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Microsoft Build 2022 | Power Platform updates
In Build 2022 , Microsoft announced an exciting new Microsoft Power Platform product and many new capabilities across Microsoft Power Platform that include:
- Introducing Power Pages: the newest Microsoft Power Platform product for creating modern, secure, responsive business websites.
- Power Apps express design: instantly turn images, docs, Figma design files, and PowerPoints into apps with leading cognitive AI capabilities using express design in Microsoft Power Apps.
- Power Virtual Agents and Azure Bot Framework, now one unified canvas: build sophisticated conversational AI bots in the new intelligent bot authoring experience.
- Auto scale with hosted robotic process automation (RPA) bots: for faster and easier scaling with Microsoft Power Automate.
- Datamarts in Power BI enable data self-sufficiency: with a frictionless data integration experience.
- Power Automate pay-as-you-go plan and updates to the embed software development kit (SDK): for a flexible way for customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to embed Power Automate in third party apps and only pay for what they use.
Please refer the following links for a deep dive.
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Power Apps Developer Plan
In May 2021, Power Apps Community Plan has been extended to meet the needs of developers and rebranded as the Power Apps Developer Plan.
What is a Developer Plan:
- Power Apps Developer Plan gives us a free development environment to build and test with Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse.
- This Developer Plan is meant for development and test use only. A paid plan is required to deploy or run solutions in a production environment for production use.
Developer plan included following changes compared to the Community plan:
- Ability to share apps with team members for development and testing purposes.
- Increased capability allocations.
- Ability to create more environments to support ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) scenarios (coming soon).
Existing Power Apps Community Plan users will also get all these updates.
Developer Plan Limitations:
- The following capacity limits apply for the individual environments.
| Capacity | Limits |
|---|---|
| Flow runs/month | 750 |
| Database size | 2 GB |
- You can’t add any other user as an Environment admin or a Maker, or to the database roles from the admin center.
Sign up:
- Signing up to Developer Plan can be done using work or school account. Signing up with a personal account is not currently supported.
- Click here to sign up.
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Power Platform Admin Analytics
In previous Dynamics versions, with the help of Organization Insights, available as a preferred solution from AppSource, we can get the organization level insights such as No of Active Users, API Calls, etc.
Now these analytics can be viewed right from the Power Platform Admin Center with no need of additional solutions.
Currently there are 3 types of Analytics are available.
- Common Data Service Analytics
- Refer the full list of reports here
- Power Automate Analytics
- Power Apps Analytics
Who can view the Analytics reports:
Admins with the following roles and a license can view the analytics:
- Environment Admin – can view reports for the environments that the admin has access to.
- Power Platform admin – can view reports for all environments.
- Dynamics 365 admin – can view reports for all environments.
- Microsoft 365 Global admin – can view reports for all environments.
Refer this article for more details
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Power platform 2020 release wave 1 – Plan and features list
The Power Platform release plan (formerly release notes) for the 2020 release wave 1 has been published with great new features.
Refer here for the details and download from here for the full list of features.
Following are the standout features for me:
- Canvas apps:
- Monitor tool – Allow makers to diagnose and troubleshoot their applications quicker
- Create an app from data in a landscape format instead of just a phone layout.
- Model Driven Apps:
- Edit/Create related records without navigating away – Users do not have to navigate away from a form to create or edit a related record
- Power app Portal:
- Web APIs for CRUD operations on Common Data Service entities – This is much awaited feature as former portal versions would only allow Read outside of ‘Entity Forms’ using Liquid script.
- Power BI Embedded component in portal designer – Portal provides the first party integration with Power BI by using the liquid tags
- Simplified themes in portals Studio
- Support for additional entities in global search – Now you can enable Global Search on Custom entities as well using a ‘Site Setting’ configuration.
- Power Automate:
- Solutioning support for UI flows – With this feature, you can create your UI flows in solutions, easily export them into a package, and then import them across different environments for your ALM needs.
- Azure integration with Power Automate – Option to create flows by using a template from the Azure portal
- Copy and paste in Power Automate – If you want to duplicate actions in the Power Automate designer, you can now copy and paste them.
- UI Flows – With UI flows in Power Automate, you can record mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry to automate manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks to improve workplace productivity
- Power Virtual Agent:
- Add a Power Virtual Agents bot into Power Apps canvas app.
- Add images and videos to topics.
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Rajeev Pentyala - Microsoft Power Platform 