2024 Microsoft Release Wave 2: what’s new for Power Platform?

We have bundled the best updates for Power Platform, from the 2024 Release Wave 2 notes! Discover all new and updated features: from design studio upgrades for Power Pages to support for Copilot in the creation of prompts. Check out all the updates below! 

Important deprecations

First of all, we will start with some important deprecations of Power Platform. By default, all model-driven apps, forms and views will only open via the modern designers, and the ‘Switch to classic’ option is no longer available. Also, the Microsoft Dataverse (legacy) connector is deprecated, but will continue to work in existing flows until a final (to be decided) date in 2024. 

Power Apps: unified experiences & acting more efficiently on data 

When it comes to Power Apps, there are several updates to make your workday even better:

• You can now work together with other users in real-time when creating canvas apps. 
• Selecting records will be faster with the look-up control. Also, Copilot can help you as 
  a user to filter, sort, and search data within a gallery by using natural language.
• The Power Platform Environment Settings app is there for application developers to create 
  settings for their applications. This app brings a single, unified and modern experience.
• Finally, you can act on your data more efficiently with new grid features to group and aggregate data, reorder columns, set column width, and complete other tasks with ease. 
  
  

Power Pages: design studio upgrades & Copilot support

For Power Pages, as an administrator, you can now block certain authentication providers and determine which ones are allowed. Besides that, the release brings several updates for the design studio. As a user, you can easily drag and drop files, or upload them directly from your camera. You can use Power Fx (low-language code) in web template components and use the support of Copilot to write formulas, or to understand existing expressions. Soon, you can also set up Microsoft Entra External ID using a wizard, to secure all the external identities you work with. 

Copilot will play a bigger role for Power Pages: you can start using the Al moderator for community templates, to detect spam content. Also, Al-powered search for community templates will give you comprehensive summaries of relevant search results. Finally, as a community admin you can create summaries from the discussion thread content. 

Power Automate: processes in Al flow and extensive monitoring

For Power Automate there are several updates that we want to share with you: 

• You can use generative Al to achieve a process in Al flows, and determine what steps are needed to achieve a certain outcome.
• It’s possible to run a cloud flow for more than 30 days per invocation, and you can create them quickly from the automate tab in Excel.
• The automation center provides you with extensive automation monitoring capabilities, using the power of Al and Copilot.
• And last but not least, with Copilot for Power Automate you will be able to create a flow description by the press of a button without having to open the flow and read the actions inside it, using AI. Copilot can now also be used to analyze flow runs, work queue data and for product questions.

Copilot Studio & Al builder: time for some new innovations

Time for some new Copilot and Al innovation! You can now add suggested prompts to custom copilots, use analytics to get insights on how your copilots are performing and use image analysis to get responses based on uploaded images. Also, you will be able to use IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Native voice integration in Microsoft Copilot Studio will dramatically improve the experience of building voice-enabled bots for customers using the voice channel in Omnichannel for Customer Service. 

With the Al Builder you can now review Al generated content with a validation station, process and generate documents with Copilot prompts, process images in the builder, and add unstructured data knowledge to GPT prompts. Furthermore, data visualization receives a great upgrade with natural language prompts. 

Dataverse updates 

Are you ready for some exciting Dataverse updates? In the data workspace you will now benefit from better automatic email validation, you will be able to create plugins that can be published for various copilots, and you can easily look up Microsoft Dataverse security roles. Besides that, you can build everything faster with Power Platform catalog enhancements. 

Governance and administration 

And finally, we will zoom in on the changes for governance and administration on Power Platform. When it comes to enterprise-scale administration, you can now delegate admin responsibility with group admin roles. There is also an updated user interface (UI) when using Access team templates in the Power Platform admin center, providing an intuitive experience.

When it comes to security and compliance, there are several updates: 

• You can manage security posture in the Power Platform admin center.
• It is soon possible to mask sensitive fields, fields with column-level security, and to eliminate the bulk export of these fields.
• You can monitor data, protect information and minimize compliance risks in a powerful experience powered by Microsoft Purview. 

Finally, the Release Wave brings a unified experience for Power Platform and finance and operations apps. You can convert the sandbox to production for unified environments and deploy and manage these. 

Want to learn more about Release Wave 2 for Power Platform? 

Contact our experts to find out more about the opportunities these updates can bring to your business