Maker Deployment page

Makers can now view all their deployments in one place, regardless of solution or pipeline. If their deployment began from (or was deployed to) the current environment, they will be able to view the run history status of it. Failed Deployments and Active Deployments are highlighted in a convenient overview, so you don’t have to go looking for them either!

In addition to deployment visibility, we’ve included a Get started section that will evolve over time. For now, it will link to documentation to help a maker begin their journey to healthy application lifecycle management (ALM).

To further improve understanding of what healthy ALM looks like, we’ll soon be adding recommendations, where makers are alerted to resolve any potentially unhealthy ALM-related behavior, such as housing high-use apps outside of a solution.

Admin Deployment page

The Deployment page in the new admin center provides a streamlined experience to help administrators learn about, setup, and operation best-in-class ALM. The initial preview provides a central location to view all deployments in the tenant, approve deployment requests, and troubleshoot failures.

Select a pipelines host from the picker to see all the pipelines and deployment history managed with that host. A dedicated Failed deployments view helps admins quickly identify and troubleshoot failures and trending issues.

Admins can approve or reject deployment requests assigned to them. First setup Delegated deployments with service principals as the recommended way to deploy securely.

It is important that admins review changes in the solution and the sharing request. With the help of Copilot-generated deployment notes visible in the request, this becomes easier, but if you want a more granular look, be sure to set up Source control integration and link the repository to the approval.

Managed Operations

The Deployment pages are an offering of Managed Operations, allowing all who make or administrate to gain further insight into their Application Lifecycle Management to ensure that business solutions are reliable and performant in production. Aside from just deployment pipelines, these maker and admin experiences will evolve over the coming months and include many more Managed Operations intersections to take advantage of. So, stay tuned for more updates and please leave your feedback below!

Learn more

Admin Deployment page

Maker Deployment page

Managed Operations

New Power Platform Admin Center

The post Introducing Maker and Admin Deployment Pages appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We are thrilled to announce the public preview of Copilot chat extensibility for model-driven apps. This new capability empowers partners and customers to tailor and extend the in-app chat, making it more context-aware and more aligned with organization’s unique needs.

By harnessing the capabilities of Copilot Studio, you can incorporate additional topics, knowledge sources, connectors, custom prompt guide and more, greatly enriching your Copilot chat experience. A dedicated agent is provisioned when customizing the Copilot chat to ensure that each model-driven app has a tailored and context-specific AI assistant. This extensibility approach ensures that your AI solutions are not only more pertinent but also scalable in tackling your unique business challenges.

It’s easy to get started. Go to https://make.preview.powerapps.com in any early release environment. Open the model-driven app whose Copilot chat you want to customize. Click on the ellipsis (…) in the left navigation bar and then select Configure in Copilot Studio. You will be directed to Copilot Studio with the appropriate agent ready for customization.

The animation below demonstrates a use case where, with just a few clicks, makers can enhance Copilot chat capabilities to answer any question from the Power Apps official documentation. Additionally, they can easily customize the Copilot UI to assist end users through prompt guides.

For more information about the capabilities being made available with this release, please refer to the Power Apps documentation under Customize Copilot chat using Copilot Studio. Please use Power Apps Pro Dev forum or reach out via LinkedIn for any feedback or questions.

The expansive potential of extensibility is truly exciting. We look forward to this journey with our partners and customers, as we incrementally roll out additional features.

Note: This feature is currently available in early release environments and will be gradually rolled out to all makers over the coming weeks.

The post Unlock new possibilities by customizing Copilot chat in your apps with Copilot Studio (Preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Summary: Welcome to the Power Apps monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share what’s new in Power Apps. A summary of product, community, and learning updates from throughout the month so you can access it in one easy place. This month we’re excited to shared a simplified approach to writing Power Fx with Copilot, Performance improvements to the Canvas designer, Studio visual updates, and smart paste for model driven apps!

AI-powered Development

Check out some of our latest improvements in this month’s Power Apps Pulse!

This month, it’s all about adding that shine! Power Apps Studio has a fresh new look, we’ve given you more ways to add web resources, and now you can customize your modern themes to get exactly the right color at each step of the ramp. Get in the know with this month’s Power Apps Pulse!

Power Apps Formula Creation with Natural Language Input

The latest update to the Power Apps formula bar introduces a new “Create a Formula” option, allowing users to craft Power Fx formulas using natural language. This innovation simplifies the formula creation process, making it more accessible for users of all skill levels. Enable this preview feature in your app settings, and then by typing a desired action in plain language, the AI suggests the appropriate formula, which can then be applied to the selected control and property.

Additionally, the update enhances the formula explanation capability, enabling users to select a portion of a formula and receive a plain language explanation of the selected part. This is particularly beneficial for understanding long or complex formulas. The Copilot in the formula bar now supports more languages, broadening the feature’s accessibility.

Modernization and visual update of the Power Apps Studio

In the effort to provide better out of the box accessibility, performance, and alignment with Microsoft product set we’ve updated the Power Apps Studio across both the canvas and model driven designers. This milestone creates a modern look and feel, as well as improved coherence throughout the Power Apps authoring experience for makers working across multiple app types, the plan designer and data workspace. No action is required to see the new updates, rolling out now.

Improved Studio performance with the new analysis engine

While you edit or play your app in Studio, a continuous analysis of app elements and their interactions is happening in the background. For example, this allows us to know that if you change an expression `Set(x, 5)` to `Set(x, {Lorem: “Ipsum”})` that the type of `x` is now a record instead of a number, and any references in your app to `x + 1` will therefore be marked as erroneous.  

To improve performance and reliability while building apps, we released the updated analysis engine, Generally Available and will be on by default for all Canvas apps, starting February 2025. To migrate ahead of this, go to app settings, and turn on ‘New analysis engine’ setting under Updates > New.

Performance Boost: The New Analysis Engine optimizes how we approach that analysis, complex Canvas apps that previously took minutes to load should now load much faster. Note that this is an authoring load time and edit time performance improvement and has no impact on app run time performance.

Accuracy: The New Analysis Engine enables more accurate determination of variable and collection types, reliably identifies the columns used in your app, and enhances Data Source call performance in published apps.

Intelligent Apps

New smart paste available in your model-driven apps

Smart paste is designed to make form-filling in model-driven apps as simple as copy & paste. Now you can effortlessly fill forms based on the information you already have, transforming the tedious task of filling forms with a smarter, faster, and more intuitive way to handle forms. We are also introducing citations so you can easily identify where suggestions come from, and expanding form fill assistance (including the new smart paste) to quick create forms.  

To learn more, read the blog at New smart paste makes filling forms as easy as copy & paste – Microsoft Power Platform Blog and documentation at Use Copilot’s form fill assistance feature in model-driven apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn.  

Learning and Documentation Updates

Training Paths and Labs

Updated Training

• Create a Dataverse table for the machine ordering app – Online workshop – Training
• Integrate a Power Apps app with Power Automate – Online Workshop – Training
• Create a model-driven Power Apps app for machine ordering – Online Workshop – Training

Documentation Updates

The post What’s new in Power Apps: November 2024 Feature Update appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

All of these announcements are entering preview by December 2024: 

• Plan designer is ready for preview. In September 2024, we opened early access for select users to a new AI-powered workspace for turning requirements into a robust Microsoft Power Platform solution—including user stories, data model, apps, and automations. In the next weeks, we’re expanding access to a full preview. Designing a solution plan with Microsoft Copilot will make it easier than ever to upgrade existing apps and processes into intelligent applications.   

• Makers can generate custom AI agents directly from Power Apps using the knowledge, logic, and actions built into existing apps to jumpstart the building of a Microsoft Copilot Studio agent. These custom agents will get work done on behalf of employees, which can reduce repetitive work, supercharge individual productivity, and drive overall business efficiency.¹ Makers will also be able to tune the out-of-the-box agents in Power Apps with custom knowledge and actions using Copilot Studio.

• Introducing managed security and managed operations in Power Platform. Just as we have simplified governance with managed environments, we are now making it easier than ever for organizations to apply advanced security to their Power Platform solutions and manage mission-critical workloads at scale. A completely redesigned admin experience now features focused capabilities for managing security, deploying solutions, monitoring telemetry, and more. 

Together, these advancements represent a major disruption to the traditional “build versus buy” tradeoff of business apps. By generating intelligent applications on a fully managed platform, technology leaders can get the best of both worlds—solutions that are purpose-built for exactly their needs but without the long-term costs of maintaining full stack projects. Forrester’s John Bratincevic argues that this is the beginning of a substantial shift.

“AI-powered enterprises will “build” software instead of “buy” it—and many applications in enterprise portfolios will consolidate onto low-code AppGen platforms.”

John Bratincevic, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Let’s dig into the details of how Power Platform is leading the AppGen transition with new capabilities rolling out now.

Build enterprise solutions, start with a plan 

In September 2024, we opened early access to a new Copilot-powered workspace in Power Apps that enables makers to design and generate a robust solution to nearly any business problem. With highly positive feedback from customers, we’re excited to bring the plan designer capabilities to preview.

Now developers will be able to start working on a business problem in an iterative process with Copilot, and keep better connection between the business requirements and the solution they are building.

The entire process of building a plan and generating solution components is iterative and collaborative. At any point makers can make changes to defined user roles, requirements, data model, or the proposed user experiences. The plan will live alongside the solution, changing with it and ensuring the understanding of the problem and requirements persist.  

The new plan designer experience will make a powerful tool for creating well-structured, adaptable, and collaborative solutions using Power Apps and Power Platform. 

Generate custom AI agents from existing app capabilities  

Makers can now easily generate agents from existing apps using the logic, knowledge, and actions built into those apps. Makers can leverage Copilot Studio capabilities directly in Power Apps to build custom agents that get work done on behalf of employees. Once these agents are deployed, users can review activity, manage complex cases, and focus on higher value work.

For instance, in a reimbursement management app, a maker takes existing process—categorization, compliance check, or rejecting requests—and builds an agent to execute these tasks. Makers can start from an existing app, and agent builder will suggest actions based on the app’s construction, like activating flows or running Power Fx functions. This significantly shortens the time to get to user value and makers can continue expanding agent functionality in Copilot Studio. For example, they can add the ability to process receipt images using the pre-built prompt with GPT-4o. 

For users, the benefits are clear: instead of requiring each request to be reviewed by a person, an agent handles it. Makers can also allow users to see which rows have been recently modified by the agent and view previous agent sessions. This transparency ensures that users can intervene when necessary, maintaining visibility and control. This functionality will be available to makers starting next month.

Improved in-app agents for data entry and summaries 

In addition to generating new custom agents, we’re also improving the out-of-the-box agents that end users leverage within Power Apps to get work done more efficiently.

Data entry is one of the tasks that many people consider tedious, and it’s no surprise that the Power Apps data entry agent, which helps users fill out forms, is highly valued by customers. At Power Platform Community Conference 2024, we announced the ability to copy text and let AI suggest form inputs from the clipboard. In a study with information workers, this Copilot assistance enabled 29% faster form filling, with 95% preferring it over manual entry.² Now, users in model-driven apps can also directly add an email or file and get field suggestions from them. The new context control lets users see what data is used to predict fields, giving them more control. In canvas apps, entering long text input with Copilot now allows for custom prompts and presents multiple options to choose from—just like people are used to from Microsoft Word.

Quickly find what you need and understand a summary of complex records. Searching, sorting, and filtering of records using natural language with the help of the Power Apps data exploration agent is now available to all users in preview. And to give users easy insights, makers can add custom AI summaries to apps with a summary card—the performance of which they can review in the monitoring page.   

Copilot chat in apps can also now be customized—starting from the app designer, makers can open Copilot Studio, provision an agent responsible for the app chat experience and add new topics, knowledge grounding, domain-specific glossaries, and actions. A customized chat agent is then ready to help users with more relevant and helpful answers. 

Introducing managed security and managed operations 

In 2022, we introduced managed environments, a suite of governance capabilities that brought more visibility and control to administrators of Power Platform. We see every day how these capabilities allow IT teams to efficiently govern hundreds of thousands of assets, making well-governed use of Power Platform available to millions of users around the world, including for customers like Deutsche Bahn, Lerøy, and Lumen. 

Today, we take another step forward. We know that large-scale app modernization and the transition of existing business processes onto intelligent solutions in Power Platform and Dynamics 365 will require even more than great governance. That’s why we’re introducing two additional, closely related capabilities: managed security and managed operations. This means that Power Apps, Power Automate, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Dynamics 365 are now delivered on a fully managed platform. 

• Managed governance helps organize and administer professional and citizen development with more visibility, more control, and less effort on the part of central teams.  

• [New] Managed security makes it easier than ever before to apply advanced threat protections across the platform, helping security professionals assess and improve the security footprint of their business applications. Managed security includes industry-leading capabilities for proactive threat detection, access management, compliance, and more. Learn more in the Power Platform security and governance blog. 

• [New] Managed operations makes it easier for advanced development teams to deploy and operate mission critical applications to maximize an organization’s productivity. This suite of capabilities is designed to safeguard and tune your production workloads with the ability to safely deploy updates, detect service degradations, and provide recommendations to improve production health. Learn more about managed operations.  

All managed capabilities are benefits of existing licenses and surface directly in existing products. This includes the Power Platform admin center (PPAC), which has now been completely re-imagined around a set of new highly productive workspaces for specific tasks—including reviewing inventory in managed environments, configuring and monitoring managed security, and leveraging managed operations capabilities for deployment and oversight.

These workspaces will also now be visible in focused ways in maker experiences. For example, developers will be able to observe and improve on the active usage of their applications in the monitoring workspace. They will see apps with low app open success rates and drill down on reasons why users can’t open the app, or they can see high latencies for showing the initial screen or data and understand what’s contributing to the problem. This will help makers find and address apps that require attention for improved performance.  

Today, we’re also making an important clarification to the licensing requirements for managed environments. Managed platform capabilities are 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. We’re clarifying that as long as each individual user in the environment is appropriately licensed with at least one premium license—Power Apps or Power Automate—managed features will work and customers will be compliant.

Learn all about the updates to governance, scale, security, and data management capabilities in the breakout session Enterprise Scale: The Future of Power Platform Governance + Security. 

Apps that help users with line-of-business tasks 

Power Platform boasts a massive 1,400+ connector ecosystem, many of those connecting to the line-of-business data, giving options to business leaders and teams to build functionality they are missing to run business smoothly.  

We’re happy to announce two advances for building line-of-business apps. First, the SAP OData connector is now generally available, allowing access to SAP’s modern product stack, improving productivity and innovation with Power Platform’s low-code capabilities. Professionals building solutions over SAP will also benefit from a new whitepaper dedicated to architecting of SAP extensions.

And second, new bi-directional integration between Microsoft Dataverse and Snowflake allows makers to build end-to-end apps that act directly on Snowflake data, including the ability to create Dataverse virtual tables from Snowflake data. Coming soon, Dataverse data will be accessible in Snowflake so that customer service teams using Snowflake can leverage powerful analytics over their data in Dataverse, gaining deeper insights into customer behavior and enhancing service quality.

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024

Power Apps solves thousands of problems for tens of thousands of customers in almost every industry. With agents working alongside users, greater productivity from AI in apps, and expanded enterprise-grade tools for management at scale, Power Apps is the place for organizations to drive tangible AI impact. 

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 to see the newest announcements firsthand and understand how you can leverage them. Embrace the era of Copilot-first development and accelerate your company transformation into the age of AI with Power Apps. 

Microsoft Ignite 2024

Experience the latest innovations for AI transformation

Explore the event

¹ New autonomous agents scale your team like never before.

² Internal Microsoft testing conducted in November 2024 on sample of 22 subjects.

The post Intelligent apps: Now created with a plan, optimized with agents, and scaled on a fully managed platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

It just takes a few seconds to connect your Dataverse environment to Git. You can connect and use Git integration within Power Apps, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Automate, and Power Pages. You’ll also need access to an Azure DevOps Git repository.

Rollout is in-progress. Git integration is currently available in public geos outside the US. Your environment must be enabled for early access and accessed at https://make.preview.powerapps.com.

As the team develops, Dataverse tracks everyone’s changes. When ready, commit your changes to a branch in the connected Azure DevOps Git repository. A commit link is provided to view the changes within the repository and compare diffs. You’ll notice solutions and solution objects are now stored in human readable formats in the repo.

Professional developers can work in source control while others work in one or more environments. It’s easy to pull others’ changes into other development environments which are connected to the same source code location. This allows team members to build without others editing in their environment and share changes once they’re ready. Connect multiple development environments using the same repo, branch, and folder. Then, in each environment create or import an unmanaged solution with the same name and publisher.

When committing and pulling changes, conflicts may be detected – meaning someone else made conflicting changes to the same object. You’ll need to choose whether to keep the version that’s in your environment or bring the version from source control into your environment. You can also revert changes in the repository, then pull the prior version into your environment.

When the team is ready to deploy to test or production, you can use Pipelines in Power Platform for the release. Building and deploying using developer tools isn’t available yet for this new format.

We hope you enjoy the preview. There are many current limitations and you shouldn’t use this feature in environments or Git folders where you’re developing production solutions. Please leave your feedback below, in the community forums, on social media, or another outlet of choice. We look forward to hearing what you’d like to see prioritized next.

Learn more

Overview of Power Platform Git integration

Setup Git integration

The post Introducing Git Integration in Power Platform (preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Introducing smart paste

Smart paste is the latest capability of Copilot form fill assistance for model-driven apps, designed to make the time-consuming and frustrating task of form filling easier. Imagine this: you have some text in an email, document, or note that you need to enter into a form. Instead of manually typing it all in, you can now simply copy the text to your clipboard. Without selecting any specific field, just click the smart paste button or use the standard paste shortcut (CTRL+V or CMD+V). Copilot will reason over the form and the pasted text to suggested what text could be used to fill specific fields, and provides suggestions inline in the form. You can review and accept the suggestions that work for you—as always, nothing gets saved until you confirm. Ignoring suggestions will automatically discard it, and we are also introducing a new capability to clear all suggestions in the form.

And if you prefer the traditional way, you can still paste directly into a specific field by clicking on it first and then pasting.

You can use smart paste in your model-driven apps by updating the following two settings in Power Platform admin center, under Settings > Product > Features > AI form fill assistance section:

1. In the Enable this feature for field, make sure that All users immediately is selected.
2. Set Enable smart paste (Preview) to On.

Discover the suggestion source using new citations

We are introducing a new capability that adds even more transparency to Copilot’s suggestions. With the new citations, you can now learn more about the source of the suggestions provided by Copilot. These citations clearly identify the source, for example “Records you have updated recently” or “Clipboard”, giving you more clarity and confidence in the suggestions you receive.

Form fill assistance now available in quick create forms

Form fill assistance, including the new smart paste capability, is now available in quick create forms as well. This means you can enjoy the same time-saving benefits across even more of your forms.

Expansion to 21 languages

Form fill assistance in model-driven apps is rolling out in the following 21 languages in addition to English (US):

1. Arabic
2. Chinese (Simplified)
3. Czech
4. Danish
5. Dutch
6. Finnish
7. French
8. German
9. Greek
10. Hebrew
11. Italian
12. Japanese
13. Korean
14. Norwegian (Bokmål)
15. Polish
16. Portuguese (Brazil)
17. Russian
18. Spanish
19. Swedish
20. Thai
21. Turkish

We want to hear from you

Learn more about this feature in the documentation. We look forward to you trying out these capabilities in your model-driven apps and sharing your feedback through the form fill assistance survey in your model-driven app.

The post New smart paste makes filling forms as easy as copy & paste appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Summary: Welcome to the Power Apps monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share what’s new in Power Apps. A summary of product, community, and learning updates from throughout the month so you can access it in one easy place. This month we’re excited to share some key announcements from Power Platform Community Conference, Explain this in GCC, the GA of Power Catalog and more!

AI-powered Development

This month on Power Apps Pulse!

This month we’re excited to share improvements to Modern Theming, a new responsive template to create a list and details screen with lightning speed, a way to choose a data source for multiple controls on a screen with one click, and a new way to open existing .msapp files. See how in this month’s Power Apps Pulse!

Start building from plans, announced at PPCC

Great solutions don’t (usually) start in code, or by immediately designing the UI. Most experienced developers and teams start with an understanding of the problem, the users involved, and their requirements, before they even write the first line of code or draft a first app screen. We’re excited to bring the ability to build a plan to the Power Apps Studio. With this ability developers will be able to start working on the business problem in an iterative discussion with Copilot in Power Apps – they will be able to better keep connection between the business requirements and the solution they are building. This iterative and outcome focused development cycle can all happen right within Power Apps Studio.

Plan designer is rolling out initially as an Early Adopters Program, you can read the blog to find out how to sign up.

Copilot Power Fx Formula Explanations now available in GCC

We are excited to share that we are bringing the Copilot experience to our Government Cloud customers! As of September 24th, you will begin to see the Formula Bar Copilot button enabled for GCC (Government Community Cloud) environments and tenants that have authorized the use of Copilot and have enabled cross-region data movement for the environment. From the Copilot button, you can select the option to Explain the Formula and receive a natural language description of what the formula is doing in the context of the app. The “Explain the Formula” feature can help you quickly diagnose problems in an app by explaining each formula in simple to understand terms.

More exciting Copilot features for GCC are on the way! We can’t wait for you to try it out! Please share your thoughts and any feedback you may have by clicking the Thumb Up/Down icon in the explanation window.

Intelligent Application workload guidance as part of Power Platform Well-Architected

We are excited to announce the release of new documentation on Intelligent Application Workloads in Power Platform, as part of Power Platform Well-Architected. This comprehensive guide provides actionable insights for planning, developing, and maintaining intelligent application workloads, leveraging the Power Platform Well-Architected design principles. Key areas covered include responsible AI, security and compliance, performance optimization, deployment and testing, and integration options. Whether you’re a workload owner, technical stakeholder, or business stakeholder, this guide is designed to help you build robust, secure, and efficient intelligent applications.

Enterprise-Grade Governance

Announcing Public preview for mask sensitive data with column-level security

All enterprise and financial customers are required to protect their customers’ personal data and sensitive information from data leaks.

Highly privileged users who have access to customers’ personal data and sensitive fields can see these fields in their entirety. There is a risk when these employees can download sensitive information using bulk export operations. With this feature, the admin can mask sensitive fields and eliminate the risk of sensitive data being bulk exported.

Column-level security – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

Create and manage masking rules (preview) – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

General availability for cross-tenant license recognition Power Apps using Dataverse

To reduce administrative overhead for multi-tenant organizations using Power Apps, we are super excited to announce the general availability of cross tenant license recognition for canvas and model driven apps using Dataverse! When end-users access an app outside of their home tenant, Power Apps recognizes use rights the user has in both their home tenant or in the resource tenant (where the app is hosted). This is an enhancement to the cross tenant license recognition that already existed for canvas apps not using Dataverse.

Power catalog is Generally Available

The catalog enables makers to share and install re-usable components and templates that are customized for their orgs, by their orgs. This provides much more useful starting points than generic templates. 

Because the Catalog is built on top of our Solutions framework, you can also easily install Catalog items from any environment in a tenant, update items so that makers use the most recent, authoritative version, and have Catalog components accessible from authoring experiences, like Canvas Studio.

The Catalog also comes with Enterprise level security. By default, Catalog items must be approved by a delegated approver before they can be officially published and accessible by your org. There are also access controls for users to be able to submit, acquire, approve, or administer the Catalog. In order to resubmit new versions, a maker needs to belong to the original publishing group. The Catalog now enables you to manage your re-usable assets across your tenant in a secure way.

Virtual table to Dataverse native table relationship

Unlocking the power of Virtual Tables 

In the fast-paced world of data management, the ability to seamlessly integrate and relate data across various sources is essential. One of Dataverse’s features is its support for virtual tables, which enables real-time data access from external systems without the need to duplicate data within Dataverse. We are announcing General Availability of new capability which allows Makers the ability to create N:1 relationships between Dataverse virtual tables and Dataverse native tables.  

Enhancement Enables Business Value 

Unified Data View: With this feature users can take business decisions with a more cohesive data view that spans across native and external data sources. This is especially useful for organizations that maintain critical data in external systems but want to leverage the powerful data view and relationship capabilities of Dataverse.  

Streamlined User Experience: For end-users, this means a more seamless experience. They can work with data from various sources without needing to know or care where the data is physically stored. Whether it’s a customer record in Dataverse or an order history stored in an external SQL database, the user interaction remains consistent. 

By relating virtual and native tables, you can unlock new possibilities in reporting and analytics. Imagine creating a report that combines data from an external ERP system with native Dataverse data, all within the same environment. 

Content: Setting up relationships with virtual tables with Power Apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn​​​

Learning and Documentation Updates

Training Paths and Labs

Updated Training

• Create formulas that use tables, records, and collections in a canvas app in Power Apps – Training
• Create formulas to change properties in a Power Apps canvas app – Training
• Set up low-code plug-ins – Training
• Get started with Power Apps canvas apps – Training
• Create tables in Microsoft Dataverse – Training
• How to build the User Interface in a canvas app in Power Apps – Training
• Make your app like a pro – Training
• Use Power Query to load data in Dataverse – Training
• Work with external data in a Power Apps canvas app – Training

Documentation Updates

The post What’s new in Power Apps: September 2024 Feature Update appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Summary: Welcome to the Power Apps monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share what’s new in Power Apps. A summary of product, community, and learning updates from throughout the month so you can access it in one easy place. This month we’re excited to share Copilot updates, GA of some key features for our makers and a huge set of Learning and Documentation updates.

AI-powered Development

Introducing our first episode of Power Apps Pulse!

We’re delighted to share with you a new series highlighting incremental improvements each month aimed at making app building faster, easier, and more delightful for your app users. Check out these updates and get making with Power Apps Pulse!

Use Copilot to filter to quickly filter, sort, and search canvas app galleries with SharePoint lists

We are excited to announce that Power Apps application runtime users can now use Copilot to filter to quickly filter, sort, and search the items in canvas app galleries with SharePoint. Copilot to filter uses your natural language to generate a query to the database that scopes the current view of records in a gallery so you can quickly find the records you need. This feature is available only for Power Apps canvas web apps and only at runtime for all applications that have been republished after version 7.4 which is expected to be available starting on July 29. It will be fully rolled out to all regions several weeks later. This premium feature is on by default and authors may disable if required.

Unlocking Power Apps: Exploring New Copilot Features with April Dunnam | Copilot Learning Hub

Join us on Copilot Learning Hub as we dive into the latest Copilot capabilities within Microsoft Power Apps. In this episode, Dona welcomes April Dunnam, a Power Apps expert, to showcase the innovative features that are transforming how users interact with Power Apps. From a comprehensive walkthrough of the new capabilities to practical demos, this episode is packed with insights for both beginners and advanced users. Discover how to leverage Copilot in Power Apps to enhance your productivity and streamline your workflows. Don’t miss out on this informative session.

Call SQL Server procedures directly in Power Fx (GA)

We are excited to announce that calling SQL Server stored procedures in Power Fx is now generally available in all regions. You do not need to call a Power Automate Flow to use a stored procedure making development of Power Apps for SQL easier for authors and faster overall performance for both authors and end users. The ability to call stored procedures for the SQL connector directly is an extension to the existing tabular model and gives users access to tables, views, and stored procedures. This feature extends our ongoing support of SQL Server as a primary development target for Power Apps.

Enterprise-Grade Governance

General availability for delete app users and view platform app users

Admins can take advantage of a modern and accessible UI to manage application users. Admins can do this by using the Application users page in the environment settings in the Power Platform admin center. Application users can be added, updated (or refreshed), and deactivated. Now deactivated application users can be deleted. Admins can also view the list of platform application users with their respective security role assigned.

General Availability for Delete stub, unlicensed, and removed Microsoft Entra group users.

Previously, stub users, unlicensed, or removed Microsoft Entra group users couldn’t be deleted from a Dataverse environment. These types of users remained in a Dataverse environment with a disabled status and were unable to log into the environment. You can now delete these users with the disabled status in your environment to comply with privacy laws, regulatory requirements, and to free up storage space.

Learning and Documentation Updates

Training paths and Labs

Updated Training

• Create a machine ordering Power Apps canvas app – Online Workshop
• Integrate a Power Apps app with Power Automate – Online Workshop
• Create a Dataverse table for the machine ordering app – Online workshop
• Create a model-driven Power Apps app for machine ordering – Online Workshop
• Use Copilot in Power Apps

Documentation Updates

The post What’s new in Power Apps: August 2024 Feature Update appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Using Copilot with filter

Open a running app that uses a gallery against SharePoint.  If you have a premium license, then you will see an adorner on your gallery.

Copilot supports three kinds of queries – filter, sort, and search.  While you can type any query you might like, it suggests possible questions based on your data in your app at the time.

Copilot then scopes the records to satisfy the query. It displays a “Filtered” badge in the upper right corner of the gallery.  The exact query that was executed is displayed as a tag. And you can continue to refine your query with additional details by adding more query commands.

Filter, sort, and search galleries with Copilot to filter provides five key benefits:

• Copilot makes end users more productive and saves time. If an author has not built in search and sort capabilities, Copilot enables this scenario and makes them more productive. End users save time with the ability to directly express their query in natural language.
• Copilot saves author’s development time. Authors save time developing apps because they don’t need to develop all the UI controls necessary for the app. Instead, they can rely on Copilot for this functionality.
• Copilot enables queries over the full query result – not just what you can see in the gallery. Users can filter, sort, and search on fields even if the application doesn’t provide UI controls for these tasks. For example, you can search for records even if the application doesn’t have a search bar.
• Copilot is query safe. It only generates queries that can be run on the server. Authors don’t need to worry about whether or not their queries can be delegated.
• Copilot keeps private data private. It only works with the data that is normally returned to the application. It doesn’t access fields that aren’t returned to the app in a gallery/grid or form.

Getting started

Choose a build after 7.4 (expected on 7/29) and make sure you’ve also re-published your app on 7.4 or later. Then access your app while it is running. (Copilot with filter only appears at runtime, it does not appear inside of studio.) Select an item in the gallery to start using Copilot with filter.

See the documentation for this feature for more details. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/user/smartgrid

The post Use Copilot to quickly filter, sort, and search canvas app galleries with SharePoint lists appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

SAP OData Connector: Single Sign-On through Microsoft Azure API Management 

In addition to Basic, Anonymous, and API Key Authentication, the SAP OData Connector, currently in public preview, now also supports Single Sign-On available through Microsoft Azure API Management. It enables SAP Principal propagation with SAP services such as SAP Gateway, S/4HANA Cloud, RISE, and many more using Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) as the Identity Provider. At the core of the solution is the proven OAuth2SAMLBearer flow. Organizations can harness the benefits of low-code development while maintaining the protection and compliance of their SAP environments. This way, users of your low-code solutions spanning the Microsoft and SAP ecosystem are mapped from their Microsoft Entra ID identities to their named SAP backend users. SAP authorizations are fully retained.

In addition to that, solving this challenge on Azure API Management level enables scaling the approach to many different consumer solutions. No more re-inventing the wheel for every developer. 

Find the policy on the Azure API Management repository here. 

To learn more about OAuth2 through Azure API Management, please visit Enable SAP Principal Propagation and SSO for Microsoft Power Platform. 

During public preview, we encourage you to explore the ability to create Microsoft Power Automate cloud flows that access SAP data through the SAP OData connector using Entra ID and provide feedback.  

This capability is available in all regions of Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate. 

SAP ERP connector: Microsoft Entra ID using certificates 

We are excited to announce the release of a new authorization type for the SAP ERP connector: certificate-based Single Sign-On (SSO). Building on existing support for Basic Authentication, Microsoft Entra ID via Kerberos, and Windows Authentication, this latest enhancement introduces Microsoft Entra ID using certificates, further strengthening security and aligning with industry standards and SAP recommendations. 

With this new authentication method, users can leverage their Microsoft Entra ID credentials to access sensitive data within their SAP systems, eliminating the need to remember multiple usernames and passwords. By employing X.509 certificates, we establish a trusted environment that securely verifies user identity, streamlining the login process while safeguarding sensitive information. 

A crucial feature of Microsoft Entra ID with certificate authentication is principal propagation, which ensures that business users engage with SAP systems using their unique SAP user credentials. This approach eliminates the need for a service principal to act on behalf of users, satisfying critical audit policy requirements. 

Certificate-based SSO enhances security and user convenience by utilizing digital certificates for authentication. Certificates offer a more robust form of verification compared to traditional username and password combinations, leveraging cryptographic techniques that are challenging to compromise. Each certificate is uniquely tied to the user and issued by a trusted authority, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access the system. Furthermore, certificates can be configured to expire automatically, adding an additional layer of security by guaranteeing that only current and valid credentials are utilized. 

Requirements for setup 

To implement certificate-based SSO, the following components are necessary: 

• On-premises data gateway: Microsoft Power Platform’s connection bridge software. 

• S-user account: Needed for SAP NCo and other supporting content/downloads. 

• SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET (NCo): Essential for establishing SAP connections. 

• SAP cryptography library: Install and verify in SAP and the Windows VM for the OPDG. 

• Public-key infrastructure solution: Required for managing certificates. 

• SAP GUI installed: Necessary for SAP configuration. 

• SAP administrator account: Required for administrative tasks. 

For more information and greater detail on the configuration of Microsoft Entra ID using Certificates please refer to the Microsoft Learn documentation. 

Microsoft Entra ID using Certificates—Data flow diagram

Starting August 14, 2024, this capability is available in all regions of Power Apps and Power Automate. 

Coming Soon (Q3/Q4 2024) 

SAP ERP Connector 

• RFC v3 Action: RFC v2 action is being deprecated in favor of the newer v3 version, which is currently in preview. It includes localization fix to handle numerals.  
• SAP Setup Assistant: The SAP Setup Assistant is designed to simplify the setup of connectivity between SAP and Microsoft Power Platform by guiding customers and partners through a step-by-step process. It provides instructions, automations, and testing for each necessary component along the way.  

RFC v3 and the SAP Setup Assistant will be generally available late third quarter of 2024. 

SAP OData Connector 

We have listened to your feedback during the public preview period and driven several enhancements to the connector. The SAP OData Connector will be generally available fourth quarter of 2024. At general availability, in addition to Single Sign-On support through Azure API Management, we will plan to support the following: 

• Microsoft Azure Virtual Network: Enable support for interacting with private virtual networks, eliminating the need for usage of gateway machines and software on Microsoft Azure. 

• Microsoft Power Fx: Native support for Power Fx queries providing the ability to generate OData queries using natural language. 
• Single Sign-On with the API Management capability of SAP Integration Suite: Allows SSO authentication to SAP OData services via OAuth flow. With SAP API Management being in the mix, customers can configure their APIM policies to match what they need for integrations and OAuth flows using SAP Business Technology Platform and can utilize the SAP Cloud Connector to connect to their SAP system. 

The future of SAP and Microsoft Power Platform

SAP and Microsoft Power Platform are areas of continued investment for Microsoft. To learn more, see these other useful resources: 

• SAP OData – Connectors | Microsoft Learn
• SAP ERP – Connectors | Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft Power Apps – Build Apps with AI | Microsoft
• SAP Procurement template for Microsoft Power Platform – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn  
• Connect Microsoft Power Platform to SAP on Azure – Training | Microsoft Learn  
• Install and configure an on-premises data gateway
• SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET

The post Announcing public preview of expanded Single Sign-On authentication options for SAP Connectors  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.