Leverage low-code to do more with less at Microsoft Ignite 2022
Welcome to Microsoft Ignite 2022! Microsoft Power Platform is empowering you to do more with less by making it easier than ever to securely scale low-code adoption, increase organizational collaboration, and infuse AI and automation into all of your business processes.
The scope of chief information officers (CIOs), IT departments, and IT professionals has greatly expanded beyond their traditional roles in recent years, making it critical that they can quickly solve technical problems to match increasing demands. As they look to do more with less, they require technology that can enable them to produce enterprise-grade solutions faster and with less effort. Learn how IT departments can maximize their low code investments across their organizations with a strong adoption strategy in the Low-code signals 2023 report.
To better support users everywhere, I’m excited to share some of the new capabilities we’re announcing at Microsoft Ignite that include:
- General Availability of Managed Environments: Managed Environments offer a set of enhanced out-of-the-box governance capabilities that simplify, automate, and streamline IT administration of Microsoft Power Platform at scale.
- ALM pipeline automation: Built-in application lifecycle management in Microsoft Power Platform to improve security and governance for solutions with less effort.
- Coauthoring in Power Apps: Makers can work together in real-time with coauthoring in the modern app designer to accelerate development with collaboration.
- General availability of Power Pages: The newest Microsoft Power Platform product for creating modern, secure, responsive business websites is now generally available and includes pay-as-you-go meters and capacity-based subscriptions.
- Interactive Power BI charts shared directly from OneDrive and SharePoint: Users can now share and interact with reports directly from OneDrive or SharePoint.
- Cross-tenant dataset sharing: Cross-tenant dataset sharing enables users to share datasets with external organizations in an easy, quick, and secure manner.
- Advancements in AI Builder: Increase document processing accuracy and the number of supported document types.
- The Power Automate copilot converts natural language to cloud flows: Users can describe what they want to automate in a sentence, and AI will build your flow in seconds.
- The Power Automate copilot formats data by examples: Power Automate users can leverage AI to reshape data for more straightforward expression authoring by using examples.
Scale low-code securely
Earlier in 2022, Microsoft Power Platform announced Managed Environments in preview. Managed Environments, which is now generally available, offers a set of enhanced, out-of-the-box governance capabilities that will simplify, automate, and streamline IT administration of Microsoft Power Platform at scale.
ALM pipeline automation
At Microsoft Ignite 2022, we’re adding to Managed Environments with built-in application lifecycle management (ALM), pipeline automation, and more.
ALM in Managed Environments will be included in-product to reduce the complexity of deploying solutions. Makers will be able to easily move their solutions from environment to environment using a secure and automated pipeline.
This pipeline is designed to be intuitive for the maker while providing greater visibility and a full audit trail to IT. This will allow IT to know when and where apps are being designed and deployed from development to production.
This will enable IT departments to save on time, costs, and resources to implement and rapidly scale their low-code practices.
This feature and more will be available in preview in December 2022.
Learn more about Managed Environments announcements.
Increased development efficiency
After securing your low-code investments and ensuring they can scale to meet your organizational demands, you are ready to roll out low-code to everyone. To improve company-wide development efficiency, we are excited to announce real-time coauthoring and the general availability of Power Pages.
Coauthoring in Power Apps
We’ve made Power Apps development easier—and more fun—by introducing real-time coauthoring.
With coauthoring, Makers can now work together on the same app and page in the modern app designer at the same time. This enables teams to divide and conquer work to achieve a completed app faster than ever before. Now you can see changes from other users as they happen—just like coauthoring inside of Microsoft 365.
Power Apps coauthoring is in preview.
Microsoft Power Pages is generally available with a simplified licensing model
In May 2022, Microsoft Power Platform announced Power Pages as a standalone product in preview. Today, we’re proud to announce that Power Pages is generally available.
As demand for custom, well-crafted business websites surges, it is increasingly difficult for IT departments and developers to write custom code for every webpage.
Power Pages enables citizen developers and professional developers alike to rapidly spin up low-code, scalable, and secure business-centric websites.
For customers to focus more on website development and less on licensing, Power Pages has also simplified its business model by moving to capacity-based subscriptions and pay-as-you-go meters.
Power Pages licenses are now charged per website via monthly authenticated and anonymous users. Additionally, Power Pages has also removed the distinction between internal and external authenticated users.
These changes make it easier for organizations to choose appropriate licensing options for their website.
Learn more about Power Pages and the new licensing model.
Accelerated data sharing to turn insights into actions faster
Part of enabling IT departments to do more, with less, is to rapidly turn their insights into actions as quickly as possible. As such we’re making it easier for IT departments to share their data securely and rapidly across tenants and via deeper integration between Power BI and Microsoft 365.
Share interactive Power BI charts directly from OneDrive and SharePoint
Today, we are thrilled to announce even greater integration between Power BI and Microsoft 365 via OneDrive and SharePoint. Almost every Microsoft 365 user relies on OneDrive and SharePoint to share, view, and explore their documents, files, and now Power BI reports. With this integration, we are enabling users to preview and interact with Power BI report files directly from their OneDrive and SharePoint experience. Users can explore and interact with the reports directly from OneDrive or SharePoint.
This capability not only makes it easier to share Power BI reports, but also simplifies the workflow for users that want to quickly analyze the reports from OneDrive or SharePoint itself, turning insights to actions even faster than before.
This feature is in private preview.
Cross-tenant dataset sharing
Cross-tenant dataset sharing enables users to share datasets with external organizations like business partners, customers, and vendors in an easy, quick, and secure manner. When the dataset is shared with external users, they can access it in their own tenant, build composite models on top of the shared dataset with their own internal data, and build and share reports based on the model.
Users can access all their external datasets in one easy-to-find place in Power BI Desktop. Along with cross-tenant dataset sharing, Power BI is making it easier to discover reports, dashboards, and workspaces shared by external tenants with you as a guest user in their tenant. Users can just go to their home page and find all content shared with them by external organizations in the “External data” tab.
These are just two of the exciting announcements for Power BI. Check out the Power BI Microsoft Ignite Announcement blog, “Do more with enterprise self-service business intelligence,” to see the full array of new Power BI features that will help you more easily turn your data into immediate impact.
Infuse AI into every business process
By implementing AI and automation, organizations spend less time, money, and effort completing repetitive tasks, freeing them to focus on other strategic investments. And Microsoft Power Platform is the easiest way to scale automation company-wide.
Today, we are proud to announce several updates to the AI and automation capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform, starting with updates to the document processing capabilities of AI Builder.
Updates to document processing with AI Builder
Document processing is one of the most frequently used AI Builder features due to the highly repetitive and time-consuming nature of document-based business processes. Today we’re announcing four key updates: built-in feedback loop, unstructured documents general availability, additional language support, and multipage table extraction.
These updates serve to help users spend less time processing documents by making the feature more accurate and able to support more types of documents.
Learn more about AI Builder updates.
Power Automate description to cloud flow
Building on the success of GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Power Platform is bringing the same copilot principles to Power Automate with description to cloud flow. Now users can describe what they want to automate in a sentence, and AI will build your flow in seconds. No endless searching or guesswork, just describe it and let Power Automate generate the requisite cloud flow. This feature streamlines automation for all users.
Power Automate format data by examples
Writing expressions to utilize data when automating workflows can be daunting. Power Automate now simplifies this process by leveraging AI to reshape data for more straightforward expression authoring by use of examples.
To access this feature in Power Automate cloud flow designer, users can select any action and use the new option “format data by examples.” By feeding the designer examples of the desired output format to produce, Power Automate will automatically generate the expression formula to use.
Learn more about Power Automate.
Next steps
Watch an overview of Managed Environments and the new AI-powered copilot in Microsoft Power Platform on Microsoft Mechanics.
Then watch the Microsoft Power Platform breakout sessions for a deeper dive into these capabilities:
- Innovate faster and achieve greater agility with the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
- Unlock new customer experiences with NLP at scale
- Scale hyperautomation in the cloud with Power Automate
- Automate your document processes with the power of AI Builder
- From low code to pro code: building and buying collaborative apps to power an evolving workplace
- Power Pages: Low-Code Web Development
- Streamline low code governance in your organization
Moreover, it’s never been easier to get started with low code and generate substantial cost savings for your organization. According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact study, developing with Power Apps yields a 74 percent reduction in average app development costs1, and for new customers Microsoft is now offering 25 percent savings in their first year on Power Apps per user and Power Automate per user with attended RPA licenses to new commercial customers in all channels.
Additionally, we recognize the tremendous efficiency gains and cost savings customers can achieve by leveraging robotic process automation (RPA) technologies, as such we are making RPA even more accessible by announcing the general availability of hosted unattended RPA bots in early 2023. Furthermore, for customers with existing RPA infrastructure, we have strategic partners in the ecosystem that will help you accelerate your RPA modernization journey to Power Automate, thus further reducing costs.
Hosted RPA bots allow you to run unattended automation at scale without the need to provide or set up any machines. In general availability customers will be able to pre-pay per user with a pay-as-you-go option coming soon.
Please speak with your Microsoft representative to learn more.
