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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Copilot can now also explain partial formulas, which is especially useful for longer formulas where you need an explanation on a specific part of the code.

And to top it off, Copilot in the formula bar will now support more languages, enabling most of our worldwide makers to take advantage of these powerful features.

Create a formula with ease

With the new “Create a Formula” feature, you can now generate Power Fx formulas directly from natural language. Simply select the Copilot button, ask it to create a formula, type your desired action in plain language, and the AI will suggest the appropriate formula and append it wherever the cursor was located when the request was made after you click apply.

This functionality is perfect for both seasoned developers and those new to Power Apps, providing a seamless experience for all users. Remember, formulas are specific to the control and property that is selected, and some actions require working across controls and properties.

Additionally, the maker can use the thumb up/down icons to provide feedback that will help to make the product and AI interactions better over time. By sharing the prompt and response along with your feedback, it helps us understand what we can do to improve.

To enable the Create a Formula Capability, turn on the “Copilot for formulas” flag in Canvas App Settings > Updates > Preview.

Explain a partial formula

In addition to creating formulas, we’ve expanded our formula explanation capability to include the ability to explain a partial formula.

By selecting a formula before clicking the Copilot icon, instead of the “Explain this formula” option, you have the option to “Explain this selection” and get a plain language explanation of what the selected portion of the formula does.

The selection does not have to be precise either, as the Copilot knows when to include context surrounding the selection in order to provide an explanation. This is particularly useful for understanding long or complex formulas that benefit from a more granular explanation.

Worldwide expansion

Copilot support in the formula bar now supports 18 languages. To find out if your language is supported, or to learn more, take a look at the product documentation.

Let us know

We hope you find these new features as exciting and useful as we do. We look forward to hearing your feedback and seeing the innovative ways you use them in your apps. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements in Power Apps!

The post Creating and explaining formulas with Copilot now even easier 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.

Extended language and geo availability

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

Latest GPT models for enhanced Copilot assistance

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

Access data workspace from within your solution

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

Data workspace is ready to create model-driven apps

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

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

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

Learn more about data workspace

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

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

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

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.

Using Copilot with filter

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started

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

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

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

Enhancing your AI business strategy with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Dataverse enables organizations to simplify the complex data integration, third-party data extensibility, and security guardrails organizations must have in place to assist in the implementation and adoption of AI.

At Microsoft Build 2024, we are excited to unveil Microsoft Copilot connectors. Microsoft Copilot connectors provide seamless and secure integration with your productivity, analytical, and operational data as well as empower users to activate existing business processes. Copilot Studio and Dataverse allow organizations to create actions, build knowledge, and integrate grounded data into their copilots with ease, all while easily meeting their compliance requirements with a rich set of security features.

Bridge the gap between enterprise data and Microsoft Copilot

The concept of enterprise knowledge in Copilot Studio is a groundbreaking addition that allows copilot makers to add specific contextually relevant knowledge sources to their copilots, thereby improving the reliability and accuracy of responses. Knowledge supports a wide range of data types, including public websites and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (powered by Dataverse) and brings simple discoverability and understanding of enterprise data, which is critical to scaling the delivery of agent copilots across an organization.

Figure 1: Makers can select enterprise data sources as their copilot’s knowledge.

Many Microsoft customers are seeing the benefits of adding grounded enterprise data into their copilot experience. From supply chain management, customer relationship management, and productivity insights, customers can increase the efficiency of business processes, make their workforce more productive, and provide rich customer experiences. Read below how Peppermint, EY, and Docusign have developed impactful solutions.

Peppermint reimagines legal business processes with Copilot

Law firms are challenged with optimizing workflow efficiency and delivering effective client services. Achieving this entails implementing a range of services, including case and matter management, document management, and client engagement. How can law firms, who are primarily focused on legal expertise, utilize technology to overcome this challenge and achieve their goals?

Peppermint Technology, a leading global independent software vendor (ISV) revolutionizing legal firms and departments, has built solutions that easily ground copilots with enterprise data stored in Dataverse and SharePoint to provide more relevant and secure business insights. Peppermint has been using Microsoft Power Platform to model their legal case process and storing their business data in Dataverse. With their existing integration, allowing Peppermint’s copilot to access enterprise knowledge and processes from Microsoft Power Platform, while maintaining user context security, requires minimal effort and allows rapid adoption of modern AI workloads for increasing productivity and automation

Figure 2: Use natural language to retrieve matters stored in Dataverse.

Lawyers can now use LARA (Legal Analysis and Research Assistant for Peppermint) to efficiently prepare for upcoming meetings by identifying internal contacts for new accounts, accessing pertinent information, and taking necessary actions ahead of their meetings.

Figure 3: Use natural language to identify connections with new accounts.

“At Peppermint Technology, we are excited to utilize Copilot Studio’s enterprise knowledge to not only extract maximum value from corporate data but also significantly enhance our law firm clients’ ability to engage with their clients and increase billing efficiencies. This strategic adoption aligns perfectly with our business priorities of reducing risk and boosting client engagement, enabling our clients to offer superior service and achieve better outcomes.”—Mike Walker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Peppermint Technology

Take your enterprise business processes further with Copilot connectors

With Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio, organizations can easily expand their copilot knowledge and actions with their business data. Copilot connectors allow organizations to bring together data from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Fabric OneLake, public websites, and many other systems of record.

When incorporating Copilot connectors into your custom copilots, Copilot will work in the background on your user’s or organization’s behalf, and reason across structured and unstructured data to execute your business processes.

Figure 4: Microsoft Copilot connectors diagram.
Copilot connectors are part of the broader Copilot ecosystem, which includes Copilot Studio and Microsoft Copilot. They play a crucial role in the extensibility of Copilot, allowing developers to create custom AI solutions that are deeply integrated with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Some key benefits of Copilot connectors are:

• Semantic search: Allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses.
• Data syncing and caching: Ensure your data is synchronized and cached efficiently, allowing for quick access, and reducing potential latency issues.
• Extensive third-party service integration: With a few clicks you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,400 connectors so that even non-Microsoft data can be included.
• Support for complex data types: The connectors can handle a variety of data types, including relational data and unstructured data, making them versatile for different business needs, and come with production-grade service levels.
• Low-code and pro-code: Whether you want to create custom application programming interface (API) or existing prebuilt connectors, the choice is up to you.

Docusign expedites the workforce with Copilot connectors

By enabling the Docusign Copilot connector within Microsoft Copilot, Docusign delivers greater value to their customers by not only surfacing document details, steps, and processes, but also allowing users to ask queries with natural language, and drive results faster than before. Docusign’s integrations with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Copilot for Sales provide AI-powered agreement insights to help drive employee productivity, close deals faster, and manage renewals at scale. Customers across human resources (HR), sales, procurement, legal, and more can now use natural language to ask Copilot for agreement status and summarization, extract key information, send reminders to others, and more.

Figure 5: Activate Docusign Copilot connector and find agreements with natural language.

“Through our partnership with Microsoft, we are revolutionizing the way organizations do business. Docusign’s integrations with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for Sales harness the power of AI to drive intelligent automation and innovation, leveraging Microsoft Power Platform plug-ins and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Meeting people where they work, these integrations empower organizations to accelerate revenue, reduce risk, and create better experiences from the agreements that run their business. Together, we’re not just streamlining processes, we’re redefining what’s possible in the digital era.”—Janine Grasso, General Vice President (GVP) of Partner Development and Alliances, Docusign

Gain visibility and increase your security posture

As organizations increase the complexity of their solutions and incorporate data from multiple systems of record through Copilot connectors, gaining and maintaining visibility of the security of that data is critical. Previously, fragmented experiences created barriers to customers assessing risks, and a lack of clear, defined guidance in achieving the defense in depth that organizations strive to maintain. Without security tools for both proactive and reactive governance of both citizen and pro developers’ applications, administrators may resort to solutions that stifle modernization, productivity, and business growth.

The Security Hub is designed to solve these challenges and more, with intuitive experiences, and strategic guidance, administrators can navigate the complexities of managing security at scale. This centralized hub provides administrators with tools to assess the security posture of their tenant, identify and act on impactful recommendations, and proactively set policies to safeguard against vulnerabilities and threats all through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center.

The Security Hub for Microsoft Power Platform, in public preview, offers several benefits, including:

• Enhanced security posture: Providing administrators with tools to assess and improve the security posture of their tenant, ensuring that data and applications are protected against vulnerabilities and threats.
• Actionable recommendations: Identify impactful recommendations that administrators can act on to strengthen security measures.
• Proactive policy setting: Proactively set policies to safeguard your environment, preventing potential security incidents before they occur.
• Centralized security management: One centralized platform for managing security across Microsoft Power Platform, streamlining the process, and making it more efficient.

These features are designed to provide a comprehensive security solution that aligns with an organization’s security practices, contributing to the overall success of digital transformation efforts. For example, Security Hub identifies if minimum safeguarding is in place and guides you to set up the appropriate data loss prevention policies (DLP) around Copilot connector usage in your organization. In addition, administrators can expect to utilize the following generally available in the Security Hub: vNet for Dataverse plugins, privileged identity management (PIM), tenant isolation, IP firewall, IP cookie binding, and environment security groups, while the following features will be available in public preview: client application control and Dataverse audit enhancements.

Additionally, Copilot Studio makers can now ground generative answers to SharePoint site content—enabling copilots to surface labeled resources as labeled responses in Teams chat with Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels are widely adopted by enterprises today to label and protect sensitive information in Microsoft 365 apps and Fabric, and they are coming soon to Microsoft Power Platform.

Watch our latest overview of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse security features.

EY prevents data exfiltration at scale with Microsoft Power Platform security controls

Data exfiltration prevention protects the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data from an organization to external parties. This allows a business to maintain business continuity, comply with regulatory requirements, and keep up with competitive advantage. This feature allows the security officer to allow or block what apps that their authorized users can run in a Dataverse environment.

“As an enterprise consumer of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, I am thrilled to share my experience with the recent enhancements made by the Engineering team. Their diligent efforts have had a significant, positive impact on our Dynamics 365 launch with the necessary data controls to support our information security policies and data governance processes.
The introduction of data exfiltration permission controls was critical to comply with our Information Privacy and Data Governance policies. These controls allow us to grant permissioned access to the Dataverse while maintaining strict data security. Here’s why these features are crucial:

• Foundation for Data Governance: The ability to control data exfiltration is at the core of our data governance strategy. With these controls, we can confidently manage how Dynamics 365 data is accessed and shared beyond our system boundaries.
• Enterprise Data Controls: Microsoft Dynamics 365’s permissioned access ensures that sensitive information remains within authorized boundaries. We can now define granular permissions, restricting data flow to only those who need it. This level of control empowers us to safeguard our data assets effectively.
• Privacy Compliance: Our member firms operate under stringent privacy agreements. The Engineering team’s work aligns perfectly with our commitment to data privacy. By enforcing permissioned access, we uphold our privacy standards and protect our enterprise information.

The Engineering team’s dedication to building robust permission controls has enabled our data landscape. We can confidently deploy Dynamics 365 and navigate the complexities of data sharing, knowing that our privacy agreements remain intact and grant access to only approved systems and usage.”—Erick J. Kirchner, Associate Director, Markets and Business Development, Ernst & Young LLP

Looking ahead

As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible with data and AI, Dataverse remains committed to providing businesses with the tools they need to succeed in an ever-evolving digital world. These new features are just the beginning of what is to come, and we cannot wait to see how organizations will leverage them to achieve new heights of productivity and security.

Join us at Microsoft Build to learn more about these exciting developments and how they can transform your business.

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