Are you excited about all the key features and capabilities that will soon arrive between Oct 2022 and Mar 2023 as a part of Microsoft’s 2022 Wave 2 Release for Dynamics 365 Power Platform? But not so keen on scrolling through the entire release document that’s been put out by the tech giant?

You’ve come to the right place. This is where we handpick the most significant and valuable feature updates and new capabilities for the D365 Power Platform so that you don’t have to spend half your weekend traversing through countless web pages of the official second Power Platform wave release.

Power Pages

Power Pages comes as one of the most exciting additions to the Power Platform that will replace the previous Power Apps Portals. It will essentially equip companies to leverage out-of-the-box capabilities, like low-code and no-code development and easy drag-and-drop features, allowing them to quickly design, configure, and publish professional websites.

Along with that, the 2022 second wave release also plans to develop the core platform and add new functionalities in templates, design studio, administration, and professional development experience.

1.Configure basic forms in the design studio

Using the Power Pages design studio, users can not only create but also customise basic forms with features, like:

• A simplified experience for adding file upload support to a form
• Form column configurations, including updating a label and adding a tooltip to a column
• No-code styling user interfaces for basic forms

General availability: October 2022

2. Template Hub (Select Dynamics 365 website templates in the template hub)

With the Power Pages template hub, users can select or create D365 website templates easily to extend the user-front capabilities of their D365 apps. What’s more, a range of predefined industry-specific and cross-industry website templates will make this process much more effortless and quicker. The possible D365 application extensions include:

• Customer self-service (D365 Customer Service and Omnichannel)
• Employee self-service (D365 Customer Service and Omnichannel)
• Community (D365 Customer Service and Omnichannel)
  Partner (D365 Sales)

General Availability: – NA

3. Select new Power Pages site templates

Users can quickly create new sites from the template hub with two new prebuilt solution templates or start from scratch using a blank starter canvas. For now, these templates will support these contexts:

Blank starter canvas: Professional developers can create custom sites without deleting or altering page templates using this template. It comes with a header, footer, and one section component.

Permit Application submission template: It spots an application submission pattern and assists in creating a complex multi-step form within a website.

New Employee Onboarding template: It has a checklist tracker pattern and provides a walkthrough for creating a series of steps as forms, which users can complete in any order.

General Availability: NA

Power Apps

For many business partners across the globe, Microsoft Power Apps has been the go-to low-code app development platform that thoroughly supports D365 extensibility, Microsoft 365 customisation, and a standalone custom line of business applications. Leveraging its solid low-code development tools, a robust and secure platform in Microsoft Dataverse, and hundreds of connectors to common business data sources, Power App enables expedited application development at a very low cost without much complexity.

These are the key enhancements and additions that the 2022 wave 2 release plan focuses on when it comes to Power Apps:

4. Form component enhancements

This enhancement allows users to create complex multi-entry forms for a highly productive experience in model-driven apps. With this feature, users will be able to access as well as edit related records from another table without leaving the current table they are working on. This means the larger context will never be out of sight for users. What’s more, they can even customise individual capabilities according to their needs.

Additionally, the form component control will render model-driven app forms, which you can easily use on another form, or add to other pages or dashboards in model-driven apps. And you will also be able to configure the command bar, business process flows, and form headers as well as show or hide tabs.

General availability: October 2022.

5. Grid Control Enhancements

Using this improvement to the grid control, which has been evolving over the previous release waves, you will have a richer and more productive user experience in the grid. The new features coming through in the next quarter will allow for grouping and nesting of multiple grids and aggregation of one or more numeric columns.

Grouping: Group data based on one column for better organisation of tabular data. Expand or collapse each group of rows when you want.

Nested grids: Expand one or more rows simultaneously to access related records without leaving the grid.

Aggregation: Extract meaningful insights from tabular data by aggregating multiple numeric columns across grouped columns. Plus, you can also opt for the total, minimum, maximum or average values as needed.

General availability: NA

6. Dataverse tables integrated inside Power Apps Studio

Once it rolls out, this update will allow users to work with the Dataverse table inside Power Apps. This ensures an effortless and efficient app-building experience for creating and updating data and metadata. It will be easier for old users to use Dataverse with a familiar, table-centric experience within the Power Apps whereas new users will receive a fresh onboarding experience.

To sum it up,
Users will get familiar table experiences across Power Apps, app designers, other Power Platform products, and also within Microsoft Teams.

Dataverse will also accommodate Power Fx calculated columns for developers to create powerful tables.
New app makers will have an example-based guided experience of how Dataverse works with Power Apps.

General availability: October 2022

7. Connect to external data from Dataverse

Users will also be able to connect their existing data sources like SQL Server, Excel files, and Microsoft List with Dataverse. With simple connections, it will be possible for you to create tables in Dataverse to display and work with external data. A small Power Apps wizard allows you full control to configure the details while creating the Dataverse table.

General availability: January 2023

8. Power BI quick reports in Power Apps

This one is already available for public preview. What it does is allow you to create reports in the Power BI service with a view in a model-driven app. With the Visualise this view option, you are able to:

Create a Power BI quick report, starting from a view with just a single click. Let the Power BI service generate visuals and layouts intelligently based on the underlying data.

Make any required modifications to visuals, filters, or columns using the display name of the column on the quick report.

Save the Power BI report to your desired workspace for easy access and customisation.

General Availability: October 2022

9. Use Teams to chat with others in app

With this update, you will be able to initiate multiple Teams chats with your co-workers without having to leave your model-driven app. It will also be easy to find existing chats related to a record or start chatting with anyone working on the same record.

For easy navigation and better user experience, all chats are stacked up on the right in a side panel and chats are tracked as chat activities in the timeline and activities views.

General availability – March 2023

10. Custom pages are responsive by default with rich layouts

With this update comes the power and control of canvas apps in the model-driven world. Developers will be able to expedite app development by adding responsive custom pages in their apps without compromising control over the design, much like in canvas apps.

Included capabilities are:

• Responsive layout templates with multiple layout options for accelerated development of responsive custom pages.
• Easy layout configuration allows you to move controls easily from one section to the other within a layout and maintain full and precise control of canvas app development.
• Multiple form factor support for desktop, mobile, and other form factors automatically with a single customer page like in model-driven apps.

General Availability: NA

Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate helps companies automate repetitive, time-intensive tasks to boost productivity. It improves workflows and comes with the tools that you can use to improve productivity in your organization by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

Power Automate provides a better way to get things done across your organization through cloud flows and robotic process automation (RPA). It is deeply integrated with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and the rest of Microsoft Power Platform.

11. Improved experience for selecting dynamic values

This feature update will give users an improved dynamic values token picker experience. What it means is when you click add Dynamic content, it will give you a list of other steps in the flow and all the options to choose from, which provides a clear structure for users. Users will also be able to view the datatype of the tokens to avoid runtime errors.

General availability: March 2023

12. Support for sequential approvals in Power Automate

This update here will enable users to set up more complex approval workflows within Teams and from within Power Automate. You will be able to define multiple levels of approval, multiple approvers, and the sequence of the approval flow.

After each approval, the subsequent approver will get a request, and when anyone rejects, the rest of the approval stages halt. Also, all approvers will be able to see the approval history and outcome at each stage.

General availability: October 2022

Power BI

The overall goal of the Power BI feature update in the 2022 second release plan is to foster a data-driven work culture within partner companies. These updates seek to empower all users at all levels to make informed, data-driven decisions with confidence and meaningful insights regardless of the scale of data. The key investment areas include capabilities that empower all individuals, teams, and companies that use Power BI.

And the prominent capability updates include:

13. Enhanced sequence creation experience with a new designer

Focused on bringing a consistent automation experience across D365 Marketing customer journey orchestration and D365 Sales sequences, this feature will enhance the experience for users, like sales engagement managers or operations managers, while using sequence designer to configure sequences.

The new sequence designer will assist sales managers and operations teams to:

• Edit a sequence step using a spacious side panel with an improved UX
• Discover and provide an exit criterion for a sequence
• Understand the end of any sequence branch with an exit icon
• Save all the changes of sequence steps with a single click

General availability: October 2022

14. Replace Get data experience in the Power BI service

To help both self-service as well as experienced users of Power BI create content easily and successfully in the Power BI service, the existing Get data experience is getting improvements. The upcoming update (2022 release wave 2 for Power Platform) focuses on user experience improvements by:

• Changing the entry point for Get data to better fit within the overall Power BI create experiences
• Streamlining how users create new Power BI reports
• Simplifying how users select data for new reports

General availability: NA

15. Mobile visual formatting

With this feature update, report creators will be able to design Power BI reports optimised for Power BI mobile apps with great ease.

Not only does it provide creators with more flexibility but also some design options to create reports for mobile devices. For instance, the visual format pane will be available for all reports in the mobile layout.

General availability: October 2022

Power Virtual Agents

Companies can create AI-powered bots that can answer FAQs, resolve common repetitive customer issues, or automate workflows that are time-consuming. It allows anyone to build custom bots using a simple, code-free graphical interface without the help of AI-experts, data scientists, or professional developers.

The second release update this year brings enhancements in these key areas:

16. Use Adaptive Cards in PVA

Using Adaptive Cards, bot authors will be able to create actionable and interactive rich media content. This feature update seeks to enrich conversational experiences in PVA and address business scenarios that require bot users to interact with custom data, tweak visual content, fill up a form, and so on.

General availability: November 2022

17. Use Power FX expressions in authoring canvas

With this functionality update, it will be possible to author low-code expressions for various system integration and data management tasks without the need for software engineers.

This means any author will be able to write expressions for any bot to implement more sophisticated logic to perform tasks like data validation or control looping logic. Additionally, it also provides better data manipulation capabilities, like performing operations on variables, along with data retrieving functionality.

General availability: November 2022

What’s next?

Find out how you can leverage these feature updates from the 2022 release wave 2 of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Power Platform within your organisation.

Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation on 01296 328 689.

Or email us at info@dogmagroup.co.uk

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