What Partners Need to Know—Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 2
Generative AI and automation are the main characters in this Release Wave, and they offer partners groundbreaking tools to improve business.
Planned updates in the 2023 Release Wave 2 for the Power Platform from Microsoft reveal updates that are designed to analyze data so that it can be used to make quick, effective business decisions and optimize operations. The updates, which began on July 18, 2023, and continue through October 1, 2023, transform the four products that comprise the Power Platform: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents, along with two new add-ins, AI Builder and Power Pages.
Generative AI and automation are the main characters in this Release Wave, and they offer partners groundbreaking tools to improve business. In this post, we present some of the most important things our partners need to know about in the updates to the Power Platform in Release Wave 2.
Power BI
Power BI brings together disparate systems, and with this update, those connections are improved.
User Creation Experience
The user creation experience undergoes an upgrade as the alignment between Power BI and Microsoft 365 is improved. This alignment increases web parity and brings the Power Query diagram view to the Power BI Desktop.
Team Enhancements
Meetings and multitasking are notorious for degrading efficiency. With enhancements for teams, both activities will become more efficient. Organizations will see better maintenance and collaboration on BI solutions with enabled GIT and source control integration.
Power Apps
Copilot brings the reach and efficiency of AI to Power Apps for improved developer productivity with natural language and insights for administrators. Modern controls and richer collaborative experiences for users, accompanied by better deployment and governance support, mean that low code can be used across the entire organization.
Power Pages
Building a site continues to become better for makers as Power Pages extends the use of Copilot. Usage and onboarding in managed environments include Power Pages capabilities.
Data can be more easily connected where it exists, and low-code makers can more easily collaborate and detect co-presence.
Power Automate
Connecting and creating becomes simpler when you can use natural language. The updates to Power Automate simplify how to build new flows across cloud and desktop through better process mining for automation and authoring. All of the flows can be easily scaled, as well, with a unified activity view and detailed notifications across the product.
Power Virtual Agents
Expanding the availability of capabilities such as multi-lingual bot support, generative answers and actions, standalone IVR and IVR integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and integration with Conversational Language Understanding service improve Power Virtual Agents in new ways, allowing partners to provide better customer service. Along with those improvements, the Enterprise Trust capabilities continue to be enhanced.
Microsoft Dataverse
Copilot and seamless connectivity to data sources enhance the Microsoft Dataverse. The maker experience and app-building productivity continue to improve, and it all integrates into the Microsoft 365 Copilot ecosystem.
AI Builder
Processing structured and unstructured documents can be more easily processed with AI Builder. With the power of GPT, enterprise guidelines can be used to automatically pre-generate responses to customer requests. Those responses are then available for human validation so that makers can review and enhance them. This makes the process of responding more efficient but still with a human touch.
Governance Administration and Pro Development
Governance and administration remain crucial functions, and Release Wave 2 2023 provides additional tools. With new controls and added visibility, those who administer Managed Environments can more easily oversee low code adoption. The Power Platform admin center makes managing at scale easier, as well.
Pro development includes a VS Code extension that works with the native Visual Studio experience. The launch of the Developer Hub simplifies onboarding for developers who are new to the platform so that they can start writing code and setting up CI/CD more quickly.
Automatically enabled features
Application administrators can review the new features for users, makers, and analysts. Admin review allows for smoother change management. The release plan tags features with “users, automatically” to note which features will be automatically enabled.
Features enabled by administrators
Some features in Release Wave 2 must be enabled or configured by application administrators. These are tagged “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan.
Know what is next for Microsoft Power Platform
These were just the highlights our Power Platform experts here at Stratos Cloud thought you should know about. Much more is coming in Release Wave 2 over the next quarter. You can find the full updates list in the Microsoft Power Platform Release Wave 2 Plan.