he's had some help over the years of people writing macros and whatever, but this could be very valuable to him to be able to automate and to do a lot of that work he does. Cause I know he's does a lot of cutting and pasting. He's not the most technical guy. I love you, Chris, but you know, it's true. So, um, something like this looks pretty exciting. So it's taking what we know as power automate and applying it to Excel, which I think is just going to increase productivity. productivity and of course, And that also means more Excel spreadsheets where people should be using maybe Power Apps, but that's a whole other conversation there. So that's something I got pretty, I thought, oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah, a gateway. Exactly. I like it. Yeah. Right. And that's GA December. So this may be, this is probably something I will see pretty soon.

[29:36] Right. So before I talk about AI flow, I just also wanted to mention that you can now run an AI flow for more than 30 days. This is something that I just wanted to mention because it's a showstopper for a lot of use cases and it's public preview from October. So for those of you who are kind of stopped in your tax business because you can't get any further because of that limitation, now you'll be able to do that. And it didn't say anything more specific about what it will now be because they have to put that threshold in there somewhere. But it did not say that in the release notes. We'll just have to wait and see what that means. So AI flows. This was what was shown at Build. And we talked about this in one of the previous episodes where I showed you or I talked about seeing someone giving a generative AI instructions describing the objective of your process. So what is it that you want to achieve? That's what you tell the AI. And then a land language model puts together a plan that is kind of the process turned into technology. So it interprets what you're saying, and it gives you a suggestion. Okay, so this is what you want to achieve. These are the steps and the actions and the triggers that we would need to make that happen.

[31:03] And then you can run it, and you can preview it and test it, of course. And then you can also go in and look after the flow is run. To see what it did so what did it trigger on what kind of reasoning did it do under you know while it was running what resources did it use and and how did it get to the result that it got in the end and you can also give it then give it feedback and say no this is not right you need to use this resource instead of that and you can teach it how to go further and also you can kind of review the a whole run history going back in time and see, okay, what is it that it fails the most at? Where is the weak points? Where is the bottlenecks? Where do we need to give it more feedback or maybe better resources to get its job done? And it's also supposed to then teach itself based on its own runs how to be better going forward. So this is AI Flows. It says public preview in August. That means that we will now soon be able to play with it. I actually registered to be part of the early access, early private preview part, but I didn't get in. So that tells you something about how much interest it is in this new piece of functionality. And it says GA in February 2025.

[32:24] This is a big deal. This is going to revolutionize the way that we look at on flows in general and and processes overall.

[32:37] My head can't really wrap itself around how big this is. It's kind of like a screen recorder, but on steroids kind of thing, almost. It is, yeah. I got that feeling as well when we looked at it. It is kind of desktop flows and AI builder and cloud flows all in one, in a way. And it blew my mind we'll put link in the show notes as well here back to the build video where you can actually see this in action and I was at Microsoft early June, mid June right after EPPC and I think they also showed something at EPPC about this where Microsoft in Norway where Frederick demoed this it blows your mind what this can actually do and of course it's early days and it It will probably be a bit thin when it comes out, but this is, be patient with this and this is going to change our world. Yeah, we're truly living in a paradigm shift with all of this stuff coming in. Yeah, and as much as we joke about co-pilot, there's still...

[33:47] Things that I'm seeing here that is just sort of like, okay, because immediately if you can jump to something that you're doing today that you can apply this to, and I have a couple of things in my head already, like every month I do my billing. I do a lot of manual processing. It's one of those, yes, I should automate this, but I'm just going to do it and I'll worry about it later. When I have time, I'll automate it. Like, you know, going to the forest, not sharpening your saws because you're too busy cutting down trees kind of thing. So now I have a use case, so I'm keen to see it. And then also things with Power Automate, something again, using generative AI to document.

[34:29] To create a description of what your flow is. That's pretty cool as well, because everybody, not a big fan of doing documentation sometimes. Times now we can just sort of get flow generate get ai to generate our documentation for us how the flow works and everything like that um also ties into a little bit of process mining as well um some of the stuff going on there that wasn't a ton of like yes process mining is there it's already something but they talk about having a thin client app now as opposed to the full client app to be able to again work better with the process money making that more efficient, you don't have to download the model anymore so it's going to be a lot more lightweight yeah.

[35:15] And you can you have also something that I saw was a bit repetitive but you get a new automation center which is really cool with the compiler of course they can analyze and kind of give you a bit of insights into both your desktop flows your cloud flows and also, work queue you yeah so it's it's a case like these things are good because there's first off there's sometimes we build something we build a flow or a workflow or a build something and it works we're happy clients happy but was it the best way is it the most efficient way um and then all of a sudden we could run into performance issues or we're using too many api calls or something like this, with all these little analysis features, this is this hopefully will help us identify and maybe begin to write more efficient flows and things as well. So there's a whole bunch of different analyze line items here, like analyze desktop flows and line work queues. Um, so yeah, this is, again, we're, we're embracing this AI to not only help us write these things, but also make sure they get written efficiently and kind of following best practices as well. So exciting times.

[36:35] Oh, yeah. Do you ever get that? Because sometimes I'm a bit starstruck by or just struck by, you know, we're living and breathing. We're seamless from its infancy into, you know, one of the fastest growing technologies of all time. And we're in the midst of it kind of. Yeah, looking at this as it grows, it's going to be, you know, this is a time for history books. And sometimes it just strikes me that, you know, you have to stop and look at it and think, wow, we're so fortunate and so privileged to actually be living and breathing this as it happens. Yeah. Like I know we joked the other day that I was there for the go live of the internet kind of thing. But I think back, I remember like being in school and I remember, I mean, now I'm really showing my age, but I remember we got internet connection into our library. I think it was in my second year of college.

[37:39] And I remember just, I mean, the internet had been around, but it wasn't mainstream. It wasn't in people's homes. You couldn't, like at that time, they had just started, internet service providers had just started appearing. We could get dial up and internet access. We had it in our school and it just blew me away. Like here, I could look up things. I could find out information from the other side of the world. I could have a chat with somebody on the other side of the world, like, you know, just typing or whatever. And now it's just sort of like my internet's slow on my phone. I'm grumbling about it. It's just like you and I, we're doing a podcast. You're on the other side of the ocean. There's a six-hour difference between us. So now we're living in something now with this AI technology. We're going again through a transitive period that's just going to be life-changing. Um, and, and, and hopefully in a very positive way, cause it's despite the, the faults of the internet, it was a very positive thing, um, that we can do all these things. Now we can maintain friendships. So, you know, around the world, um, I'm hoping AI is sort of that same impact and not the, the doom and gloom, which some people say again, like everything, uh, it's like fire, right? Fire is a great tool, but you could get burnt. um so yeah that's my little philosophical ai.

[39:02] Discussion gonna be both you know all of these big invention inventions they're always both you always get you can't have one without the other if you have a new tool like you said just with fire right you're someone's going to use it for evil it's not it's not getting around it so So, yeah, I'm excited to see where this brings us. And speaking of AI. And speaking of AI, next one on the list is Copilot Studio. And the 2024 release, Wave 2, brings native capabilities for extending Microsoft Copilots. So I feel like there's a centralization going on where now you have one-stop shop for everything Copilot in Microsoft, and that would be Copilot Studio. IVR with support for conjunction with Dynamics customer service. So that's voice support for components.

[39:56] General availability of generative actions, geo expansion. Oh, there's in Germany, ALM capabilities, topic level import and export, neural based access control, and also a lot of improvements in terms of governance and administration. And and a more granular AI management control. So...

[40:23] And uploading images, which I thought was kind of neat.

[40:27] I mean, that exists in the newest version of ChatGPT today. For example, like I did a talk, I think at DynamicsCon, and I took a picture. I like to take a picture of a selfie of the people that are attending my session. And then our friend George Dubinsky said, oh, run that picture through ChatGPT 4.0 and get it to count how many people are in the room. And it did. I threw it in there and boom, there are, you know, 30 something people in the room. Um, you know, break it down by gender, you know, like 15 females, 16 males kind of thing. Um, you know, it just sort of like, wow. So, but that was, but that's on the newest version. Here's the funny part. This is on the newest version of chat GPT. Um, we had, as you know, we're kind of doing some renovations around the house. We had a whole pile of bricks that we dug up from our own walkway that we're giving away. We posted it on the Facebook, I think, giveaway thing or whatever. Anybody's looking for bricks, they're all gone. Sorry. But anyways, I said, well, my wife is saying, oh, I have to count how many bricks to post it. And I'm like, oh, take a picture and put it through ChatGPT. But she didn't realize she needed the newest version. So she put it on ChatGPT 3.5 or whatever. It came back saying, oh, I can't do that. But maybe if you count the bricks and tell me what it is, I could help you out.

[41:55] Well, see, see these old limitations. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the thing. If you need to count bricks, use the newest version. But anyways, going back to like, we're, you know, us, we're off of the rails intended for directions. This is going to be a long one, you guys.

[42:15] Anyways, these release note ones are always long ones, so they're used to it. And Daniel got through our last episode already, so he's on long drive. Oh, yeah, I got a text. Oh, wow. I said long drive, and he goes, yep. Yeah, he's going to have to check in every time now. It's going to be a thing. All right, so let's dive into the difference. So it is divided into sections as well. So we have co-pilot and AI innovation. We have speech and IVR for co-pilot news. So first up, do you have a favorite? Have you picked something you want to highlight? It was the image one. I talked about that already. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, yeah. So you can get insights into how your co-pilots are performing. You get responses based on uploaded images. That's what you talked about. That is public preview in November. And also you can now add suggested prompts to custom co-pilots. So you know that thing when you use a co-pilot in your PowerPages designer or in your Canvas app designer on the right side, and you have that little star thingy that you can click on that gives you suggestions to what kind of prompts you can use. Now, when you create your own co-pilot, you're able to actually add those yourself. So you can add those pre-built prompts to your custom co-pilot.

[43:39] But the thing that I wanted to talk about, because for some strange reason, I am super, super duper excited and have zero knowledge about speech and AI. And I've been seeing this for so far away, I think maybe five or six years ago, that I caught an interest in speech UX, so user experience in terms of speech, because it fascinates me and it frustrates the bejesus out of me. I have Google Home here and it's complete rubbish. And mostly it's because of the user interface, because you can't see the possibilities.

[44:16] Visual user interfaces allows you always to see what we call affordance. What does this interface afford? forward you see buttons you're inclined to click on it you see a lever you're inclined to pull it but with speech without that visual interface how do you know what you can do with it so that's always fascinated me and also so then when stuff um on speech uh comes up and especially at um at stuff like build and then the release notes that always catch my attention because i'm I'm very excited to see what people do with it because it's so cool. So this news is about that you can use IVR with Omnichannel for customer service. Now, we've seen a demo of what this can look like, and it is absolutely fantastic. Now you can actually just, and it's not like back in the day when you had the phone service, You called your electrician provider, it says, blah, blah, blah, blah, say yes, say what you want, da, da, da, and it doesn't work. There's this intelligent native voice integration that understands what you're saying and also is able to reply to you with voice. So it's text, it's voice to text and text to voice in real time. And it's supposed to then act as the first.

[45:39] First-line worker in a customer service scenario, where it can actually then allow you to speak to a service provider or a customer service person that is actually a bot.

[45:52] It has a lot of new capabilities that I understand nothing about. But for instance, the silence detection for prompts, including retries and reprompts, and that you can configure actions for non-response, for instance. Barge in control for determining whether a bot can be interrupted or not, right? So there's a lot of new things here that if you're into text-to-speech and speech-to-text that you should look into. And I know that there's so much happening in this space, especially on the Azure side. It's just mind-boggling. So if you're into that, keep an eye on this.

[46:38] Yep. Yep. Yeah. I've seen some demos that are amazing. So yeah, lots of videos out there already, but just this, again, paradigm shifting stuff. Shifting into AI builder. You want to talk about the key investment areas and highlights? Absolutely. Certainly. Certainly, as they would say.

[47:09] So basically, insights. No, that's sorry. I'm still in Copilot. I had it here two seconds ago. Okay. I have it in front of me. Let me do that. Oh, it's fine. Okay. No, I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. Got it. Okay. So basically, you know, generative AI prompts, creating advanced AI actions used across Copilots. You know, built-in power apps, flows, AI prompts, large language models, investment, grounding data sources, unstructured data, multimodal inputs, meaning like documents and images, all that kind of cool stuff that we talked about before, and extending the output possibility. So not just in a chat window, but in his documents and in his cards and that kind of thing. A prompt catalog and, of course, governance. I mean, governance is like a common theme across the whole shebang because people would be building all of these applications and bots and pages and all this stuff that needs to be maintained and controlled. Old. So that's sort of the, um, uh, the investment areas and then also into prompt builder, um, as well, which is that new interface to allow you to build all these AI prompts as well. So. Yeah, we talked about that in a previous episode as well, the prompt builder. I think that was also released in the last release notes, if I'm not mistaken.

[48:34] And this is kind of huge as well. You can create a prompt and you can use it across multiple Power Platform products to invoke generative AI capabilities in every process solution that you're building. So this goes across Copilot, apps, Power BI flows, Dataverse tables, solution-aware components that can be triggered with Power Fx expressions. So this is really powerful, the prompt builder and the prompts that you can then create and use and deploy through to your downstream environments and trigger with Power Fx. So this is definitely something to watch. Yeah. And the other cool thing is, guess this jumped out at me, because this is something with AI Builder, because anytime you want to use AI Builder, you got to set up a trial and you could try it out, try a few things. But you saw this too. I could just see you're exciting. You could use AI Builder with a developer plan, finally. So every month you get 20,000 credits, which no one really knows the math on how that works. but you can actually try all this AI builder stuff in your developer environments. And I'm a huge fan of the developer environments and the developer plan.

[49:51] I, you know, I could demo pretty much everything in this and now we can do the AI builder stuff there. So if you need to demo AI builder or try it out or convince a client, because it's a, it's a bit of a, from a licensing perspective, it is a bit of an ask originally to get to people to think about AI builder. So now we can start building more proof of concepts and it just more accessible to the community. So that's exciting news. That's very exciting. Absolutely. And there's another, there's.

[50:19] Yeah, it's a public preview. It's September with GA in October. So right around the corner. Yeah, pretty soon, actually. There's another few announcements, but nothing too big from what I could tell, actually. Something else that jumped out at you. I saw you can author power cards with GPT prompts. So, Power Cards is visual components that are AI-powered that you can add your dynamic content to that are grounded in GPT responses. So, I'm not sure if that's new. I don't remember seeing it anywhere else, Power Cards. Power Cards is new. It's another interface, kind of the lightweight interface. Face you can tie into teams or other chatbots kind of thing but it's i'm not an expert in it i know i had to i looked a little bit into it so power cards isn't new i think getting this into ai builder is probably the the the new enhancements are happening there so i'm sure i'm sure by saying that daniel's gonna start texting me going oh power cards are cool check this out look what i I can do, do, do, do. Like, usually if I kind of stumble on something, he calls me out on it. So anyways.

[51:47] Yeah. Let's see what Daniel brings, comes up with, and then we can share it in the next regular episode. So our last big section is Dataverse. Or was there something else in AI Builder that you wanted to talk about first? Yeah. All right. So Dataverse, of course, is to me the heart and soul of the Power Platform. And, you know, anytime we kind of get to that, there's, you know, what are the investments here? There's a lot of stuff that's, you know, forgotten in Dataverse. But it looks like more and more, a lot of things in terms of integration. The document we have talks a lot about the management of the Co-Pilot Studio plugins, which is sitting in the Dataverse section. So I'm just wondering if that's just a bit of a misalignment or if it truly is a Dataverse thing.

[52:38] But we also talk about the different, the Knowledge Center powered by Dataverse. I'm not sure if that's a new announcement or just sort of a continuation of other conversations. And this is the thing, there's so much happening every week it's hard to see what's actually new or what's an enhancement sometimes um but the one thing that kind of jumped out at me which is kind of goes back to something that uh our friend chris huntingford in a lot of his sessions he's been banging this drum about microsoft purview and he keeps telling learn microsoft purview and it looks like now there's definitely more stuff the dataverse microsoft purview integration is getting more tighter in in terms of doing from security aspect of understanding security posture, denying guest access from an enterprise level.

[53:26] Masking sensitive data in column fields and things like that. So a lot of stuff happening around security and Dataverse as well in these release notes, as it should, and just sort of getting more visibility into that. Because like I said, Dataverse is the heart and soul, but that's also what is your most biggest asset in most companies it's your data um and that's where it's being stored so a lot of interesting stuff there and i know i kind of jumped around on a whole bunch of things but yeah but it's hard to kind of see the there's there seems to be no good narrative around what's happening with dataverse because it seems to be a lot of small little pieces that don't necessarily follow a structure or read But it's not a huge one big story around the investments. More, these are the bits and pieces that we see that we are investing in more than anything, really. What stood out to me, and this is just because it's weird. It says standardized security role and system application docs.

[54:38] Yeah. You think admins and non-admins, you don't want me to read it? You think they're going to cut it?

[54:44] No, no, no, no, no, go ahead. Okay, so users, admins, and non-admins can easily look up Microsoft Dataverse security roles and their respective privileges online in our documentation or ask Microsoft Co-Pilot in Bing. System application users and their security roles are also documented and can be inquired using Co-Pilot in Bing. Is this this reads to me like they're going to update their documentation up regarding standardized security roles and system application and this is public preview in september general availability in january and this has been around forever tell me oh mr big docs dude what is going on i think this i think you're reading more to what it really is so So some of the documentation is automatically generated. So a lot of the PowerPages stuff, the decryption announcements, a lot of this stuff just automatically gets generated into Docs. So it just looks like this is, it's kind of a weird thing to have in a release plan, but from what I read, it's just sort of like this will be automatically generated. A lot of the API stuff, for example, if you read to the docs,

[56:03] there's actually not a writer going through writing it. It's actually being regenerated. There's a template. There's a format that's just happening automatically.

[56:12] So again, I think this is just another thing that they're automating some of the documentation because the tools are there. It's not hard to do.

[56:19] So that's how I read it. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure my former colleagues in the docs will tell me appropriately if I am wrong. But that's how I see it. So again, Microsoft Docs, there's a team behind it, people are writing it or reviewing it. But a lot of the docs that are specific things like, you know, the API, some of these other announcements, some of these things are automatically generated.

[56:43] Just so a little bit of an insider info there. So, yeah. Okay, makes a bit more sense now. So then maybe it's not documented well now what the different standard user roles are actually like. Because it changes probably so much, it might be a bit outdated because no one knows too. Like sometimes these features are so small, they just, they miss the documentation loop. So I see, you know, more documents, the better. So all good. And, you know, now we have, now there's tools that can go through and monitor and update that. So, but still you need the human in the loop. Exactly. So maybe they have a bit of help from a co-pilot or an AI feature as well. Something that actually did stand out to me is the release note that says, build faster with enhancements to the cataloging platform. This was public preview in May, so this is not new, but it says that it's going to be generally available in October.

[57:49] And yeah, there are a lot of enhancements to Power Platform Catalog. So if you are using that, if you're into that, then make sure to dive into all those different enhancements. Things like general availability for Power Apps and Power Automate, ability to choose the solution to install catalog items into, publish to catalog directly from apps and flow screens. So kind of more of the catalog into the designers that we are used to working with instead of the other way around uh improved catalog experience for canon studio yeah um so it seems to be kind of seeping more into the designer space than in the administration space um in terms of the catalogs yeah yeah i haven't done a lot with the catalog but yeah yeah me neither so that's something i I need to explore more. Yeah, me too. There is another section here, Microsoft Power Platform Governance and Administration. It is so important or else Chris is going to kill us if we don't talk about it. So we need to get into that as well. You want to talk about the key investment areas? Yes. Into the governance. Yes, it's important. It is.

[59:07] There's one thing here that is standing out to me. Yeah. So basically it's, I mean, the enhancements, of course, the admin center experience, making that organizational functionalities, more streamlined experience, of course, using Copilot to help you out with a lot of these things. New ALM features so upgrades to the pipelines again to make like I said before the whole ALM process is just going to get easier and easier giving more features so finally like I said five years ago in Power Platform Dynamic Serum there really wasn't much in terms of ALM now every month there seems to be new ALM features coming through even you know having users get environments pretty easily so you can go in as a new user get an environment set up I've done this and training where it's great. I can just set up user accounts and immediately the environments get provisioned as they sign in. That's pretty cool stuff. That's already existing, but that's just getting better.

[1:00:04] And of course, tying in power platform and finance and operations, that's getting tighter as well, which is good. We're getting, you know, converging because I've worked on a few projects that, and I'm not an F&O expert, but trying to get it to talk to F&O tables and back and forth has always been a bit clunky. So if we can get that smoother, more tighter integrated, that's just going to help us building business applications that tie into some of these first party applications. So that's exciting news as well. And of course, security and compliance is always the big thing that continually is always something people are worried about, people are concerned about, and looks like it's getting improved as well by making a lot of these sometimes tenant level features, more enterprise level features of limiting access and making sure the right guardrails safety features are set up within the whole power platform.

[1:01:00] Yeah, absolutely. Very, very important.

[1:01:04] And this is what stood out to me as well, the finance and operation app. So you can now actually, you can install finance and operations in the same environment as you have your sales and marketing and your power apps and your database. It's going to be in the same environment. You're going to be able to follow the same ALM process, and it's going to be available through the app switcher. And it's bringing the two closer together, which makes a lot of sense. And we've been waiting for this for a couple of years, so this is really good.

[1:01:36] And also something about Purview in here, just because you mentioned it earlier. I wanted to see what that was. Monitor and protect your data with Microsoft Purview. So this is public preview and November 17th, very specific, and is general available in, oh, that was public preview in November 17th, 2023. I'm sorry. This is my mistake. I read that wrong. And it's going to be generally available in October 24th. So this is a long time coming and some feature updates to the monitor and protect your data preview capabilities here. So look into that if you need to.

[1:02:24] And I think that's kind of the end of the line at the bottom of the document. Sorry. Yep. Yep. We're over an hour now. So I know. Yep. But yes. Yep.

[1:02:38] At the bottom of the document, there is a list of the applications for Power Platform apps and services. So if you, and it's important to keep up to date on the things that not only the new stuff, but also what's dropping out at the bottom of the bucket.

[1:02:52] So there are links to the different resources where you can go and catch up on the applications. And of course, we need to also mention the Release Planner, which is a website that you can go to where you can subscribe and kind of choose the different products and features that you want to subscribe to news and updates for. And you can see what's coming and what's already out there to try. And get up to date about these things, not only when the release waves hit, but between those dates as well. Yeah, because things can get added and removed.

[1:03:30] They most definitely will. And we've seen this a lot of times in the past. These are living documents. And when COVID hit, for instance, we saw a huge rearrangement in priorities in terms of these news and updates. So keep up to date on the documents. The PDF that you downloaded will be outdated pretty soon. So it's a good idea to go grab a fresh one every time you need to go through it. Sure. Cool. Well, ton of exciting features. I'm excited for what's coming out. It's going to give us a lot of talk about in future episodes for sure.

[1:04:06] Absolutely. Yes. Let's try to keep tabs on all of these favorite features of ours and see where they land. And some new ones to try out as well. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Let's dive into the catalog and purview and all of these things. We have homework to do. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll release a normal episode at a normal schedule, so that will be next week. So yeah, just keep an eye out for that. All right. Thanks, everybody, for joining in. Yes. Catch you later. Bye-bye. Bye. Thanks for listening. And if you liked this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. Make sure to leave a rating and review your favorite streaming service and makes it easier for others to find us follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode thanks for listening to the power platform boost podcast with your host Ulrika Akerbeck and Nick Dahlman and see you next time for your timely boost of power platform news.

[1:05:10] Music.