Release Highlights of Microsoft Power Platform 2022 Release Wave 2
The low code application platform market is rapidly expanding. Multiple secular industry trends are driving a significant shift in this space including increasingly constrained resources for digital transformation, and a highly fragmented existing footprint of business applications within most customer organizations. Power Platform's aim is to bring visibility and control across the entire organization while accelerating transformation for citizen developers and professionals alike. Let's take a look at the Microsoft vision overview that covers the exciting new features being launched in Power Platform for the 2022 Release Wave 2.
Looking for a real-time example of a customer's invoice process. Currently, the manual process requires each invoice to be read, matched against the purchase order, and processed into a Citrix system that's used for the management of parts orders between suppliers and distribution centers. To reduce the pressure on the invoice processing team, unintended automation with Power Automate was utilized. This was perfect as it helped eliminate manually monitoring the SharePoint site for invoices. The new SharePoint actions in Power Automate for desktop increase the speed and ease of use of desktop automations. SharePoint is the first cloud connector coming in desktop flows with more to come. It brings the power of the cloud right inside desktop automations. With the SharePoint connector and Power Automate for desktop, users can combine actions from both desktop and the SharePoint connector all within a single desktop flow.
An important part of the desktop flow built by a customer is the creation of a CSV file of the invoice data which is loaded into the Citrix system. Power Automate improves the support for UI automation on Citrix environments by having a lightweight runtime inside the target Citrix environment. This runtime communicates with the Citrix session and thus directly accesses UI elements, bringing direct addressability to controls that bypass the need for image-based lookup where possible. Being able to roll out RPA at scale also means easily managing credentials for users and accounts. That's why customers can now use their own encryption keys that reside in their Azure key vault to encrypt all customer data Power Automate uses.
A customer needed a way to provision machines without the need to have IT manage it. Now users can quickly and easily run desktop flows using managed virtual machines. As a true software as a service for RPA, unattended RPA bots can now be created and automatically scaled across hosted virtual machines powered by Microsoft Azure. This lifts the pressure from IT while empowering the center of excellence team that drives automation.
As in any organisation, the control lines facilities didn't work in a coordinated fashion and their internal processes for configuring product structures and approving projects for production were inconsistent, manual, and inefficient. To solve these issues and others, a Customer used Power Apps to create the solution that employees were looking for.
First, they had to connect existing data sources such as SQL Server, Excel File, and Microsoft Lists with Microsoft Dataverse. Microsoft Dataverse has supported virtual tables for a long time. They're extremely powerful but could be difficult to set up. With this release, the customer was able to create tables in Dataverse that serve as external data by leveraging simple connections to find the external data.
In addition to that, they were able to easily get started with Microsoft Dataverse using the familiar table-centric experience directly within the Power Apps, including a fresh onboarding experience for new makers. Working with Dataverse tables inside Power Apps Studio made the app building experience easy and efficient to create or update both data and metadata. Once the data and metadata are ready, makers can create reports in the Power BI service starting with a view in a model-driven app. Power BI automatically generates the visuals for you, so you can start exploring the data with just a few clicks. A crucial aspect for customers was to find an efficient way to allow teams to collaborate and act on business data. From this wave, teams can collaborate with colleagues by seeing their availability in multiple places.
You can now see your colleague's picture and online presence by default in all model-driven apps. In addition to that, you can easily find existing chats related to a record or start a new one with anyone else who is working on the same record. The chats are tracked as chat activities in the timeline and activities views. To start multiple team chats with anyone else who is working on the same record without leaving your app has never been so easy.
The customer wanted to take things a step further in their gaming division. The objective was to quickly build an engaging website that delivers information and services to its customers and partners. That's when Power Pages comes to play. Power Pages is an enterprise-grade, low-code development and hosting platform for building business data-centric websites. It allows everyone to be productive by supporting a collaborative environment for fusion teams to bring together the best of their assets and skills into a single solution.
So where does a low code maker start from? They can use the template hub to understand what they can build on the platform thanks to a set of pre-defined industry-specific, as well as cross-industry website patterns. With this wave, Microsoft has just introduced the new building permit application template. Should they need any help while creating the new website, makers can always use step-by-step guided learning, as well as short tutorial videos highlighting key Power Pages capabilities. In addition to that, makers can create websites based on various templates, extending their Dynamics 365 applications such as customer self-service, partner, community, and employee self-service.
Makers will find a simplified WYSIWYG experience to create and customize a website. They can easily configure basic forms. New capabilities include updating a label and adding a tooltip to a column. To learn more about the Power Platform 2022 Release Wave 2 click here
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