Upgrade your development pipeline quality 

Power CAT Tools feature suite is designed to streamline your development workflow with capabilities that automate essential tasks and provide insightful guidance based on real-world best practices. Read on to learn about the tools in this powerful suite of features.

Code Review Tool 

Code Review Tool automatically reviews your code to help to ensure adherence to best practices and standards, helping you identify and rectify potential issues early in the development process. 

Code Review Tool automatically reviews code to identify potential issues early in the development process, providing actionable insights and recommendations for optimization and improvement. It meticulously scans the codebase of various platform component types (canvas apps, cloud flows, bots, and more), highlighting areas that require attention and offering a standardized checklist of best practices curated by solution architects in Microsoft.  

This helps developers maintain high standards in their code, reducing the likelihood of errors and enhancing overall performance.

Learn more about code review.

AI-generated solution documentation 

Using AI, solution documentation automates the generation of basic documentation details, significantly reducing the manual effort required. This AI-powered approach helps to ensure that documents are created efficiently and accurately, minimizing human errors and removes the burden of generating basic documentation details, allowing users to focus on more strategic activities and enhancing productivity and efficiency. Simply choose or upload an unmanaged solution, choose the desired document sections, and export to word for quick and easy documentation. 

Read more about AI solution documentation.

Risk assessment 

The Risk assessment feature evaluates potential risks in solutions exposed by security roles and provides actionable mitigation strategies. This proactive approach helps makers and admins address risks collaboratively before and after deployment into production with real business data, helping to ensure the stability and security of their solutions and the system. 

It’s imperative to establish a robust framework for managing security threat tolerance and reducing vulnerability surface area. Whether you’re using Microsoft Dataverse or any other data store, this principle remains crucial. Setting a standard for identifying risks appropriate for your business data’s context is a critical first step. Organizations should define clear guidelines and baseline policies that can systematically evaluate and address potential security threats. This proactive approach helps to ensure that all custom roles are assessed against predefined criteria, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. Continuous monitoring and updating security configurations to adapt to evolving threats is essential for maintaining a strong security posture. 

The Risk assessment tool offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities designed to enhance security and compliance specific to the Dataverse security model and Microsoft Power Platform solutions. This tool is particularly beneficial for both makers and administrators, as it provides automated scanning and compliance checks for custom security roles within Dataverse. By continuously monitoring and evaluating security roles, the tool helps identify potential weaknesses and helps to ensure that roles meet baseline access levels, which can be customized to reflect an organization’s specific security requirements.  

It flags noncompliant roles that do not meet baseline policies defined by administrators, preventing deployment of solutions with noncompliant roles and allowing app owners to take corrective action promptly. Detailed insights into the privileges and clear instructions help app owners understand the potential risks and take appropriate actions to mitigate them to achieve compliance. 

For administrators, the tool offers a unified view of security settings across different environments, making it easier to manage and monitor security roles. It also supports the evaluation of roles against configurable baseline risk ratings, helping administrators enforce compliance and maintain governance throughout the development lifecycle. 

Get more information on Risk assessment.

API playground 

The API Playground, offering a Postman-like experience, allows developers to test and explore APIs seamlessly. This tool is a pre-authenticated software testing environment that helps makers quickly and conveniently interact with Dataverse web API. By eliminating the need for extensive setup or authentication processes, it simplifies the process of integrating and debugging APIs. 

Learn more information on API playground.

Plugin monitor 

The tool provides a convenient, modern interface to easily monitor and analyze plugin performance and behavior, providing insights into efficiency and helping plugin developers optimize their plugins for better performance. Use tracing to troubleshoot low-code and pro-code plug-ins. Tracing helps makers by recording run-time information as an aid in diagnosing the cause of failures, or for general validation of certain states during development. 

Learn more about plugin monitor.

Empowering makers with Power CAT Tools solutions

The Power CAT Tools solution is a distinctive community offering provided by the Microsoft Power CAT team, designed to elevate your development experience beyond what the native platform offers. Built on the low-code platform itself, this open-source repository helps to ensure transparency and offers unique insights into development best practices that are not available natively. The tools suite helps build robust and efficient solutions by making it easier for makers to adhere to best practices. 

Get started with Power CAT Tools today 

To get started with Power CAT Tools, simply download and install the app from the Microsoft AppSource. Configure your development environment to integrate with Power CAT Tools, explore the various features, and begin using the toolkit to enhance your development projects. 

Go to the GitHub repository to get started, or quickly install from AppSource.  

We hope you find Power CAT Tools valuable in your development journey. Thank you for your continued support and contributions. Happy building! 

The post Elevate your Microsoft Power Platform development experience with Power CAT Tools  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Key areas of focus include expanding AI capabilities and agents to automate routine tasks, provide actionable insights, and improve decision-making at every level. This wave introduces enhancements to user experiences, enabling more intuitive workflows, smarter resource management, and greater collaboration. Businesses can benefit from intelligent tools that optimize operations, improve customer engagement, and support strategic growth initiatives.

In addition to productivity and efficiency, this release prioritizes security, governance, and extensibility, helping to ensure businesses can scale confidently while maintaining compliance and control. With these advancements, organizations can take advantage of the full power of AI and agents to transform their operations and deliver exceptional value to their customers. Watch a summary of the release highlights for 2025 release wave 1.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of AI to help sellers meet their targets while boosting seller productivity. Copilot and agents enhance performance and simplify tasks, to help grow your pipeline, sharpen strategies, and accelerate deals. A reimagined user experience ensures sellers never miss the best move. Automated research, ongoing follow-ups, and prioritized tasks provide continuous guidance, allowing you to focus on the right actions to drive success and grow your business. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features included in this release wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will enable agentic capabilities for case and knowledge management, as well as AI-driven routing, while extending Copilot capabilities for customer service representative and supervisor experiences, with a focus on productivity improvements. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Customer Service can benefit your business.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center will transform service experiences with new features to deliver effortless self-service, accelerate assisted service, and drive efficiency. The 2025 release wave 1 introduces Copilot and agent capabilities to automate intent determination for evergreen self-service and autonomous knowledge management.  Additional key features include multi-modal support in customer intent agent, enhanced unified routing features, and new workforce and quality management capabilities.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service introduces Copilot-first experiences that enhance service operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences in 2025 release wave 1. Key features include automated inspection generation from templates, actionable insights for schedulers, quick access to vital information for frontline workers and managers, plus seamless integrations with Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance capabilities are designed with a copilot-first experience, delivering enhanced automation and agentic capabilities. This release focuses on simplifying complex tax management and regulatory compliance, automating account reconciliations with agents, improving bank reconciliation processes, and adding intelligence to planning, along with extensibility and data refresh updates for business performance analytics. Discover how the latest enhancements to Finance can benefit your business in this video.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management advances autonomy by integrating intelligence, automation, and analytics to improve productivity and organizational adaptability. This update enhances operational efficiency by automating supplier communications, improving demand planning accuracy with cell-level explainability and generative insights, and taking advantage of AI in manufacturing to align production data with actual processes.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, contract management, invoicing, time and expense entry, and core transaction processing. The spotlight is on AI-assisted core functionality improvements in what-if analysis, proposal generation, time and expense and approvals. This release will introduce a mobile app for time management and deliver scale improvements to support larger projects and handle higher invoice volumes.

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities will continue enabling AI and autonomous enterprise resource planning (ERP) with capabilities that support ERP application suite in Dynamics 365, including Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, Human Resources, and Project Operations. We’re infusing agent experiences across applications, including chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, and enabling extensibility for agent scenarios along with enterprise-grade security and compliance at scale.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources enhances intelligence, automation, and analytics across the hire-to-separate process to boost productivity and enable business agility. We’re advancing recruiting with AI-driven assessments and integrations with external job boards, including LinkedIn. Additionally, we’re improving benefits and people management experiences for employees and HR business partners through AI-first solutions and automation. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce advances in-store experience by providing a mobile-first point-of-sale that reduces store hardware footprint and boosts sales conversion. The improvements to the payment connector allow modern payments methods, further reducing hardware requirements and offering more purchasing options for customers. Additionally, omni-channel unified pricing enables retailers to establish more intricate pricing structures, helping them remain competitive.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces intelligent AI agents to enhance efficiency and automation for small or medium sized businesses (SMBs). These agents seamlessly integrate to execute complex tasks, generate reports, automate processes, and optimize order creation using natural language processing. This release focuses on manufacturing, sustainability, and electronic document capabilities, along with enhanced Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service integrations.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data powers Copilot and agents with the latest customer insights, enabling your teams to take advantage of this data directly within their daily workflow. Enriched with the latest marketing behavioral interactions and streamlined data ingestion, your business can access up-to-date customer profiles without delays to build each experience upon the last.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys brings the power of AI to engage your customers on new channels so you can create new scenarios and business opportunities. Thanks to advanced journey capabilities, you can optimize interactions with your customers, helping to ensure that each touchpoint is meaningful and impactful. The new forms and event management features not only streamline the lead generation process but also help ensure that high-quality leads are captured and nurtured effectively.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft Power Apps changes how software solutions are built with the plan designer where makers can provide a business problem, and a set of agents helps them build a Microsoft Power Platform software. Apps created using Power Apps are intelligent, powered by a set of extensible agents that support most common tasks like exploring, entering, and summarizing data. Makers can automate common tasks by creating agents from existing apps and deploying them to take care of work autonomously. With integrated ability for users to understand and monitor agent actions, and easy ability to resolve issues when agents hit roadblocks, Power Apps is accelerating the shift to intelligent AI-driven solutions at scale. Watch this video to discover the exciting features launching in this release wave.

Microsoft Power Pages enables businesses to build secure, data-driven portals effortlessly. Recent updates include AI-driven features like Web Agents for multi-platform engagement (email, Teams, WhatsApp), AI-assisted form filling for improved productivity, dynamic list visualizations for better insights, and enhanced governance policies to strengthen security and streamline site deployments.

Microsoft Power Automate is transforming how enterprises automate complex business processes through new human-in-the-loop experiences, including advanced approvals and AI native capabilities, such as generative actions and intelligent document processing. A comprehensive suite of governance, observability, and security controls coming to the automation center and Microsoft Power Platform admin center help to manage complex automations at scale. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Power Automate in this wave.

Microsoft Copilot Studio brings new autonomous agent capabilities; extension of Microsoft 365 Copilot with Custom Agents; new capabilities for the Copilot Studio embedded builder in Microsoft Copilot including support for actions, new enterprise knowledge sources, and the ability to upgrade a declarative agent to Copilot Studio custom agent to access additional capabilities and new conversational channels for custom agents including WhatsApp and SharePoint. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Copilot Studio can benefit your business.

AI Builder in Copilot Studio brings the power of advanced automation to routine processes like email handling, document processing, and image management, helping businesses run smarter and more efficiently. AI Builder has multi-modal content processing capability, which allows businesses to handle various data types—including text, document, and images—within a single natural language instruction. Enhanced Prompt builder tools empower makers to customize AI actions with diverse inputs, expanded data sources from Microsoft Dataverse, and support for generating multiple content types, including documents.

Dataverse is continuing to extend maker experiences by enriching app and agent building capabilities across the platform. Dataverse can seamlessly connect all your data together with an ever-expanding set of external data sources. And with your data together, Dataverse can convert your enterprise data into knowledge, which you can use to customize and extend agents that are built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and the agent builder experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot. These investments are aimed at grounding AI-driven experiences with enterprise knowledge across Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Platform Administration and Governance continues to provide enhanced tools and insights for admins to get the most from Microsoft Power Platform. In this wave. We’re focusing on security, easing adoption and governance of Copilot and agents, and helping enterprises boost the adoption of Microsoft Power Platform at enterprise scale with a modernized admin center experience and a new admin connector for automating admin tasks.

Highlights from Role-based Copilot offerings

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales continues to drive innovation with advanced generative AI capabilities designed specifically for sales-focused roles. In this release, we’re enhancing our assistive features by surfacing further CRM platform insights and recommendations to the sales team across the Microsoft 365 product suite. We’re also streamlining SalesChat™ experiences and driving new agent workflows to put organizations in control of automation experiences and notifications.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for agents within their flow of work. In this release, we’ll be introducing connectivity with any CRM system and inline email summary and drafting.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance enhances efficiency for finance professionals by providing insights that aid strategic decision-making and reduce manual tasks. The 2025 release wave 1 focuses on intelligent automation of variance analysis in Excel, access to external data sources, extending functionalities through Copilot Studio, supporting collections calls in Teams, and taking advantage of generative AI to summarize macroeconomic conditions. Visit the release planner to learn more about upcoming features.

Early access period

Starting February 3, 2025, customers and partners can validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These updates include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled in production environments by April 2025. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2025 release wave 1 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page for more information.

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2025 release wave 1 plan, the Microsoft Power Platform 2025 release wave 1 plan, and the Role-based Copilot offerings 2025 release wave 1. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

The post 2025 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Role-based Copilot offerings appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

After a successful Early Access Program, we are also excited to announce that Microsoft Copilot Studio autonomous agents are now in preview. Copilot Studio enables more customers and users to build powerful autonomous agents for a multitude of use cases. We’re also introducing major updates to Power Platform to enhance developer capabilities. Finally, we’re sharing streamlined management of security and governance for Microsoft Power Platform, including your agents.

Over the past year, we’ve witnessed how reimagining business processes with Copilot and agents has revolutionized what we build, including intelligent apps and AI agents. Additionally, enhancing efficiency through automation and AI has fundamentally changed how we build, unlocking even more rapid low-code development.

Supercharge business processes with agents: Change what we build

For years, Microsoft Power Platform’s AI-infused low-code capabilities have empowered organizations to create and deploy applications with ease. Now, with Copilot as the new UI for AI, any organization can build powerful agents that augment their workforce and execute business processes right inside Copilot Studio—without any coding. Autonomous agents can work independently, detecting events like an email arriving, and use generative AI to trigger a series of actions. By automating complex tasks, these agents can orchestrate workflows and work unprompted alongside or on behalf of users or entire teams.

Autonomous agents now in preview

Since its debut at Microsoft Ignite 2023, Copilot Studio has transformed how businesses apply AI to common conversational workflows. By enabling users to create custom agents with advanced AI integration, we’re empowering organizations to streamline customer engagement, employee experience, and partner relationships.

And the introduction of autonomous agents (preview) is a game-changer. Agents built in Copilot Studio can now operate independently, dynamically planning and learning from processes, adapting to changing conditions, and making decisions without the need for constant human intervention. These autonomous agents can be triggered by data changes, events, and other background tasks—and not just through chat.

We’re also announcing agent library (preview) so users can get a head start by choosing agents based on commonly used scenarios and autonomous triggers (preview), allowing agents to automatically respond to signals across your business and initiate tasks. These advancements make it easy to automate complex tasks and processes.

Agent builder in Microsoft Power Apps now in preview

We’re also announcing the preview of agent builder in Power Apps, enabling organizations to rapidly transition into the AI-first era. By using existing knowledge, logic, and actions already built into the apps they create, makers can develop agents to handle tasks autonomously, eliminating repetitive processes, redefining individual productivity, and improving overall business efficiency.

Stories and benefits from the Copilot Studio autonomous agent Early Access Program

Autonomous agents are expanding the boundaries of what’s possible, enabling the creation of innovative applications and solutions that drive significant business outcomes:

• Accenture, a leading global professional services company that specializes in IT services and management consulting, has created agents to simplify complex operations and boost customer satisfaction.

“Accenture joined Microsoft Copilot Studio’s Early Access Program on autonomous agents and tapped into our deep industry and functional expertise to swiftly create high-impact, agent-driven use cases that drive workforce efficiency and enhance customer experiences. We developed nine powerful agents for Business Operations and Industry, positioned to increase operational efficiency by 40%, raise customer satisfaction scores by 10% to 20%, and lower costs by 15%. The simplicity of Copilot Studio’s agentic platform, ease of use, and configurability played a critical role in our success.”

—Rich Holsman, Senior Managing Director of Global Data and AI, Accenture

• Pets at Home, a leading pet care business in the United Kingdom, has used Copilot Studio to create autonomous agents for specific business workflows. One agent that was created for the profit protection team enabled more efficient case compilation for human review, potentially saving seven figures annually.

“We’re using AI to do the time-consuming work so our colleagues can use all resource and expertise to make decisions quickly based on large amounts of data. It’s truly helped empower colleagues through both the level of information at their fingertips, and in time spent on more nuanced and insightful work. The agent solution allows the profit protection team to more effectively assess cases for potential profit loss and dedicate more of their time to skilled analysis, rather than simply information gathering.”

—William Hewish, Chief Information Officer, Pets at Home

Enhance efficiency with AI in low-code: Change how we build

Microsoft Power Platform has always been focused on enabling rapid development of solutions. With Copilot, that is truer than ever. It is increasingly possible to use natural language, images, and documents to develop applications, automations, and more. This will unlock faster development and make Microsoft Power Platform increasingly accessible.

Plan designer in Power Apps now in preview

The new plan designer in Power Apps (preview) is a game-changer, integrating AI-powered assistance directly into the app creation process. Makers can now simply describe their business challenges and provide context like process diagrams, data models, or even screenshots of legacy applications. From there, Copilot will draft user roles and requirements, which can then be refined or modified with AI assistance. Copilot offers real-time suggestions and automation within a single conversational interface, leading makers from problem definition to solution architecture.

Unlock endless possibilities with deeper Microsoft Azure integration

By integrating Copilot Studio with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry Portal, users can bring their own models, prompts, and knowledge, ensuring a smooth and efficient connection with Azure services—without the need for extensive coding.

Copilot Studio pay-as-you-go with your Azure subscription

As accessing Azure AI capabilities in Copilot Studio becomes more common, flexible pricing has become essential. On December 1, 2024, Microsoft will introduce an option to buy Copilot Studio messages with pay-as-you-go consumptive billing through existing Azure subscriptions. This pricing option empowers developers to harness the full potential of Azure AI, while providing the flexibility needed to scale and adapt to changing demands.

Empower administrators with streamlined governance and security

In 2022, we transformed governance with managed environments, empowering tens of millions of citizen developers around the world.

Now, we’re taking it further with managed security and managed operations. These new features bring advanced threat protection, proactive alerts, and seamless disaster recovery to Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, Copilot Studio, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Integrated directly into the reimagined Power Platform admin center, these capabilities ensure your business applications are secure, scalable, and always performing at their best.

Embrace the future of AI-first development

The integration of Copilot and autonomous agents is further revolutionizing development in Microsoft Power Platform. These advancements are not just about automating processes; they are reshaping the landscape of digital innovation. Microsoft Power Platform enables organizations to become AI-first companies—innovating faster, making smarter decisions, and delivering greater value to their customers.

Explore Microsoft Power Platform blogs and sessions for Microsoft Ignite 2024

Copilot Studio introduces autonomous agents, agent library:

• Blog: Learn more about this update
• Breakout: What’s new with Copilot Studio and agents
• Breakout: Extending M365 Copilot with Copilot agents: Best practices
• Breakout: Reinventing business processes with autonomous agents 

Copilot Studio and Azure AI announce new tools for developers:

• Blog: Learn more about this update
• Keynote: Microsoft Ignite Keynote
• Breakout: Better together: Copilot Studio and Azure AI
• Breakout: Developers guide to building your own agents

Copilot Studio enhances platform with new updates:

• Blog: Learn more about this update
• Breakout: What’s new with Copilot Studio and agents
• Breakout: Get the most of your enterprise knowledge with Copilot Studio
• Breakout: Get started with best-in-class Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio
• Breakout: Ground Microsoft 365 Copilot in your business knowledge

New capabilities in Power Apps help leverage AI for business productivity:

• Blog: Learn more about this update
• General session: Unlock the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio
• Breakout: The Future of Power Platform: Intelligent Apps
• Breakout: Building intelligent applications with AI and Power Apps
• Breakout: Unlock Productivity with AI in Power Apps
• Breakout: Deep Dive: Create, monitor and optimize enterprise apps with Power Apps
• Theater: Building complete solutions with Copilot and Power Apps

New AI and governance features in Microsoft Power Automate:

• Blog: Learn more about this news
• Breakout: Unlock innovation with practical strategies in Power Automate
• Breakout: Revolutionize the way you work with Power Automate and AI 
• Breakout: Automate email, doc, and image processing with GPT in Power Automate

Power Platform Admin Center simplifies security and governance experience:

• Blog: Learn more about this news
• Breakout: Enterprise Scale: The Future of Power Platform Governance
• Theater: Leveraging rich visibility to secure AI driven business applications
• Theater: Getting the most out of the new Power Platform Admin Center

The post Redefine development: AI-first innovation with agents and Microsoft Copilot in Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We’ve got an action-packed schedule lined up, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to dive deep into Microsoft Power Platform technical readiness and best practices. You’ll also gain hands-on experience with the technology and learn how to apply it in real-world scenarios. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting your journey with Microsoft Power Platform, this conference is designed to provide you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. But it’s not just about the sessions and workshops; it’s about the connections we make and the community we continue to build. 

Microsoft Power Platform

Cut costs and development time with low-code tools.

Learn more

The latest innovations in Microsoft Power Platform

In case you missed it this morning, Charles Lamanna delivered an inspiring keynote, highlighting the latest innovations and future directions for Microsoft Power Platform. His keynote was followed by Jeff Teper and Kim Manis, who brought us the latest and greatest news on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Fabric. Here’s a quick overview of the key takeaways: 

• Microsoft Power Automate AI recording for desktop flows—public preview: AI Recorder simplifies the creation of desktop flows by reducing errors associated with recording clicks and keystrokes. It offers a “show and tell” experience, making it easy for users of all skill levels to record desktop flows.

• Power Automate generative actions with inline cloud flows—EAP: This feature enables users to create and manage cloud flows directly within their workspace in Power Automate, enhancing productivity and streamlining workflows. 

• Desktop flows from natural language—public preview: The ability for users to generate desktop flows in Power Automate using natural language is now in public preview, simplifying the automation process and making it more accessible. 

• Two-action panes in the Power Automate designer—generally available: Gain a more flexible and efficient design experience in Power Automate designer by allowing users to work with multiple action panes simultaneously. 

• Coauthoring in Microsoft Power Apps—generally available: Coauthoring enables multiple makers to work on different parts of a canvas app simultaneously, speeding up development and making collaboration seamless and efficient. 

• Generate a plan with Copilot in Power Apps—limited preview: This will now help users generate detailed plans for their Power Apps projects, facilitating better planning and execution. 

• GitHub Copilot in Power Pages—public preview: Professional developers using GitHub Copilot chat in Microsoft Visual Studio can now leverage a Microsoft Power Pages agent for page-specific coding assistance, blending pro-code with low-code and moving website development into the AI future. 
• Copilot agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio—public preview: Copilot agents boost productivity by automating tasks and retrieving information quickly. Integrated with Microsoft 365 Copilot, they enhance workflows by connecting to your organization’s knowledge and data sources. Read more about our announcement on Copilot Agents in this blog, published on September 16, 2024.
• Agent builder—public preview: Agent builder is a new, lightweight Copilot Studio experience that makes it simple for users of any skill level to build Copilot agents directly within BizChat and SharePoint and publish them as Copilot extensions. Read more about our announcement. 
• Enhanced Copilot Studio capabilities: The core platform now features GPT-4o as the default model, offering more precise answers than GPT-3.5 Turbo. Copilot Studio can handle larger knowledge sources (up to 512MB) and interpret images, diagrams, and tables in PDFs, enhancing its accuracy, efficiency, and versatility for modern businesses.

Explore opportunities to connect at the Power Platform Community Conference

As mentioned, there are so many opportunities to connect with fellow Microsoft Power Platform enthusiasts so hold on to your hats! Here’s what you can look forward to: 

• Keynote presentations: Ryan Cunningham will be hosting a thrilling panel discussion on security, research, and intelligent applications with Thomas Dohmke, Vasu Jakkal, and Jamie Teevan. They’ll be talking about the future of technology in the era of AI on Friday, September 20, 2024. 

• Breakout sessions: With more than 100 breakout sessions, you’ll have the chance to dive deep into Microsoft Power Platform technical readiness and best practices. 

• Hands-on workshops: Don’t hesitate to participate in one of the 20 full-day workshops to get hands-on experience with new Microsoft Power Platform technology and learn how to apply it in real-world scenarios. 

• Ancillary activities: Enjoy 15 additional activities, including meetups, community activation events, and even talent shows. 

• Show floor: Explore more than 60 partner booths and visit the Microsoft Booth to engage one-on-one with Microsoft experts, see product demos, collect unique event stickers and pins, and attend additional theater content in our dedicated theater space.  

Continuous product innovation with Microsoft Copilot and AI 

Finally, we want to extend a huge thank you to you, the Power Platform community, for your continued support and enthusiasm. Your feedback and engagement drive our innovation and success. The Power Platform community is a vibrant and diverse group of individuals who are passionate about driving change and making a difference. The impact of the developments contributed by this group extends beyond just our immediate projects, influencing broader industry trends and setting the stage for future advancements.  

This week is a celebration of that spirit, and we’re excited to see the amazing things that will come out of this conference as the insights shared during this event are invaluable. So, let’s dive in, learn, share, and make this the best PPCC yet!  

Looking ahead, don’t forget to register for Microsoft Ignite, taking place in November 18–22, 2024, for even more exciting innovations on the horizon for Microsoft Power Platform. You can also always stay connected throughout this week and post-conference by joining the Power Platform LinkedIn Community. This is the home of all ongoing product updates and insights, but also a place to share your experiences and connect with each other.  

The post AI-powered business innovation with the Power Platform Community appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Explore new opportunities for applying AI to your unique business needs.

Try for free today

An agent is an AI assistant designed to automate and execute business processes, working with you or for you. They can build capacity for every individual, team, and organization—from sales to marketing to customer service, and more—enabling you to scale impact like never before.

Agents come in all shapes and sizes. They help you retrieve information from grounding data and reason over it to summarize or answer questions. More capable agents take actions when asked, replacing repetitive tasks, and the most advanced agents will be autonomous, operating independently to create plans, orchestrate other agents, and learn to know when to escalate to an employee.

With Copilot Studio, you can create and publish agents to all kinds of channels, including Microsoft Teams, your website, or your customer engagement hubs, and we’ve seen great customer momentum with more than 50,000 organizations having used Copilot Studio to date. 

We’re announcing two new capabilities for Copilot Studio:

• First, agents built in Copilot Studio can now be published directly into Microsoft 365 Copilot, surfacing right in the user’s flow of work.
• Second, we’re unveiling a new Copilot Studio experience that empowers users of any skill level to create agents right from within Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat and SharePoint.

These new features will be rolling out in general availability to all Microsoft 365 Copilot customers over the coming weeks. 

Publish Copilot agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot agents enable you to enhance Copilot’s capabilities by connecting to your organization’s knowledge and data sources. When Copilot can draw from valuable data in SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics 365, or your line of business systems, it becomes significantly smarter about your business and its processes. You can also expand Copilot’s capabilities by equipping it with new skills, such as sending emails, updating records, or creating support tickets. And Copilot agents are capable of integrating with your existing line of business systems, enabling them to take action wherever it’s needed.

Users can find agents in a new Copilot agent store in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat, Teams, and the Microsoft 365 app, and they can use these agents by mentioning them (@mention) or by interacting directly with them. IT admins can curate the catalog of agents available in the store from the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Empower users of any skill level to create agents

When it comes to agent creation, we’re excited to introduce a new, lightweight Copilot Studio experience that makes it simple for users of any skill level to build an agent directly within Business Chat and SharePoint. This new experience will roll out in general availability to all customers through October.

With it, you can tell Copilot Studio what you want your agent to do using natural language, and easily choose which knowledge sources you’d like to integrate from across your organization’s data, whether it’s specific documents or entire databases. When you’re ready, the agent can be used by you, shared with a select group, or deployed to an entire organization. Building an agent in SharePoint is even easier and you can create agents in SharePoint with a few clicks, no coding skills required.

You can continue to customize these or any agents in the full Copilot Studio editor, adding more advanced capabilities including autonomy. As we announced at Build 2024, we believe autonomous agents will fundamentally change business processes. We’re actively working with enterprise customers who are building autonomous agents in Copilot Studio as part of our private preview, and we look forward to sharing more later this calendar year about how users can build and use autonomous agents.

Manage agents with centralized controls

We believe organizations that embrace AI will create and use many agents. Copilot Studio provides a trusted environment that delivers confidence through comprehensive policies, access controls, and agent management, all easily managed within the admin center. This includes the ability to control agent creation, sharing, and use, which allows organizations to meet their security, compliance, and governance goals.

Furthermore, the data used to ground agents remains securely within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary, adhering to your organization’s labeling and policy guidelines. When extending your agents through Copilot Studio, your data remains in the Microsoft Azure tenant boundary with security layers to prevent invalid authentication and authorization and data loss prevention (DLP) policies for additional control. And all of this is built on Microsoft’s Responsible AI and Enterprise Data Protection standards.

Ultimately, in a world where AI is rapidly transforming how we work, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio offer new opportunities for applying AI to your unique business needs. By empowering users to create, tailor, and deploy agents of all types, Microsoft is making advanced AI accessible and valuable to everyone.

• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Learn more about Microsoft Copilot Studio governance. 
• Read the Microsoft 365 blog post about Copilot Wave 2.
• Join us at the Power Platform Community Conference to see how Microsoft is transforming the developer experience. 
• Get in touch with a Microsoft representative today.

The post Unveiling agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio to supercharge your business appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The upcoming wave is centered around utilizing advanced AI and Microsoft Copilot technologies to enhance user productivity and streamline operations across diverse business applications. These enhancements include intelligent automation, AI-powered insights, and immersive user experiences that are designed to break down barriers between data, insights, and individuals. Watch a summary of the release highlights. 

Discover the latest features that empower organizations to operate more efficiently and adaptively. From AI-driven sales insights and customer service enhancements to predictive analytics in supply chain management and autonomous financial processes, the new capabilities enable businesses to proactively address challenges and capitalize on opportunities. 

Highlights from Dynamics 365 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to enhance customer understanding and boost sales through data, intelligence, and user-friendly experiences. In this release, we are focused on including natural language copilot for summarizing information, creating a new full-screen Copilot Home with curated insights and role-specific actions, and using AI-powered insights to find leads. Watch this video to discover the new and enhanced features included in this release wave. 

Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to deliver and enhance cutting-edge generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities with sales-specific workflows, data, and actions. We will focus on using AI-powered insights to create leads, deepen the integration into Copilot in Microsoft 365, and use natural language capabilities to allow sellers to ask data-related questions of their CRM. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through new copilot capabilities such as proactive prompting, ability to access data from external systems securely with plugins, email enhancements, and AI-infused routing. Watch this video to discover how the latest enhancements to Customer Service can benefit your business. 

Microsoft Copilot for Service is now generally available, bringing new capabilities to enhance user experiences. These features will be integrated across Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 Chat, and Copilot embedded in third-party CRMs. View this video about the features launching in this wave for Copilot for Service. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center will add new features for voice, messaging, Copilot, AI-infused routing, and contact center operations including out of box support for additional CRMs. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Dynamics 365 Contact Center this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enables a shift from reactive to proactive and predictive service, empowering digital transformation and innovative business models. Using Copilot, frontline workers will be able to retrieve critical information and initiate mixed-reality remote assist calls within Teams through Copilot. Managers will be able to create, update, and manage work orders effortlessly across web, Outlook, and Teams interfaces. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance continues its journey of leading in autonomous finance, using AI to transform common end-to-end financial processes. This release focuses on in-app copilot capabilities, immersive persona-based user experiences, expanding country coverage, electronic invoicing enhancements, business performance analytics and planning enhancements, and autonomous reconciliation capabilities. Discover how the latest enhancements to Finance can benefit your business in this video. 

Microsoft Copilot for Finance is expanding data reconciliation capabilities in Excel with assisted data sanitization and preparation routines. Extending variance analysis capabilities with support from additional data sources and enabling collaboration on findings with stakeholders will also be a focus in the upcoming wave. Additionally, the Teams integration will facilitate collections calls with suggested scripts and automated recording of action items in the financial system. Check out this video to see the exciting new features releasing in Microsoft Copilot for Finance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is advancing along the path of an autonomous supply chain by integrating intelligence, automation, and analytics into every facet of business procedures, thereby improving user productivity and enhancing organizational adaptability. In this update, the spotlight is on improving order-promising capabilities for manufacturers. Demand planning is upgraded to incorporate forecasting with external signals, and the inclusion of Copilot weaves insights and analyses directly into workflows, identifying trends and irregularities, while also allowing for specific data inquiries at the cell level. Additionally, Traceability Copilot keeps track of actual products in production and compiles a comprehensive historical record of related activities. Watch this video to discover the exciting features launching in this release wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations is focused on enhancing usability, performance, and scalability in key areas such as project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing. The spotlight is on AI-assisted core functionality improvements in estimation, proposal generation, journals, approvals, and contract management, with added mobile capabilities and scale improvements to handle larger projects and invoices at an increased scale. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in Project Operations this wave. 

Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities will continue to invest in capabilities applying to Finance, Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources, and Project Operations. We are infusing copilot experiences across applications, including natural language chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, and enabling extensibility for copilot scenarios. We will also bring more value and insights to finance and operations apps data and enhancements to ensure continued enterprise-grade security and compliance at scale. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to build intelligence, develop automation and analytics around the hire-to-separate process, increase user productivity, and empower business agility. We are enhancing recruiting with AI-driven assessments and offer management, improving experiences for employees and HR business partners in benefits and performance management, and advancing analytics, insights, and planning through business performance planning and analytics capabilities. View this video to learn more about the features releasing in this wave. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is using the power of AI to empower retailers to streamline their operations and drive increased customer loyalty and conversions. With Copilot, retail managers, sales associates, and merchandisers will gain new AI-powered insights into customer buying patterns and preferences, recommendations for positioning and selling products, and business intelligence on store performance. Improvements to the self-checkout POS make customer checkouts more efficient, and user experience updates to Store Commerce app streamline daily tasks for faster, more efficient sales and service. Watch this video to see the new features releasing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is focused on maintaining service reliability performance and security standards. We’ll continue enhancing productivity by optimizing core processes with Copilot, expanding to cover more than 170 countries, and offering enhanced reporting with more than 80 Microsoft Power BI reports. Additionally, integration with Field Service will be expanded, along with new financial management features. We will also enhance development tools and governance, along with improved data privacy and compliance management. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist will bring significant improvements to the quality of Mixed Reality (MR) annotations in Teams mobile for both iOS and Android users. The update will enhance the accuracy of MR ink on irregular and complex surfaces, making it easier for remote experts and technicians to collaborate seamlessly. Mixed Reality annotations in Teams mobile will be generally available in the next wave, along with ongoing investments in stability, performance optimization, and usability improvements across HoloLens 2 and iOS and Android applications. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Data empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, leveraging it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. This release enables you to streamline data integration by using Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric, attach your data in OneLake to Customer Insights, accelerate time to insights with data in Data Lake format, increase control when attaching to data in Dataverse, and seamlessly generate insights from marketing. Discover how these latest enhancements can benefit your business in this video. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys brings the power of AI to redefine the workflow for marketers, enabling them to be more productive than ever before. Businesses can optimize every interaction with their customers with end-to-end journeys across departments and channels. With this release, you will have more flexibility and control when it comes to journeys, managing your web forms and tailoring Copilot to your business. Watch this video to learn about the new features releasing in this wave. 

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform 

Watch this video to explore the exciting new features releasing across Microsoft Power Platform. 

Microsoft Power Apps will continue to transform app experiences with infused intelligence, enabling users to be more productive by using Copilot to work with data, get insights, and improve their apps. Makers will continue to benefit from AI-assisted development, enabling rich and complex applications to be built with monitoring, control, and unmatched governance for admins, ensuring organizations can adopt low-code and AI transformation at scale. 

Microsoft Power Pages will expedite site building for a low-code maker or pro developer to build intelligent sites that reimagine the way you interact with your employees, customers, and partners. 

Microsoft Power Automate will continue to make it easier to build flows by using natural language and multi-modal generative AI capabilities across cloud flows and desktop flows, troubleshooting runs, and managing your automation estate with an end-to-end view. This, along with improvements in process mining to jumpstart creation of automation through Microsoft 365 integration and ongoing improvements to scaling, means it’ll be easier than ever for new users to get started and scale. 

Microsoft Copilot Studio is advancing copilot capabilities and IVR support with Customer Service and will expand geographically to the United Arab Emirates and Germany. Additionally, the team is improving software lifecycle management capabilities with topic-level import/export and role-based access control (RBAC), as well as enhancing governance and administration functionalities. 

AI Builder is investing in Prompt Builder for creating and deploying GPT prompts with enterprise data to enhance flows, apps, data tables, and copilots. We are also enhancing Intelligent Document Processing with a new validation station in Power Automate, application lifestyle management (ALM) support, and pre-built AI models for translation, classification, and personally identifiable information (PII) detection. Lastly, we’ll improve AI governance through capacity management, data policies, and including AI Builder capacity in the Power Apps developer plan. 

Microsoft Dataverse is enhancing the maker experience by boosting app building productivity with Copilot, ensuring seamless connectivity to external data and knowledge sources, and integrating AI-powered Enterprise Copilot in Microsoft 365. These investments aim to streamline development and use AI for more efficient and intelligent solutions. 

Governance and administration continues to advance via tools and insights that empower Microsoft Power Platform admin to easily get their job done. This wave focuses on governing Copilot adoption and easily securing low-code assets, helping enterprises boost adoption of Microsoft Power Platform solutions in their organization while keeping their digital environment safe. 

Early access period 

Starting July 29, 2024, customers and partners can validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These updates include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled in production environments by October 2024. Take advantage of the early access period to test these updates and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Explore the 2024 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform or visit the early access FAQ page for more information. 

For a complete list of new capabilities, please refer to the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 2 plan and the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 2 plan. We also encourage you to share your feedback in the community forums for Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform. 

The post 2024 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform now available  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This morning’s Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, available to view on-demand, includes highlights and demonstrations of features from the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Lenovo, Sonepar, Ford, Omnicom Group, and G&J Pepsi are using these capabilities in transformative ways.  

Extend Microsoft 365 with role-specific Copilot capabilities

The central theme across this release wave is how, across the business and productivity applications organizations depend on, Copilot is helping to better empower employees, improve business processes, and engage customers. In fact, 68% of surveyed Copilot users told us that it helps them jumpstart their creative process, and 70% said Copilot made them more productive so that they could do their job faster and easier.¹

Since each role is unique, we have extended Copilot for Microsoft 365 even further to tailor Copilot experiences for specific business functions. This includes Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Service and the recently announced Microsoft Copilot for Finance—all integrated with the apps and data you use every day so that you can spend less time searching for data and more time engaging with customers and driving a strategic agenda for your organization.

Underpinning these Copilot extensions is Microsoft Copilot Studio, which makes it easy to customize and build your own customer and internal-facing copilots using your data and workflows. We are excited to dive deeper into Copilot this release wave and help you use it to transform your business.

Business Applications Launch Event

Tune into demos of new capabilities, on demand.

Watch here

Transforming customer and field service with generative AI 

Release wave 1 introduces new Copilot capabilities to help customer service agents and frontline workers boost efficiency, reduce training costs, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Copilot for Service—which infuses generative AI into your existing contact center and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions—include Copilot-drafted knowledge articles to streamline the knowledge creation process, as well as proactive Copilot responses for conversations with customers. 

At the launch event, we shared how Lenovo is integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Service, third-party solutions, and custom bots to scale its innovative service delivery solution, Premier Support Suite for PC devices. Thousands of agents can now provide omnichannel support to customers in 200 regions and in more than 40 languages globally.   

We also spotlight how G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottler in the U.S., has reduced operating costs by 6.6% and increased revenue by 8% with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Power Platform. They expect Copilot to further streamline work order management and enhance their best-in-class service by giving the field service teams access to a complete picture of their accounts in real time.   

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot for Service, and Dynamics 365 Field Service.  

The future of enterprise resource planning (ERP)

ERP is going through a once-in-a-generation transformation. For decades, employees across the globe have manually completed a significant amount of ERP processes daily to keep their companies running. Microsoft is pioneering a new vision for ERP—a world where ERP solutions powered by AI operate more independently, continually adjusting to evolving circumstances, involving users when necessary, and opening new possibilities for businesses.  

At the launch event, we spotlighted how Omnicom Group, a global leader in marketing communications, envisions leveraging Dynamics 365 for a new, autonomous ERP model that will help it to accelerate growth, become more efficient, and power its ability to innovate. They can use the new Copilot to optimize their strategic decision-making and transform their operational processes, such as prompting Copilot to identify opportunities for growth expansion and gauge the performance of initiatives.  

We also introduced new Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that help small and medium businesses to automate processes and complete tasks faster. A new Copilot chat pane allows users to quickly find and go to data, reveal insights, and get help with tasks. Users can prompt Copilot to create sales lines, match e-invoices with purchase orders, answer questions about data analyses, help with repetitive tasks, and more.  

Other updates include sustainability tracking, the ability to connect Business Central with Shopify B2B (business-to-business), and developer tools for Copilot.  

Explore the release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Copilot for Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Business Central.  

Accelerate development with Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform is the rapid modernization platform of choice of hundreds of thousands of organizations, providing AI-first, low-code tools to build enterprise-wide solutions and automations. Copilot is seamlessly integrated across Microsoft Power Platform, empowering you to create applications, automations, and analytics through simple, natural language and conversational interactions.  

At the launch event, we demonstrate how Ford is leveraging Copilot to produce connected services to enhance the driving experience. Like Ford, organizations can take advantage of new Copilot capabilities in this release wave to transform workflows. Microsoft Power Automate introduces new ways to create cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining using natural language prompts. Microsoft Power Apps accelerates app development with enhanced user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. Microsoft Copilot Studio enables organizations to build custom copilots, with new ways to build custom prompts and generative actions, along with access to OpenAI’s custom GPTs and AI Builder models for extended scenarios.   

Explore the release plans for Power Apps, Microsoft Power Pages, Power Automate, Microsoft Power BI, and Copilot Studio.  

Deliver more personalized customer experiences  

Buyers expect businesses to cater to their unique set of needs. To do so, marketing and sales teams need a unified understanding of the customer and the ability to orchestrate experiences across marketing, sales, and service.  

Sonepar is leveraging Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to become the first global B2B electrical distributor to provide a fully digitized and synchronized omnichannel experience to every customer. With Copilot alongside sellers, Sonepar can personalize marketing content, improve the quality of leads, and enhance every engagement with customers.  

New Copilot capabilities in release wave 1 provide recommendations, summarize data, retrieve information, and perform actions in context and within the flow of work—so they can stay productive and focus time on engaging customers.  

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event  

We invite you to tune into the launch event on-demand for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.  

Be sure to read the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan in the release planner.  

Sources:

¹ Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report: What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? (microsoft.com) 

The post 2024 release wave 1 kicks off with hundreds of AI-powered capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

As organizations expand their Microsoft Power Platform footprint to meet the needs of their users for application modernization and the inclusion of Microsoft Copilot, administrators can utilize premium features such as managed environments to govern at-scale quickly and easily, while increasing visibility and control. However, as more environments are deployed, administrators need a way to streamline governance and ensure consistency. 

One of the reasons why Microsoft Power Platform is becoming more popular and widely adopted in organizations is its ability to enable rapid application development and innovation. Microsoft Power Platform allows users of different skill levels to create and customize apps, workflows, chatbots, and reports that suit their business needs, using low-code or no-code tools. Microsoft Power Platform also integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Teams, as well as with external data sources and services. By using Microsoft Power Platform, organizations can empower their employees to solve problems, automate processes, and improve efficiency, without compromising security or compliance. 

In our effort to increase efficiency and streamline the process of managing Microsoft Power Platform, we’re thrilled to introduce the public preview of Microsoft Power Platform environment groups and rules and the newest capabilities of environment routing.  

Explore more about environment groups and rules in the official documentation. 

Making governance at-scale even easier 

Environment groups empower admins to establish governance policies through customizable rules, ensuring consistency across environments and eliminating chaos. Microsoft Power Platform administrators can create environment groups. These groups serve as holders for related environments. You can use environment groups to organize your environments by department, project, cost center, or any other relevant criteria, offering a systematic way to manage collection of environments in aggregate. 

In each environment group, administrators can uniformly apply six key capabilities of managed environments to all associated environments. These include setting sharing restrictions for canvas apps, utilizing AI to generate app and solution summaries, and enforcing best practices with solution checker—eliminating the need for manual solution checking. This initial suite of rules is just the beginning, with plans to expand in the near future, providing Microsoft Power Platform administrators even greater control over their environment groups.  

By joining a group, an environment automatically follows all of the group’s rules. You don’t need to set it up manually. This makes sure that all environments in the group are aligned with the basic standards from the start. To ensure that each environment in an environment group maintains the configuration settings determined at the environment group level, the administrators of those single environments within the group will not be able to alter those settings and fall out of compliance with any configured rules.  

Why is default environment routing important? 

Thanks to environment groups, these environments come preloaded with essential admin settings, including sharing limits and solution-checker, making adoption a breeze for Microsoft Power Platform admins. Previously, new makers had to figure out which environment to work in. With default environment routing, this decision happens automatically. Default environment routing is a feature that automatically directs new makers to their personal developer environments instead of the default environment. 

Personal developer environments are individual workspaces, similar to Microsoft OneDrive, where makers can confidently build apps and solutions using Microsoft Dataverse without worrying about others accessing their work, assets, and artifacts. Admins no longer need to be concerned about makers accidentally working in the default environment, where their work might conflict with others. 

When combining with environment groups and rules, these environments come preconfigured with environment-level governance settings, including sharing limits and solution checker. This feature helps new makers to avoid confusion and conflicts when working in Microsoft Power Platform and helps admins to manage their environments more easily. 

What are the key points to remember? 

• Preview feature: Keep in mind that this feature is currently in preview. While it provides early access for feedback, it’s not intended for production use and may change or be discontinued in the future. 
• Managed environments: All developer environments created through environment routing are managed environments as are all environments in a group. These environments require premium licenses for running Microsoft Power Platform assets. 
• Developer plan: Managed environments are not included as an entitlement in the developer plan, which is a free plan for individual developers to learn and build solutions. Learn more about the Microsoft Power Apps developer plan. 

Next steps 

Environment groups and rules streamline management with efficient oversight over multiple environments using a centralized, consistent approach. This ensures uniform standards and configurations across all environments, significantly enhancing developer efficiency by providing ready-made, pre-configured environments that eliminate the need for manual setup. Consequently, this uniform governance simplifies administration and reduces overhead, leading to a more efficient development process. We’re excited to see how organizations continue to develop their Microsoft Power Platform adoption, build centers of excellence, and provide the tools needed for organizations to build modern, enterprise-scale solutions safely and securely.  

We value your feedback and want to hear from you on what features and improvements you would like to see added to environment groups and rules. Throughout 2024, we’ll be enhancing environment groups based on user input. Stay tuned for exciting updates. 

Microsoft Power Platform

Introducing the public preview of Microsoft Power Platform environment groups and rules.

Learn more here

The post Increase efficiency with Microsoft Power Platform governance 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.

Extending your Copilot and conversational experience with enterprise data using plugins

Customers have been asking how they can use Copilot to tap into enterprise data, remove data silos, and improve productivity and collaboration. With plugins, customers can ensure their copilots can securely integrate with this most critical line of business data. At Ignite, we are announcing the ability to extend your Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Power Platform plugins and Microsoft Copilot Studio. We’re introducing three ways in which customers can leverage the power of data inside Copilot for Microsoft 365 or their own Microsoft Power Platform copilots.  

1. Using the existing Microsoft Power Platform connector ecosystem of more than 1,100 live connectors, customers and partners can enable their users to access and update data from external systems. Customers can leverage existing certified Microsoft Power Platform connectors as Microsoft Copilot Studio Topics, which in turn can enrich Copilot for Microsoft 365. 

We are extending the capabilities of our more than 50 intelligent supply chain solutions with Microsoft Power Platform, [Microsoft] Fabric, and Copilot. For instance, Accenture’s supplier risk control tower solution builds the digital twin using Dataverse and Fabric to predict delays and offers recommendations to supply chain operators through the copilot for real-time collaboration with suppliers and automated execution to mitigate disruptions. Through the Power of 3 with Microsoft, Accenture, and Avanade, we are able to infuse rich data and intelligence through Copilot into the broader Microsoft 365 and business application ecosystem, thus enhancing decision making and overall productivity for our clients. 

– Kumar Majety, Cloud Supply Chain Solution Lead, Accenture 

2. With prompt builder, customers can build, test, and deploy AI prompts that will instruct copilots to perform specific actions when asked. In addition, prompts can be grounded in business data to customize your prompts with real-time business data. For example, makers can teach Copilot to produce a specific case summary, case classification, or draft an email reply according to their company policy and based on their company’s case history stored in Dataverse.

3. With Power Automate flow plugins, users can expose the tasks they have in Microsoft Planner by asking “What are my planner tasks?” Similarly, users can find the list of approvals assigned to them by asking “List my approvals.”  

Companies, developers, and ISVs can extend their products into Copilot using plugins 

Our partners have expressed their excitement about taking part in the age of AI. Enabling their products and services as plugins across low-code applications allows them to become part of the extensibility opportunity. ISVs can leverage existing Microsoft Power Platform connectors for creating AI plugins or import existing OpenAI plugins to use in public preview.

“We are thrilled to participate with Microsoft in this age of AI and provide value to our joint customers. The introduction of Power Platform connector as a plugin for Microsoft Copilot opens up an entirely new set of ways for our clients to deliver exceptional customer service.” 

– Kumar Krishnasami, Founder and CEO, Desk365 

Accelerate content generation scenarios with AI Builder GPT prompts 

Generative AI and Microsoft Power Platform create a powerful combination to bring to life next-generation workflows.  

To enable more organizations to leverage the power of generative AI, we are excited to announce the general availability of GPT prompts within AI Builder. Prompts are how users can interact with large language models like GPT, instructing the next generation of AI models to perform specific tasks. However, starting from zero can be tough, but by using AI Builder, users can now integrate generative AI prompts within their Power Automate workflows, Power Apps, Dataverse tables, and copilots. To help users get started, a prebuilt library of ready-to-use prompts is available and includes common scenarios like summarization, classification, content extraction, translation, and sentiment analysis. The prompts also comply with Microsoft’s approach to responsible AI. Users can also craft their own prompts, grounded with company data to produce specific outputs that are unique to their business.  

Build apps better and faster with Dataverse and Copilot AI assistance

Copilot in Power Apps is an AI companion that lets low-code makers easily create apps from ideas through natural language or from existing data in Excel and is one of the fastest-growing ways to build enterprise-ready business solutions backed by Dataverse.

The following capabilities are now generally available: 

1. From ‘idea to app’ within a few minutes using natural language

Makers can describe the app that they want to build and have a Dataverse table and app generated through an interactive Copilot AI-assisted experience. Previously, many makers would spend multiple days gathering requirements, building a prototype, getting feedback, testing, and iterating with business users. Now, with Copilot-assisted app creation, makers can prototype an app faster than ever before, and iterate with business users to build the desired business apps.  

2. Import from Excel to build your apps

Makers can use Copilot AI assistance and the power of Dataverse to import data from Excel to create configurable tables in minutes. Makers were previously facing issues when wanting to scale their app from Excel to a wider audience and use cases—from size limitations, concurrent usage challenges, and governance. The process to upgrade from your Excel file to Dataverse was historically lengthy and prone to errors. With two clicks under two minutes, makers can now import their Excel files into Dataverse, and get suggested table schema to build their next Copilot-enabled apps.  

3. Build formula columns in Dataverse

Now generally available, Formula columns are the next generation of columns in Dataverse. Based on Power Fx, they use the similar Excel-like language you use for Power Apps. Makers can also use natural language to generate formulas, now in public preview. Formula columns empower citizen developers to express business logic on top of existing columns and reference columns from other tables, directly in Dataverse.  

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Activate Azure data to unlock AI-driven insights with Dataverse Link to Microsoft Fabric 

We are excited to announce the general availability of Link to Fabric, a no-copy, no-ETL (extract, transform, load) direct link between Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric. With the general availability of Microsoft Fabric, low-code makers can derive AI-driven insights across business apps and data sources and drive action.  

If your organization uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Microsoft Power Platform with Microsoft Power BI, Link to Fabric provides an even simpler data integration option. Your low-code makers can work with their data securely in Fabric without the need to export data or build and maintain data pipelines. 

Low-code makers can Link to Microsoft Fabric from the Analyze menu in the Power Apps maker portal command bar. The system validates configuration and lets you choose a Fabric workspace without leaving the maker portal. When you confirm, the system securely links all your tables into a system-generated Synapse Lakehouse in the Fabric workspace you selected. Your data stays in Dataverse while you can work with all Fabric workloads like SQL, Python, and Power BI without making copies or building pipelines. As data gets updated in Dataverse, changes are reflected in Fabric near real time. 

Activate low-code app development atop your Fabric OneLake with Dataverse virtual tables  

We are also excited to announce the preview of Dataverse virtual tables over Microsoft Fabric, which enables your low-code app builders to connect to data in Microsoft OneLake and build Power Apps, and drive business actions without data copy, no-ETL, or third-party integration tools. Additionally combined with Power Pages, low-code makers can build external-facing websites and drive action from insights with partners, suppliers, and customers.  

Pattern Energy, a developer and operator of utility-scale wind and solar power facilities across the United States, Canada, Japan, and Mexico, is on a mission to accelerate the world’s transition from fossil energy to a sustainable future. Timely and detailed insights on projects in Dynamics 365 are combined with data from the field to keep track of issues and avoid delays in bringing green energy to the grid. Pattern Energy has empowered a team of low-code makers who can get actionable insights across their data sources and act faster within all their business units across the globe. 

“We worked with Microsoft from early stages of the Fabric preview and realized the features were going to be a game changer for us. Exporting data from Dynamics 365 has never been easier. With Power Platform and OneLake, our teams have access to near real-time data, actions, and workflows. Once all these features are made generally available we’re excited to deploy across our organization; giving everyone at Pattern the tools they need to accelerate their ability to make data-driven decisions.”  

– Duncan Gifford, Director, Enterprise and Data Architecture, Pattern Energy 

Learn more

• Learn more about Microsoft Dataverse.
• Extend Copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Read more about Dataverse Link to Fabric.

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