Today, we are happy to introduce, “Approvals kit” – a kit from Power CAT that will accelerate building your approvals faster than ever – available as a public preview. Approvals kit is a no-code ready-made kit built on top of Power Platform components that allows your organization to configure sophisticated approvals such as conditional branching, delegation, admin overrides and more – all without the need to write a single code – empowering every person in your organization to “do more with less” for your organization’s approval needs.

Approvals Kit Overview

Approvals Kit Overview – Watch video

What can you do with Approvals Kit?

Approvals kit is template built with over 20 cloud flows and Power Apps app that you can install in any Dataverse environment. By using the approvals kit, you are able to quickly set up the following requirements that are typically required in any approval processes.

– Multi-stage approvals

– Conditional approvals

– Delegation

– Out of office

– Organizational calendar

– Workdays based timeout

– Reassignment

What is the difference between Approvals connector and the Approvals Kit?

Approvals kit is a template that is based on the standard Approvals connector, but takes things to the next level by leveraging the power of Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. By combining these low code tools together, the Approvals Kit offers you a prepackaged solution to handle common scenarios that save you time to building a custom solution for the equivalent features that the kit provides.

Licenses

One of the key differences when compared to the standard Approvals connector is the Approvals kit is built with premium features. Given these features you will need both Power Apps licenses and Power Automate licenses to support user designing and manage approvals.

End users making approvals will depend on the integration required could use standard seeded licenses or they may also need Power Apps licenses if you elect for a more integrated approval process that displays approval history.

Who is involved with the Approvals Kit?

The Approvals Kit for Power Platform is designed to support multiple people in your organization, including Power Platform administrators, approvals administrators and business users who need to make approval decisions. In summary the key roles are:

Power Platform administrators can create and assign environments and import the approvals kit solution as system administrators or system customizers.

Approvals administrators such as sales directors, and power users can configure the kit to match business requirements and analyze approval processes for improvement opportunities.

Approvers who could be sales managers, and business users can use the kit to streamline their approval workflows and improve efficiency.

Getting Started

Approvals Kit documentation https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit : Public landing page of the kit, describes what and where approvals kit is along with usage personas and frequently asked questions.

Learn Module https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/Learn : Self-guided or instructor led delivery to get started using the approvals kit.

Instructor Guide https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/Instructor : New automated setup experience to take a group of learners through the learn module content.

Office Hours https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/OfficeHours : Join our regular office hours on the second Monday of each month.

The post Introducing Approvals kit appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Automate across Power Platform environments

With this capability, cloud flows with the Dataverse connector can now be used for a wide range of integration and automation use cases including moving and linking data, working with data in-place from other apps and processes, and automating activities like provisioning, set-up, or clean-up steps across environments.

During the public preview, separate actions and triggers with names ending in selected environment (preview) are being introduced for use in new and existing cloud flows. The preview actions are available now, and the triggers and other improvements are planned to roll out in next several weeks. After the preview, Dataverse connector operations in existing flows will be automatically updated to include the Environment parameter. There’s no action needed from flow owners or changes to existing flow behavior as part of this update.

Connect to other environments dynamically

With the Environment parameter, you can select an environment to use for the operation, or specify the environment dynamically using an expression, environment variable, or dynamic content. To learn more about connecting to other environments and using the preview actions, visit the documentation.

Streamline cross-environment solution development

Before this update, cloud flows using the Dataverse connector needed to be deployed to the same Power Platform environment as the apps and data they were connecting to, and connecting to other environments was possible by falling back to the more limited set of actions and triggers in the Microsoft Dataverse (legacy) connector. While it’s recommended to use the Dataverse connector in the same environment for best performance, it’s no longer necessary to deploy the same flow to multiple environments or fall back to the legacy connector for cross-environment integrations.

Get started

To create a flow that connects to other environments, sign in to Power Automate and create a new cloud flow with the List rows from selected environments (preview) action or another action with a name ending in selected environments (preview). If you don’t have an environment with Dataverse as a data store, use the Environment selector at the top right to switch to one that does, or create a developer environment. Learn more from the documentation for connecting to other environments.

This update is for the Microsoft Dataverse connector in Power Automate. In Power Apps, you can build canvas apps with tables from other environments through the Change environment option.

Additional improvements to the Dataverse connector are arriving soon, including triggering flows from activity in other environments, the When a row is selected trigger, and an updated migration assistant for updating flows from the legacy Dataverse connectors. For the latest on the deprecation of the Microsoft Dataverse (legacy) connector, please see the deprecation announcement.

We look forward to your feedback on these enhancements to the Dataverse connector and others that you’d like to see. Let us know your thoughts and suggestions in the Power Automate community and Ideas forum.

The post Seamlessly connect apps, data and processes across Dataverse environments appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Based on your feedback, Power Automate has two categories of enhancements that are improving the ALM story:

1. Solution cloud flow improvements
2. Core ALM improvements

Below are details about each enhancement category and information about what has recently been released, is being released, or is planned.

Solution Cloud Flow Improvements

Solution cloud flows are stored in Dataverse, so they are ready to take part in ALM and can be administered and managed via Dataverse APIs along with other Power Platform components.

A solution can contain flows, apps, tables, and more. Solutions are the mechanism for implementing application lifecycle management (ALM) in the Power Platform.

See Solutions overview, Microsoft Docs for more information.

Flows created in a solution or added into a solution can be referred to as solution flows or solution-aware flows. A typical use case is for customers to develop flows in a development environment and then move those flows to a test environment for isolated testing. After testing, the customer can then move the flows to a production environment. This process is much easier using solutions with all artifacts stored in Dataverse and leveraging the flexibility of connection references and environment variables. Solution flows are also easier to administer and manage since, once flows are in Dataverse, administrators can audit, query, and inventory them by querying Dataverse.

See Overview of solution-aware flows, Microsoft Docs for more information.

Recently released

• Users can see solution references on the flow details page – May 2022 – release plan item – Makers can understand what solutions a flow is referenced from and can quickly open those solutions.
• Solution cloud flows are shown in the My Flows list – June 2022 – release plan item – Makers can see solution cloud flows in the Cloud Flows and Shared with Me lists to easily find the most recently created and edited solution cloud flows. See documentation for more details.

Upcoming

• “Save As” on a solution cloud flow saves the new flow as a solution cloud flow, instead of a non-solution cloud flow.
• Makers create solution cloud flows by default when Dataverse is present.
• Admins and makers can migrate non-solution cloud flows into Dataverse and into solutions

Core ALM Improvements

In addition to getting cloud flows into solutions, there are several core improvements to make ALM easier as well. Most of these items are detailed in our release plans. 
Recently released

• Connection references show in the flow details page without a connection – Nov 2021 – release plan item – Makers can see all the connection references that a flow is using and items needing attention are highlighted.
• Connection reference names are unique by default – Dec 2021 – release plan item – Makers can differentiate between connection references.
• Makers and admins can change the owner of solution cloud flows – Feb 2022 – release plan item – Makers can easily adjust the ownership of solution cloud flows in Power Automate portal instead of going into the legacy solution explorer experience.
• Solution cloud flow exports are now source control friendly – Feb 2022 – Pro-developers and admins can now comment on specific aspects of a flow when it is checked into source control.
• Simplify how solution cloud flows are shared with other users – April 2022 – release plan item – Makers can more easily share solution cloud flows with team members.

Currently rolling out

• Solution checker warns if solution cloud flows are using connections instead of connection references – June 2022 – release plan item – Admins and Makers can be warned when solution cloud flows are not following ALM best practices.

Upcoming

• Flow ownership supported for Service Principals – release plan item – Service Principal users can own and run flows. There will be a separate blog post on this item when it is released.
• Send email notifications to solution cloud flow owners about key events – Makers get email notifications for key events including flow failures, throttling, edits, and suspensions.
• Use environment variables in any flow trigger – Makers can use environment variables in all flow triggers, with a few exceptions.
• Push environment variable updates into flows asynchronously – Makers updates to environment variable values will be asynchronously propagated into referencing flows.
• Warn makers if they are about to edit a managed flow and create an unmanaged layer – Makers are warned before creating customization artifacts.

To learn more about Power Automate ALM, see Overview of solution-aware flows. To learn more about Power Platform ALM, see Overview of ALM with Microsoft Power Platform.

We hope that you will find these improvements useful and thank you for your continued feedback. Happy Automating!

The post Making application lifecycle management (ALM) easier in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Common Data Service (current environment) connector, featuring a native integration between Power Automate and Dataverse, will now be known as Microsoft Dataverse, and appear with the new icon and color shade as shown below. Now we know that old habits die hard – and that’s why you will still be able to search using the old name for a while. Lastly, the names of triggers and actions, and their options and descriptions will be updated to match the revised terminology.

Besides being more reliable and performant than its predecessors, it has many cool features like –

• Triggering upon a combination of data change events like addition, modification or deletion of a row
• Trigger Filtering
• Trigger Delay
• User Impersonation
• Actions to add, get, modify, and delete rows in Dataverse
• List rows with pagination, advanced filtering, sorting and relational querying
• Add or remove relationships between rows of distinct tables
• Working with file or image content
• Calling bound and unbound Dataverse actions
• Performing a changeset request
• Invoking Dataverse flows from Power Apps canvas and model-driven apps
• Availability in Microsoft Dataverse for Teams
• Using current environment connector in non-solution based flows
• Modularization using nested parent and child flows (also see Call Child Flows and Helpful tips for using child flows for additional resources)
• Availability in all Power Automate public and sovereign regions, including US Government GCC and China
• Localization in all 41 languages supported in Power Automate

Throughout the month of April, we’ll add more documentation for each of the above topics in all our supported languages, with refreshed examples and images.

What’s even better than the existing features – is that we are continuously adding new features, improvements and bug fixes. Next month, we are releasing two new capabilities – a new action that redefines information retrieval with an AI-powered search and a new trigger that enables kickstarting automation based on business logic execution, to complement the existing trigger that responds only to data changes in a table row. Based on the business events model native to Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, the new trigger radically simplifies orchestrating automation across Dataverse, Finance & Operations and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps, bringing your marketing, sales, operations and customer service together over one unified platform.

That’s not all – here are some of the usability improvements and key bug fixes added recently –

• Better discoverability of AI Builder actions in Dataverse
• User-friendly formatted values (eg. option set labels instead of GUIDs)
• Support for Owner field while creating Tasks
• Multi-select field parity with legacy connectors
• Improved date time field handling
• Improved null value handling
• Bug fixes for Relate rows action
• Bug fixes for entity options during flow design time
• Base64 encoding mismatches in text data type fields
• Several security, performance and throughput improvements

The previous Common Data Service connector will be known as Microsoft Dataverse (legacy). It will be shown with the new icon, albeit in a de-emphasized color shade as shown below.

The Dynamics 365 connector will not undergo any change, as we announced its deprecation on May 5, 2020.

In the upcoming months, we will continue to make stability improvements and add more capabilities to the Dataverse connector, including but not limited to some of the unique capabilities of the Dataverse (legacy) connector. Let us know what you would like us to add next!

Learn how to make the most of all these capabilities in the Dataverse connector documentation and reference, and share your feedback on UserVoice directly, or in the designer as shown below.

Happy automating!

The post Announcing changes to Power Automate’s native integration with Microsoft Dataverse appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.