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Microsoft announced the 2024 Release Wave 1 plans for Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365. This details the features and enhancements scheduled for rollout from April 2024 to September 2024. In the release plan, Microsoft reveals lot of new upcoming features that are planned to be released during the timeframe. Their aim is to enhance digital transformation through improved user experiences, automation and advanced Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Let’s take a look at what’s in store with the Microsoft Power Platform in the coming months!

Power Platform Updates

Power Apps

The Power Apps team is working on ways to accelerate app development by integrating Copilot for makers and users with Power Apps. This will enable users to reason and gain data insights when building custom apps. As a result, makers can leverage Copilot to create/modify apps, work with data, and enhance overall functionality. Users can use natural language to explore data and navigate apps, thereby improving the overall user experience. The team is focusing on simplifying the process of creating modern apps through modern controls, simplified responsive layouts, and collaborative features.

The team is also making improvements to Power Apps Studio’ monitoring and code management tools. They are adding capability for makers and admins to expand apps across the organization with improved QA tools and guardrails. One of the exciting new feature is the capability for users to make direct calls to SQL Server stored procedures without paying any performance penalty using Power Fx.

Here’s a preview look at the Create page with the modern look and capabilities. (Image Source: Microsoft Documentation)

To know more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave for Power Apps, check out the Release Planner.

Power Automate

Similar to Power Apps, Power Automate will also incorporate Copilot capabilities across cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining. Cloud flows uses AI to allow customers to focus on what is only required and automate the rest with natural language and low code. Desktop flows provides Windows desktop application automation, services, and experiences for orchestration and deployment within Power Platform. Business users can build richer automations faster, troubleshoot issues and manage them easily, thereby providing a pleasant and delightful experience. Power Automate process mining improvements through AI to gain insights, use of out-of-the-box templates for rapid deployment from data ingestion to pre-defined custom reports, integration with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and more. These capabilities enable organizations to unlock the full potential of their data and accelerate their journey towards operational excellence.

Check out the Release Planner to know more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave for Power Apps.

Power Pages

Microsoft Power Pages is a low-cost SaaS platform to create and host modern websites. In the upcoming release, Power Pages will also implement Copilot with which developers can expedite the process of building their websites from scratch. The release will also focus on improvements to data connectivity, enhance the professional developer experiences through tooling support for development, application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities, extensibility patterns that allow developers to extend the website for more complex business requirements. Users can secure, monitor and govern their websites from the Power Platform Admin Center. One of the new features planned for this release is the ability to create virtual tables to use external data sources. This allows to connect the Power Pages site to external data sources like SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint.

Check out the Release Planner to know more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave for Power Pages.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Previously known as Power Virtual Agents, Copilot Studio extends the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot into Microsoft 365. Users can design, test and publish copilots easily, generate AI-enabled conversations and accelerate their productivity with custom workflows. In 2024 release wave 1, Microsoft is bringing in native capabilities for existing Copilots, voice support along with Dynamics Customer Service, capabilities to integrate with OpenAI GPTs, software lifecycle management capabilities and role-based access control. The team is also working towards GA for generative actions and geo-expansions to UAE, Germany, Norway, Korea, South America, and South Africa regions. With the generative answers capability, you can specify the internal and external sources which the Copilot can use to answer questions with the help of AI capabilities.

Check out the Release Planner to know more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave for Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Microsoft Dataverse

Dataverse allows you to easily build scalable and interconnected applications. Microsoft is aiming to make investments to enhance user experience when building applications using the power of Copilot. The team is also working on enabling seamless connectivity to external sources as well as developing an AI-powered Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Check out the Release Planner to know more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave for Microsoft Copilot Studio.

AI Builder

AI Builder enables users to use and customize the latest AI models from Azure AI to build business solutions. Microsoft aims to develop a prompt builder for GPT prompts from the latest generative AI capabilities from Azure OpenAI service. Users can also take advantage of pre-trained AI models. They can be used to build specific application scenarios like sentiment analysis, invoice processing, etc., Businesses can build their own custom AI models based on the specific needs such as email classification, object detection and so on.

Some Important Dates

February 5 – Early access for Microsoft’s partners and customers. They can test and validate these latest features on non-production environment. The list of early access features are available here.

February 19 – Release plans available in 11 additional languages.

April 1 – General Availability (GA) for 2024 Release Wave 1 for different regions

Overall, the release offers the capability for businesses to boost productivity and efficiency through automation and AI-powered assistance. They can gain deeper insights from their data and make better data-driven decisions. Power Platform users can easily build custom applications and modernize their application capabilities.