Power Platform at Microsoft Ignite 2022

This week was Microsoft's Ignite conference where many product announcements were shared. We've gathered some of our favorite Power Platform announcements below!

General Availability of Managed Environments

In July 2022, we previewed a new major investment area for Power Platform called Managed Environments.?This offers several capabilities for the Power Platform aiming to simplify, automate, and streamline administration over the platform.?This has been a massive area of interest, given the complexity of managing a low-code platform.?Today, Managed Environments has been moved out of Preview and into General Availability.

The first wave of Managed Environments capabilities included more visibility with the admin digest, more control with sharing limits, and less effort with easy activation.?

Additional features have been added to the short-term roadmap.?One of my favorites is the custom onboarding experience built into the product.?This is visible to new makers and provides them with content and guidelines specific to their organization.

Check out the upcoming features below.

Expect to see more features added to Managed Environments, as it is a key investment for the product team.?See more about the capability here: The future of low-code governance with Managed Environments for Power Platform

ALM Pipeline Automation

Built-in application lifecycle management will also be coming to Managed Environments, but it deserves a separate call-out.?Makers will be able to easily move solutions between environments without having to understand the intimate details of ALM.?This feature will help ensure all makers can participate in ALM best practices while still providing an audit trail for IT.

ALM Pipeline Automation will be available in preview in December 2022.

Coauthoring in Power Apps

Real-time coauthoring has arrived for Power Apps!?With coauthoring, makers can concurrently work together on an app, allowing a team to divide and conquer.?Makers will be able to see who else is in the app with them and see changes made in real-time all while not disturbing others’ work.

Integrated virtual agent in Power Apps

Getting stuck on something like a function in Power Apps can be challenging and hinder continued development.?This is why we are introducing an integrated virtual agent in the Power Apps maker studio.?This bot can point users to support content, internal resources, and – coolest of all – match you with an experienced maker at your company.

General Availability of Power Pages – and a simplified licensing model

Power Pages, the newest member of the Power Platform family, is now GA and with a great, new licensing model.?Power Pages subscription licensing is now per website and based on monthly authenticated and anonymous users (removing the distinction between internal and external authenticated users).?We also are now offering a pay-as-you-go plan, which is per website as well: this provides flexibility to choose the right model for your website, considering aspects like website seasonality and forecasting.

AI Everywhere and the Power Platform

Artificial Intelligence is continuing to be infused into the Power Platform and Ignite announced some new AI capabilities.

Document processing with AI Builder has taken off like wildfire to no one’s surprise.?We’ve even created the Document Automation Toolkit to speed up the creation of these processes.?Some additional updates have been announced, including:

Built-in feedback loops in preview – continuously improve the quality of AI model outputs.?Users can review elements with lower confidence scores and if retraining is required, it’s sent through a feedback loop queue.

General availability of unstructured documents – work with free-form document types such as letters, statements of work, etc.

Additional language support – now supporting 164 languages as well as nine languages for handwriting text detection.

Multipage table extraction – Grab data from a table that spans multiple pages.

Another amazing feature leveraging AI is the ability for users to describe what they want to automate in a sentence and AI will create the Power Automate workflow.?Similar to Power Apps Express Design, this makes automation with the Power Platform even more accessible to all users.

Expression authoring in Power Automate is also getting easier, leveraging AI to reshape data and create expressions through examples.

These are just a few Power Platform highlights from Ignite 2022. ?Check out the Ignite Book of News for a full list of announcements!