Microsoft has published the 2022 release wave 1 plans for Power Platform.
This wave features new capabilities and enhancements for Power BI, Power Apps, Power Apps portals, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and AI Builder that will launch between April 2022 and September 2022.
Here’s a preview of what’s coming in the first wave of this year for the Power Platform.
Power BI
Microsoft’s investments in Power BI focus on trust and compliance, auditability, information quality, adoption, connectivity, self-service data prep, big data, enterprise semantic models and enterprise reporting.
- Improved create experience using natural language and work sharing for easy collaboration using OneDrive
- Enhancements to goals focused on enterprise needs, integration with PowerPoint and new capabilities to Power BI within Teams
- Improved experience with big data through automatic aggregations, data-protection capabilities through DLP, and better visibility into activity to admins.
Power Apps
Power Apps allows developers at every skill level to build enterprise-class apps.
- New built-in collaboration features enable teams to work on an app simultaneously, as well as merge and track changes for faster development.
- Makers and developers will be more productive over Dataverse by leveraging intelligence to assist development with natural language to code powered by advanced AI models such as GPT-3 and PROSE.
- Organizations will deliver apps faster and safer, such as Power Apps mobile apps, which allows the packaging of apps to deploy on Android and iOS). Improvements to ALM and governance capabilities ensure safe and scalable rollouts.
Power Apps Portals
Expect new capabilities for administration, packaging and professional development. The wave includes out-of-the-box capabilities to support low-code/no-code development, as well as some features for professional developers. Some of the capabilities include:
- Converting portals into cross-platform mobile applications
- Option to use Global search powered through Dataverse search integration
- Enhancements for professional developers to do more with the portals using Power Platform PAC CLI tool, as well as for admins to author administrative workflows using Admin APIs.
Power Automate
Power Automate is more accessible than ever before with integrations in Windows 11 that help in automating tasks no matter where you are in Microsoft 365. Other updates include:
- Making it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of users and accounts
- Features that are increasingly automatable by default (adhering to the API-first approach), so that IT departments can manage their Power Automate infrastructure in whatever way they want
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents provides the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface. A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and answer a user's questions.
Some improvements in the latest release include:
- Improvements in the authoring experience with commenting
- Power Apps Portals integration
- Data loss prevention options
- Proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams
AI Builder
In the 2022 wave 1, AI Builder adds capabilities around document automation including processing unstructured documents (such as contracts or e-mails). Users can extract key information from documents and process them automatically in an end-to-end flow using Power Automate.
The latest wave also includes effectively managing the governance and lifecycle of AI Models. The focus is on a feedback loop process to improve model accuracy by retraining models with data processed in production.
Data Integration
In this release wave, Microsoft delivers improvements in big data performance and high-scale connectivity, as well as several enhancements across connectors, Gateway and VNet. New capabilities also simplify data prep through a visual authoring environment and diagram view to create high-scale dataflows to Microsoft Cloud, supporting Power BI, Insights Apps and Power Platform.
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