With over 48 million monthly users, Microsoft Power Platform is transforming how organizations deliver modern AI-powered customer experiences, improved employee satisfaction, and business results. Customers increasingly rely on the Power Platform to run global-scale, mission critical workloads, where the risk and business impact of failure are high. These workloads demand operational excellence: highly controlled change management to avoid unexpected disruptions to stability and quality, deep insights into ongoing operations to detect and resolve issues, and resiliency to recover from failures.

To address these needs, we are pleased to announce Power Platform managed operations, a suite of capabilities to empower organizations of all sizes to build, deploy, and operate their most critical workloads. Built with both existing and emerging AI-driven solutions in mind, these capabilities ensure stability and minimize disruption while maximizing the productivity of operations teams.

Application Lifecycle Management  

A 2023 study from the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) highlights that fixing bugs after deployment can be up to 30 times more expensive than addressing them during the requirements, design phase, or pre-production stage.

Managed operations ensure high-quality releases with a comprehensive, integrated set of DevOps tools. New deployment experiences allow organizations to scale through admin-approved deployment pipelines. Deployment approvals are streamlined with notes that describe what is deploying to production. These deployment experiences make it easier than ever to detect, root cause, and resolve deployment failures. Further, deployments can also extend to include your custom processes, such as performance optimization checks or data validation workflows. Deployments performed by a service principal account maintain least privileged access to production environments. Also, available to run standalone or as a part of a deployment is Power Apps Test Engine, which is currently in preview, it executes test automations on standalone canvas apps and it simplifies testing with features like Power Fx-based YAML test authoring, DOM abstraction for control references, and connector mocking to avoid API side effects. These change management capabilities maximize the reliability of your applications, flows, and agents in production.

Observability and Insights 

Managed operations enable teams to quickly detect, triage, and respond to issues to minimize impact on end-user experiences or your business processes. New monitoring experiences provide out-of-box metrics that represent end-user experiences or successful use of technology supporting your business processes. These metrics help detect production degradations and are complimented by in-product recommendations that provide actionable guidance to improve performance and reliability. These new monitoring experiences are available without dependency on Azure Application Insights or Azure Data Lake. However, built-in integration with these services is also available to easily ingest and process Power Platform and Dynamics 365 logs with Azure Application Insights. With Dataverse integration with Fabric Shortcuts, now available in early private preview, you can instantly bring D365/Power Platform inventory into Fabric, ensuring that your teams have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips. This streamlined access accelerates insights, enhances decision-making, and simplifies data management, empowering you to make impactful, data-driven choices faster than ever before.

Built for Data Resilience 

In today’s data-driven world, ensuring data resilience is essential for businesses operating at a global scale. Managed operations enable organizations to protect and recover their data seamlessly with a range of flexible backup and retention capabilities: 

• Extended Backup Retention: Customers can now extend their backup retention from seven to 28 days. Learn more.
• Self-serve Disaster Recovery: Self-serve disaster recovery is now available in private preview. Admin can perform a Disaster recovery drill or real time “Emergency response” failover and failback with this feature. Join the early preview.
• Recycle Bin for Table Records: Users may delete records or transactions intentionally or accidentally, through both manual and automated processes, including single, multiple, or bulk deletions. The new recycle bin feature, currently in preview, addresses challenges in recovering deleted data within a configurable timeframe, providing a safety net to intentional or accidental data loss. Learn more. 
• Long-Term Retention: A table can be enabled for a long-term data retention policy. All parent and associated child activities, emails, attachments are retained as a set when you set up a policy on a parent table. Customers can use retention policies to securely store inactive and or infrequently used data long-term in Azure Data Lake tiers, providing a cost-effective solution for archiving while ensuring compliance and easy access. Learn more 

Together, these features strengthen data resilience by offering flexible, scalable backup and retention solutions, empowering businesses to safeguard their data reliably and efficiently. 

Empowering Enterprises to Operate with Confidence 

Managed operations represents a new era in application management, enabling enterprises to support mission-critical workloads at scale in an evolving digital landscape. It is time to take advantage of the Microsoft Power Platform’s AI-driven potential in your enterprise. Get started now with confidence knowing that you are backed by the dynamic and resilient capabilities of managed operations at your disposal.

The post Introducing managed operations for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform   appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Microsoft Power Platform empowers you to address both priorities with ease. With the release of managed security for Microsoft Power Platform, it is simple to balance both AI-adoption and top-tier data protection. This new suite provides industry-leading capabilities for protecting all your organization’s assets, ranging from mission critical workloads to citizen-developed resources to cutting-edge AI-powered agents. Managed security delivers security controls to ensure safe and scalable adoption business applications, Copilots, and agents: 

• Security Posture Management: Intelligent guidance for scalable and efficient enterprise-grade security. 
• Threat Protection: AI-powered detection and monitoring to address and prevent security risks.
• Data Protection and Privacy: Robust controls to ensure confidentiality and encryption, ensuring security of sensitive information.  
• Identity and Access Management: Seamless and adaptive tools to ensure only authorized resource and data access.
• Compliance: Assured visibility and adherence to industry and regional regulatory requirements.  

With managed security, Microsoft Power Platform empowers businesses with advanced protection to harness their AI-potential with confidence and ease. 

Security Posture Excellence 

The Power Platform admin center has been redesigned to deliver a seamless , world-class security management experience to administer your organization at scale with greater visibility, pointed guidance, and simplified controls. The new generally available security page experience in the Power Platform admin center, makes it easy to discover and navigate the range of capabilities which managed security provides. With actionable insights and opinionated guidance, this single pane of glass empowers administrators to effortlessly view and manage security tasks, assess their tenant’s security posture, and implement proactive policies across network security, access control, compliance, and threat detection. With the security score, illustrated on a qualitative scale (Low, Medium, High), you can get a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s security posture. Then, you can act on timely and tailored recommendations to improve your tenant’s security score configuring both proactive and reactive security guardrails, prioritized by level of risk.

Threat protection 

As dependency on digital technology and integration with AI to fuel enterprise solutions grows, so does cybercrime. The frequency of data breaches across the globe has increased year over year reaching new all-time highs. But with managed security, you can feel confident that your organization remains secure against these evolving threats, equipped with AI-powered, real-time detection enabled through integration with Microsoft Sentinel. This cloud-native security information event and management platform equips admins to have a comprehensive security and monitoring solution that intelligently detect and respond to suspicious activities such as mass data deletion or app execution from unauthorized geographies.

Data protection and privacy

Managed security provides a robust selection of controls to ensure that your data is protected with confidentiality and integrity. Building on the core capabilities provided in the Power Platform such as end to end encryption, Dataverse security, tenant isolation and data loss prevention policies, managed security equips admins with additional proactive safeguards and capabilities to prevent avenues for data leakage.

To mitigate the risk of data exfiltration through plug-ins and connectors, you can leverage network security to protect both inbound and outbound traffic. . Power Platform now supports Virtual Network (vNet) integration for both connectors and Dataverse plug-ins including Microsoft Copilot Studio integrations, providing private, outbound connectivity from the Power Platform to resources within your vNet. By limiting the resources in your Power Platform environment to only access an Azure Virtual Network, you can ensure that your Power Platform resources are protected without overexposure to the internet or unauthorized access, enhancing security when extending your business processes. We are continuing to invest in expanding the vNet supported scenarios and are excited to announce the public preview support to the Snowflake connector. Enterprises will be able to use this connector to securely access their Snowflake data without the need to exposing the data over internet.

For scenarios that leverage PII such as credit card numbers or social security numbers, you can create data masking rules to ensure that your organization’s and customer’s sensitive data is protected. With data masking, also referred to as de-identification or obfuscation, sensitive data is replaced with masked strings, ensuring that the original values remain hidden. Only authorized users can access unmasked data, only one record at a time, ensuring that data is treated with utmost sensitivity. Safeguard your data by leveraging an existing, pre-defined rule, or creating your own as a solution.

In addition, customer managed keys (CMK) ensure that data is not only protected both in transit and at rest, but also give organizations control over their encryption keys for enhancing data security. Advanced connector policies, now available in early preview, enable a scalable approach to managing which connectors are allowed or blocked. With support for environment group level configurations, this new capability addresses the strong demand for managing data policies (DLP) at environment group level, enabling a more streamlined governance strategy. Additionally, any connector, including those previously considered non-blockable, can now be restricted, ensuring comprehensive control over data access and security. Lastly, the integration of Microsoft Purview with Microsoft Dataverse enables powerful security capabilities. With the Microsoft Purview Data Map, you can benefit from automated data discovery and sensitive data classification, gain a deeper understanding of your business applications data estate, safeguard your data, and enhance your risk and compliance posture.

Identity and Access Management

Managing access to sensitive information and resources is top of mind for IT admins and CISOs across industries and ensuring the least privilege access is paramount in maintaining a strong security stance. Power Platform is well-integrated with Entra ID for identity and access management, empowering admins to securely manage users and their interactions with various Power Platform resources. Managed security boasts an additional wealth of seamless capabilities built upon Entra ID offering granular control to ensure that your data and resources are only viewed by authorized users.

As the race to adopt AI is prioritized across industries, admins are looking to address the risk of over-sharing resources. Managed security supports granular sharing limits for canvas apps, and now expanding with generally available solution-aware cloud flows support preventing makers from sharing flows across security groups and with individuals. For Copilot Studio agent scenarios, a series of new controls are now available in preview: admins are equipped with fine-grained controls over editor versus viewer permissions on a per environment or environment group basis and can limit viewers to security groups, individuals, or a finite number of viewers.

Other key features available with managed security include support for filtering user access to resources only from pre-authorized network locations with IP firewall, which helps prevent unauthorized access and enhances network security. You can prevent user sessions being hijacked by malicious actors with IP cookie binding – which ties user sessions to specific IP addresses. Enhanced privileged access management ensures users have elevated permissions only when needed, reducing the risk of misuse and maintaining a strong security posture. Conditional access for canvas apps to enable administrators to set granular conditions under which users can access these types of resources, providing an additional level of flexibility and resource access control. To minimize the risk associated with accessing external resources, Managed Identities support for Dataverse plugins allows for secure and seamless authentication, eliminating the need for hard-coded credentials and simplifying the management of access to resources.

To further enhance security and reduce the risk of incidental over-sharing, a new control is now available on the security page to block or enable access by Entra guests to your Dataverse-backed environments as needed. By default, guest access is restricted for new Dataverse-backed environments, ensuring a secure setup from the start. With this new public preview feature, you can further boost your security score by enabling this setting for existing environments, too.

Compliance

Regional, industry-wide, and organization-specific regulations are top of mind as the race towards AI adoption continues. With managed security, you can feel confident that your organization’s business applications and copilots are meeting all compliance requirements including assured visibility, granular traceability, and comprehensive audits.  

With Dataverse audit capabilities in the Power Platform admin center, you can dive deeper with comprehensive logging capabilities, including admin, maker, and user activity logs, all critical for identifying potential security threats. By monitoring unusual activity, such as a sudden surge in login attempts or changes to security settings, you can easily detect and respond to attacks before they escalate. 

Microsoft Purview supports detailed auditing across Power Platform, including Copilot Studio events, to meet compliance requirements. It allows customized audit logs and provides detailed reports for AI-driven scenarios, enhancing security and compliance.

Moreover, to meet your enterprise’s compliance requirements with greater granularity, Dataverse offers robust data logging capabilities within managed security. This feature is essential for investigating security incidents and is designed to meet the external and internal auditing, compliance, security, and governance policies that are common to many enterprises. You can easily customize your Dataverse audit for a variety of entities and fields to ensure that you have comprehensive visibility into your data interactions, helping to maintain a secure and compliant environment.

Strengthen AI Adoption with a Security-First Mindset  

In the age of AI, IT admins are challenged to navigate a complex security landscape while architecting the next wave of innovation in their enterprises. With the security-first capabilities provided in Power Platform managed security, the possibilities for your business are endless.

Using these capabilities, enabled customers such Toyota to “establish a secure and agile integration foundation for Power Platform and Azure using Azure VNet, eliminating the need for an on-premises data gateway. This enabled Toyota to develop generative AI apps on an Enterprise-Ready architecture, balancing security and agility through collaboration between citizen developers and IT.” – Takanori Mito, IT Promotion Div. Toyota Motor Corp.

The Power Platform admin center provides visibility, pointed guidance, and scalable control for managing your organization’s business applications. Equipped with actionable recommendations, admins can protect their organization’s resources from any external threats and ensure that their sensitive data stays private and protected. With rich identity and user management, scalable and secure adoption is a reality. The time to tap into your enterprise’s transformative AI potential is now; dive in with the cutting edge and responsibly designed management tools of managed security features at your fingertips.

Learn More

• Learn more about managed operations
• Enterprise Scale: The future of Power Platform governance + security – Breakout session
• Latest updates with Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Latest updates with Microsoft Power Apps
• Latest updates with Microsoft Power Platform

The post Introducing managed security for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform: advanced protection for an AI-driven world  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Microsoft partners are helping organizations achieve greater efficiency by using our growing ecosystem of Microsoft Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio to build these types of solutions. We’re excited to announce that Litera, a global leader in legal technology solutions, enabled its first innovative Copilot connector designed to transform legal workflows. The connector extends Litera’s core workflows beyond their proprietary user interfaces, offering unparalleled accessibility to a firm’s intellectual property. 

Accenture extends its portfolio of Intelligent Supply Chain Platform solutions built on Microsoft technologies by unveiling a groundbreaking copilot extension in Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its Supply Risk Control Tower solution. 

Copilot Studio makes it easy to extend the capabilities of copilots with actions, connectors, and sources of data. Copilot connectors include data sources within the productivity cloud in Microsoft 365, business data in Microsoft Dataverse, data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, and analytical data in Microsoft Fabric, as well as non-Microsoft enterprise data sources. Through Copilot connectors, you can now ground your copilot responses with multiple enterprise data sources for more relevant and reliable responses from copilots and copilot extensions. 

Litera’s Copilot connector provides unparalleled accessibility to a firm’s intellectual knowledge 

The Litera Search Copilot connector enables legal professionals to execute complex natural language searches for both legal matter experience and precedent content from any Copilot-enabled application, allowing users to get matter and precedent detail without learning how to navigate a complex search screen. Best-fit insights are delivered instantly, eliminating the need for endless clicks to drill down into legal matter context or iterations to refine search context and outcomes. Imagine that you are a junior associate in charge of creating a first draft for a real estate credit litigation in a New York state agreement: you can gain instant insight into how your top firm experts have structured and written indemnification clauses for credit agreements saving valuable time and leveraging the firm’s collective knowledge. Whether drafting new contracts, looking to assign the most experienced attorney to a specific case, compiling a pitch for new business, or understanding market conditions during negotiations, the Litera Search Copilot connector brings the ease of natural language matter and content search to a vastly expanded domain of user interfaces. 

 “Collaborating with Microsoft has allowed us to advance our use of new AI techniques to create revolutionary tools for the legal industry. By integrating with Microsoft Copilot, we’re delivering intelligent, AI-driven experiences that significantly enhance productivity and efficiency for legal professionals. This partnership not only highlights our commitment to innovation but also sets the stage for a transformative future in legal technology.”

Greg Ingino, Chief Technology Officer at Litera 

First, the user asks in natural language for litigation that meets certain criteria. 

Once they see the list of matching litigation, the user then makes the request for details on a specific legal matter from the first set of results. 

For end-users, these solutions offer significant value by streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity, as legal professionals can now reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on more critical aspects of their work. The integration of AI and natural language capabilities means users can interact with the software more intuitively, ultimately transforming the way they manage and utilize legal documents.  

Accenture brings supply chain management to Copilot 

Extending its portfolio of Intelligent Supply Chain Platform solutions built on Microsoft technologies, Accenture has unveiled a groundbreaking extension in Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its Supply Risk Control Tower. This innovation streamlines the daily workflows of supply chain teams, particularly material planners. Supply chain professionals can now receive daily updates from Copilot detailing incoming orders and providing real-time insights into potential risks. More than just a tracking tool, Copilot proactively recommends optimal course of action, streamlining decision-making processes and empowering teams to respond swiftly and strategically to dynamic supply chain scenarios.  

To create this advanced functionality, Accenture used the capabilities of Copilot Studio, incorporating knowledge, topics, and actions. This was combined with the power of Dataverse and its vast connector ecosystem, integrating Accenture’s deep supply chain data domain expertise with Copilot generative AI capabilities. The outcome is the transformative Supply Chain Insights App. With Microsoft Power Platform native integration into Copilot Studio, Accenture automated critical order management tasks in enterprise resource planning systems such as Dynamics 365 and SAP, saving valuable time and reducing manual data entry errors. 

Activate Dataverse data as knowledge using Copilot connectors 

Using Copilot connectors, you can bridge the gap between Dataverse data and Copilot. The ‘Add knowledge sources’ option allows developers to integrate deeply with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Once configured, a semantic search allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses. Data synchronization and caching ensure your data is available for quick access and reduce potential latency issues. 

Using Dataverse is just one of the capabilities of Copilot connectors. For example, with a few clicks, you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,400 connectors, which includes extensive third-party service integration with your copilot. Using these connectors, you can add actions to your copilot to allow it to complete new tasks related to your solution. The following diagram illustrates the full breadth of capabilities of Copilot connectors. 

Adding actions using a Microsoft Power Platform connector is just one of the options available for adding new actions to a copilot.  

Prompt actions allow you to generate content or extract insights with AI Builder prompts. The prompts include prebuilt prompts that can be customized by parameters or from Dataverse data. For example, passing a customer name, a prompt action could summarize related data for the customer name using Copilot. 

Conversational actions receive a user query and process it by completing one or more operations, and then sends one or more responses back to the copilot that it is being used from. The conversational action could use the generative answer node to respond to the query. The answer could be based on knowledge configured that was unique to the scenario. For example, you could have a billing code lookup that produced answers about specific billing codes to the requesting user. 

Flow actions allow you to build a Microsoft Power Automate flow that runs to process the request from a user. These actions can be used to add the ability for the copilot to complete a task. For example, adding a billing code could be implemented as a flow action. The cloud flow would use other connectors to check if the billing code existed, follow company standards, and then finally add the billing code, responding to the user that the code was added.  

Copilot connectors allow you to build complete solutions 

Copilot connectors provide you with multiple ways to extend copilots with your unique solution. By combining several of these capabilities to form your full solution, you’ll be able to provide your users with access to the right knowledge and actions to make them more productive. These features are just the beginning of what’s to come, and we can’t wait to see how organizations will use them to innovate using Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. 

Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio

 Extend the capabilities of copilots with actions, copilot connectors, and sources of data.

Learn more

The post Litera and Accenture transform business processes with Microsoft Copilot connectors appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Microsoft partners are helping organizations achieve greater efficiency by using our growing ecosystem of Microsoft Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio to build these types of solutions. We’re excited to announce that Litera, a global leader in legal technology solutions, enabled its first innovative Copilot connector designed to transform legal workflows. The connector extends Litera’s core workflows beyond their proprietary user interfaces, offering unparalleled accessibility to a firm’s intellectual property. 

Accenture extends its portfolio of Intelligent Supply Chain Platform solutions built on Microsoft technologies by unveiling a groundbreaking copilot extension in Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its Supply Risk Control Tower solution. 

Copilot Studio makes it easy to extend the capabilities of copilots with actions, connectors, and sources of data. Copilot connectors include data sources within the productivity cloud in Microsoft 365, business data in Microsoft Dataverse, data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, and analytical data in Microsoft Fabric, as well as non-Microsoft enterprise data sources. Through Copilot connectors, you can now ground your copilot responses with multiple enterprise data sources for more relevant and reliable responses from copilots and copilot extensions. 

Litera’s Copilot connector provides unparalleled accessibility to a firm’s intellectual knowledge 

The Litera Search Copilot connector enables legal professionals to execute complex natural language searches for both legal matter experience and precedent content from any Copilot-enabled application, allowing users to get matter and precedent detail without learning how to navigate a complex search screen. Best-fit insights are delivered instantly, eliminating the need for endless clicks to drill down into legal matter context or iterations to refine search context and outcomes. Imagine that you are a junior associate in charge of creating a first draft for a real estate credit litigation in a New York state agreement: you can gain instant insight into how your top firm experts have structured and written indemnification clauses for credit agreements saving valuable time and leveraging the firm’s collective knowledge. Whether drafting new contracts, looking to assign the most experienced attorney to a specific case, compiling a pitch for new business, or understanding market conditions during negotiations, the Litera Search Copilot connector brings the ease of natural language matter and content search to a vastly expanded domain of user interfaces. 

 “Collaborating with Microsoft has allowed us to advance our use of new AI techniques to create revolutionary tools for the legal industry. By integrating with Microsoft Copilot, we’re delivering intelligent, AI-driven experiences that significantly enhance productivity and efficiency for legal professionals. This partnership not only highlights our commitment to innovation but also sets the stage for a transformative future in legal technology.”

Greg Ingino, Chief Technology Officer at Litera 

First, the user asks in natural language for litigation that meets certain criteria. 

Once they see the list of matching litigation, the user then makes the request for details on a specific legal matter from the first set of results. 

For end-users, these solutions offer significant value by streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity, as legal professionals can now reduce the time spent on administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on more critical aspects of their work. The integration of AI and natural language capabilities means users can interact with the software more intuitively, ultimately transforming the way they manage and utilize legal documents.  

Accenture brings supply chain management to Copilot 

Extending its portfolio of Intelligent Supply Chain Platform solutions built on Microsoft technologies, Accenture has unveiled a groundbreaking extension in Copilot for Microsoft 365 for its Supply Risk Control Tower. This innovation streamlines the daily workflows of supply chain teams, particularly material planners. Supply chain professionals can now receive daily updates from Copilot detailing incoming orders and providing real-time insights into potential risks. More than just a tracking tool, Copilot proactively recommends optimal course of action, streamlining decision-making processes and empowering teams to respond swiftly and strategically to dynamic supply chain scenarios.  

To create this advanced functionality, Accenture used the capabilities of Copilot Studio, incorporating knowledge, topics, and actions. This was combined with the power of Dataverse and its vast connector ecosystem, integrating Accenture’s deep supply chain data domain expertise with Copilot generative AI capabilities. The outcome is the transformative Supply Chain Insights App. With Microsoft Power Platform native integration into Copilot Studio, Accenture automated critical order management tasks in enterprise resource planning systems such as Dynamics 365 and SAP, saving valuable time and reducing manual data entry errors. 

Activate Dataverse data as knowledge using Copilot connectors 

Using Copilot connectors, you can bridge the gap between Dataverse data and Copilot. The ‘Add knowledge sources’ option allows developers to integrate deeply with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Once configured, a semantic search allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses. Data synchronization and caching ensure your data is available for quick access and reduce potential latency issues. 

Using Dataverse is just one of the capabilities of Copilot connectors. For example, with a few clicks, you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,400 connectors, which includes extensive third-party service integration with your copilot. Using these connectors, you can add actions to your copilot to allow it to complete new tasks related to your solution. The following diagram illustrates the full breadth of capabilities of Copilot connectors. 

Adding actions using a Microsoft Power Platform connector is just one of the options available for adding new actions to a copilot.  

Prompt actions allow you to generate content or extract insights with AI Builder prompts. The prompts include prebuilt prompts that can be customized by parameters or from Dataverse data. For example, passing a customer name, a prompt action could summarize related data for the customer name using Copilot. 

Conversational actions receive a user query and process it by completing one or more operations, and then sends one or more responses back to the copilot that it is being used from. The conversational action could use the generative answer node to respond to the query. The answer could be based on knowledge configured that was unique to the scenario. For example, you could have a billing code lookup that produced answers about specific billing codes to the requesting user. 

Flow actions allow you to build a Microsoft Power Automate flow that runs to process the request from a user. These actions can be used to add the ability for the copilot to complete a task. For example, adding a billing code could be implemented as a flow action. The cloud flow would use other connectors to check if the billing code existed, follow company standards, and then finally add the billing code, responding to the user that the code was added.  

Copilot connectors allow you to build complete solutions 

Copilot connectors provide you with multiple ways to extend copilots with your unique solution. By combining several of these capabilities to form your full solution, you’ll be able to provide your users with access to the right knowledge and actions to make them more productive. These features are just the beginning of what’s to come, and we can’t wait to see how organizations will use them to innovate using Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. 

Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio

 Extend the capabilities of copilots with actions, copilot connectors, and sources of data.

Learn more

The post Litera and Accenture transform business processes with Microsoft Copilot connectors appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Microsoft Copilot is designed to enhance business productivity by leveraging AI to streamline routine tasks, allowing users to concentrate on strategic and creative endeavors. It boosts organizational efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up time for the workforce, and enriching solution capabilities with integrated experiences in Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Teams.

Enhancing your AI business strategy with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Dataverse enables organizations to simplify the complex data integration, third-party data extensibility, and security guardrails organizations must have in place to assist in the implementation and adoption of AI.

At Microsoft Build 2024, we are excited to unveil Microsoft Copilot connectors. Microsoft Copilot connectors provide seamless and secure integration with your productivity, analytical, and operational data as well as empower users to activate existing business processes. Copilot Studio and Dataverse allow organizations to create actions, build knowledge, and integrate grounded data into their copilots with ease, all while easily meeting their compliance requirements with a rich set of security features.

Bridge the gap between enterprise data and Microsoft Copilot

The concept of enterprise knowledge in Copilot Studio is a groundbreaking addition that allows copilot makers to add specific contextually relevant knowledge sources to their copilots, thereby improving the reliability and accuracy of responses. Knowledge supports a wide range of data types, including public websites and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (powered by Dataverse) and brings simple discoverability and understanding of enterprise data, which is critical to scaling the delivery of agent copilots across an organization.

Figure 1: Makers can select enterprise data sources as their copilot’s knowledge.

Many Microsoft customers are seeing the benefits of adding grounded enterprise data into their copilot experience. From supply chain management, customer relationship management, and productivity insights, customers can increase the efficiency of business processes, make their workforce more productive, and provide rich customer experiences. Read below how Peppermint, EY, and Docusign have developed impactful solutions.

Peppermint reimagines legal business processes with Copilot

Law firms are challenged with optimizing workflow efficiency and delivering effective client services. Achieving this entails implementing a range of services, including case and matter management, document management, and client engagement. How can law firms, who are primarily focused on legal expertise, utilize technology to overcome this challenge and achieve their goals?

Peppermint Technology, a leading global independent software vendor (ISV) revolutionizing legal firms and departments, has built solutions that easily ground copilots with enterprise data stored in Dataverse and SharePoint to provide more relevant and secure business insights. Peppermint has been using Microsoft Power Platform to model their legal case process and storing their business data in Dataverse. With their existing integration, allowing Peppermint’s copilot to access enterprise knowledge and processes from Microsoft Power Platform, while maintaining user context security, requires minimal effort and allows rapid adoption of modern AI workloads for increasing productivity and automation

Figure 2: Use natural language to retrieve matters stored in Dataverse.

Lawyers can now use LARA (Legal Analysis and Research Assistant for Peppermint) to efficiently prepare for upcoming meetings by identifying internal contacts for new accounts, accessing pertinent information, and taking necessary actions ahead of their meetings.

Figure 3: Use natural language to identify connections with new accounts.

“At Peppermint Technology, we are excited to utilize Copilot Studio’s enterprise knowledge to not only extract maximum value from corporate data but also significantly enhance our law firm clients’ ability to engage with their clients and increase billing efficiencies. This strategic adoption aligns perfectly with our business priorities of reducing risk and boosting client engagement, enabling our clients to offer superior service and achieve better outcomes.”—Mike Walker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Peppermint Technology

Take your enterprise business processes further with Copilot connectors

With Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio, organizations can easily expand their copilot knowledge and actions with their business data. Copilot connectors allow organizations to bring together data from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Fabric OneLake, public websites, and many other systems of record.

When incorporating Copilot connectors into your custom copilots, Copilot will work in the background on your user’s or organization’s behalf, and reason across structured and unstructured data to execute your business processes.

Figure 4: Microsoft Copilot connectors diagram.

Copilot connectors are part of the broader Copilot ecosystem, which includes Copilot Studio and Microsoft Copilot. They play a crucial role in the extensibility of Copilot, allowing developers to create custom AI solutions that are deeply integrated with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Some key benefits of Copilot connectors are:

• Semantic search: Allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses.
• Data syncing and caching: Ensure your data is synchronized and cached efficiently, allowing for quick access, and reducing potential latency issues.
• Extensive third-party service integration: With a few clicks you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,000 connectors so that even non-Microsoft data can be included.
• Support for complex data types: The connectors can handle a variety of data types, including relational data and unstructured data, making them versatile for different business needs, and come with production-grade service levels.
• Low-code and pro-code: Whether you want to create custom application programming interface (API) or existing prebuilt connectors, the choice is up to you.

Docusign expedites the workforce with Copilot connectors

By enabling the Docusign Copilot connector within Microsoft Copilot, Docusign delivers greater value to their customers by not only surfacing document details, steps, and processes, but also allowing users to ask queries with natural language, and drive results faster than before. Docusign’s integrations with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Copilot for Sales provide AI-powered agreement insights to help drive employee productivity, close deals faster, and manage renewals at scale. Customers across human resources (HR), sales, procurement, legal, and more can now use natural language to ask Copilot for agreement status and summarization, extract key information, send reminders to others, and more.

Figure 5: Activate Docusign Copilot connector and find agreements with natural language.

“Through our partnership with Microsoft, we are revolutionizing the way organizations do business. Docusign’s integrations with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for Sales harness the power of AI to drive intelligent automation and innovation, leveraging Microsoft Power Platform plug-ins and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Meeting people where they work, these integrations empower organizations to accelerate revenue, reduce risk, and create better experiences from the agreements that run their business. Together, we’re not just streamlining processes, we’re redefining what’s possible in the digital era.”—Janine Grasso, General Vice President (GVP) of Partner Development and Alliances, Docusign

Gain visibility and increase your security posture

As organizations increase the complexity of their solutions and incorporate data from multiple systems of record through Copilot connectors, gaining and maintaining visibility of the security of that data is critical. Previously, fragmented experiences created barriers to customers assessing risks, and a lack of clear, defined guidance in achieving the defense in depth that organizations strive to maintain. Without security tools for both proactive and reactive governance of both citizen and pro developers’ applications, administrators may resort to solutions that stifle modernization, productivity, and business growth.

The Security Hub is designed to solve these challenges and more, with intuitive experiences, and strategic guidance, administrators can navigate the complexities of managing security at scale. This centralized hub provides administrators with tools to assess the security posture of their tenant, identify and act on impactful recommendations, and proactively set policies to safeguard against vulnerabilities and threats all through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center.

The Security Hub for Microsoft Power Platform, in public preview, offers several benefits, including:

• Enhanced security posture: Providing administrators with tools to assess and improve the security posture of their tenant, ensuring that data and applications are protected against vulnerabilities and threats.
• Actionable recommendations: Identify impactful recommendations that administrators can act on to strengthen security measures.
• Proactive policy setting: Proactively set policies to safeguard your environment, preventing potential security incidents before they occur.
• Centralized security management: One centralized platform for managing security across Microsoft Power Platform, streamlining the process, and making it more efficient.

These features are designed to provide a comprehensive security solution that aligns with an organization’s security practices, contributing to the overall success of digital transformation efforts. For example, Security Hub identifies if minimum safeguarding is in place and guides you to set up the appropriate data loss prevention policies (DLP) around Copilot connector usage in your organization. In addition, administrators can expect to utilize the following generally available in the Security Hub: vNet for Dataverse plugins, privileged identity management (PIM), tenant isolation, IP firewall, IP cookie binding, and environment security groups, while the following features will be available in public preview: client application control and Dataverse audit enhancements.

Additionally, Copilot Studio makers can now ground generative answers to SharePoint site content—enabling copilots to surface labeled resources as labeled responses in Teams chat with Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels are widely adopted by enterprises today to label and protect sensitive information in Microsoft 365 apps and Fabric, and they are coming soon to Microsoft Power Platform.

Watch our latest overview of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse security features.

EY prevents data exfiltration at scale with Microsoft Power Platform security controls

Data exfiltration prevention protects the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data from an organization to external parties. This allows a business to maintain business continuity, comply with regulatory requirements, and keep up with competitive advantage. This feature allows the security officer to allow or block what apps that their authorized users can run in a Dataverse environment.

“As an enterprise consumer of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, I am thrilled to share my experience with the recent enhancements made by the Engineering team. Their diligent efforts have had a significant, positive impact on our Dynamics 365 launch with the necessary data controls to support our information security policies and data governance processes.

The introduction of data exfiltration permission controls was critical to comply with our Information Privacy and Data Governance policies. These controls allow us to grant permissioned access to the Dataverse while maintaining strict data security. Here’s why these features are crucial:

• Foundation for Data Governance: The ability to control data exfiltration is at the core of our data governance strategy. With these controls, we can confidently manage how Dynamics 365 data is accessed and shared beyond our system boundaries.
• Enterprise Data Controls: Microsoft Dynamics 365’s permissioned access ensures that sensitive information remains within authorized boundaries. We can now define granular permissions, restricting data flow to only those who need it. This level of control empowers us to safeguard our data assets effectively.
• Privacy Compliance: Our member firms operate under stringent privacy agreements. The Engineering team’s work aligns perfectly with our commitment to data privacy. By enforcing permissioned access, we uphold our privacy standards and protect our enterprise information.

The Engineering team’s dedication to building robust permission controls has enabled our data landscape. We can confidently deploy Dynamics 365 and navigate the complexities of data sharing, knowing that our privacy agreements remain intact and grant access to only approved systems and usage.”—Erick J. Kirchner, Associate Director, Markets and Business Development, Ernst & Young LLP

Looking ahead

As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible with data and AI, Dataverse remains committed to providing businesses with the tools they need to succeed in an ever-evolving digital world. These new features are just the beginning of what is to come, and we cannot wait to see how organizations will leverage them to achieve new heights of productivity and security.

Join us at Microsoft Build to learn more about these exciting developments and how they can transform your business.

The post Unlock new levels of productivity with Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Enhancing your AI business strategy with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Dataverse enables organizations to simplify the complex data integration, third-party data extensibility, and security guardrails organizations must have in place to assist in the implementation and adoption of AI.

At Microsoft Build 2024, we are excited to unveil Microsoft Copilot connectors. Microsoft Copilot connectors provide seamless and secure integration with your productivity, analytical, and operational data as well as empower users to activate existing business processes. Copilot Studio and Dataverse allow organizations to create actions, build knowledge, and integrate grounded data into their copilots with ease, all while easily meeting their compliance requirements with a rich set of security features.

Bridge the gap between enterprise data and Microsoft Copilot

The concept of enterprise knowledge in Copilot Studio is a groundbreaking addition that allows copilot makers to add specific contextually relevant knowledge sources to their copilots, thereby improving the reliability and accuracy of responses. Knowledge supports a wide range of data types, including public websites and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (powered by Dataverse) and brings simple discoverability and understanding of enterprise data, which is critical to scaling the delivery of agent copilots across an organization.

Figure 1: Makers can select enterprise data sources as their copilot’s knowledge.

Many Microsoft customers are seeing the benefits of adding grounded enterprise data into their copilot experience. From supply chain management, customer relationship management, and productivity insights, customers can increase the efficiency of business processes, make their workforce more productive, and provide rich customer experiences. Read below how Peppermint, EY, and Docusign have developed impactful solutions.

Peppermint reimagines legal business processes with Copilot

Law firms are challenged with optimizing workflow efficiency and delivering effective client services. Achieving this entails implementing a range of services, including case and matter management, document management, and client engagement. How can law firms, who are primarily focused on legal expertise, utilize technology to overcome this challenge and achieve their goals?

Peppermint Technology, a leading global independent software vendor (ISV) revolutionizing legal firms and departments, has built solutions that easily ground copilots with enterprise data stored in Dataverse and SharePoint to provide more relevant and secure business insights. Peppermint has been using Microsoft Power Platform to model their legal case process and storing their business data in Dataverse. With their existing integration, allowing Peppermint’s copilot to access enterprise knowledge and processes from Microsoft Power Platform, while maintaining user context security, requires minimal effort and allows rapid adoption of modern AI workloads for increasing productivity and automation

Figure 2: Use natural language to retrieve matters stored in Dataverse.

Lawyers can now use LARA (Legal Analysis and Research Assistant for Peppermint) to efficiently prepare for upcoming meetings by identifying internal contacts for new accounts, accessing pertinent information, and taking necessary actions ahead of their meetings.

Figure 3: Use natural language to identify connections with new accounts.

“At Peppermint Technology, we are excited to utilize Copilot Studio’s enterprise knowledge to not only extract maximum value from corporate data but also significantly enhance our law firm clients’ ability to engage with their clients and increase billing efficiencies. This strategic adoption aligns perfectly with our business priorities of reducing risk and boosting client engagement, enabling our clients to offer superior service and achieve better outcomes.”—Mike Walker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Peppermint Technology

Take your enterprise business processes further with Copilot connectors

With Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio, organizations can easily expand their copilot knowledge and actions with their business data. Copilot connectors allow organizations to bring together data from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Fabric OneLake, public websites, and many other systems of record.

When incorporating Copilot connectors into your custom copilots, Copilot will work in the background on your user’s or organization’s behalf, and reason across structured and unstructured data to execute your business processes.

Figure 4: Microsoft Copilot connectors diagram.
Copilot connectors are part of the broader Copilot ecosystem, which includes Copilot Studio and Microsoft Copilot. They play a crucial role in the extensibility of Copilot, allowing developers to create custom AI solutions that are deeply integrated with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Some key benefits of Copilot connectors are:

• Semantic search: Allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses.
• Data syncing and caching: Ensure your data is synchronized and cached efficiently, allowing for quick access, and reducing potential latency issues.
• Extensive third-party service integration: With a few clicks you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,400 connectors so that even non-Microsoft data can be included.
• Support for complex data types: The connectors can handle a variety of data types, including relational data and unstructured data, making them versatile for different business needs, and come with production-grade service levels.
• Low-code and pro-code: Whether you want to create custom application programming interface (API) or existing prebuilt connectors, the choice is up to you.

Docusign expedites the workforce with Copilot connectors

By enabling the Docusign Copilot connector within Microsoft Copilot, Docusign delivers greater value to their customers by not only surfacing document details, steps, and processes, but also allowing users to ask queries with natural language, and drive results faster than before. Docusign’s integrations with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Copilot for Sales provide AI-powered agreement insights to help drive employee productivity, close deals faster, and manage renewals at scale. Customers across human resources (HR), sales, procurement, legal, and more can now use natural language to ask Copilot for agreement status and summarization, extract key information, send reminders to others, and more.

Figure 5: Activate Docusign Copilot connector and find agreements with natural language.

“Through our partnership with Microsoft, we are revolutionizing the way organizations do business. Docusign’s integrations with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for Sales harness the power of AI to drive intelligent automation and innovation, leveraging Microsoft Power Platform plug-ins and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Meeting people where they work, these integrations empower organizations to accelerate revenue, reduce risk, and create better experiences from the agreements that run their business. Together, we’re not just streamlining processes, we’re redefining what’s possible in the digital era.”—Janine Grasso, General Vice President (GVP) of Partner Development and Alliances, Docusign

Gain visibility and increase your security posture

As organizations increase the complexity of their solutions and incorporate data from multiple systems of record through Copilot connectors, gaining and maintaining visibility of the security of that data is critical. Previously, fragmented experiences created barriers to customers assessing risks, and a lack of clear, defined guidance in achieving the defense in depth that organizations strive to maintain. Without security tools for both proactive and reactive governance of both citizen and pro developers’ applications, administrators may resort to solutions that stifle modernization, productivity, and business growth.

The Security Hub is designed to solve these challenges and more, with intuitive experiences, and strategic guidance, administrators can navigate the complexities of managing security at scale. This centralized hub provides administrators with tools to assess the security posture of their tenant, identify and act on impactful recommendations, and proactively set policies to safeguard against vulnerabilities and threats all through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center.

The Security Hub for Microsoft Power Platform, in public preview, offers several benefits, including:

• Enhanced security posture: Providing administrators with tools to assess and improve the security posture of their tenant, ensuring that data and applications are protected against vulnerabilities and threats.
• Actionable recommendations: Identify impactful recommendations that administrators can act on to strengthen security measures.
• Proactive policy setting: Proactively set policies to safeguard your environment, preventing potential security incidents before they occur.
• Centralized security management: One centralized platform for managing security across Microsoft Power Platform, streamlining the process, and making it more efficient.

These features are designed to provide a comprehensive security solution that aligns with an organization’s security practices, contributing to the overall success of digital transformation efforts. For example, Security Hub identifies if minimum safeguarding is in place and guides you to set up the appropriate data loss prevention policies (DLP) around Copilot connector usage in your organization. In addition, administrators can expect to utilize the following generally available in the Security Hub: vNet for Dataverse plugins, privileged identity management (PIM), tenant isolation, IP firewall, IP cookie binding, and environment security groups, while the following features will be available in public preview: client application control and Dataverse audit enhancements.

Additionally, Copilot Studio makers can now ground generative answers to SharePoint site content—enabling copilots to surface labeled resources as labeled responses in Teams chat with Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels are widely adopted by enterprises today to label and protect sensitive information in Microsoft 365 apps and Fabric, and they are coming soon to Microsoft Power Platform.

Watch our latest overview of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse security features.

EY prevents data exfiltration at scale with Microsoft Power Platform security controls

Data exfiltration prevention protects the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data from an organization to external parties. This allows a business to maintain business continuity, comply with regulatory requirements, and keep up with competitive advantage. This feature allows the security officer to allow or block what apps that their authorized users can run in a Dataverse environment.

“As an enterprise consumer of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, I am thrilled to share my experience with the recent enhancements made by the Engineering team. Their diligent efforts have had a significant, positive impact on our Dynamics 365 launch with the necessary data controls to support our information security policies and data governance processes.
The introduction of data exfiltration permission controls was critical to comply with our Information Privacy and Data Governance policies. These controls allow us to grant permissioned access to the Dataverse while maintaining strict data security. Here’s why these features are crucial:

• Foundation for Data Governance: The ability to control data exfiltration is at the core of our data governance strategy. With these controls, we can confidently manage how Dynamics 365 data is accessed and shared beyond our system boundaries.
• Enterprise Data Controls: Microsoft Dynamics 365’s permissioned access ensures that sensitive information remains within authorized boundaries. We can now define granular permissions, restricting data flow to only those who need it. This level of control empowers us to safeguard our data assets effectively.
• Privacy Compliance: Our member firms operate under stringent privacy agreements. The Engineering team’s work aligns perfectly with our commitment to data privacy. By enforcing permissioned access, we uphold our privacy standards and protect our enterprise information.

The Engineering team’s dedication to building robust permission controls has enabled our data landscape. We can confidently deploy Dynamics 365 and navigate the complexities of data sharing, knowing that our privacy agreements remain intact and grant access to only approved systems and usage.”—Erick J. Kirchner, Associate Director, Markets and Business Development, Ernst & Young LLP

Looking ahead

As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible with data and AI, Dataverse remains committed to providing businesses with the tools they need to succeed in an ever-evolving digital world. These new features are just the beginning of what is to come, and we cannot wait to see how organizations will leverage them to achieve new heights of productivity and security.

Join us at Microsoft Build to learn more about these exciting developments and how they can transform your business.

The post Unlock new levels of productivity with Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Microsoft Power Platform comprehensive suite of security capabilities helps organizations to keep their enterprise data safe while leveraging the platform’s AI capabilities. Power Platform security features build on and augment the foundation provided by Microsoft security products and services, so customers get the deepest protection across the breadth of technologies their organization uses.  

Sign up for private preview of Security Hub

Enhance your data safety with AI

Learn more

This month we are announcing several new security features for Power Platform:

• Admins will now have one place to manage Power Platform security at scale using the new Security Hub in the Power Platform admin center.
• New advanced data exfiltration protection features, including the next generation of network isolation and continuous access evaluation of user access rights.
• Microsoft Sentinel for Power Platform integrates Power Platform apps, workflows, and connections into your organization’s security operations to provide a holistic view in the industry leading security information and event management (SIEM) Microsoft Sentinel. 

To help you understand the full security capabilities of Power Platform, we just published a whitepaper focused on enterprise security. This whitepaper shows you how to align Power Platform with your security practices.

Let’s look at these new security capabilities in more detail and explore how they can help secure your Power Platform deployments. 

Achieve the full potential of AI enabled business applications with enhanced security management in the Security Hub

In today’s fast-paced digital transformation environment in the new era of AI, organizations have a hard time understanding how to unlock the power of business data and the flexibility of Power Platform while continuing to meet the ever-evolving security and compliance requirements. Without effective tools for assessing and managing security, administrators may resort to solutions that overly restrict modernization, productivity, and business growth. Security Hub in Power Platform admin center is designed to solve these challenges and more. Administrators will be able to quickly assess the security posture for the tenant, identify and act on the topmost impactful recommendations to improve the posture, use the rich set of high values tools and security capabilities available to gain deep visibility, detect threats effectively, and proactively set policies in place to safeguard from vulnerabilities and risks.  

Security Hub is a must-have for any organization looking to achieve their security and compliance goals with minimal effort and resources, while gaining a competitive edge in the market with secure and reliable AI-enabled business applications solutions. 

Security Hub is currently in private preview, you can express interest in joining the preview here. 

Applying Sensitivity Labels with Microsoft Purview Data Map now supports Dataverse

Applying Sensitivity Labels with Purview Data Map enables organizations to identify sensitive data easily and consistently across the data estate, regardless of where it resides or how it is structured. It also reduces the manual effort and human error involved in labeling the data by using predefined rules and policies that match your business and compliance needs. 

Using the public preview, you can now register Dataverse in Purview and apply Sensitivity Labels to columns in your tables. Try the new preview feature by following “Connect to and manage Microsoft Dataverse in Microsoft Purview“. 

Admin activities now visible in Microsoft Purview 

The ability to view Power Platform administrative logs using auditing solutions in Purview has reached general availability. With enhanced auditing capabilities providing insights ranging from environment lifecycle operations to billing activities, you’re able to adhere to compliance requirements and are empowered to act on security threats. To learn more, see the documentation.  

Access audit data using Microsoft Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse and Microsoft Power BI 

Security professionals can now use their own Synapse workspace to access Dataverse audit data to comply with their auditing requirements. Power BI can also be used to create and monitor auditing events. This feature is now generally available and for more information, review the documentation. 

New advanced data exfiltration protection and network isolation 

One of the best ways to protect your data is to limit access. Limiting access too broadly, though, can often prevent valid users and trusted sources from accessing data and can slow innovation. Power Platform is introducing new ways to limit access to data while at the same time allowing the right users and apps secure access. 

Secure connections from Power Platform to Azure Virtual Network resources

Customers frequently use Power Platform resources together with Microsoft Azure applications and services hosted within their enterprise network. The new virtual network support for Power Platform allows this type of integration to be done over a private network instead of the public network. Customers can maximize their existing Azure networking investment to enable advanced network isolation that securely integrates with low-code resources without exposing any of them over the public internet.  

The following are examples of what is possible by enabling virtual network support to a Power Platform environment: 

• Use the private outbound connectivity from Dataverse plug-ins to access external data sources within the virtual network. For example, the plug-in could access an API hosted as an Azure application to integrate the logic into the plug-in processing. 

• Use private outbound connectivity from Power Platform to access Azure services such as Microsoft Azure SQL, Microsoft Azure Storage, Microsoft Azure Key Vault, and others using Power Platform connectors. For example, a Microsoft Power Automate cloud flow could securely retrieve data from an Azure SQL table that supports another enterprise application. 

These examples demonstrate how the Virtual Network integration breaks down the barriers to any Virtual Network resource integrating with any low-code app, automation, or copilot. 

Virtual network support is in public preview now and you can review the documentation for details on how to enable it in your environments. 

Protect your Dataverse data with a firewall 

Many organizations want more control over who is accessing their business data. In public preview now is a new IP firewall feature. The IP firewall helps to protect your organizational data in Dataverse by limiting user access to the data from only allowed IP locations. 

The IP firewall analyzes the IP address of each request in real time. For example, suppose the IP firewall is turned on in your production Dataverse environment and allowed IP addresses are in the ranges associated with your office locations and not any external IP location like a coffee shop. If a user tries to access organizational resources from a coffee shop, Dataverse denies access in real time. Learn more about IP firewall and how to enable it in.

Continuous access evaluation  

In today’s modern workplace, a user’s eligibility for business application access can change at any time. Evaluating eligibility for application access only during authentication would not ensure that critical events like a network change are re-evaluated when they occur.   

In public preview today, Power Platform now supports continuous access evaluation, a feature of Microsoft Entra ID. Dataverse will initially support this near real-time evaluation, and support for other Power Platform services will follow. Continuous access evaluation continuously evaluates user access to resources based on Microsoft Entra ID signals, such as critical events and changes in user location. User access to resources can be revoked/reauthenticated in near real-time if a critical event occurs, such as IP location change. 

You can enable continuous access evaluation to help mitigate insider and data exfiltration threats. For example, an employee can’t authenticate while on the corporate network, export a valid access token, and then replay it from an external location. Organizations can also use this for shutting down a terminated user and other scenarios that require immediate response. 

To learn more about the continuous access preview feature, review the documentation. 

Power Platform Managed Identity support

Power Platform Managed Identity will allow organizations to securely connect to Azure resources that support Managed Identity from Power Platform resources like Dataverse plug-ins, connections, and flows without the need for managing the credentials. Additionally, you can enforce conditional access policies on resources within Power Platform. For example, if an organization wants to enforce an Azure policy that allows the use of Power Platform resources from location, and particular device, the Power Platform resource onboarded on Managed Identity will simply honor it.

We are enabling this experience under private preview starting with Dataverse plug-ins this week and in future we will support other experiences on Managed Identity within Power Platform. You can join the private preview program here. 

Microsoft Entra ID Privileged Identity Management support

Use Entra ID Privileged Identity Management to assign admin roles and use Power Platform admin center with the elevated role assignments. For more on this preview feature review the documentation. 

Prevent data exfiltration from Dataverse by controlling apps access

Secure Dataverse environments by allowing only approved apps to access. This is to prevent data exfiltration where employees cannot use apps like Excel or custom apps to download data from a Dataverse environment. This feature is currently in private preview. 

Support for IPv6 starts rolling out 

IPv6 is the latest protocol of network layer of the internet designed to address issues with IPv4, most notably, IPv4 exhaustion. Microsoft will continue to support both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols for Power Platform products and services. 

Customers using IPv6 are requested to ensure their network settings are configured correctly, especially firewall rules to allow IPv6 Service Tags.  Review IPv6 support in Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 for complete details on plans and how to prepare your organization.

Integrating Power Platform into your security operations center 

Organizations are turning to tools like Microsoft Sentinel to provide enterprise overwatch to respond to the increased complexity of detecting, investigating, and mitigating threats. Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native security information event and management platform that provides intelligent security analytics for enterprises and provides security operations center (SOC) analysts with a single pane of glass for threat detection and incident management across the organization. 

Business applications, including low-code solutions, typically don’t expose enough telemetry to the SIEM platforms for adequate threat protection. We are announcing the public preview of Microsoft Sentinel for Power Platform, a comprehensive security and monitoring solution that helps you protect and defend your Power Platform environments. With the solution, organizations can detect and respond to the following type of threats and suspicious activities: 

• Power Apps execution from unauthorized geographies 
• Suspicious data destruction by Power Apps
• Mass deletion of Power Apps 
• Phishing attacks made possible through Power Apps
• Power Automate flows activity by departing employees 
• Microsoft Power Platform connectors added to the environment 
• Update or removal of Microsoft Power Platform data loss prevention policies 

Microsoft Sentinel support for all Microsoft Business Applications  

We are also opening a private preview of an enhanced solution that extends threat detection protection with Sentinel to Dynamics 365 and Power BI, in addition to Power Platform. Customers in the private preview will be able to monitor and secure the entire business application portfolio from a single pane of glass, with substantial content update, including new data connectors, hunting queries, playbooks, workbooks, and many new threat detections scenarios. Sign up now by joining the Security Connection Program (CCP) and selecting “SIEM & XDR” as the product of interest. 

Keeping your organization’s apps and data secure is a priority. With the addition of these new features Power Platform enhances your ability to meet the requirements for your Power Platform solutions and to create a secure and productive workplace for your users. 

Learn more about Power Platform security

• Power Platform security whitepaper
• Low-Code Security and Governance
• Virtual network support documentation
• Continuous access documentation
• Admin audit logging documentation 
• Access Dataverse audit using Synapse documentation 
• Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management documentation 
• Admin audit logging documentation
• Access Dataverse audit using Synapse documentation 

The post Protect enterprise solutions with new Microsoft Power Platform security features  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Microsoft Power Platform comprehensive suite of security capabilities helps organizations to keep their enterprise data safe while leveraging the platform’s AI capabilities. Power Platform security features build on and augment the foundation provided by Microsoft security products and services, so customers get the deepest protection across the breadth of technologies their organization uses.  

Sign up for private preview of Security Hub

Enhance your data safety with AI

Learn more

This month we are announcing several new security features for Power Platform:

• Admins will now have one place to manage Power Platform security at scale using the new Security Hub in the Power Platform admin center.
• New advanced data exfiltration protection features, including the next generation of network isolation and continuous access evaluation of user access rights.
• Microsoft Sentinel for Power Platform integrates Power Platform apps, workflows, and connections into your organization’s security operations to provide a holistic view in the industry leading security information and event management (SIEM) Microsoft Sentinel. 

To help you understand the full security capabilities of Power Platform, we just published a whitepaper focused on enterprise security. This whitepaper shows you how to align Power Platform with your security practices.

Let’s look at these new security capabilities in more detail and explore how they can help secure your Power Platform deployments. 

Achieve the full potential of AI enabled business applications with enhanced security management in the Security Hub

In today’s fast-paced digital transformation environment in the new era of AI, organizations have a hard time understanding how to unlock the power of business data and the flexibility of Power Platform while continuing to meet the ever-evolving security and compliance requirements. Without effective tools for assessing and managing security, administrators may resort to solutions that overly restrict modernization, productivity, and business growth. Security Hub in Power Platform admin center is designed to solve these challenges and more. Administrators will be able to quickly assess the security posture for the tenant, identify and act on the topmost impactful recommendations to improve the posture, use the rich set of high values tools and security capabilities available to gain deep visibility, detect threats effectively, and proactively set policies in place to safeguard from vulnerabilities and risks.  

Security Hub is a must-have for any organization looking to achieve their security and compliance goals with minimal effort and resources, while gaining a competitive edge in the market with secure and reliable AI-enabled business applications solutions. 

Security Hub is currently in private preview, you can express interest in joining the preview here. 

Applying Sensitivity Labels with Microsoft Purview Data Map now supports Dataverse

Applying Sensitivity Labels with Purview Data Map enables organizations to identify sensitive data easily and consistently across the data estate, regardless of where it resides or how it is structured. It also reduces the manual effort and human error involved in labeling the data by using predefined rules and policies that match your business and compliance needs. 

Using the public preview, you can now register Dataverse in Purview and apply Sensitivity Labels to columns in your tables. Try the new preview feature by following “Connect to and manage Microsoft Dataverse in Microsoft Purview“. 

Admin activities now visible in Microsoft Purview 

The ability to view Power Platform administrative logs using auditing solutions in Purview has reached general availability. With enhanced auditing capabilities providing insights ranging from environment lifecycle operations to billing activities, you’re able to adhere to compliance requirements and are empowered to act on security threats. To learn more, see the documentation.  

Access audit data using Microsoft Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse and Microsoft Power BI 

Security professionals can now use their own Synapse workspace to access Dataverse audit data to comply with their auditing requirements. Power BI can also be used to create and monitor auditing events. This feature is now generally available and for more information, review the documentation. 

New advanced data exfiltration protection and network isolation 

One of the best ways to protect your data is to limit access. Limiting access too broadly, though, can often prevent valid users and trusted sources from accessing data and can slow innovation. Power Platform is introducing new ways to limit access to data while at the same time allowing the right users and apps secure access. 

Secure connections from Power Platform to Azure Virtual Network resources

Customers frequently use Power Platform resources together with Microsoft Azure applications and services hosted within their enterprise network. The new virtual network support for Power Platform allows this type of integration to be done over a private network instead of the public network. Customers can maximize their existing Azure networking investment to enable advanced network isolation that securely integrates with low-code resources without exposing any of them over the public internet.  

The following are examples of what is possible by enabling virtual network support to a Power Platform environment: 

• Use the private outbound connectivity from Dataverse plug-ins to access external data sources within the virtual network. For example, the plug-in could access an API hosted as an Azure application to integrate the logic into the plug-in processing. 

• Use private outbound connectivity from Power Platform to access Azure services such as Microsoft Azure SQL, Microsoft Azure Storage, Microsoft Azure Key Vault, and others using Power Platform connectors. For example, a Microsoft Power Automate cloud flow could securely retrieve data from an Azure SQL table that supports another enterprise application. 

These examples demonstrate how the Virtual Network integration breaks down the barriers to any Virtual Network resource integrating with any low-code app, automation, or copilot. 

Virtual network support is in public preview now and you can review the documentation for details on how to enable it in your environments. 

Protect your Dataverse data with a firewall 

Many organizations want more control over who is accessing their business data. In public preview now is a new IP firewall feature. The IP firewall helps to protect your organizational data in Dataverse by limiting user access to the data from only allowed IP locations. 

The IP firewall analyzes the IP address of each request in real time. For example, suppose the IP firewall is turned on in your production Dataverse environment and allowed IP addresses are in the ranges associated with your office locations and not any external IP location like a coffee shop. If a user tries to access organizational resources from a coffee shop, Dataverse denies access in real time. Learn more about IP firewall and how to enable it in.

Continuous access evaluation  

In today’s modern workplace, a user’s eligibility for business application access can change at any time. Evaluating eligibility for application access only during authentication would not ensure that critical events like a network change are re-evaluated when they occur.   

In public preview today, Power Platform now supports continuous access evaluation, a feature of Microsoft Entra ID. Dataverse will initially support this near real-time evaluation, and support for other Power Platform services will follow. Continuous access evaluation continuously evaluates user access to resources based on Microsoft Entra ID signals, such as critical events and changes in user location. User access to resources can be revoked/reauthenticated in near real-time if a critical event occurs, such as IP location change. 

You can enable continuous access evaluation to help mitigate insider and data exfiltration threats. For example, an employee can’t authenticate while on the corporate network, export a valid access token, and then replay it from an external location. Organizations can also use this for shutting down a terminated user and other scenarios that require immediate response. 

To learn more about the continuous access preview feature, review the documentation. 

Power Platform Managed Identity support

Power Platform Managed Identity will allow organizations to securely connect to Azure resources that support Managed Identity from Power Platform resources like Dataverse plug-ins, connections, and flows without the need for managing the credentials. Additionally, you can enforce conditional access policies on resources within Power Platform. For example, if an organization wants to enforce an Azure policy that allows the use of Power Platform resources from location, and particular device, the Power Platform resource onboarded on Managed Identity will simply honor it.

We are enabling this experience under private preview starting with Dataverse plug-ins this week and in future we will support other experiences on Managed Identity within Power Platform. You can join the private preview program here. 

Microsoft Entra ID Privileged Identity Management support

Use Entra ID Privileged Identity Management to assign admin roles and use Power Platform admin center with the elevated role assignments. For more on this preview feature review the documentation. 

Prevent data exfiltration from Dataverse by controlling apps access

Secure Dataverse environments by allowing only approved apps to access. This is to prevent data exfiltration where employees cannot use apps like Excel or custom apps to download data from a Dataverse environment. This feature is currently in private preview. 

Support for IPv6 starts rolling out 

IPv6 is the latest protocol of network layer of the internet designed to address issues with IPv4, most notably, IPv4 exhaustion. Microsoft will continue to support both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols for Power Platform products and services. 

Customers using IPv6 are requested to ensure their network settings are configured correctly, especially firewall rules to allow IPv6 Service Tags.  Review IPv6 support in Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 for complete details on plans and how to prepare your organization.

Integrating Power Platform into your security operations center 

Organizations are turning to tools like Microsoft Sentinel to provide enterprise overwatch to respond to the increased complexity of detecting, investigating, and mitigating threats. Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native security information event and management platform that provides intelligent security analytics for enterprises and provides security operations center (SOC) analysts with a single pane of glass for threat detection and incident management across the organization. 

Business applications, including low-code solutions, typically don’t expose enough telemetry to the SIEM platforms for adequate threat protection. We are announcing the public preview of Microsoft Sentinel for Power Platform, a comprehensive security and monitoring solution that helps you protect and defend your Power Platform environments. With the solution, organizations can detect and respond to the following type of threats and suspicious activities: 

• Power Apps execution from unauthorized geographies 
• Suspicious data destruction by Power Apps
• Mass deletion of Power Apps 
• Phishing attacks made possible through Power Apps
• Power Automate flows activity by departing employees 
• Microsoft Power Platform connectors added to the environment 
• Update or removal of Microsoft Power Platform data loss prevention policies 

Microsoft Sentinel support for all Microsoft Business Applications  

We are also opening a private preview of an enhanced solution that extends threat detection protection with Sentinel to Dynamics 365 and Power BI, in addition to Power Platform. Customers in the private preview will be able to monitor and secure the entire business application portfolio from a single pane of glass, with substantial content update, including new data connectors, hunting queries, playbooks, workbooks, and many new threat detections scenarios. Sign up now by joining the Security Connection Program (CCP) and selecting “SIEM & XDR” as the product of interest. 

Keeping your organization’s apps and data secure is a priority. With the addition of these new features Power Platform enhances your ability to meet the requirements for your Power Platform solutions and to create a secure and productive workplace for your users. 

Learn more about Power Platform security

• Power Platform security whitepaper
• Low-Code Security and Governance
• Virtual network support documentation
• Continuous access documentation
• Admin audit logging documentation 
• Access Dataverse audit using Synapse documentation 
• Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management documentation 
• Admin audit logging documentation
• Access Dataverse audit using Synapse documentation 

The post Protect enterprise solutions with new Microsoft Power Platform security features  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today, we are excited to launch a new set of prebuilt AI functions that can be easily added to a low-code solution without having to engineer a custom prompt. These prebuilt functions provide a great starting point to combine the power of LLMs and power of low-code, but they are just scratching the surface of what is possible. We will also cover how Projectum, a Microsoft partner, was able to leverage prompt builder, Microsoft Power Platform no-code prompt engineering interface, to build and incorporate custom, generative AI actions into their low-code project management solution. If you do choose to try out custom prompts, then please check out the newly published AI Builder prompt engineering guide for some great strategies on how to get started.

Start with prebuilt functions to quickly implement generative AI capabilities 

Starting today, prebuilt AI functions can be used to quickly incorporate generative AI into your Microsoft Power Apps solutions or your Microsoft Power Automate flows without having to engineer your own prompt. Then, if needed, makers can utilize the prebuilt prompt template and customize it to their needs in Microsoft Copilot Studio. 

These readily accessible AI functions are designed to facilitate common AI-driven tasks across the platform. Whether it’s summarizing emails or conversations, categorizing complaints or reviews, extracting critical information from extensive text, crafting responses or drafts to specific messages, or discerning the sentiment of product evaluations, AI functions provide quick-start access to generative AI capabilities.

Here are some examples of how you can use these ready-made prebuilt prompts today:

• AI Summarize: Summarize text from an email or document and add the summary to a Microsoft Dataverse table record. Your application end users would benefit from the summary and can quickly evaluate the next steps.
• AI Classify: Quickly classify customer inquiries into your own categories to ensure the inquiry is assigned to the correct team. You could use this from your custom copilot to route the inquiry and reduce customer frustration from being redirected multiple times.
• AI Reply: Help staff move past writer’s block by drafting a reply message. For example, draft a reply to a customer’s review of a product.
• AI Extract: Automate data augmentation by extracting data like phone numbers or names of people from incoming correspondence. This saves time and improves data quality by prepopulating the data.
• AI Sentiment: Build in the ability to your apps or automations to quickly check if text is positive, negative, or neutral. For example, for the staff reviewing customer feedback, you could provide an indicator in the application of the sentiment.

Projectum: Empowering project management with AI-driven insights

Projectum is a leader in strategic portfolio management, delivering solutions that streamline project management and yield superior outcomes. Specializing in portfolio management, resource and capacity demand management, and time registration, Projectum is the go-to partner for businesses aiming to turn strategy into successful execution. With Projectum, organizations enhance project delivery, optimize efficiency, and boost their bottom line. 

Last year, Projectum unlocked new product opportunities with generative AI capabilities in its Power PPM (project portfolio management) product. Using AI Builder’s prompt builder, Projectum allows project managers to create strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, identify project risks, summarize project reports, and generate real-time project status updates—all using natural language. With AI Builder’s custom prompts, Projectum can easily control the generative response, invoke prompts via Power Apps, and ensure governance through integrated monitoring. AI Builder also enables Projectum to ground the generative AI’s responses in enterprise knowledge, thereby delivering accurate and relevant responses to its customers. 

“AI Builder and Copilot in Power Platform products have been transformative for Projectum. Our users can now wield powerful AI capabilities right within our Power PPM solution. The ability to create custom prompts, invoke AI-driven SWOT analysis, and generate new types of insights has elevated our product’s value proposition.

It’s a win-win for us and our customers, and we see AI Builder supporting all three categories of Project Management AI use cases: automation (improving approval flows and data summarization), assistance (draft schedules and risks logs), and augmentation (business case validation)” 

— Peter Charquero Kestenholz, Founder and Head of Innovation & AI at Projectum 

Best practices for combining prompts and low-code: AI Builder prompt engineering guide

Prompts act as the foundational elements for integrating generative AI capabilities within Microsoft Power Platform, embedding seamlessly into its comprehensive suite, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio. Facing unlimited possibilities for content generation and data transformation, low-code makers and developers can reference the AI Builder prompt engineering guide for creating efficient and accurate GPT prompts. The following example visualizes a GPT prompt that makers could use to analyze a complaint from a customer on delivery of their order. Makers can incorporate the customer complaint and the shipping policy as input parameters.

Prompts empower makers to develop bespoke AI functions tailored to business needs and binds them as actions to controls in Power Apps. Leveraging Microsoft Power Fx, makers can effortlessly activate these prompts through various user interactions, such as page refreshes or button clicks. The new prompt engineering experience allows the addition of input parameters to prompts, providing a more contextually relevant data input to LLMs at runtime, thereby eliciting more precisely aligned responses from GPT models.

Prompts find significant utility in Copilot Studio, where they can operate as custom AI plugin actions using just natural language. These plugins serve as a powerful method to extend the native capabilities of your copilots, ensuring their responses are finely tuned to meet specific business requirements. Copilots are designed to call upon these custom plugins to fulfill tasks in response to end-user prompts, enabling a custom copilot experience that leverages these uniquely defined plugin actions for relevant user queries.

Furthermore, prompts can play a crucial role in Power Automate, where they simplify the creation of AI-driven actions for intelligent workflow design. By enabling the extraction of data from unstructured sources and transforming it into structured output, prompts enhance the efficiency and intelligence of downstream processing, making them an indispensable tool for building and infusing generative AI capabilities throughout the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem.

How you can get started with prompt builder in AI Builder

• Try prompt builder
• Prompt engineering guide
• Prompts overview documentation
• Learning videos:
  • Overview video
  • GPT prompts with Excel video
• Governance: learn about administrating generative AI features and cross region availability

The post Prompt engineering made easier with AI Builder appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today, we are excited to launch a new set of prebuilt AI functions that can be easily added to a low-code solution without having to engineer a custom prompt. These prebuilt functions provide a great starting point to combine the power of LLMs and power of low-code, but they are just scratching the surface of what is possible. We will also cover how Projectum, a Microsoft partner, was able to leverage prompt builder, Microsoft Power Platform no-code prompt engineering interface, to build and incorporate custom, generative AI actions into their low-code project management solution. If you do choose to try out custom prompts, then please check out the newly published AI Builder prompt engineering guide for some great strategies on how to get started.

Start with prebuilt functions to quickly implement generative AI capabilities 

Starting today, prebuilt AI functions can be used to quickly incorporate generative AI into your Microsoft Power Apps solutions or your Microsoft Power Automate flows without having to engineer your own prompt. Then, if needed, makers can utilize the prebuilt prompt template and customize it to their needs in Microsoft Copilot Studio. 

These readily accessible AI functions are designed to facilitate common AI-driven tasks across the platform. Whether it’s summarizing emails or conversations, categorizing complaints or reviews, extracting critical information from extensive text, crafting responses or drafts to specific messages, or discerning the sentiment of product evaluations, AI functions provide quick-start access to generative AI capabilities.

Here are some examples of how you can use these ready-made prebuilt prompts today:

• AI Summarize: Summarize text from an email or document and add the summary to a Microsoft Dataverse table record. Your application end users would benefit from the summary and can quickly evaluate the next steps.
• AI Classify: Quickly classify customer inquiries into your own categories to ensure the inquiry is assigned to the correct team. You could use this from your custom copilot to route the inquiry and reduce customer frustration from being redirected multiple times.
• AI Reply: Help staff move past writer’s block by drafting a reply message. For example, draft a reply to a customer’s review of a product.
• AI Extract: Automate data augmentation by extracting data like phone numbers or names of people from incoming correspondence. This saves time and improves data quality by prepopulating the data.
• AI Sentiment: Build in the ability to your apps or automations to quickly check if text is positive, negative, or neutral. For example, for the staff reviewing customer feedback, you could provide an indicator in the application of the sentiment.

Projectum: Empowering project management with AI-driven insights

Projectum is a leader in strategic portfolio management, delivering solutions that streamline project management and yield superior outcomes. Specializing in portfolio management, resource and capacity demand management, and time registration, Projectum is the go-to partner for businesses aiming to turn strategy into successful execution. With Projectum, organizations enhance project delivery, optimize efficiency, and boost their bottom line. 
Last year, Projectum unlocked new product opportunities with generative AI capabilities in its Power PPM (project portfolio management) product. Using AI Builder’s prompt builder, Projectum allows project managers to create strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, identify project risks, summarize project reports, and generate real-time project status updates—all using natural language. With AI Builder’s custom prompts, Projectum can easily control the generative response, invoke prompts via Power Apps, and ensure governance through integrated monitoring. AI Builder also enables Projectum to ground the generative AI’s responses in enterprise knowledge, thereby delivering accurate and relevant responses to its customers. 

“AI Builder and Copilot in Power Platform products have been transformative for Projectum. Our users can now wield powerful AI capabilities right within our Power PPM solution. The ability to create custom prompts, invoke AI-driven SWOT analysis, and generate new types of insights has elevated our product’s value proposition.
It’s a win-win for us and our customers, and we see AI Builder supporting all three categories of Project Management AI use cases: automation (improving approval flows and data summarization), assistance (draft schedules and risks logs), and augmentation (business case validation)” 
— Peter Charquero Kestenholz, Founder and Head of Innovation & AI at Projectum 

Best practices for combining prompts and low-code: AI Builder prompt engineering guide

Prompts act as the foundational elements for integrating generative AI capabilities within Microsoft Power Platform, embedding seamlessly into its comprehensive suite, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio. Facing unlimited possibilities for content generation and data transformation, low-code makers and developers can reference the AI Builder prompt engineering guide for creating efficient and accurate GPT prompts. The following example visualizes a GPT prompt that makers could use to analyze a complaint from a customer on delivery of their order. Makers can incorporate the customer complaint and the shipping policy as input parameters.

Prompts empower makers to develop bespoke AI functions tailored to business needs and binds them as actions to controls in Power Apps. Leveraging Microsoft Power Fx, makers can effortlessly activate these prompts through various user interactions, such as page refreshes or button clicks. The new prompt engineering experience allows the addition of input parameters to prompts, providing a more contextually relevant data input to LLMs at runtime, thereby eliciting more precisely aligned responses from GPT models.

Prompts find significant utility in Copilot Studio, where they can operate as custom AI plugin actions using just natural language. These plugins serve as a powerful method to extend the native capabilities of your copilots, ensuring their responses are finely tuned to meet specific business requirements. Copilots are designed to call upon these custom plugins to fulfill tasks in response to end-user prompts, enabling a custom copilot experience that leverages these uniquely defined plugin actions for relevant user queries.

Furthermore, prompts can play a crucial role in Power Automate, where they simplify the creation of AI-driven actions for intelligent workflow design. By enabling the extraction of data from unstructured sources and transforming it into structured output, prompts enhance the efficiency and intelligence of downstream processing, making them an indispensable tool for building and infusing generative AI capabilities throughout the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem.

How you can get started with prompt builder in AI Builder

• Try prompt builder
• Prompt engineering guide
• Prompts overview documentation
• Learning videos:
  • Overview video
  • GPT prompts with Excel video
• Governance: learn about administrating generative AI features and cross region availability

The post Prompt engineering made easier with AI Builder appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.