Microsoft has released its highly anticipated 2023 Wave 2 Power Platform features and it’s packed with innovative enhancements, set to revolutionize the way we build, automate, and analyze applications. From Co-pilot and Generative AI to UI/UX improvements and the evolution of Dataverse, there’s something for every developer to get excited about.
In this blog article, we’ll dive deep into the highlights of the Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 2, exploring how these new capabilities can supercharge your productivity, boost collaboration, and take your applications to new heights. Here are some of my highlights from the Power Platform 2023 release wave 2 plan:
Co-pilot and Generative AI
We’ve seen a lot of announcements from Microsoft about co-pilot and AI over the past few months, including at Microsoft Build recently, so it’s no surprise to see it featuring heavily in the Wave 2 release notes.
- Co-pilots to enable Makers to build and refine apps quicker (Power Apps, Power Pages).
- Business chat co-pilot that helps business users get insights and provide suggestions about the data and process that can level up your user’s awareness and productivity.
- Power Virtual Agents can use SharePoint and Dataverse as a source for AI generated answers, that greatly speed up the bot set up time and enhance the answers for users.
AI Builder
The heavy investment in AI, makes it no surprise to see some exciting new features coming to AI builder, including:
- Ability to detect when AI extracted content is low confidence and send for human review with a new validation station.
- Transcribe audio files and analyse for insights and action items.
- Automatically detect and remove personally identifiable information from documents.
UI/UX Improvements
UI/UX and accessibility improvements are always welcome to refresh the look and improve the useability of the system.
This release we see improvements for both the Maker and end users:
- Power Apps formula bar can be repositioned and resized, a simple change that will really enhance the maker experience when building Canvas Apps.
- Model Drive Apps will get a UI uplift to utilise fluent controls to provide a more consistent and eye-catching experience.
Dataverse and PowerFx
There are quite a few new features we see in the Dataverse area:
- Low-code plugins (using Power Fx) that will bridge some of the gap for what low code makers can achieve in the synchronous space. This also include the ability to call plugins in Canvas apps via Dataverse actions.
- Expansion of the capability of formula columns, including for currency, date, decimal and choice columns
- Ability to use Power Fx to perform rollups (aggregation), this feature will be rolled out gradually with more features.
- Reference to a data hygiene suite that will initially be tested with a smarter email validation feature, however, gives glimpses that this will evolve to include a much wider range of out of the box validation and data deduplication features.
- Ability to associate activities with multiple records, which will greatly improve the out of the box experience to easily capture when a phone call or meeting relates to more than one record (case, lead, etc)
For the full list of new features and any updates for the platform, view the interactive Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Release Planner.
What are your favourite features?
For a more in-depth look at Wave 2 features, consider joining Canberra’s Power Platform and Dynamics 365 User Group event this month. RSVP here.
