Confidently drive enterprise scale on the managed platform  

In the modern digital era, the opportunity for innovation by leveraging organizational data in AI-driven scenarios is at an unprecedented high. We recently introduced autonomous agents which can operate independently, dynamically plan, and learn over time. These new agents are rapidly increasing in complexity and widely distributed across the organization:  

• Knowledge: connect to 1300+ Power Platform connectors from the Power Platform ecosystem.
• Actions: evolving from retrieval only to automatically performing tasks on your behalf. 
• Channels: published to multiple internal and external channels (beyond the boundaries of Microsoft 365 Copilot). 

As AI-driven scenarios continue to grow, IT admins are architecting the next wave of innovation in their enterprises by embracing managed platform features to meet modern data demands. With the security-first capabilities provided in Power Platform’s managed platform features, the possibilities for your business are endless. 

• Managed Security: In the Power Platform Admin Center, Security Hub is the one stop shop for IT admins to enable AI-powered enterprise security management at scale. In Security Hub, IT admins can monitor their Security Score, which compiles many of our best practices and recommendations, evaluates how your tenant stacks against our recommendations into a single score, and suggests actions to boost your tenant’s security posture.
• Managed Governance: In the Power Platform Admin Center, boost innovation while managing risk (Copilot Hub) and getting visibility into usage patterns for ROI analysis (Licensing Hub). Copilot Hub for agent administration is the central location for agent readiness, governance, and usage. Licensing Hub simplifies management of licensing, capacity, and overages. To learn more about Dataverse capacity management, read this blog on how we now enable PayGo for overages.  
• Managed Operations: In the Power Platform Admin Center (for admins) and Maker Portal (for makers), we have Monitoring Hub to observe and maintain optimal operations by managing changes to production environments, detect and remediate incidents, and maintain business continuity.

Hear how we manage risk at Microsoft from MS IT. Read the full blog on how Power Platform Admin Center simplifies security and governance experience.  

Customize AI agents with enterprise knowledge in Copilot Studio 

As AI changes the ways we work, traditional workflows are getting reimagined as business process-oriented agents. In the same vein, enterprise data becomes valuable knowledge that agents can use to extend the range of functionality. However, even as makers are building more apps and agents than ever before, the majority of enterprise data still remains untapped. That’s changing with Copilot Studio, which ingests a range of data sources as “knowledge” to customize your agent including:  

• Productivity data from Microsoft Graph (Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, etc.).
• Line of Business data from Microsoft Dataverse and third-party data from external sources (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow). 
• Pro-code assets from Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI Search, and Azure SQL. 

When incorporating these sources of enterprise data as knowledge, a customized agent is created, as demonstrated in Peppermint’s Personal Injury Claims agent demo. By integrating these data sources, businesses can accelerate business processes and drive transformative growth. 

Automate e-mail, doc, and image processing with GPT with AI Builder

Much of the new, incoming enterprise data is unstructured data from documents (see examples below), emails, images, audio, video, and text that will require analysis. And even today, most of our business processes remain heavily document centric. To address this challenge, AI Builder enables makers to optimize document workflows through process automation so you can gain insights from your unstructured data. 

To manage and process incoming documents, we announced new additions to enhance existing document process workflows (Custom Document with Azure Document Intelligence 4.0) for enhanced performance and confidence scoring.  

Additionally, we announced Document Processing with GPT. GPT can facilitate document processing which eliminates the need to label data and train new models. With AI Builder, makers can build and customize AI Prompts to:  

• Extract information from documents. 
• Detect the language used in text.  
• Recognize text in an image or PDF (multimodality). 

And much more. To quickly get started, choose from a variety of prebuilt prompts in Prompt Library. Makers can also customize prompts with enterprise knowledge from Dataverse.  

Watch an end-to-end document processing workflow in:  

• Power Automate (Customer support demo) to categorize, translate, redirect, draft, and respond to incoming customer service emails. 
• Power Apps (Lost and Found demo) to describe a lost item based on an image and match that description to a database containing reports of lost items.  

AI Builder powered by GPT has transformed the way makers tap into their organization’s unstructured data by building end-to-end document processing workflows. AI Builder understands incoming documents, uses knowledge from Dataverse, and completes the workflow on your behalf. To learn more, read AI Builder’s announcements Ignite blog.  

Gain direct access to data for AI app development and analytics with Microsoft Power Platform and Snowflake   

We jointly announced an expanded partnership to enable bidirectional access between Microsoft Dataverse, the data layer of Power Platform, and Snowflake. This new Snowflake Power Platform connector enables developers and business users to:  

• Leverage data in Snowflake directly from the Power Platform. Developers can now build end-to-end business applications with their data in Snowflake, removing the operational burden of managing custom workflows. Users can create a Dataverse virtual table from Snowflake (demo).  
• Access data in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform from Snowflake to take full advantage of the AI Data Cloud to improve analytic insights and harness the power of enterprise AI.

See how it works and hear from SKF, a global manufacturing leader, on how they have implemented the connector and are experiencing faster time-to-value by removing some of the operational complexities of data integration. Together, Microsoft + Snowflake simplify data collaboration, enhance business insights, and harness the power of AI for our customers’ business needs. 

Recap 

Dataverse is the enterprise data platform for makers to add grounded enterprise data and make agents actionable. By building on Dataverse, makers can: 

1. Enable scale and reduce risk through a managed platform including managed security, managed governance, and managed operations. 
2. Incorporate knowledge from across your enterprise including productivity data, Line of Business data, and pro code assets.
3. Easily build business process workflows with GPT from unstructured data including documents, emails, images, audio, video, and text.
4. Tap into 1300+ Power Platform connectors (including the enhanced Snowflake connector) from the growing Power Platform ecosystem.  

Learn more about Microsoft Dataverse: 

• Podcast: Low Code Approach | Microsoft  
• Webpage: Microsoft Dataverse | Microsoft Power Platform 
• Documentation: What is Microsoft Dataverse? – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn  

Check out other great sessions to catch up on: 

• Keynote: Microsoft Ignite Keynote with Satya Nadella 
• Keynote: Unlock the Value of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio 
• Breakout: What’s new with Copilot Studio and agents 
• Breakout: Ground Microsoft 365 Copilot in your business knowledge 
• Breakout: Reinventing business processes with autonomous agents 
• Breakout: The Future of Power Platform: Intelligent Apps 
• Breakout: The spectrum of agents with Copilot Studio  
• Breakout: Extending Microsoft 365 Copilot with Copilot agents: Best practices 

The post Dataverse at Microsoft Ignite Highlights appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Effective Dataverse capacity management is a key priority for IT and business administrators. With the latest updates to the Power Platform Admin Center,

1. Capacity management is now more streamlined and flexible, offering admins precise control over resource allocation
2. Pay-as-You-Go (PayGo) option is now available to enable scalability

Storage allocation

The foundation of the enhanced capacity management experience lies in granular allocation. Admins can now pre-allocate Dataverse capacity directly to specific environments, ensuring business units and teams operate with the resources they need while maintaining independence from other workloads. 

For example, in a tenant shared by multiple business units, you can now guarantee a specific amount of capacity being available to a given unit. This prevents resource conflicts and ensures that critical workloads receive priority. Admins no longer need to manually monitor or redistribute resources as demands evolve. Instead, capacity can automatically be drawn from the tenant pool for environments with higher demands. 

This precision-driven approach ensures optimal resource usage across the tenant, eliminating inefficiencies like overprovisioning and underutilization.

Overage management with PayGo  

While pre-allocation provides robust control, unexpected surges in demand can still occur. To address these situations, the Power Platform Admin Center now seamlessly integrates a Pay-as-You-Go (PayGo) option with the allocation experience. 

The new experience also supports Microsoft Copilot Studio, providing a streamlined approach to managing message capacity. This integration ensures that admins can efficiently manage messaging workloads alongside other capacity resources, further enhancing overall system flexibility. 

When environments approach their allocated capacity limits, admins receive proactive notifications and can choose how to address overages: 

• Switching to PayGo for Specific Workloads: Admins have the option to selectively enable PayGo metering for specific product to the PayGo Azure subscription, ensuring that only certain product usage in the designated environments incur charges for PayGo. This eliminates concerns about other workloads unintentionally impacting the PayGo budget. 

• Depleting Pre-Paid Capacity First: The flexibility to combine pre-paid capacity with PayGo in the same environment ensures that businesses can fully utilize their pre-purchased resources before incurring any additional costs. This approach avoids being billed at PayGo rates for all usage in the environment, maintaining cost efficiency. 

For admins needing stricter governance, options for programmatic hard limits on environment consuming capacity can prevent overages entirely, ensuring compliance and budget control. 

Set up PayGo with consumption experience

Setting up PayGo is now a seamless process, thanks to new user experience improvements in the Power Platform Admin Center. Admins can effortlessly: 

• Select the appropriate Azure subscription and resource groups to ensure alignment with organizational policies. 

• Configure selective metering with clarity, choosing only the workloads or environments that should transition to PayGo when needed. 

• The improved consumption dashboard offers real-time insights into usage patterns, billing trends, and capacity consumption, empowering admins to make data-driven decisions. Additionally, Admins can view billing details, allocate charges, and set spending alerts directly in the Azure portal. 

By combining granular allocation with the flexibility of Pay-as-You-Go and the transparency of detailed consumption reporting, the Power Platform Admin Center has the tools your need to: 

• Optimize resource utilization across all environments. 

• Scale seamlessly for unplanned surges while maintaining governance. 

• Eliminate inefficiencies, reduce manual overhead, and enhance cost predictability. 

This comprehensive approach ensures that any business can manage the capacity needs of their business without compromising the speed of growth and innovation on the Power Platform. 

Learn more about Dataverse

• Get started with PayGo
• Listen to Low code approach podcast 
• Read Dataverse webpage 
• Read Dataverse documentation 

The post Seamless Capacity Management: PayGo for Overage appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We are excited to announce that the Copilot hub in the Power Platform Admin Center is now generally available for all commercial customers! All Power Platform admins have access to the Copilot hub, designed to empower admins by providing a centralized location for usage insights, governance controls, and readiness resources. Whether you are looking to monitor usage, configure Copilot settings, or access key documentation, the Copilot hub makes it easy for you to do just that. Start exploring and learn how to get started here. 

What can I expect to find on the Copilot hub? 

Managing Copilot features across the Power Platform just got a whole lot easier. The Copilot hub in the Power Platform Admin Center is designed to give admins a comprehensive toolkit for gaining insights, ensuring readiness, and maintaining control over Copilot capabilities. Here’s an overview of the three core sections in the Copilot hub. 

Readiness: Your Go-To Resource Hub 

The readiness section is your central location for understanding everything about Copilot in the Power Platform. It’s packed with educational resources to help Power Platform admins understand how Copilot works and provides a clear view into our data and security fundamentals for Copilot features. It also highlights resources around Microsoft’s unwavering commitment to Responsible AI, ensuring that the technology adheres to ethical principles and safeguards user trust. But that’s not all – staying informed is crucial in today’s fast-evolving landscape. The Readiness section features announcements of new Power Platform Copilot releases, ensuring Power Platform admins are up to date on the latest enhancements and capabilities. This section equips you to enable Copilot features in your organizations with confidence.  

Usage: Tracking Adoption Made Simple 

Understanding how and where Copilot is being used in your organization is essential for effective management and planning – and that is where the Usage section shines. This area provides Power Platform admins with metrics on Copilot adoption across key areas of the Power Platform, including Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, and Copilot Studio. These insights enable admins to identify patterns, drive adoption strategies, and maximize the value of Copilot for their organizations. 

Governance: Centralized Control at your Fingertips 

Managing and maintaining oversight of Power Platform Copilot features is made easier than ever now, thanks to the insights and tools available in the Governance section. The Governance section is designed to give Power Platform admins full visibility into Copilot features through insights and tools to monitor and manage feature availability across environments. Here’s what you’ll find: 

• A detailed breakdown of Copilot features: Gain a clear view of all Copilot capabilities and identify which environments they’re enabled in. This transparency helps admins ensure consistency and compliance across the organization.  

• Settings grouped by product level for easy management: Settings are organized by product – Power Platform, Copilot Studio, Power Apps, and Power Automate – making navigation intuitive and efficient. Need to adjust Copilot feature availability for a specific product area? A convenient side pane lets you update Copilot environment- and tenant-level settings without leaving the Copilot hub, simplifying the entire process.  

• Content moderation for Responsible AI Insights: The Governance section goes beyond settings – it also provides information on how Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles are put in practice across the Microsoft Power Platform. This helps admins understand the safeguards in place to maintain ethical and responsible AI practices.  

With these tools, the Governance section enables admins to efficiently tailor Power Platform Copilot settings to meet the unique needs of their organization, while maintaining full transparency and control. 

Why does this matter and what is next? 

As AI-powered capabilities continue to redefine how people work, the demand for streamlined governance and insightful analytics grows. The Copilot hub in the Power Platform Admin Center is designed to meet this growing need, offering a centralized location for resources that enables admins to embrace innovation, while ensuring compliance, security, and responsible AI practices.  

The journey doesn’t stop here – this is just the beginning for the Copilot hub in the Power Platform Admin Center. We’re committed to evolving the Copilot hub with richer insights and enhanced controls to continue to support admins in governing Power Platform Copilot features. As we roll out new updates and capabilities, we’ll keep you informed every step of the way.  

The post Announcing General Availability of Copilot hub in Power Platform Admin Center  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Why This Change? 

Managed environments empowers customers with critical tools for comprehensive governance, advanced security, and streamlined operations management to enhance oversight across the entire platform. Managed environments capabilities remain a benefit of existing premium licenses, and any environment with managed features requires the users of any of the assets in that environment to have a premium license. However, there’s been some confusion in the past about whether apps and flows with standard features in a managed environment require the same user to have both a Power Apps and Power Automate license to be compliant. It is not our intention to “double charge” for these features, so we’re updating the Power Platform licensing guide to clarify that as long as all active users are appropriately licensed with at least one premium license, managed environments features will work, and customers will be compliant. 

With these updates, we’re taking steps to remove a key hurdle and offer a licensing model that better aligns with the way you use the Power Platform every day. 

What’s Changing? 

We will be updating the Power Platform licensing guide to clarify that as long as all active users are appropriately licensed with at least one premium license, a Power Apps Premium or a Power Automate Premium, managed environments features will work, and customers will be compliant.  

Customers with Power Apps Premium or Power Automate Premium user licenses are eligible to use managed environments capabilities to govern all the apps and flows in the environment. This enables your organization to strengthen governance and security using the full capabilities of managed environments. For example, if your organization assigns premium Power Apps (or premium Power Automate) licenses to all active employees, managed environments can be activated across all environments organization wide including the Default environment. (See FAQ section for more information) 

These updates are designed for Power Platform’s user-based licenses, such as Power Apps Premium and Power Automate Premium. Capacity-based licenses (e.g., Power Automate Process, Copilot Studio messages, or Dataverse capacity) remain excluded from this change to ensure the premium experience remains consistent and valuable.  

No Change for Premium Assets

Premium flows and apps will continue to require dedicated premium licenses, regardless of the environment they’re in. This ensures stability in customer expectations and budgeting.

How Does This Benefit You? 

This streamlined licensing model opens managed environments for even more users, helping organizations adopt critical governance and security features without requiring additional licenses. Here’s how: 

• Enhanced Control and Security 
  Managed environments allow you to apply advanced data policies, create safe environments, and manage resources effectively across departments. With simplified access, it’s now easier to keep your data and workflows secure. 
• Reduced Complexity 
  By aligning managed environments capabilities directly with existing Power Platform Premium licenses, you’ll save on the time and cost of navigating additional license requirements for critical governance features. 
• Greater Flexibility for Growing Organizations 
  For organizations expanding their use of Power Platform across teams, these changes mean more seamless scaling without increased licensing costs for essential governance features. 

What’s Next? 

Our goal with this update is to make managed environment capabilities accessible to a broader range of customers. This licensing change is a direct response to customer feedback, and we’ll continue to evaluate ways to improve managed environments and Power Platform governance in response to your evolving needs. 

Stay tuned for more details during Microsoft Ignite on November 19th and be sure to reach out to your Microsoft account representative if you have any questions on how this update can benefit your organization.

FAQ

Q: How do the changes to the managed environment licensing model impact my existing Power Apps and Power Automate licenses? 

A: These changes allow customers to assign their existing premium Licenses more easily and consume them fully, before they need to acquire more licenses. 

Q: Do all users in a managed Environment need a premium license even if they are not directly interacting with flows or apps? 

A: No, this doesn’t change, only active users in managed environments that are generating activity by launching an app or running a flow are required to have a premium license assigned. 

Q: What is the expected license behavior if a user is assigned a Power Apps Premium and Power Automate Premium while running basic on in-context Flows only? 

A: If a user is assigned both a Power Apps Premium and Power Automate Premium but only running basic or in-context flows, the Power Apps premium covers this activity, the Power Automate premium provides additional flexibility for any premium flows. 

Q: What types of activities are considered basic flows in managed environments, and how are they covered under this new model? 

A: All Standard Standalone flows hosted in managed environment that got created via the Power Automate Studio or outside of the studio (via SPO, Teams, Outlook…) are basic flows in managed environment that can be run if the user has a Power Apps Premium license, or a Power Automate Premium license.  

Q: Flow using SQL in an environment used by a user with a Power Apps Premium; Does the user need an Automate Premium License? 

A: Yes, they need a Power Automate License. When the flow is not running in the context of a Power App and is using a premium connector like SQL, then a Power Automate Premium license is required. The Power Apps Premium licenses does not cover standalone cloud flows with premium connectors unless the flow is directly associated with or triggered by the Power App. 

Q: Desktop flow in managed environment with desktop DLP used by a user with a Power Apps Premium. Does the user need an Automate Premium License? 

A: Yes, they need a Power Automate Premium License. Desktop Flows (RPA) require a Power Automate Premium License, regardless of the user’s Power Apps license. The Power Apps Premium license does not cover desktop automation or RPA scenarios. 

Q: User with a Power Automate Premium License that starts to use a premium Power App; 
Do they need a Power Apps Premium license? 

A: Yes, they need Power Apps license. A Power Automate Premium license does not include access to Premium Power Apps. To use Apps in managed environment or to use premium Power Apps (Apps with Dataverse or premium connectors), the user must also have a Power Apps Premium license. 
Note: If the user was assigned the premium Power Automate licenses just to use basic flows in a managed environment (vs. for the use of RPA or premium flows), admins can remove that assignment once the Power App Premium is assigned. 

Q: A user with a Power App Premium license creates a new standalone flow via Power Automate studio and the flow only uses standard connectors (SharePoint, Outlook…).  
Does the user need a Power Automate Premium? 

A: No, Power Automate is not required. Standard flows do not require an additional premium license, so the user can run the flow in a managed environment using their existing Power Apps Premium license. 

Q: A user sets up an independent flow in an environment that integrates with Dataverse as part of a data management process and not triggered by any Power App. Does the user need a Power Automate Premium License? 

A: Yes, a Power Automate Premium license is required.  Since the flow uses Dataverse, which is a premium connector, the user needs a Power Automate Premium license to use this flow when it is not in the context of a Power App. 

Q: A user with a Power Apps Premium license creates a flow using AI Builder (e.g., extracting text from documents) within an environment. Does the user need a Power Automate Premium license? 

A: Yes, a Power Automate Premium license is required. The use of AI Builder is considered a premium feature within Power Automate, so even though the user has Power Apps Premium license, they must also have a Power Automate Premium license to run flows with AI Builder capabilities. 

Q: A flow using a premium connector is shared with a team of 10 members. The flow runs within a managed environment, and all users need access to edit or trigger the flow. Some users have Power Apps Premium licenses, while others have Power Automate Premium licenses. What is required? 

A: All users who need to interact with or trigger the flow must have Power Automate Premium license. Power Apps Premium licenses do not cover editing or running a standalone flow with a premium connector outside the context of an app. 

The post Announcing exciting updates to managed environments licensing appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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

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

Application Lifecycle Management  

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

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

Observability and Insights 

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

Built for Data Resilience 

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

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

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

Empowering Enterprises to Operate with Confidence 

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

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

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

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

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

Security Posture Excellence 

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

Threat protection 

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

Data protection and privacy

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

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

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

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

Identity and Access Management

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

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

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

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

Compliance

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

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

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

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

Strengthen AI Adoption with a Security-First Mindset  

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

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

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

Learn More

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

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

Make your Custom Pipelines Host Discoverable by Default

If you as an admin want to enable your makers to discover your custom host instead of the tenant-wide platform host when they navigate to Pipelines, this is the feature you’ve been waiting for. Since a change made earlier this year, the platform host and its capabilities became the landing pad for any maker going to the Pipelines page due to its out-of-the-box readiness.

Before, if admins wanted makers to use centrally governed pipelines in a custom host instead of using personal pipelines in the platform host, they would have to first set up a custom host and associate makers’ development environments with it. With a default custom host set, those with pipelines create-access and owners of existing pipelines in that custom host can associate new development environments easily by simply going to the Pipelines experience in those development environments and deploying through a pipeline in the host (new or existing).

“Use a custom pipelines host” Setting

Now, when tenant admins navigate to the Deployment Pipeline Configuration app for the platform host (by clicking “Manage pipelines” from the Pipelines page in make.powerapps.com), they will see a new setting under Advanced Settings. Admins can then provide the environment ID for a custom pipelines host to use instead of the platform host when makers are using pipelines in an environment that has not yet associated with a pipelines host.

If makers already used the platform host to deploy, it is important to note that the environments in use must be disassociated from that host before they can be used in the newly assigned custom host.

A new world of possibilities for ALM readiness

Now that admins can assign custom hosts as the default host for their makers’ Pipelines experience, they can also granularly control who can create personal pipelines (within that custom host) when they land on Pipelines in any development environment, even if it’s not already associated with the host. Admins can achieve this by assigning the “Deployment pipeline default” role to users or groups within their custom host who they wish to enable personal pipeline creation for. And, of course, makers who don’t have pipelines create-access can use any pipelines that are shared with them by an admin!

Copilot-generated deployment notes are now available worldwide in 20 supported languages

Finally, Copilot-generated deployment notes are available in 20 major languages* for Makers outside of the U.S. Now, depending on your language settings in the Power Platform page you’re deploying from, Copilot will generate deployment notes in that language. Of course, this also means that Copilot can read and process solutions that aren’t just in English!

*supported languages include English, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Import solutions from the environment’s associated pipelines host

Need to hydrate a development environment with a solution that you’ve deployed via Pipelines in the past? Or maybe you’re an admin and one of your makers left the organization along with their personal dev environment? Now, you don’t have to look for the solution manually or upload a .zip file! All solutions deployed through pipelines are now easily accessible in the solution import experience.

Makers can view any solution that they have deployed, while admins can view all deployed solutions in the organization by toggling on Show shared solution deployments. Makers can use this toggle too, but only if enabled through a new admin-controlled Advanced Setting in the Deployment Pipeline Configuration app.

Coming soon

Stay tuned for more exciting Power Platform ALM features coming later this year, and be sure to check out Microsoft Ignite taking place November 18–22, 2024 for highly anticipated announcements!

Learn more about Pipelines and ALM

• Overview of pipelines in Power Platform. Microsoft Docs
• Set a default pipelines host. Microsoft Docs
• Use Copilot to generate deployment notes. Microsoft Docs
• FAQ for “use copilot to generate deployment notes”. Microsoft Docs
• Import solutions from a pipelines host. Microsoft Docs

The post Exciting New Updates for Pipelines in Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Extended language and geo availability

As part of general availability, data workspace is now accessible in 9 different languages worldwide, including English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. This allows more users around the world to take advantage of the enhanced data experience in their native language. We’ve also ensured that this feature complies with geo availability policies. Thus, it can be accessed reliably across regions, expanding the feature’s global reach.

Latest GPT models for enhanced Copilot assistance

To elevate your experience, we are now using the latest GPT models, GPT 4o mini and GPT 4o, in this GA release. These models bring enhanced AI-driven interactions, enabling more precise data model generation, improved natural language processing, and greater overall performance in Copilot’s ability to understand and act on your requests.

Access data workspace from within your solution

One of the major new features in this GA release is the ability to access the data workspace directly from within your solutions. This improvement streamlines how tables and apps are created and managed. It ensures they adhere to your solution-specific standards and governance from the very beginning. When you access the workspace from your custom solution, any tables and apps created using the data workspace will automatically apply the correct solution prefixes. They will also reside directly within your solution, removing the need for time-consuming adjustments and manual alignment.

Data workspace is ready to create model-driven apps

In addition to its data modeling capabilities, data workspace now enables you to create not only modern canvas apps but also model-driven apps directly from the workspace, all based on the data model you build.

• Canvas apps offer a highly customizable, design-first experience where you have full control over the app’s layout, appearance, and functionality. You can use drag-and-drop controls to build your apps. You can then configure them with Power Fx, making it easier to tailor apps exactly to your business needs.
• Model-driven apps, on the other hand, provide a more structured approach to app development. The data model itself determines most of the layout and user interface. With the new functionality in the workspace, you can now create model-driven apps directly from the data model you’ve designed. Once your data relationships and entities are in place, you can automatically generate a model-driven app. The app will reflect the structure and complexity of your data, without needing to be configured from scratch.

These new capabilities streamline the app-building process significantly. Whether you want the creative freedom of canvas apps or the structured approach of model-driven apps, the workspace now supports both. This makes it easier than ever to create business apps tailored to your data model.

Learn more about data workspace

Looking Ahead: This GA release is just the beginning. We continuously meet Microsoft’s promise for Copilot availability and expand the product’s capabilities based on your needs. Stay tuned for future updates, including more language support, integrations, advanced customization options, and even smarter Copilot interactions.

Try It Now: The new data experience is now live and available to all users. We invite you to try it out, explore the possibilities, and let us know what you think. Access the documentation below to learn more.
Create new tables
Build apps through conversation

The post Data Workspace is Now Generally Available! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The accelerating growth in data volume, coupled with its siloed nature, makes deriving insights costly and time-consuming. As a result, enterprises must improve data access to drive productivity and efficiency across different business teams. However, they face seemingly insurmountable hurdles when their data is contained in disparate sources. Beyond the inherent challenges posed by data silos, every enterprise is acutely aware of the security risks it faces due to the rise of active targeting by global threat actors, making security a non-negotiable priority. IT must safeguard data while enabling the enterprise to manage it at scale without redundancy or increased costs. 

Recent technological advancements in AI and machine learning, including data-grounded Copilots and context-rich analytical and recommendation systems, present enterprises with new ways to manage their data estates at scale using Microsoft Dataverse and deliver generative AI solutions with this knowledge using Microsoft Copilot Studio.  

Microsoft Dataverse offers a comprehensive solution by empowering low-code makers to accomplish more, while providing pro developers and IT teams with enhanced power and scope. This enables enterprises to unlock greater value from their data, while ensuring cost-efficiency, security, governance, and compliance across the entire application data lifecycle. 

With applications built on Dataverse, enterprises can improve productivity at every phase of the data lifecycle. Dataverse provides: 

• Seamless ingestion of data with AI-assisted mapping; 

• Support for large-scale business needs with highly performant and scalable APIs and Power Platform connectors; 

• Business insights with support for Direct Querying using SqlQueries (using Tabular Data Stream (TDS)), Power BI capabilities and built-in Microsoft Fabric link capabilities;  

• Storage capacity tools to manage data at scale; and 

• The enterprise-grade security of Microsoft Entra ID. 

With the ever-growing volume of data generated by enterprises, it is critical that organizations find ways to ingest data at scale – but ingestion is only the first step in the process. Features like AI assisted mapping can provide meaningful productivity gains through recommendations on Dataverse table selection for new data ingestion. Time spent on schema analysis and data ingestion can be further minimized by leveraging Power Platform dataflows: a self-service, cloud-based data preparation technology designed to simplify and accelerate these processes. 

AI-Assisted Dataflows enable enterprises to efficiently ingest, transform, and load data into Power Platform environments with greater precision and less guesswork. For instance, Dataverse’s AI-assisted mapping suggests column mappings when importing data into Dataverse tables. By leveraging these AI-driven recommendations, makers can effectively reuse the robust data schemas already in place within business applications, eliminating the need for manual data remapping. This not only improves data quality and consistency, but also enhances overall productivity. Additionally, solution-aware dataflows support the seamless migration of apps and components across environments, (such as from test to production,) addressing a critical IT requirement. 

When data migration is not the preferred solution due to challenges associated with managing large volumes of data across different IT systems, Dataverse virtual tables provide IT teams with the ability to access data from non-Dataverse sources in real-time. Virtual tables provide read/write access to enterprise data without the need for ingestion into Dataverse. This capability creates a low-code pathway for enterprises to modernize legacy applications, enabling the development of automated flows, interactive Power Pages, and AI-driven knowledge bases, while avoiding the complexities of data replication and reducing the impact of API thresholds, throttling, and costs on invoking APIs. 

Customers across the globe, like Chevron, are using Dataverse virtual tables with SharePoint, Azure SQL server, Fabric, and Salesforce to harness the capabilities of Power Platform and Power Pages. Dataverse plans to add support for more sources, leveraging additional connectors.  Learn more about Dataverse virtual tables.  

By leveraging virtual tables, enterprises can create relationships between external data and data that exists natively in Dataverse. Once these connections are established, data can be seamlessly accessed from multiple data silos across the enterprise, enabling makers to effectively utilize this data in the applications they’re building. Learn more about creating virtual table relationships. 

Enrich your data using new AI Functions  

Valuable enterprise data often languishes in an unstructured format. For example, an un-alerted comment field may contain key feedback that has the potential to dramatically improve customer satisfaction. AI functions help enterprises summarize, translate, and extract nuggets of insight from this data, which may otherwise go untapped, using prompts. To drive action, the business can even utilize AI to craft customer emails and documents, adding significant value and increasing productivity.  

While AI Functions provide powerful out-of-the-box capabilities, enterprises can take AI integrations even further by grounding custom AI prompts with Dataverse data. 

This allows the enterprise to: 

• Link AI prompts directly to business data in Dataverse tables; 

• Provide context-specific responses based on the organization’s information; and 

• Improve accuracy by referencing up-to-date data from the internal environment. 

For example, an enterprise could create a custom prompt to extract key details from customer proposals, grounded in its Proposals table in Dataverse. This combines the power of large language models with proprietary business data. 

Support your business needs for large volume operations

In today’s world, increasingly driven by data and AI, Dataverse Elastic Tables backed by Azure Cosmos DB is a powerful option with practically unlimited storage. Makers can bulk load large data volumes at high throughput and enable applications to scale up to 120 million writes per hour and 6000 reads per second, while storing 3 billion records in a single table, all with low code. Elastic Tables even supports business scenarios that require flexible schemas with JSON payload, and is already being used extensively by Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications. It allows enterprises to optimize data capacity utilization with its auto delete capability based on time to live functionality – and as always, data is protected by Dataverse security. Learn more about Dataverse Elastic Tables. 

With rapid business growth inevitably leading to large data volumes in existing standard Dataverse tables (which supports up to 100TB), enterprises need the ability to hyperscale write operations. Dataverse bulk operation APIs  are designed for enterprise makers to support these high throughputs write scenarios. Bulk operation APIs like CreateMultiple, UpdateMultiple, and UpsertMultiple can provide throughput improvement of up to 5x, growing from 2 million records created per hour using ExecuteMultiple to the creation of 10 million records in less than an hour. Customers have saved up to 82% of the time spent in end-to-end scenarios using CreateMultiple, UpdateMultiple, and UpsertMultiple in Dataverse SQL tables. 

Drive action on your insights with Fabric from Dataverse 

Dataverse makes hyperscale data accessible and understandable, identifying insights and improving business outcomes. With Microsoft Dataverse Link to Fabric, enterprise data stays in Dataverse, without data copy, while authorized users work with it in Fabric and Power BI to unlock new insights. Using Fabric tools such as SQL, Spark, and dataflows, enterprises can combine, transform and aggregate additional enterprise data into their Dataverse data, enabling near real time insights. 

Enterprises often need to leverage data across different lines of business (LOB) beyond Dataverse applications. Fabric mirroring makes it easy to move this enterprise data into Fabric, where Fabric tools generate insights by combining the enterprise LOB data with the Dataverse data already linked to Fabric. 

When a business scenario requires LOB or other IT data (such as Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos Database, and Snowflake) to be maximized from within a Dataverse application to drive business outcomes, low code makers can create Dataverse virtual tables for all the data sitting in Fabric and leverage Power Apps within the Dataverse application. 

“To quickly answer questions, a client’s Accounts Receivable (AR) team will often desire historical sales invoice details in their Dynamics 365 Financials application, but this data could be in multiple systems and oftentimes is cost prohibitive to migrate into a central ERP.  Now with Fabric-based virtual tables, we will implement a Dynamics 365-embedded Power App sourced from legacy sales data housed in a Fabric data warehouse. We love it…same data, same answer, and delivered in less time!” 

Travis Christens, Director Business Analytics and Azure –armanino

Data capacity management 

With rapid enterprise digitization and business expansion resulting in exponential data growth, further accentuated by the prevalence of AI, enterprises need to ensure continued performance of the live application and optimize storage capacity consumption. This must be achieved while ensuring adherence to compliance and regulatory requirements, by reducing the risks associated with historical data. Dataverse tools such as Power Platform capacity reports assist organizations to better manage application data by providing visibility into the storage capacity consumed by business applications. IT admins can further reduce unnecessary storage consumption with regular scheduled usage of Bulk Delete.  

In many business scenarios (such as customer service case management, Finance Ledger, and Supply Chain Inventory), even as the data lifecycle of the business application moves from active to inactive over a defined period, inactive data must be retained for at least seven years for legal and regulatory compliance. While Dataverse has no set limit on active data required to support an enterprise’s unlimited business growth, database capacity consumption can be reduced by storing historical inactive data in Dataverse long term retention for Dataverse and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations applications. 

Dataverse enables an enterprise grade security model for modern access requirements  

In today’s business environment, teams need to share and collaborate on data spread across multiple resources. Historically, enterprises have been forced to choose between fostering efficient, productive work and ensuring the security, governance, and regulatory compliance of their data and IT systems.  

Dataverse enables a more efficient business model by allowing data access for multiple users across different teams while providing enterprise-grade security backed by Microsoft Entra ID. Enterprises with matrix-based organizational structures can now enable users to own records across different business units, granting each user access control and deletion privileges for the specific records they own – thereby improving productivity. For example, an enterprise’s customer service associates can be granted access to customer accounts and emails by the sales team without violating access controls. 

Security is a huge concern for every organization, and Dataverse offers capabilities such as customer managed key, customer lockbox, environments security groups, Dataverse Audit, and Azure vNet to ensure enterprises can be confident that their data is secure both at rest and in transit. The Power Platform security hub allows administrators to assess the security posture for the tenant, identify and act on recommendations, and use its rich set of high value tools to gain visibility, detect threats, and proactively set policies in place to safeguard from vulnerabilities and risks. 

Next Steps 

In summary, Microsoft Dataverse provides a powerful and scalable solution for enterprises seeking to manage their data efficiently and securely, empowering organizations to overcome the challenges of data silos, enhance productivity, and ensure compliance with security standards. Features such as AI-assisted mapping, virtual tables, and Elastic Tables enable businesses to ingest, transform, and activate data seamlessly, supporting large-scale operations without the need for extensive data migration. Moreover, Dataverse’s integration with Microsoft Fabric and its security features backed by Microsoft Entra ID ensure that enterprises can manage their data lifecycle effectively from ingestion to long-term retention, while maintaining robust security and governance. This comprehensive approach allows enterprises to unlock the full potential of their data, driving actionable insights and improving business outcomes. 

As the volume of enterprise data continues to grow, adopting a solution like Microsoft Dataverse becomes increasingly critical. It not only addresses the immediate needs of data management, but also positions businesses for future growth and innovation. Enterprises are encouraged to explore the capabilities of Dataverse to enhance their data strategies and achieve greater efficiency and security in their operations. To fully unlock the potential of your data and take your organization’s data strategy to the next level, consider diving deeper into the specific capabilities that Dataverse provides. 

AI-Assisted Mapping: Streamline your data ingestion processes and improve data consistency by leveraging AI-driven recommendations for seamless integration. 

Modernized Business Units: Empower your teams to collaborate effectively across different business units with enhanced data ownership and access control features. 

AI Functions: Harness the power of AI to derive actionable insights from your data, transforming it into a strategic asset. 

Elastic Tables: Support large-scale operations with the flexibility and scalability that Elastic Tables provides, ensuring your data infrastructure grows with your business needs. 

Fabric Link: Integrate Dataverse with Microsoft Fabric to enable seamless data flows across your organization, driving efficient data activation and business outcomes. 

Long-Term Data Retention: Implement robust data lifecycle management strategies with Dataverse’s long-term retention capabilities, ensuring compliance and governance over time. 

To learn more about managing security and governance within the Power Platform, visit Power Platform Security Hub on Microsoft Learn. 

By taking these next steps you’ll be well on your way to optimizing your data management strategy, enhancing productivity, and ensuring the security and compliance of your enterprise’s data. Explore these features today and see how Microsoft Dataverse can help you achieve your business objectives. 

The post Hyperscale Your Enterprise Business Applications with Microsoft Dataverse appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Catalog in Power Platform

Share and install reusable assets, such as apps, flows, connectors, and prompts, customized for your organization.

Learn more

The catalog in Power Apps and Power Automate is now generally available to the public. The catalog enables makers to share and install reusable assets, such as apps, flows, connectors, prompts, and more, that are customized for your organization, by your organization. This provides much more useful starting points than simple and generic templates. In addition, because the catalog is built on top of our solutions framework, you can also easily install catalog items from any environment in a tenant, and have catalog assets accessible from authoring experiences, like Canvas Studio and flow designer.

You can publish assets as a template or as a managed item. Templates are pure copies that any makers can utilize as they wish. Managed items are more tightly controlled and can be republished with updates over time so that your organization uses the most recent, authoritative version across environments.

Please note that you will need a managed environment to publish assets in the catalog as part of general availability. However, all assets can be installed from any environment, even ones that are not managed.

Using the catalog in Power Apps and Power Automate

Customers are using the catalog for a variety of scenarios, including:

• Saving templates for reuse across environments.
• Bundling components into a collection for specific departments to utilize.
• Spinning up multiple catalogs and seed with sample data and apps for demo purposes.
• Using the assets of a managed item as is and making no changes.
• Building custom functionality on top of the assets in the managed item without changing the original components.
• Using the assets to assist with building their own solutions. For example, Power Apps component framework components, custom connectors, and so on.
• Partners are also using the catalog to streamline the process of building solutions and curating components for multiple customers at the same time across environments.

The catalog is highly flexible to handle a broad range of use cases, while backed by enterprise level governance and security, which is critical when managing a centralized and shared repository across many makers in a tenant. The catalog comes with comprehensive cross-environment roles and permissions, additional publishing groups to control who can make updates, administration and approval capabilities, installation tracking, and application lifestyle management (ALM). Organizations where makers can share and reuse artifacts in a controlled and secure environment will get the most out of Microsoft Power Platform.

What our customers are saying about the catalog:

“Through Accenture’s participation in the private preview of Microsoft power catalog, we’ve provided feedback to Microsoft to help them shape a ready-to-use, centrally governed repository that can supercharge application and workflow development. In support of Accenture’s strategy to reuse and scale solution components, we will explore power catalog [during public preview] to help streamline and speed application development cycles, and to drive brand consistency across Accenture applications.”

— Uday Adhikari, [Microsoft] Power Platform lead for North America at Accenture

“5/5. The catalog closes the gap in distributing updates between (product) development, Sales, and Operations departments. For demos, we often require certain versions or special releases. With catalogs we enable everyone to set up the tailored demo by themselves while the product group can maintain pre-release builds at the same time.”

— Sebastain Sieber, Most Valuable Professional, proMX.

The catalog feature will be generally available with the following features:

• Enterprise level roles and permissions to restrict who can publish and install catalog items across environments
• Approval of catalog items by admins before they’re officially published for your organization to use
• A suite of Microsoft-provided components out-of-the-box, such as Enterprise templates
• Low-code and easy-to-use wizards to publish and install items
• A My Activity page to track status and see any error codes for published and installed items
• An administrative workspace to manage catalogs, users, and settings
• And several other features, such as environment variable support, connection checks, a gallery page with comprehensive filters to browse catalog items, and more

Learn more about the catalog in Microsoft Power Platform

To learn more about the catalog, you can read an overview, the usage guide, and administration and setup instructions.

Some features planned on the horizon include:

• Integration with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Providing the option to choose the solution you’d like to install catalog items into.
• Allowing makers to choose which solutions should be updated with new versions.
• More post-installation options for different components (such as opening up a specific editor).
• Submitting apps and flows directly into catalog with solution creation/selection as part of the wizard.
• Improved error detection and handling.

You can find the catalog feature in your left navigation in both Power Apps and Power Automate. Contact your admin to help set up the catalog and you can get started right away.

The post Enable reusability and maintain best practices with the catalog in Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.