Microsoft adds major upgrades to Power Apps at Ignite

At Microsoft Ignite 2024, which began Tuesday in Chicago, the company announced a series of low-code product enhancements, targeted at developers, that ranged from new capabilities in Power Apps and Power Pages to new AI and governance features in the codeless automation tool Microsoft Power Automate.

According to a release from Microsoft, the Power Apps upgrade is designed to help build intelligent apps and give users more ways to leverage AI for greater productivity in low-code apps.

The capabilities, which will be in preview next month, include a new way to build complex offerings on the Power Platform. Developers, supported by the Copilot in Power Apps, will be able to define a business problem and then step through and review proposed roles and requirements, working alongside Copilot to help ensure it reflects the true business problem, Microsoft said.

Copilot, it said, “will iteratively build a solution architecture from apps, pages, automations, and agents as possible assets. This iterative and outcome-focused development cycle will happen within a single view in Power Apps Studio, but can enhance the way solutions are built across the breadth of low-code apps.”

Other enhancements include:

Agent builder in Power Apps that Microsoft said will give developers “a fast and convenient way to bring their apps into the agentic era by being able to build agents for their app from within Power Apps Studio, using the lightweight Copilot Studio experience. The app-specific agents will leverage the logic, knowledge and actions already existing in the apps to execute tasks autonomously.” App users can oversee the actions that the agents took in the app and take action if necessary.
AI-generated record summary card with a custom prompt that will enable developers to “enrich the user experience in low-code apps with several generative AI features, including adding a custom prompt to their apps to help users easily gain insights from their records.”

The ability for users to fill out forms using files and emails as a source of data, making assistance in apps more useful out of the box. “Model-driven app users will be able to add a file or email to generate form field suggestions, saving valuable time on a tedious task,” the release stated. “The form filling experience has been improved based on user feedback, giving more control over suggestions.”
The ability for Snowflake data to be brought into Dataverse, Microsoft’s enterprise data platform for Copilot, through a new Snowflake Power Platform connector, which the release said will allow sales teams to analyze purchase patterns in Snowflake and track leads in real time within Dataverse.

Kyle Davis, VP analyst at Gartner who specializes in areas related to application modernization using low-code and genAI, said the “major changes that will help Power Platform customers are the new managed capabilities aligned to roles within an organization, the change to data policies, and the new capacity management capabilities.”

The new AI and governance features in Power Automate, the platform’s codeless automation tool, Microsoft said, will “span Copilot for Power Automate cloud automation and robotic process automation (RPA). These updates will enable users to build more intuitive, reliable, and fast authoring automations.”

Scheduled for preview in December, the offerings include generative actions that will accept natural language input and let cloud flows create AI-powered steps from it, and a Copilot expression assistant, currently in preview, that will help developers build expressions by describing what they want to create and referencing the dynamic data in the flow.

According to Davis, “nearly all the built-in governance capabilities have fallen under Managed Environments. The feature list has grown over time and was due for a revamp. The new approach includes new capabilities, but also breaks out the governance capabilities that existed under Managed Environments into three areas: managed governance, managed operations, and managed security.”

These areas, he said, “align with typical roles within an organization. For example, managed operations are where you’ll find backup and recovery, ALM, testing, and monitoring capabilities. Managed Security is where you’ll find IAM, network isolation, advanced data policies, and encryption.”

Davis added, “the major change to data policies is that they have been simplified. The blocked, non-business, and business categories have been removed. Now, an organization can choose which connectors to make available and which to block. Also, all connectors are now blockable.”

Also launched on Tuesday were:

New capabilities in Power Pages that Microsoft said are designed to enhance the user experience, streamline operations and provide secure, intelligent solutions to meet evolving business needs. These capabilities, in preview, include agent-enabled workflows that “will allow users to empower their digital presence through autonomous agents, secured by robust access controls.”
An update to the SaaS-based Power Platform admin center, currently in preview, that Microsoft said will “include pages to help users manage low-code assets and explore resources, view and help with agent adoption in Microsoft Copilot Studio, manage capacity and licenses and monitor reliability and optimize latency. The updated security page will allow IT admins to gain visibility, get recommendations and utilize the controls needed to improve their security posture.”

Davis said, “the new capacity management capabilities allow admins to allocate Copilot Studio messages, Dataverse capacity, and other capacity-based features to different environments. This has been a pain point in the past, especially when an organization has elected to use a chargeback model but has had no way to protect capacity accrued at the tenant level for those business units or departments that had paid for it. Now, if different business units or departments have their own environments, those environments can have the capacity they paid for allocated to them.”