Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1… New Features Incoming!

WOAH! Detour… If you’re following my posts this week, you’ll have noticed this isn’t the expected post on Filter Array as part of this week’s mini-series on Data Operations in Power Automate. Really… I blame Microsoft… for giving us some AWESOME release plans yesterday… READ MORE [https://lowcodele
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WOAH! Detour… If you’re following my posts this week, you’ll have noticed this isn’t the expected post on Filter Array as part of this week’s mini-series on Data Operations in Power Automate. Really… I blame Microsoft… for giving us some AWESOME release plans yesterday which I couldn’t wait to talk about.

So, in this post I’m going to take a look at the 2023 release wave 1 plans, and let you know my favourite upcoming features for Microsoft Power Platform 😎

Check out all the new features…

You can check out all the new upcoming features in this release plan using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Power Platform release planner. It’s got an awesome new UI too making it 10x easier to find your favourite new features and when they’re coming along to your environments 🙂

Microsoft Release planner (dynamics.com)

Power Apps

My favourite of the product line up obviously comes first… and I’m so excited by some of the things that’ve been announced for Power Apps to allow makers and developers to deliver solutions with better user experiences so much more easily.

My first favourite upcoming feature is the new look coming to out-the-box Canvas Apps controls. This is definitely something I think the community has been crying out for, for quite a while after we found out we could copy and paste Power Apps for Teams controls into the normal Canvas studio. There are always  limitations and different properties for these controls though, so hopefully this will address some of those issues, whilst of course making it 10x faster to build beautiful Fluent UI adopting low-code applications 😍

Not only have we now got some updated controls in the pipeline that we’ll be able to work with… Microsoft are now making it so much easier for makers to build responsive apps with fantastic user experiences more easily. In this latest release wave, Microsoft have announced the ability to simply use drag and drop type interactions to build out responsive pages without needing to understand containers as much as is needed now! This even goes as far as being responsive enough to cover multiple form factors such as tablets, desktops and mobile phones, which are all testable in the studio’s play mode. 👀

One final feature I’d like to point out which I think will be fantastic for empowering makers even more, is the ability for fields to be automatically added to forms and views when created! Not all makers know straight away that we have to first create our column, but then also add it to the places we want to see it in! This solves that first hurdle when working with model-driven apps for beginners.

I’m interested as to why someone is creating customisations in a production environment there, Microsoft…

Power Automate

One of the latest features being further improved and released as part of the 2023 release wave 1 plans is the ability to use natural language to create flows. Powered by GPT3, this will empower makers at a beginner level to get started with building new cloud flows by describing them in natural language.

I’m not sure how well this will work for more advanced Power Platform developers… can it handle automatically implementing proper error handling, expressions where they’re needed etc? We’ll see! I think this will be a great support for makers and beginners at this point though! 👏

Power BI

Something I find really interesting when it comes to the delivery and then user adoption of solutions is how they’re surfaced to users. I think this is an important part of delivering a solution that shouldn’t be overlooked by doing things such as sending our customers or end users a link and expecting that they keep hold of it!

This latest feature is a great way of looking at how solutions are surfaced and used by our end users and creates the ability for Power BI reports to be discussed over in a Teams meeting!

This’ll let teams create conversation on data based analytics as they’re live on the screen in front of them! 🗣️

Power Virtual Agents

This is one in the product line that to be honest at this point, I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at, at all! Though that doesn’t mean I won’t spot a good feature when I see one 😎

One of my key interests working as a consultant is delivering a good UX with my solutions. This latest feature in Power Virtual Agents allows enrichment of conversations with adaptive cards and custom-formatted data or visual content. For those users that are able to interact with visuals and who may benefit more from visual content than auditory or very content/text based content, this should be fantastic!

Power Pages

If you’ve taken a look at the release plans already, you’ll have probably already been made aware of this one… and I think it’s very much awaited by the Power Platform community!

In this latest feature from the Power Pages team, it’s now possible to make your Power Pages solutions, solution aware! This’ll make supporting the process of Application Lifecycle Management so much easier for developers working with Power Pages!

I hope you liked this post, and you like some of these awesome new features! Let me know your favourites from the release plan below in the comments!

Written by
Lewis Baybutt
Microsoft Business Applications MVP • Power Platform Consultant • Blogger • Community Contributor • #CommunityRocks • #SharingIsCaring
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