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.

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• There were several live sessions (now available on-demand) for participants to learn about the Copilot and AI features of Power Platform.
• Participants followed a Learn Collection for help in getting started.
• Over 100 project submissions were received with 4 winners chosen across the different categories.

Summary of the participants and project submissions from around the world.

The categories for the hackathon were:

Grand prize winner – The best of the best! Rewards the solution that meets all judging criteria, wows judges, and has potential real-world value for Power Platform Users.

Best AI-powered solution – Rewards the solution that integrates AI in an innovative way.

Best Better Together Use Case – Rewards the solution that uses the Power Platform and other Microsoft products in an interesting way.

Best Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Use Case – Rewards the solution that helps make the Power Platform community more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

The submissions were innovative and demonstrated how AI can be helpful across numerous use cases. Be inspired this year in building AI-powered solutions with Power Platform by checking out these community submissions below:

• Education – Teaching Accelerator
• Family Support – Make Life Easy | Parents Advisor
• Healthcare – Romão’s Homecare | Medical Assistant
• Human Resources – The Relocation Game | Seeker
• Not-for-profit – Migrant Worker Case Management
• Information Technology – Prompt Wagon | CodeScribe

Education

Teaching Accelerator

Teachers spend thousands of hours each year planning the curriculum for their students. Elliot Fraser developed a Power Platform solution, known as the Teaching Accelerator, to expedite the process for teachers in creating a curriculum for their students. The solution utilizes OpenAI’s ChatGPT service where teachers can interact with it through a Copilot embedded in the model-driven app to create lessons, modify the lessons created, and create an entire curriculum of lessons for a topic.

Teachers can interact with a Copilot within the model-driven app for creating lessons and a curriculum for students.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• Model-driven app which is the primary end user interface for the teachers to plan their lessons and a curriculum for students.
• Custom pages built using Power Apps canvas apps are embedded in the model-driven app to help guide teachers to create a curriculum of lessons, create lesson plans and view, modify and assign existing lessons.
• Teachers enter their questions into a Copilot that was built using Microsoft Copilot Studio to receive AI-generated suggestions for a curriculum and lesson plans. The Copilot appears in a pane within the model-driven app through a custom page.
• Power Automate cloud flows in the background interact with OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to relay the suggestions to the teacher.
• When the teacher is satisfied with the suggestions from Copilot, they can ask Copilot to generate the curriculum and lesson plans in the model-driven app. Depending on where the teacher executes this in the app, Copilot calls a function in OpenAI to create an array of the curriculum or lesson plans as a JSON object. This output is then saved in Dataverse using a cloud flow by transforming it into rows of data which the teacher sees as the curriculum or lesson plans in the model-driven app.

What we loved

Elliot’s Teaching Accelerator solution won the Grand Prize winner category of the hackathon due to the impact it would have in the education space by reducing the hours teachers spend annually. Teachers can quickly create a curriculum and lesson plans for students in minutes with the help of generative AI and Power Platform.

Since the hack, Elliot has an updated version of the Teaching Accelerator where he’s made enhancements based on feedback from teachers who have been testing the solution. For an overview of the updated solution version, watch Elliot’s presentation from a previous The Low Code Revolution episode.

Family support

Make Life Easy

To provide everyday support for parents of autistic children, Raghav Mishra developed a Power Apps canvas app to create structured daily routines. As a parent to an autistic child, Raghav recognized their son thrived when steps of their daily routines were illustrated visually by his wife with the corresponding written text. Inspired by his wife’s dedication in helping their son, Raghav turned to the Power Platform combined with OpenAI’s services to develop a Power Apps canvas app that uses generative AI to help create the text-based steps of the tasks and design the corresponding images of the steps. The Make Life Easy app can be used by parents to establish routines the children can follow.

Parents interact with generative AI in a canvas app to create written and visual steps for tasks children follow.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• Parents use the canvas app to interact with OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to generate a list of text-based steps for tasks, such as the steps children follow to put their shoes on.
• The text-based steps for each task are saved in Dataverse, which are displayed in the gallery of the app.
• Parents can select a step from the gallery and interact with OpenAI’s DALL-E service to create the corresponding visual images for all steps, such as asking for an image of a child sitting on a chair as a step the child follows to tie their shoelaces.
• Once all images of the steps for the tasks are created, they can be added to the schedule board for children to follow. Parents can then assign the tasks to their children.
• Children see their assigned tasks in their personal daily schedule board within the app. They can follow each of the steps through the visual and written instructions generated by AI.

What we loved

Raghav’s Make Life Easy solution won the Best Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Use Case category for designing a solution that supports parents of autistic children and their daily routines. Parents can interact with generative AI in a Power Apps canvas app to define the steps of a task and create the corresponding visuals. Children can follow these AI-generated steps through written and visual comprehension in the app.

Parents Advisor

To help parents encourage and teach children every day, Richard Li created a Power Apps canvas app known as Parents Advisor, where parents can seek additional support for advice on educating their children. Several Azure OpenAI services and OpenAI services were used together with Power Platform to provide tailored recommendations based on the individual in-app user profiles. Children can also have one-on-one interaction with AI, where the AI-generated answers are verbally read to them from the app itself. The Parents Advisor app can be used daily by both parents and children for written and aural comprehension.

Parents and children interact with generative AI to create tailored learning experiences in the canvas app.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• Parents can select from built-in prompts in the canvas app such as how to encourage their child to sleep independently. They can also enter their own custom prompts directly in the app, where Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service will respond with an answer which the parent can save for future reference.
• Parents also have the option to provide their prompt verbally through the built-in microphone control of canvas apps. Their verbal prompt is then transcribed to text using OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text service and can also be translated to more than 50 languages.
• All responses from Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service can be transcribed from text-to-speech using the Speech service from Azure AI. The style of the voice can be altered using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) such as the effect, style and multilingual voices. This means the AI advisor can “talk” to children by reading the responses to prompts through the built-in audio control of canvas apps.
• Most of the parent end-user features are also replicated for the children end-users where they too can interact with the Parent Advisor app and access the list of built-in topic prompts. Or they can enter their own custom prompts and have the app read the responses generated.
• One of the fun features of the app is using Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to author bedtime stories for children based on pre-selected criteria of the character (e.g. Cinderella), language, genre, length and the requested story details. The parent or child also has an option to create their own bedtime story by adding their own prompts. Based on the prompts selected, the app will generate a bedtime story which can be read by the parent or child, or the app can read it to them through the native audio control of canvas apps.

What we loved

It was very cool to see the solution utilize the Speech service from Azure AI to transcribe the responses from text-to-speech in relation to the prompt entered by the parent or child. We also liked it was diverse and inclusive in providing multi-language support to cater for different languages of families.

Healthcare

DISCLAIMER: Applications built using Microsoft Power Platform are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment.

Romão’s Homecare

To assist doctors and nurses with scheduled visits to patient’s homes, the Romão brothers – Douglas and Renato, built several apps by combining low code and pro-code techniques. A Power Apps canvas app, known as the Romão’s Homecare mobile app, is used by the doctors and nurses for visibility of daily scheduled in-home patient visits and to record details of their assessment from their devices. The information entered in the Romão Homecare app is saved in Dataverse and is accessible through a Power Apps model-driven app.

Doctors and nurses capture their assessment of patients during in-home visits with assistance from generative AI in a canvas app.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• The canvas app is the primary end user interface for doctors and nurses where they can see a list of their upcoming scheduled in-home visits. The built-in interactive map control displays the location of their patient visits.
• The native camera control of canvas apps enables them to capture photos during their assessment with the patient. These photos are uploaded into Azure Blob Storage and a sentiment score based on the images uploaded is generated using a Python web app via Azure App service.
• Audio recordings can also be captured using the native microphone control in canvas apps where the audio is transcribed to text using OpenAI Whisper’s speech-to-text service.
• A simple Yes/No checklist is used which is submitted to OpenAI to provide a score of the visit.
• On completion of the visit, the overall score calculated by OpenAI indicates the wellbeing of the patient with a high score being good and a low score requiring further attention.
• A model-driven app displays the stored patient data in Dataverse where information can be modified if needed.

What we loved

Doctors and nurses taking notes during or after a patient visit takes time and the solution reduces this administrative effort by capturing audio recordings and transcribing them to text using OpenAI Whisper’s speech-to-text service. There’s no duplicate time spent re-entering their notes by typing into the app. The data being accessible through Dataverse is also convenient for the information to be modified if additional details need to be edited.

Medical Assistant

To help the medical industry interpret computerized tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, Yevhenii Dementiev, Valentin Gasenko and Surkho Salamov built an app, known as the Detect Cancer app, to support physicians with reviewal of patient scans. The aim of the solution is to help physicians to distinguish between possible tumors and other anomalies, improving the precision of diagnosis and identifying tumors at various stages.

AI technologies used in their solution identifies potential tumors and anomalies to help physicians with diagnosis.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• Physicians use a canvas app where images from the CT and MRI scans can be uploaded using the built-in attachments control of canvas apps.
• Using AI Builder Object Detection Model, the uploaded images are analyzed and highlight the detected possible cancer regions on the CT scan and MRI scan.
• A Power Automate cloud flow sends the detected information from the AI model to OpenAI’s Completions service to generate medical conclusions for the physicians to predict the recovery of the patient.
• The physician can also dive further into the regions detected for analysis and comparison from previous CT and MRI scans of the patient. Based on the historic data, OpenAI can provide a prediction of the patient’s recovery from cancer.
• Dataverse is used to store all information about the patient scans and conclusions of the detected cancer regions.

What we loved

This is an incredible solution that supports a healthcare use case by assisting detection of cancer regions and medical conclusions using AI Builder Object Detection Model combined with OpenAI services. It was also nice to see the team include feedback in their video submission from their target audience of physicians. Their solution has demonstrated how Power Platform and AI together can be of secondary help to healthcare professionals.

Human Resources

The Relocation Game

Employee relocation can be overwhelming for employees in two ways: understanding what their organization’s local policies are and adjusting to a new city – especially if the employee is unfamiliar with the local surroundings. Denisa Mihai built a Power Apps canvas app known as The Relocation Game, to help employees with their move by interacting with a Copilot to learn about the local policies and help identify the city’s landmarks through AI Builder.

Employees interact with a Copilot embedded in a canvas app to learn more about their work benefits, the required documentation for relocation and can be connected to the HR team.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• A Copilot is embedded in a Power Apps canvas app which uses the built-in boost conversation capabilities where natural language processing is applied to find, collate and parse relevant information from the sites and summarize the search results into plain language for the employee.
• Employees interact with the Copilot within the Relocation app where they can ask about the company benefits, documentation required for their move to a new country, and request to be connected to the HR team for additional questions.
• An AI Builder object detection custom model was developed and trained to recognize city landmarks for employees to become familiar with their city’s surroundings. The trained object detection custom model is embedded into the Relocation app.
• Using the built-in camera and image controls of canvas apps, the employee takes photos and uploads these into the object detection custom model for it to recognize and present the name of the landmark to the employee.
• Employees can also create their own collection of landmarks by taking photos and adding them to their list of landmarks in the Relocation app.

What we loved

Employees can feel supported for their relocation to another city by interacting with a Copilot with boost conversation capabilities enabled to help with HR related enquiries. We liked that there was an element of “discovery” built into the app for employees to take photos and verify a landmark of the city using the AI Builder object detection custom model.

Seeker

Recruiting new talent is often time-consuming during the phases of advertising, finding candidates and interviewing candidates. Isabelle Gaboc, Daniel Kerridge, and Jady Mulqueeney developed an end-to-end solution to reduce the administrative hours spent. A Power Pages site was built to handle the job listings and the initial interview process with candidates. Candidates can choose to have an automated interview within the Power Pages site where interviews are tailored to the candidate. Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT capabilities in AI Builder generates open ended questions in alignment to the job description and information provided in candidate’s resumes, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT service is utilized during the interview for an ongoing conversational dialog with the candidate.

Open ended interview questions generated with the AI Builder connector in Power Automate are used in the AI-led interviews with candidates.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• An AI-generated Power Pages site was created using Copilot that enables candidates to review all available positions. They can apply by uploading their resumes and begin the automated interview process shortly after.
• Several cloud flows were built to extract text from the uploaded resume where the data is parsed and analyzed using the AI Builder text recognition prebuilt model to convert the resume to text.
• The automation continues by converting the job description to text using Azure OpenAI GPT capabilities in AI Builder to format the resume text from the previous step by removing unnecessary information and only keep the information aligned to the job description. As the last automation step, AI Builder’s OpenAI GPT capabilities are used again to generate open ended interview questions based on the refined resume text and job description.
• The candidate interviews are conducted within a webpage in the Power Pages site through a virtual call with a .NET bot integrated with Azure Communication Services. The interview questions generated by AI Builder from the cloud flow are retrieved by the .NET bot from the webpage using liquid, a markup language in Power Pages.
• Using Azure AI services text-to-speech, the .NET bot asks the candidate the interview questions generated by AI Builder.
• In return, the candidate can respond verbally to the .NET bot where the audio dialog is translated from speech-to-text using Azure AI services.
• The .NET bot will then send the translated text to OpenAI’s ChatGPT service with a prompt to respond accordingly for the interview. The output used for the response is translated once again to speech and relayed aurally back to the candidate. This enables a constant conversational AI dialog loop between the bot and the candidate.

What we loved

Their Seeker site solution won the Best AI-powered solution category of the hackathon due to the impact it would have for Human Resources in allowing candidates to use a Power Pages site to upload their resume for a job application and use OpenAI’s ChatGPT services to create a list of interview questions, followed by conducting the interview through a virtual voice call – all without any human intervention.

For a more detailed overview of the solution watch the Seeker team’s presentation from a previous Microsoft 365 & Power Platform weekly call.

Not-for-profit

Migrant Worker Case Management

Filipino citizens who work abroad sometimes face difficulties in understanding their rights in the country they work in. A case management solution was developed by Carmina Symaco, Marcos Antonio Abrematia and Jayson Espadero to support migrant workers in solving their issues by interacting with a Copilot embedded in a Power Pages site. All questions are created as a case in Dataverse where additional support personnel can review and respond to the person working abroad.

Migrant workers can paste an excerpt from their employment contract into the page in the Power Pages site to generate details that are more easily understood.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• A Copilot built using Microsoft Copilot Studio utilizes the built-in boost conversation capabilities where local websites of a country are associated to the Copilot to generate responses to questions asked by migrant workers.
• The Copilot is embedded in a Power Pages site where the user provides details of their role, the country they are working in and selects from a list of topics that resemble their issue to gain further assistance. Based on the information provided, Copilot returns the desired information extracted and collated from local websites of the country the Filipino citizen works in.
• Excerpts from their employee contract can also be parsed and analyzed using Power Automate cloud flows combined with OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to interpret the details and generate an answer that can be easily understood by them.
• All answers are captured as a case where support personnel can review them in a canvas app. An embedded Copilot in the app assists the support personnel to generate responses for the cases.
• AI Builder text recognition prebuilt model was used to classify the cases based on the description the migrant worker provided to the Copilot in Power Pages. In the app, there is a view for cases where the tag identified by AI Builder and the selected issue type by the migrant worker do not match. The administrator reviews the conversation history between the migrant worker and Copilot to correct the classification of the case.

What we loved

The solution was supportive of migrant workers by using a Copilot with boost conversation capabilities to answer queries and use OpenAI’s ChatGPT service to help them understand their employment contracts. Since it’s embedded in a Power Pages site, they’re able to access the Copilot 24/7 which is of benefit to workers across different time zones. The team also included some neat features for the support personnel and one that stood out was using AI Builder text recognition prebuilt model to verify the classification of the case was correct which will help with the long-term quality of the data.

Information Technology

Prompt Wagon

Artem Chernevskiy, Katerina Chernevskaya, and Nikita Chernevskiy recognized that prompt engineering is a growing new skill for organizations of all industries to utilize. Prompt engineering is natural language inputs or queries users provide to Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce the desired outputs or responses. To help organizations become skilled in prompt engineering, a Power Apps canvas app known as Prompt Wagon, was developed where users can select from a list of more than 100 pre-defined prompts and practice their knowledge of prompts by interacting with Azure OpenAI’s ChatGPT service within the app. The aim of the app is to help end users of all levels – beginners or advanced to learn how to construct their prompts and grow their prompt engineering skills.

Users can practice prompt engineering with the canvas app and gain more confidence in using generative AI.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• Users can select from 100+ pre-defined prompts across three categories of Business, Data and Education in the canvas app to help them exercise prompt engineering with the Azure OpenAI ChatGPT service. It also includes multi-language support in English, German and French.
• A custom connector was built to query the Azure OpenAI ChatGPT service from the canvas app. This enables users to interact with the services from within the app.
• Dataverse is used to store the text, images, prompts and translations of the German and French languages. All of these are surfaced onto the canvas app from Dataverse.
• Built-in app settings are available to modify the prompts and query parameters directly within the app. The updated settings are adhered to when end users next enter their prompts into the app.

What we loved

The app will help organizations be better equipped with prompt engineering through interacting with generative AI in the app. It was great to see the team build a custom connector to make the actions reusable across their solution that query the Azure OpenAI ChatGPT service from the canvas app. The use of Dataverse for the high volume of text, images, prompts and translations of several languages will support the solution to scale as the library of prompts grow over time with use.

CodeScribe

Developers often review code authored by others, with a common scenario being legacy code, where there can be little documentation or comments in the source code. To help automate code reviews, Robert Perillo built a Power Apps canvas app known as CodeScribe for developers to copy and paste code snippets into the app. A summary of the code is provided using Azure OpenAI’s Completions service to assist developers with understanding the code.

Developers can perform code reviews instantly by entering code snippets into a Power Apps canvas app and Azure OpenAI will summarize the code.

The solution consists of the following main features:

• Developers can paste code snippets into the canvas app and when they submit the code for review within the app, a Power Automate cloud flow executes to call the Azure OpenAI Completions service which analyzes the code snippet.
• Azure OpenAI then formats the code into two outputs, the first being a code summary that provides an overview of what the code does, and the second is a commented code block that explains each step of the code in detail for documentation purposes.
• The Power Automate cloud flow sends the formatted code to the canvas app for developers to review the summarized code and view a running commentary on the lines of code.

What we loved

Robert’s CodeScribe app won the Best Better Together Use Case category to help developers with the task of reviewing and documenting code by combining Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Completions service. We liked that the summaries are produced within minutes, reducing the time spent on code reviews. The solution breaks down what the code does by first summarizing it in a short paragraph, followed by a detailed explanation for each of the steps in the code.

Share your story with us!

Do you have a story or experience to share? We are excited to learn more about how individuals and organizations are using Power Platform with generative AI and Copilot capabilities! Submit your story at https://aka.ms/ShareAIStory

Learn more about Microsoft Power Platform and Copilot

• Understanding prompt engineering
• Create an app using AI Copilot
• Get started with Copilot in cloud flows
• AI-powered and Copilot features in Power Pages
• Build an AI-based Copilot with Microsoft Copilot Studio
• Quickstarts with Azure OpenAI Services

The post How Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether inspired AI-powered solutions for real-world use cases appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

You can quickly: 

• Create low-code web and mobile apps, using Microsoft Power Apps, with complex security requirements, which are cross-platform and easy to deploy. 
• Integrate with internal and external systems using more than 1,000 connectors and robotic process automation, using low-code Microsoft Power Automate flows. 
• Publish websites, using Microsoft Power Pages, that have complex membership, content management, visual styling, and data access requirements.

Yes, ok, you’re highly likely to have heard all this before, and you may be thinking that all this talk of “low-code” is more hype than reality. With the advent of the age of AI where copilot is being used to build apps using natural language, you may even think that low-code is only for simple, low-usage applications in teams that do not have access to professional developers. Does it really suit large-scale application development that must adhere to a strict set of enterprise architecture requirements? And what about supporting all this low-code as it grows in complexity? Wouldn’t it be better to build using traditional software development tools right from the beginning and prevent any costly rewrites when the demands and complexity becomes too high for low-code. 

Let’s forget about low-code (for a minute)

Do you respond with a resounding yes to the questions above? If so, and you are a professional software developer, then this doesn’t surprise me, and I’m not sure that the term “low-code” is always that helpful when trying to describe Microsoft Power Platform. 

“Wait, what now?” Well, just hear me out!  

There’s no doubt that there’s a huge and growing demand for application development. We’re building new apps, modernizing existing apps, and adding innovations through AI and connectivity with Microsoft 365. Starting a development project requires making tough decisions, such as which technology to use for the data access layer, how security will be managed, and how to scale your app. The level of abstraction we choose often dictates the speed at which the software can be built, and there are tradeoffs between productivity, flexibility, and cost. Using Microsoft Azure services such as Microsoft Azure API Management is a good example of where the benefits, such as easy deployment and subscription access control features, outweigh the licensing and implementation constraints. With this in mind, following are some of the ever-growing features of Microsoft Power Platform, looked at through the lens of the software development tooling you may already be familiar with. 

Building business applications fast 

Business applications can be complex to develop due to the high number of factors that need to be considered, such as user interface design, storage requirements, security, compliance, and scalability. Microsoft Power Platform makes building business applications easier. 

• Responsive and accessible applications can be developed once and then used across multiple platforms on desktop or mobile devices. 
• Reusable UI components are built using React that can be assembled using a drag-and-drop interface. 
• React components can be developed and deployed using Microsoft Visual Studio Code for single application use or shared between multiple projects via a centralized repository. 
• Apps can be easily deployed as packages that include both metadata components, compiled code, and data import files. If required, canvas apps can be distributed as native mobile apps to end users through Microsoft Intune, Visual Studio App Center, Google Play store, and Apple Business Manager. 
• Native offline support uses a local MySQL database, and automatically stores data operations to be automatically replayed once reconnected to the network. 
• Test Engine uses Playwright to execute user interface tests as part of automatic testing pipelines. 
• Microsoft Power Platform CLI can be used to automate all parts of solution development, deployment and environment management using Azure PowerShell, Microsoft Azure Pipelines, or GitHub actions. 
• Public facing websites can be quickly created using Power Pages, and then edited using Visual Studio Code. These sites that use Azure-deployed ASP.NET as the backend, have automatic content delivery network (CDN) and caching support. Sites can use the built-in Web API with a configurable security provider to create complex single or multi page applications. 

Everything connected 

With data stored in so many places within your organization—and external services often being vital to business processes—integration and connectivity are crucial for successful business solutions. Microsoft Power Platform makes integration easier.  

• A library of more than 1,000 connectors can be used to create event-driven orchestrations that are built on top of Microsoft Azure Logic Apps and OpenAPI, but without the need for Azure subscription setup and deployment. 
• Microsoft Visual Studio can be used to create ASP.NET Web APIs that can easily be deployed as custom connectors. Debugging using dev tunnels is easy when using the Visual Studio Microsoft Power Platform Connected Services configuration. 
• Dataverse Synapse Link and Dataverse Link to Microsoft Fabric data can be used for real-time analytics within OneLake. 
• Dataflows in Microsoft Power Platform use Power Query to import or synchronize data from diverse data sources. 

Data platform as a service 

Storing data in a secure, performant, and scalable way is vital to every business application’s success. Microsoft Power Platform makes this easier using Microsoft Dataverse to underpin all its tools. 

• Dataverse is a highly available, cloud-based data platform that is built upon Azure, providing all the robustness, scalability, compliance, and security that you’re used to with Microsoft Azure SQL, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Lake, and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. 
• Data can be relational, blob, or unstructured, and is metadata-driven so that it can be accessed in a highly contextual way. Fully functional apps can automatically be built using this metadata, and AI can be used to query using natural language. 
• Uptime guarantees and monitoring tools give you complete visibility of your data without the need for building additional logging and monitoring solutions. 
• An Open Data Protocol (OData) Web API and connector is available to interact with your data and expose it to other applications that can be built using traditional software tools. 
• The Dataverse SQL endpoint is used to automatically create compelling and visually appealing Microsoft Power BI dashboards and reports. 
• C# can be used to extend Dataverse with custom business logic and create custom APIs that run inside the Dataverse platform. 
• Native integration with Microsoft Azure Service Bus makes it easy to extend using Microsoft Azure Functions, Microsoft Azure Event Hubs, and Microsoft Azure Event Grid. 
• Virtual tables allow non-Dataverse data sources to be surfaced, queried, and linked to standard Dataverse tables. Out-of-the-box support for Azure SQL, SharePoint, and C# custom providers makes it extremely easy to build apps upon multiple data sources in a unified way.
• Built-in audit log capabilities and long-term data retention features allow you to track changes and retain unlimited data long term in a cost-efficient way, without the need for any added development or management. 
• Dataverse search gives users a fast, AI-powered way of finding data and documents within Dataverse.  

Native AI support 

• Conversational bots that use Azure Bot Service can be quickly configured, trained, and deployed to be used inside Microsoft 365 or external facing websites. 
• Complex AI models can be trained in document, image, and sentiment recognition and then easily deployed and used in business applications. 
• Microsoft Copilot Studio supports building natural language conversational AI copilots that can be built using a graphical UI and trained on data for internal or external scenarios.  
• Copilot plugins can be built using OpenAPI connectors in combination with prompt engineering. 
• Copilots can be automatically added to business applications to give a natural language interface to data and information that is most relevant to the user.  

Performance and scale 

Microsoft Power Platform is built on Azure and is already tried and proven so that you don’t need to build your own platform. With automatic elastic scale, it can manage thousands of users and terabytes of data. Where performance cannot be met due to the tradeoffs that come from a higher level of abstraction, Microsoft Power Platform can be extended using lower-level tools and technologies, and connected through the many extension-points such as custom connectors, custom controls, Service Bus integration, and C# plugins. Many of these extensions can be deployed using Microsoft Power Platform solutions to make versioning and dependency management easier. 

Consumption and licensing 

It can often be extremely difficult to calculate the cost of Azure resources required by an application that you’re building once it is deployed. With Microsoft Power Platform comes a higher degree of predictability of cost through seat-based licensing, with consumption-based licensing being applied to services such as AI Builder and Copilot Studio copilots.  

The pay-as-you-go plan for Power Apps and Power Automate does give you the flexibility to use an Azure subscription if you prefer a pure consumption-based model. 

So, what about low-code? 

A common challenge in software development is that there are simply not enough hours in the day. It is generally accepted that adding more developers to a team does not always mean higher productivity. Adoption of new tools or technologies is usually driven by the desire to write less code to make the development process faster, less prone to bugs, and to make it easier to meet standards—especially around security. This is exactly what Microsoft Power Platform does for professional software development. Yes, there are tradeoffs, but as with all technology choices, the benefits are balanced against the drawbacks. Microsoft Power Platform provides a huge degree of functionality with minimal coding—making development much easier and faster. Where needed, it can be extended using traditional languages such as C# and TypeScript, deployed to cloud or even on-premises servers. So low-code is more about less code, and the less code we write, the easier it is to maintain, support, and upgrade—leaving more time for innovation on new features. Any software libraries that we might have used to speed up development before always need to be kept up to date to avoid deprecations and security vulnerabilities. An often-overlooked benefit of writing less code is that Microsoft Power Platform always keeps up-to-date with security patching, and very infrequently removes a feature. Multiple years notice is given before it is. 

But should everyone really develop apps? 

In addition to reducing the time and effort needed to build software, Microsoft Power Platform can also lower the barrier to entry, enabling those without traditional software development skills to build low-code solutions. 

As a professional developer, you may think that giving everyone access to build apps would cause software to be created that does not follow your organization’s IT policies and standards. With Microsoft Power Platform’s focus on governance, management, and monitoring, it creates an ecosystem that is safe and controlled for both low-code and pro-code developers to build applications within. This gives one set of standards for everyone, where administrators create clear boundaries and policies without restricting innovation.  

These managed environments foster collaboration and innovation, so that you can easily share and co-author your solutions with other developers, business users, and stakeholders. Inevitably, this will result in applications being built that are more likely to meet requirements and delight your users. When Microsoft Power Platform is available to all, there is also a lowered risk of teams procuring their own Shadow IT solutions. 

Write less code with Microsoft Power Platform

The term “low-code” is used to describe the next level of abstraction in software development and empowering everyone to build applications. However, Microsoft Power Platform is also a set of tools that is built upon the technologies you may already be using in Azure. It can coexist, augment existing solutions, and be extended by using traditional software development techniques. So next time you hear “low-code”, think about writing less of that tedious boilerplate code, to give you more time to create more robust, exciting, and innovative solutions. 

Get started as a developer

• Sign up for a free developer plan, discover self-paced learning paths, and read the full Microsoft Power Platform developer documentation. 
• Register here to attend the DEVintersection Conference and the Microsoft Azure + AI Conference. 
• See the full list of sessions at DEVintersection. 

Interested in learning more about how Microsoft Power Platform accelerates productivity for professional developers? Sign up for our monthly newsletter to get the latest updates! 

The post Accelerate developer productivity with Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Microsoft engineers and industry experts provide a session lineup with deep dives into the technologies you can bring to your work today, including .NET 8, Microsoft Visual Studio 2022, C# 12, .NET Multi-platform App UI, and latest in AI, Azure, web technologies, and Microsoft Power Platform. Plus, you have the power of an in-person event to get your questions answered by the experts who make the products you depend on.

We’re happy to be part of the CODE Magazine 30th anniversary celebration and excited to have their leadership and team at DEVintersection bring their favorite topics to the mix of subjects at the conference for you.

AI, especially language models, has exploded onto the scene. Microsoft is here to help you navigate this fantastic opportunity to create competitive advantages for your organization. In addition, you’ll find some great Microsoft Power Platform topics targeting everything your development team needs to know to add Microsoft Power Platform as part of your development strategy.

DEVintersection and the Azure + AI Conference focus on the latest in technologies from Microsoft with leadership and industry experts—get your answers here.

Register for DEVintersection.

Featured Microsoft Power Platform sessions:

• Accelerating application development for code-first developers
• Extending the Power Platform with C# and TypeScript—AMA
• Power Platform +SAP + Copilot—On your marks, get set, go
• Getting started on Power Apps as a traditional developer
• Elevating UI in Power Apps: Bridging low-code with pro-code aesthetics
• Automate and scale your business processes with ease using Power Automate
• How to extend the Power Apps user interface with React components to give low-code makers even more power!
• How to build and debug Power Platform custom connectors for your ASP.NET web API right from inside Visual Studio
• Harness the capabilities of Power Fx within the Power Platform CLI and Azure DevOps

See the full list of sessions here.

Interested in learning more about how Microsoft Power Platform accelerates productivity for professional developers? Sign up for our monthly newsletter to get the latest updates.

The post Join Microsoft at the DEVintersection Conference in Orlando appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

• Copilot in Power Apps is revolutionizing the way we think about building and using apps, making developers faster and more agile than ever before. The list of what you can do with Copilot is growing, with more complex layout and data tasks coming to the Power Apps Studio. Now you can also add an even more powerful Copilot for your end users, which works over both the data in your app as well as websites or other content sources, all backed by Power Virtual Agents.

• Enterprise-grade governance is more important than ever in the age of AI. Managed Environments, generally available at MPPC one year ago, have given administrators more visibility and more control with less effort. Now we’re taking those capabilities to the next level with new tools for environment routing, delegated deployments, and AI-generated deployment notes and app descriptions.

• Modern user experiences will be shaped by Copilot, which in turn raises the bar for the rest of the UX platform. It’s now easier to deliver apps that are fast, delightful, collaborative, and available on every device. We’ve made advancements in modern controls, introduced a new theming engine, and continue to improve mobile Power Apps—including new support for offline data in canvas apps. 

I invite you to build AI-powered applications with Power Apps.

Copilot drives maker productivity and user delight

More than 63,000 organizations have already used generative AI capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform.¹ Copilot is making building and using apps easier and faster.

For makers, Copilot in Power Apps helps you build apps faster than ever before. Now you can add and edit multiple Microsoft Dataverse tables using Copilot directly within the Power Apps Studio, making it possible to work on more sophisticated apps with the power of natural language assistance. Copilot can also now answer app building questions that include terms, jargon, and formulas—in addition to helping you directly edit and update properties of your apps. Copilot is getting new skills every week; give it a try in Studio today and help shape the future of AI-powered app development.

And now, you can bring the power of Copilot to your end users with an expanded Copilot control that can answer questions over the data in your app and multiple external websites. In model-driven apps, the new Copilot-powered summarize action will automatically generate summaries of any record when users navigate to a form, saving valuable time when a new user is coming up to speed. Now built on Power Virtual Agents for powerful, multi-data-source generative answers and limitless extensibility, the Copilot control makes app experiences possible that were unimaginable just 12 months ago.

Managed Environment advancements empower low-code at high scale

Twelve months ago, we released Managed Environments to help administrators streamline governance. According to Gartner’s Kyle Davis, “Managed Environments offers unique features that allow organizations to better support self-service development and adaptable governance at scale.”

Today, we are excited to announce the next wave of Managed Environments capabilities to enable governable citizen development at scale. With the public preview of Default Environment Routing, admins can now automatically direct new makers into their own personal developer environment instead of the shared default environment. Makers automatically get a dedicated, safe, personal environment to innovate, and for admins, it’s much easier to manage app sprawl. Existing Managed Environment capabilities, including maker onboarding and sharing limits, help new makers begin their low-code journey quickly and safely.

We’ve also made it easier for makers to deploy their apps to production with easy on-ramps to pipelines—our in-product application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities—when makers share or publish. Citizen developers can do so with approval and without elevated permissions with delegated deployments. Admins can secure production environments and data with a permissioned service principal. This follows the least privileged access policies of the organization.

With the help of Copilot, makers will create more applications, and more releases than ever. Admins need to keep up with this rapid development pace. Copilot’s AI-generated deployment notes give them more visibility into the assets that they approve and manage. All apps in managed environments will also include Copilot-generated app descriptions—that makers can edit—to help IT better understand the apps that they support and improve end user app discovery.

Finally, Power Platform advisor now provides admins with proactive recommendations and inline actions to govern and secure the platform more easily. This includes recommendations to clean up unused apps, lock down over-shared apps, and add owners to abandoned apps. Customers can join the private preview.

Modern experiences for everyone and everywhere

Apps built with Power Apps now all benefit from a modern user interface aligning to the latest Microsoft Fluent Design System. This provides makers with beautiful controls and experiences to delight their users.

We’re introducing three new composite controls—Header, Table, and Form for Canvas apps. These controls join (and build on) the 20 modern controls already available that are based on the Microsoft Fluent design system, but take things to the next level by providing more complex interactions out of the box. These new controls are responsive by design, making makers faster when building their apps.

We also released the new, refreshed look of model apps in August in the monthly channel, which will be available in the semi-annual channel for all customers in release wave 2 this month.

Customers worldwide in banking, IT, and manufacturing have adopted modern controls for their canvas apps.

We’re also introducing a brand new theming system which generates a color ramp to be used for app design and controls styling. This will help makers build beautiful, accessible, and performant apps quicker by simplifying styling and reducing the need to manage style at each control level. The theming system also works for classic and custom controls via Power Fx.

We also recently announced built-in offline for canvas apps. Now, makers can easily enable canvas apps to work performantly regardless of their user’s location or connectivity status. With the flip of a switch, makers can make Dataverse data in canvas apps available offline, and built-in offline will handle all the complexity of determining needed data, managing syncs, and sharing network state.

With Power Apps you can do it all

It’s our mission at Microsoft to enable every individual on the planet. Power Apps empowers new makers and enables professional developers to build the smart way for every need and for the benefit of the users.

Our Power Platform community groups have roughly doubled in the past year since the first Microsoft Power Platform Conference because the makers see that with Power Apps, they can build solutions that matter.

For those who wish to follow the Power Platform Conference remotely, look up #MPPC23 on X and LinkedIn or follow the conference on X at PowerPlatformConf. 

And, lastly, for those interested, please join the Microsoft Power Platform community. 

What’s next

We’re marching on towards our vision to enable every developer to build every solution on one comprehensive platform. Register for Microsoft Ignite, November 14–17, 2023, where you can learn more about Microsoft Power Platform and also about even more great new capabilities coming to the platform.

Sources

¹ Satya Nadella, FY23Q4 Earnings Call TranscriptFY23Q4.docx (live.com)

The post Power Apps announces new Copilot abilities, modern controls, and governance tools at the Power Platform Conference appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The biggest Power Platform event of the year is here! Please join us for the second annual Power Platform Conference, sponsored by Microsoft, this October in Las Vegas! Discover, connect, and explore across keynotes, sessions, breakouts, and more – dedicated to all the goodness of Microsoft Power Platform.

The conference will kick off October 1-2 with pre-event sessions. The main event will run October 3-5, culminating with a fantastic lineup of post-event workshops on October 6th. These events will feature more than 100 speakers across more than 70 sessions. Take advantage of this opportunity to reconnect with colleagues, industry leaders, and Power Platform evangelists from all over the world.

Don’t miss this chance to meet new connections, share your love for Power Platform, and learn about the latest and greatest innovations across low-code: from security and governance to the easiest way to add LLM AI capabilities in your low-code apps. We can’t wait to see you there!

Click here to register: https://aka.ms/MPPC23/Apps/Register

Featured Power Apps Sessions

• Power Apps Roadmap – Innovation in the Age of AI 
• Running Your Enterprise on Power 
• Intelligent Apps Made With Ease 
• Designing Your Power Platform Environment Strategy  
• Learn the Many Ways to Use Custom Fonts in Power Apps 
• Power Apps – Tips From a First-Time User 
• Do Low Code Projects Need Change Management? Appsolutely! 
• Admin Scale: Operating the Power Platform Across the Enterprise 
• Why Integrate Power Apps with Power Automate? 
• An Espresso Shot of Being a Power Platform Admin and the Tools 
• A Beginner’s Guide to PowerApps and PowerBI 
• Power Platform Architecture Internals  
• And more! 

The post Join us at the second Power Platform Conference this October in Las Vegas appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

To help your team take on these complex challenges and drive your business toward future success, it’s essential to invest in the right technology.

Discover the next generation of intelligent business applications

The future of business starts today—and we’re excited to invite you to get a first look at what you need to get ahead at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event. Watch product leaders guide you through the new capabilities. See hundreds of new product features, advancements, and innovations to help you drive revenue, delight customers, increase visibility, and strengthen collaboration across your organization.

Learn about the new features and capabilities being released across Microsoft Power Apps, including: 

• New look-and-feel options for canvas and model-driven apps. 
• Advancements in maker experience and collaboration tools—including simpler navigation, efficient gestures, coauthoring abilities in the modern app designer, sending data-driven actionable cards from Power Automate flows, and easier ways to create tables in the maker portal. 
• Automated application lifecycle management (ALM) for all makers. 
• Enhanced capabilities that give admins greater control over what goes to production and the customizations of the first-run experience. 
• Improved user experiences to boost productivity with more advanced search tools, a visible offline syncing icon, shared device mode, and a launch icon for mobile apps. 
• Maker and app copilots that help makers build apps and users to work with their data using natural language.  

And there’s much more in store. You’ll also see how these solutions work for businesses like yours with demos hosted by Microsoft product experts. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, about how to innovate with business applications to grow your business faster than ever. The team behind the Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 will also share insights and guide you through how all these updates, advancements, and new tech will help you:

• Expand visibility, reduce time, and enhance creativity in your departments and teams with unified, AI-powered capabilities.
• Empower your employees to focus on revenue-generating tasks while automating repetitive tasks.
• Connect people, data, and processes across your organization with modern collaboration tools.
• Innovate without limits using the latest in low-code development, including new next-generation AI capabilities.

AI innovations

A major theme of this digital event is the evolution of AI. Leaders in the field will show you some of the latest developments in AI that are leading the next generation of business applications. You’ll also join us for a special session that includes a deep dive into the tech behind language models hosted by Dr. Walter Sun, Microsoft Vice President, AI in Business Applications. Throughout the event, you’ll receive expert guidance on how to build more agile, customer-focused teams by empowering your solutions with AI and see firsthand how to get more value out of your data, collaboration, and tools.

Brand-new insights from the experts

Find out how to enhance your customer experiences across your business with a look at real-life scenarios in expert-led demos of new capabilities and features. Gain valuable insights for overcoming your current challenges from other Microsoft customers who will share their journeys. And get answers to questions from the experts during a Q&A chat.

For a range of key best practices, strategies, and insights applicable to organizations across many industries, you don’t want to miss this digital launch event.

Watch product leaders guide you through the new capabilities. We hope you’ll join us. 

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event 

Tuesday, April 4, 2023 

9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC–7)

The post Explore new capabilities in Microsoft Power Apps at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

When
December 15^th, 2021, 8AM PST

Where:

https://aka.ms/powerappscall-join

Agenda 

• Introductions by Todd Baginski
  
• Power Apps Xbox Games with Brian Dang
  
• Power Apps Office-like comments with Emma Cooper
  
• Recent Power Apps News and Community Updates by Todd and Chuck
  
• Next call details by Todd Baginski
  

Emma Cooper

Currently excited to be working as a PM at Microsoft because of my interest in advancing technology, advocating for users and getting things done!

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/it-it/blog/author/emcoope/

Brian Dang

Elementary school teacher turned classroom app developer. Senior Program Manager @ Microsoft. Photographer. Storyteller.

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/author/brdang/

Todd Baginski

I’m a proud Partner, and the CTO at Canviz where I am currently leading several projects that include PowerApps, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint Framework, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, full web stack, and numerous other technologies. Sharing my expertise and knowledge with others is important to me, I love to teach. I’ve been blessed to receive the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for the last 13 years. This award recognizes my contributions to the technical communities I am a part of. For over a decade, I have created close relationships with the Microsoft SharePoint & Azure teams which provides me access to early releases. My team and I work closely with the Microsoft teams before products are released publicly to develop training and samples that are distributed worldwide to architects and developers. I give back to my local community by coaching and growing youth sports teams; emphasizing hard work, excellent sportsmanship, teamwork, and leadership.

https://toddbaginski.com/blog/ 

The post December 2021 Power Apps Community Call: Power Apps co-authoring features with Emma Cooper and creating Xbox games with Brian Dang appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Power Apps Holiday Calendaring Application

For folks not familiar with Christmas Advent calendar it is a special calendar used to count the days of Advent in anticipation of Christmas. In this session Craig Gregory will show best practices he used to create this exciting and topical Power Apps sample!

ProvisionGenie – an open-source provisioning engine for Microsoft Teams

Luise Freese and Carmen Ysewijn worked together to automate the tasks to create useful Team’s Teams complete with monitoring through the graph API, role based security and documentation!

When

November 17^th, 2021, 8AM PST

Where:

https://aka.ms/powerappscall-join
Agenda 

• Intro – 5 minutes (Todd & Chuck)
  
• Power Apps Christmas Calendar – 20 minutes (Craig Gregory)
  
• Teams Provision Genie – 25 minutes (Luise + Carmen)
  
• Recent Power Apps News and Community Contributions – 5 minutes (Todd and Chuck)
  
• Next call details – 1 minute (Todd)
  

Carmen Ysewijn

Carmen is a Power Platform Architect at Qubix (Belgium) with a passion to find the right solution for any challenge that arises. With this solution-oriented approach, she helps customers improve their business processes. She loves to share the knowledge she gains along the way on her blog or speaking at conferences. Based Kontich, Flemish Region, Belgium. https://twitter.com/CarmenYsewijn

Luise Freese

Luise Freese is an independent Microsoft 365 Consultant and Low Code Developer. She is awarded as an MVP and member of the Microsoft 365 PnP team, where she helps people extend Microsoft 365. She facilitates her clients’ digital and cultural transformation by simplifying their business processes and mastering the art of teamwork. She runs her own blog at https://m365princess.com and is co-founder of https://pyod.shop. She loves LEGO and stickers; her favorite number is 42, she lives in Germany. https://twitter.com/LuiseFreese

Craig Gregory

SharePoint and Power Platform Consultant/Researcher/Builder | Infosys based in Arizona

My SharePoint career began in 2016 with SharePoint 2013 along with InfoPath forms. In 2018 started the journey with SharePoint Online and the Power Platform. My focus is O365 SharePoint and Power Platform. My skills range from consulting, researcher of solutions, no code to low code solutions, and understanding the wholistic workings of O365 apps utilized together. I’m driven by the constant changing of technology and it drives my continuous desire to learn more. https://twitter.com/crashlongjohns

Todd Baginski

I’m a proud Partner, and the CTO at Canviz where I am currently leading several projects that include PowerApps, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint Framework, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, full web stack, and numerous other technologies.
Sharing my expertise and knowledge with others is important to me, I love to teach. I’ve been blessed to receive the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for the last 13 years. This award recognizes my contributions to the technical communities I am a part of. For over a decade, I have created close relationships with the Microsoft SharePoint & Azure teams which provides me access to early releases. My team and I work closely with the Microsoft teams before products are released publicly to develop training and samples that are distributed worldwide to architects and developers. I give back to my local community by coaching and growing youth sports teams; emphasizing hard work, excellent sportsmanship, teamwork, and leadership.

https://toddbaginski.com/blog/ 

The post November 2021 Power Apps community call: Power Apps Christmas Calendars and ProvisionGenie an open-source provisioning engine for Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The August Power Apps community calls has a special treat! By popular demand, we are continuing the deep dive walk throughs of the Demo Extravaganza submissions. For August we will be looking at: How to feed your dragon game by Gerard Simpson and Event Calendar App by Juli Reid. Additionally, Microsoft feature PM, Varda Shrivastava will walk us through how to analyze Model-driven applications performance data using Performance Insights. If you haven’t looked at if before, Performance Insights is a self-service tool for enterprise app makers that analyzes runtime user data and provides a prioritized list of recommendations to help improve the performance of Model-driven apps. With this feature, we’re converting raw telemetry data into actionable work items for you to tackle. The call will also include Power Platform Patterns and Practices updates by April Dunham. Of course, none of this would be possible without the host and creator of the Power Apps community call, Power Platform MVP Todd Baginski.

When

            August 18^th, 2021 – 8AM Pacific Time

Agenda 

• Introductions and kick off by Todd Baginski
  
• Performance Insights by Varda Shrivastava
  
• Event Calendar App by Juli Reid
  
• How to feed your dragon game by Gerard Simpson
  
• Power Platform Patterns and Practice updates by April Dunnam
  
• Power Platform Updates and closing by Todd Baginski
  
  

Where: https://aka.ms/powerappscall-join

Demo Extravaganza 2021 Finalists Video Entries

If you missed the demo extravaganza not to worry you can watch the entire recording on the Microsoft 365 Developer YouTube Channel and for your viewing pleasure have broken down the submissions into easy “bite sized” videos:

• Power Apps Demo Extravaganza 2021 – Course Maker Solution – Rory Neary @azurerory  https://youtu.be/gHgQ4r60pxc
  
• Power Apps Demo Extravaganza 2021 – Course Maker Solution – Rory Neary @azurerory – (Extended Demo)  https://youtu.be/BPZ_q__7sNk
• Power Apps Demo Extravaganza 2021 – Number Puzzle – Krishna Rachakonda @rachakonda78  https://youtu.be/-EzdaIQlnW8
  
• Power Apps Demo Extravaganza 2021 – Pandemic Response Solution – Venkat Rao https://youtu.be/ddVJObr3lHw
  
• Power Apps Demo Extravaganza 2021 – Kitty Run! Game – Nicholas Nguyen | @PowerAppsGamer1 https://youtu.be/e1puxuRjw2w
  
• Power Apps Demo Extravaganza 2021 – Sports Stats Tracker – Todd Baginski | @toddbaginski, Matt Schuessler | @mattschues, Hubert Sui | @HubertSui, Sarah Meyer, and Damian Gibbs https://youtu.be/DJfDL9FWH0M
  

Juli Reid



I am a ‘Jill of all trades’, Queen of everything. Developing creative solutions with SharePoint and Microsoft Power Platform Tools are at the top of the list of my favorite activities. Also high on that list are automating daily tasks with Powershell. Among the myriad other things, I do or have done are managing Nintext Workflows, InfoPath forms, wireless accounts, MobileIron, cell phones and creating searches, reports, one-steps and dashboards in Cherwell.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/juli-reid-10a315b/

Gerard Simpson



I am a Chartered Civil Engineer with no formal IT qualifications, and I work for an organisation, which develops and operates a wide range of renewable energy projects. I am your typical Citizen Developer. I had been dabbling with power automate for a while, but once I built my first stand-alone app in Power Apps back in July 2020, there was no looking back. I am well and truly hooked on all this powerful goodness!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerard-simpson-76bb08a5

Varda Shrivastava

“I’m a product manager on the Power Apps Interface team. My focus is on empowering our makers to build usable, performant apps that end-users love!”

https://www.linkedin.com/in/varda-shrivastava/

April Dunnam

I’m a Power Platform Developer Advocate at Microsoft and Power Platform MVP Alumni. As a Power Platform Developer Advocate, my mission is to help citizen and code-first developers succeed in building collaborative applications for the Power Platform. I develop written content, videos, and samples; speak at conferences; and advocate for developers with Microsoft’s engineering groups. I have an active YouTube Channel and blog where I share how-to videos and demos around Power Apps, Power Automate, Teams and SharePoint. I regularly speak at events across the globe to share Power Platform knowledge.

(99+) April Dunnam | LinkedIn

Todd Baginski

I’m a proud Partner, and the CTO at Canviz where I am currently leading several projects that include PowerApps, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint Framework, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, full web stack, and numerous other technologies.
Sharing my expertise and knowledge with others is important to me, I love to teach. I’ve been blessed to receive the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for the last 13 years. This award recognizes my contributions to the technical communities I am a part of. For over a decade, I have created close relationships with the Microsoft SharePoint & Azure teams which provides me access to early releases. My team and I work closely with the Microsoft teams before products are released publicly to develop training and samples that are distributed worldwide to architects and developers. I give back to my local community by coaching and growing youth sports teams; emphasizing hard work, excellent sportsmanship, teamwork, and leadership.

https://toddbaginski.com/blog/ 

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