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.

This update and other data workspace features are now available in 20 languages worldwide. These include English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Finnish, Greek, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Russian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

For more information about the availability of data workspace, see Create and edit tables using Power Apps.

Build data model with existing tables

You can now add existing tables to your workspace either manually or with Copilot recommendations. Copilot will suggest the most relevant tables based on the set of tables currently in your workspace. Additionally, when working within a solution, you can also filter to show only tables in current solution, promoting better ALM practices.

Manage existing tables in the enhanced ERD view

The ERD view and interaction of data workspace have also been enhanced to streamline the management of your data model. You can now review column details about your tables, as well as to show and hide columns and relationships of your tables.

Limitations

While we are working on enabling a full editing experience of existing table within data workspace, currently you can only add existing tables to data workspace in read-only mode. To edit existing table, you will need to open the table in a new tab. This also means that you will not be able to create one-to-many relationships to existing table in the data workspace.

You can find more information about limitations of data workspace in this doc: Limitations using the table visual designer

Learn more about data workspace

• Create and edit tables using Power Apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
• Data Workspace is Now Generally Available! – Microsoft Power Platform Blog
• Work with complex data models in an ERD view assisted by Copilot – Microsoft Power Platform Blog

The post Work with existing tables in data workspace 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.

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 the GA of field suggestions for Model Driven makers, Data workspace in 9 langagues worldwide and improved ALM for virtual tables and Copilot Studio!

AI-powered Development

See highlights of what’s new this month on Power Apps Pulse!

We’ve got some great enhancements to share this month! It’s never been easier to share your canvas apps, check out new ways to work with JSON-based data with updates to how you can use ParseJSON(), and build UI faster with improvements to the Copilot button inline action. Get in the know with this month’s Power Apps Pulse!

Copilot Field Suggestions for Model Driven Apps Forms and Views is available in GA

We are excited to announce that makers can leverage Copilot for column suggestions when creating new Forms and Views. You don’t have to start from blank any longer. When creating a new View, for example, makers can select Get AI generated column suggestions, which will enable Copilot to generate suggested columns for the View based on the Table columns, and View name or descriptions if they are available. This option is also available for new Quick view and Quick create forms.

The feature is available worldwide for English language users.

Data workspace is now generally available in 9 languages worldwide 

Craft your data model from natural language input, Excel file, or SharePoint list with Copilot assistance. Build deployment-ready business solutions involving multiple tables at a time in ERD view. Create not just canvas apps, but also model-driven apps on top of your business data — all available through Data Workspace in 9 languages now!

Comment Generated Formulas is now GA and available in multiple languages!

We are excited to announce that our Comment Generated Formulas feature is now generally available (GA)! This innovative tool allows you to create Power Fx formulas directly from code comments by typing // followed by your natural language request, making it easier than ever to create Power Fx formulas. Simply direct the Copilot on what you want to do in plain language, and our AI will generate the corresponding formula for you by leveraging the context of the application.

In addition to its general availability, the Comment Generated Formulas feature now supports multiple languages beyond English. This enhancement ensures that users around the globe can take full advantage of this powerful tool in their native language, whether it’s French, Spanish, German, or any other supported language. For all new apps, this feature is enabled automatically. For existing apps, you can easily turn it on from the New Settings. So make sure you have enabled the feature, and start transforming your comments into functional formulas today!

Enterprise-Grade Governance

New Rule for Generative AI features

Since some Copilots and generative AI features are not available in all geos or languages, we previously introduced two settings that enable Copilot features by allowing processing of data outside of region. This month, we are announcing a way to manage these settings at scale by using a new rule for environment groups.

Tenant admins can configure environment groups and publish the “Generative AI settings” rule to enable/disable cross-geo data movement and/or Bing search. For more information on these settings, see Turn on copilots and generative AI features – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn.

Application Lifecycle Management for Virtual Tables

We’re thrilled to announce an enhancement for virtual tables—Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) capability! This new functionality enables developers to streamline the transition of virtual tables in Solutions across Power Platform environments using environment variables.

Environment variables are essential to effective ALM, allowing developers to adjust connection references as virtual tables move from one environment to another. For example, when integrating with SharePoint, developers can update the connection reference to reflect a test or production URL. Similarly, for SQL integrations, switching between test and production servers is now straightforward.

With this new feature you can add virtual tables to a solution, export the solution, and import it into other environments, complete with all virtual table settings. This enhancement simplifies deployment and management, empowering developers to build with even greater efficiency and flexibility.

Healthy ALM in Microsoft Copilot Studio: Solution Explorer in Microsoft Copilot Studio (MCS) is in Public Preview

Solution explorer in Copilot studio is now available in public preview, and the team is thrilled to announce the launch of the latest features designed to manage copilots and their components like knowledge, topics, actions and more! Whether you’re Maker or ISV or End customer, Solution explorer offers capabilities to transport & deploy copilots and components between environments, to customize and extend existing copilot with proper controls. ALM in Copilot Studio is our desire to democratize conversational AI as a part of that mission to empower. We’ve listened to our customers’ needs and worked tirelessly to bring an ALM that truly stands out.   

Feature #1 Access solutions in MCS: In addition to accessing Solutions in MCS, customers can now create a new solution, add existing copilot to the solution and view all the objects related to the copilots, all within MCS without navigating out of the current platform. 

Feature #2: Create Copilot using solution: Customers can now create copilot using a solution which is their preferred solution within MCS. This prevents us from having any orphaned customizations

Feature #3 Edit and Extend copilot and components using solutions: Customers can now edit and extend copilot and its components using a solution which is their preferred solution within MCS. This helps to seamlessly upgrade and deploy copilots. 

Feature #4 Deploy copilot and components using Pipelines with a single click: Customers can now use pipelines as a single click process to deploy Copilots to Prod environment and is a very secure way to accomplish this migration.  

Create and manage custom solutions – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

Export and import copilots using solutions – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

Export and import copilot components using solutions – Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Learn

Learning and Documentation Updates

Training Paths and Labs

Updated Training

• Build your first app with Power Apps and Dataverse for Teams
• Build a mobile-optimized app from Power Apps
• Work with canvas app source code
• Configure forms, charts, and dashboards in model-driven apps
• Customize a canvas app in Power Apps
• Design a Power Apps canvas app by using Figma
• Get started with Power Apps and SharePoint
• Use specialized components in a model-driven form

Documentation Updates

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

Source: (Gartner, October 2024)1* 

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms** for the sixth year in a row. This recognition, we feel, reflects the trust of millions of users who continue to build on Microsoft Power Platform—a comprehensive low-code solution that spans application development, process automation, external websites, and intelligent copilots.  

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms

Learn why Microsoft was named a Leader.

Read the report

The success stories of our customers demonstrate the tangible impact of Microsoft Power Platform in real-world scenarios. A few examples include:

• Pacific Gas & Electric, a US utility company that has built over 300 complex solutions delivering over $75 million in savings each year and are also adopting generative AI to further advance their service center chatbot, which alone saves $1.1 million each year in helpdesk support.
• Zurich Insurance Group, a Swiss insurance company, is skillfully balancing the growth of low-code development with the strong governance required in the highly regulated financial services industry sector. 
• Cineplex, one of Canada’s leading media and entertainment companies, has saved 30,000 hours (approximately 3.5 years) and over $1 million in the past two years by leveraging automation and copilots built on Microsoft Power Platform to improve overall customer service and reduce query handling time from 15 minutes to just 30 seconds.² 

These companies—and many more—are using Microsoft Power Platform to transform their operations by building solutions on a secure, scalable platform that effectively handles and streamlines AI integration, governance, security, and enterprise data connectivity, a platform that enables developers to build with natural language, visual interface, or code, and deploy powerful solutions to web, mobile, or Microsoft Teams with ease.

“[Microsoft] Power Platform enables us to carefully control the data that feeds our AI models and, through [Microsoft Azure] Active Directory and [Microsoft] Dataverse, also control who can access which data through those models”.

Thomas Bilbo, Principal, Product Owner, PG&E 

Let’s dive into the factors that we believe set our platform apart as a Leader. 

Microsoft Copilot in Power Platform is transforming how people use and create software, making Microsoft the low-code application platform (LCAP) of choice for customers who need to rapidly modernize their application estates for the age of AI. 

Makers can harness Copilot in Power Apps to turn natural language descriptions into functional solutions quickly. Copilot helps makers from the beginning, when they build a plan for their solution, and continues to assist with tasks like working with data models, adding new tables, creating relations between data, adding new screens and controls within the canvas experience, and crafting complex formulas in Microsoft Power Fx.  

“Building the prototype from scratch would have taken 6-8 hours. We were able to just describe in natural language and build in a few minutes.”

Ron Colvin​, Director of Innovation, CONA Services​ 

End-users benefit from out-of-the-box Microsoft Copilot capabilities when using apps built on Dataverse. And with Copilot streamlining actions such as drafting text inputs, filling forms, and filtering records, users are saving significant time on manual and repetitive tasks.  

To date, over 480,000 organizations have used AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform. For instance, Nsure.com significantly improved efficiency and reduced costs by using generative AI to automate complex business processes, cutting manual processing time by 60% and associated costs by 50%.  

Confidently adopt at scale with enterprise-grade security and data governance  

Through Managed Environments, the suite of advanced governance capabilities that comes with Power Platform premium licenses, the platform provides a robust control framework for secure, scalable low-code adoption. Leading organizations like PG&E, Equinor, Shell, T-Mobile, Lumen Technologies, Zurich Insurance Group, and HSBC manage extensive developer networks and solutions globally with exceptional visibility and control.  

Since 2022, Deutsche Bahn (DB) Group has been using Managed Environments to drive innovation at scale across the world’s largest railway company. At Rabobank, more than 55% of their 40,000 employees use Microsoft Power Platform solutions. Similarly, Accenture has over 200,000 employees using applications built on Microsoft Power Apps every month. 

Each of our coworkers has a [Microsoft] Power Platform license to create, to solve problems for his or her team, or even for the whole company. It’s very easy to make your own app, and very fast.

Thomas Czierpke, Head of Adoption and Change Management, Microsoft 365, DB Group  

We continue to invest in Managed Environments as customers drive greater scale and sophistication on the platform. In the past year, we have introduced comprehensive application lifecycle management, including Git integration and source control, a proactive intelligent advisor for risk management, and advanced administration options. We’re equipping administrators and experienced developers with advanced tools, and our upcoming release plan will continue to add new functionality in application lifecycle management, enterprise-scale administration, licensing and capacity management, monitoring, security, and compliance. 

Start your low-code transformation now 

In the journey of digital and AI transformation, every maker and every developer plays a crucial role in driving innovation. It’s amazing to see 83,000 participants in our partner bootcamps and airlifts, with Microsoft Power Platform communities growing to 5.8 million monthly active users! It is all of you—our community—that make this journey so rewarding. 

We are grateful to all the organizations, customers, the community, and partners for this recognition—thank you for everything that you do! As a next step, dive into building with Power Apps Developer Plan. Learn more about our position as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms report. 

Sources

1. Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, October 16, 2024, Oleksandr Matvitskyy,  Kimihiko Iijima, Mike West, Kyle Davis, Akash Jain, Paul Vincent

2. Microsoft Fiscal Year 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call 

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms. 

**Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

The post Microsoft named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms    appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Is your team still taking turns building in the Canvas designer? Have you been patiently waiting for coauthoring to be generally available to finally start building canvas apps with your teammates? Power Apps is beyond thrilled to officially announce the much-anticipated general availability of Canvas coauthoring! Now, both the Canvas designer and Modern app designer have coauthoring as a generally available feature. Fusion teams can now work in the same app at the same time, see changes made by other team members while making your own. Building sophisticated apps require teamwork from others’ expertise; with coauthoring being generally available, building Power Apps with your team has never been easier!

Enable coauthoring in Canvas

As we roll out coauthoring general availability in the Canvas designer, navigate to the Canvas designer for the desired app that you’d like to coauthor in. Then, open App settings, under New >, enable the Coauthoring toggle.

Why coauthor?

Coauthoring revolutionizes the way makers collaborate in Power Apps. It allows multiple users to simultaneously work on the same app, enabling real-time updates and seamless communication via commenting. Team members can now share ideas, provide instant feedback, and make changes without dividing efforts or consolidate changes from multiple app instances. This not only accelerates the development process, but also enhances creativity and innovation by allowing diverse perspectives to come together in the app authoring journey. The Power Apps team is excited to support this feature as GA to further empower fusion teams to build more efficiently. Visit our documentation to learn more details about this experience.  

Upcoming coauthoring plans

This feature is not yet on by default, as this wave of coauthoring general availability includes some limitations, documented here. We continue to build to reach better feature parity for single-author sessions before enabling the feature to be on by default. If you have any feedback, please share with us to continue to improve the overall coauthoring experience.

The post Canvas coauthoring is now generally available! 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

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Like with SharePoint, this feature operates with any natively bound gallery where the gallery is directly populated by SharePoint and not by a collection or variable.

Using Copilot with filter

Open a running app that uses a gallery against SQL Server.  If you have a premium license (which is required for the SQL Server connector), 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. Note that Copilot over SQL supports an additional verb “in” that SharePoint does not support. It will search for an occurrence of your search text inside of a record value.

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.

Create a new app with Studio version on or after 3.24092.17 or re-publish an existing app with this version. 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 SQL Server appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

By 2026, 40% of net-new applications will be intelligent apps…[that] incorporate AI to enhance existing experiences and form new use cases

IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Developer and DevOps 2024 Predictions

Copilot will continue to bring a tremendous opportunity for developers and end users to be more productive. Power Apps will enable makers and end users with Copilot and a team of agents, each with rich domain skills across solution architecture, data modelling, and data exploration. Makers will be able to build intelligent solutions that solve business problems faster and with less effort.

Start with a plan

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.

Makers will be able to start with a description of their business problem as well as provide additional context like process diagrams, data models, or even screenshots of legacy apps. Copilot will use this input to draft user roles and requirements for the solution. From this starting point, makers can continue to add or change roles and their requirements directly or with the assistance of Copilot.

Once the team will be aligned on requirements, Power Apps will propose a data model to support the solution and allow the maker to explore and make updates through a visual entity relationship diagram (ERD).

When the maker will be ready to start building the solution components, the plan designer will recommend what types of apps and automation will fit their requirements. In the initial release of this functionality, the recommendations will include Canvas and model driven apps, and cloud flows in Power Automate.

This entire process of building a plan and generating solution components is iterative and collaborative. At any point makers are able to make changes to defined user roles, requirements, data model, or the proposed user experiences.

And this additional context and grounding isn’t available just for the creation experience – the plan will now live alongside the solution, changing with it and making sure the understanding of the problem and requirements isn’t lost. This way anyone who comes to edit the existing solutions can not only see the actual status quo, but the rationale that led to it.

From the view of suggested apps, makers can jump into app generation, see a live preview of the app for quick validation, and leverage the full power of the canvas and model driven designers to customize and continuing building the app.

Power Apps Studio is evolving to enable developers throughout the entire software development cycle, centered on the end user and their requirements. The plan designer is going to be available through Early Adopters Program, before entering public preview. You can request to join at https://aka.ms/LetsBuildaPlan – this doesn’t grant immediate access but will get you on the list as we expand to more users to engage with the product team, provide feedback, and get hands-on with the plan designer and intelligent apps.

Collaborate with Copilot and your team

While building alongside Copilot continues to improve, so does working alongside the rest of your team. We’re extremely excited to announce that Coauthoring in Power Apps is now generally available. The ability to work with a team of developers, business users, and other stakeholders in a single pane of glass brings great advantages. Especially in a world where low-code and code-first development happens in one solution.

Building apps that are intelligent from the start

This week we also announced updates for end users to easily work with data in their apps. With smart paste, instead of tediously searching for the right inputs, the end user can copy text from an e-mail or other source, let Copilot identify the right information, and map the content directly to their form. From there, users can decide what to accept or change.

Additionally, when working over a large number of records, Copilot is able to help search and filter the data for users. Instead of numerous point-and-click actions, they can use natural language to quickly filter and search through data directly on the grid.

These updates, available in Public Preview, continue to bring intelligent skills to core tasks for our end users, without the need for the developer to custom build an experience.

Request to join and become an early adopter

If you’re passionate about these updates coming for makers and end users, please join our Early Adopters Program. This doesn’t grant immediate access but will get you on the list as we expand to more users to engage with the product team, provide feedback, and get hands-on with the plan designer and intelligent apps.

You can request to join here: https://aka.ms/LetsBuildaPlan

The post Build user-focused intelligent solutions in Power Apps, start with a plan. appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.