Features across Power Platform and Dynamics 365 have been announced as part of Microsoft’s Wave 1 2023 release. These are features expected to be released from April 2023 to September 2023. This post picks out some of my highlights from the Power Platform release plan for a quick look at what we can expect over the next few months.
For the full release plan, check out these links:
- Microsoft Power Platform 2023 release wave 1 plan overview | Microsoft Learn
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 1 plan overview | Microsoft Learn
Power Apps: Drag and drop to build responsive pages more easily
Containers in canvas apps were introduced previously as a way to make your apps responsive. Responsive designs enable your app to scale to the size of the screen it’s being used on, such mobile. The new feature is an update to these containers. It will enable makers to easily add and reorder controls within the containers.
The screenshot below has been provided in the release notes to show how the new containers will look.
Power Automate: Connect to other environments in the same region from the Microsoft Dataverse connector
In the past, you could build a Power Automate flow that connects to Dataverse tables in different environments. With the current version of the Dataverse connector, this is not possible and you can only connect to tables within the same environment as the flow. This will soon change, as the current Dataverse connector will allow makers to connect to other environments in their flows, as long as the environment is in the same region.
Power Automate: Generate expressions from examples
Format your data with examples is a feature available in the cloud flow builder of Power Automate. It simplifies flow building experience by reducing the need for you to write your own expressions from scratch. This feature is currently in preview so you can try it out now, but is expected to become generally available in May 2023.
If you want to change how data is returned in your flow, typically you would need to write an expression- which can be complex and time consuming. With format your data with examples, you don’t need to be an expert on expressions. Now, as you provide examples of how you want the data returned, Power Automate will generate the expression for you.
Read more about it here: Power Automate: Format your data with examples – Rishona Elijah (rishonapowerplatform.com)
Power Virtual Agents: Core authoring updates
The Power Virtual Agents (PVA) unified canvas is a new building experience that brings together the low-code PVA as we know, with pro-code capabilities from Bot Framework Composer. These features are currently in preview, but some are expected to become generally available in May 2023. This includes the ability to:
- Easily create and add Adaptive Cards in your topics
- Multi-modal responses: Create variations for messages, which can also change depending on whether it is speech or text.
- Use Power Fx for enhanced logic in conversations. For example, if you want to route a conversation based on a date being in the next 7 days, a Power Fx formula can be used to enable this.
See here for about these updates and try them out today.
AI Builder: Retrain documents using the feedback loop features
If you’re using AI Builder to read your custom documents, process text or detect objects, you may have encountered occasions where you receive a low accuracy (confidence) score for predictions. With the upcoming feedback loop feature, low-scored documents will be flagged and sent back to the training wizard queue for retraining. The maker can view these, then retrain the model to account for the new documents. This helps to maintain the quality of the AI model over time.
Rishona Elijah 