What’s new: Power Apps January 2023 Feature Update
Welcome to the Power Apps monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share a summary of product, community, and learning updates from throughout the month so you can access it in one easy place. A variety of new and highly anticipated features are now available which we are very excited to share.
We are continuing to improve and simplify the platform, with updates in Trust, Maker and End User Productivity as well as new video and doc contents to help you adopt and optimize Power Apps within your organization.
Trust
- Automate deployments with pipelines in Power Platform, now in preview
- General Availability of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Lockbox
- Public Preview of Delete users in Power Platform
- Dataverse Security Roles risk assessment tool
Maker Productivity
- Virtual tables creation wizard now in public preview
- MS Access to Dataverse migration tool now supports Number:Single, Number:Double (Float) columns
- Getting started with Power Apps made easier
End User Productivity
- The new look for model driven Power Apps is available now in preview
Trust
Automate deployments with pipelines in Power Platform, now in preview
Pipelines aims to democratize application lifecycle management (ALM) for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 customers by bringing deployment automation capabilities into Managed Environments in a manner that’s more approachable for all makers, admins, and developers. See pipelines and Managed Environments in action with this new Microsoft Mechanics video and go deeper with this new video from Power CAT Live.
Pipelines can be setup and run entirely within Power Platform – with governance, visibility, and safeguards automatically built in so that your business solutions can come to market faster with less effort and higher quality. The system handles all the heavy lifting and ongoing maintenance so you don’t have to.
Learn more at Automate deployments with pipelines in Power Platform, now in preview | Microsoft Power Apps
Announcing General Availability of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Lockbox
We are excited to announce that Customer Lockbox for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 is generally available (GA) in public clouds starting with January 11th 2023. Customer Lockbox helps organizations meet the local compliance regulations requirements by governing the Microsoft access to their data, in the rare circumstances when access is needed to investigate and resolve a support request or as result of a problem detected by Microsoft.
Once configured for the tenant, the lockbox policy is enforced only for environments that activated Managed Environments within the respective tenant. Administrators receive notifications regarding pending lockbox requests at which point they can use the available interface to review, approve (or reject) data access requests and audit lockbox request events.
Learn more at Securely access customer data using Customer Lockbox in Power Platform and Dynamics 365 – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Announcing Public Preview of Delete users in Power Platform
We are pleased to announce that you can permanently delete users from your Power Platform environments. This is available for public preview in both public and sovereign clouds.
When you delete a user from Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and this user was created in your Power Platform environments, the user remains in Power Platform with a disabled user status. This user can stay in Power Platform environments forever.
You may want to delete these users for the following reasons:
- Users no longer exist in your Azure AD.
- Users moved out of the environment’s security group.
- Users no longer have a license to use the application.
- To comply with regulatory and privacy requirements.
Deleting these users also bring you the following benefits:
- Save on storage costs.
- Better system performance.
Learn more at Responding to DSR requests for Microsoft Dataverse customer data – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Dataverse Security Roles risk assessment tool
Power CAT’s Dataverse Security Roles risk assessment tool will help you understand implicit risks in the configuration of your Dataverse security roles. You can even set your own measure for risk assessment.
Ravi Chada shows how in this video. Security roles are the greatest conglomeration of a list of tables and privileges. A maker can check a few circles and may not know to what extent might be the right choice. As an Admin you may be concerned as to what might happen when the app is shared with users. This tool provides you a way to assess the risk for each security role in your environment and Ravi shows you how to get the most of it.
Learn more at powerapps-tools/Apps/Security Risk Assessment at master · microsoft/powerapps-tools · GitHub
Maker Productivity
Getting started with Power Apps made easier
We have improved the trial sign up experience to make it easier for you to try Power Apps for free. You can now sign up for a trial in just a couple of clicks.
Learn more at Power Apps 30-day free trial – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
Virtual tables creation wizard now in public preview
We are excited to announce that makers can now create virtual tables directly in the maker portal in just a few minutes using a guided creation wizard!
With this new experience, you can create virtual tables from SharePoint and SQL without any code, and without leaving the maker portal. Upon creating the virtual table, it will act like a standard Dataverse table, from which you can create relationships with other data in Dataverse, build apps, or use it in a flow.
Use virtual tables to save time on data integration in Dataverse, quickly build model-driven apps from external data, or even connect to Azure Synapse via serverless SQL.
Learn more at Virtual tables creation wizard now in Public Preview | Microsoft Power Apps
MS Access to Dataverse migration tool now supports Number:Single, Number:Double (Float) columns
Since the launch of the MS Access to Dataverse migration tool, Number:Single and Number:Double columns have not been able to be automatically migrated. These data types are commonly used in Access. These were initially blocked due to the difference in size between the Dataverse Float data type and the MS Access Number:Single and Number:Double types and the concern of the number of potentially unsuccessful migrations. The suggested workaround was to convert the Single and Double columns into Decimal prior to migration.
Based on research of Migration telemetry, we have found that many of the attempted column migrations are within the Dataverse min/max size limit of +/- 100 Billion. However, the Dataverse Float data type still has a limitation of 5 digits after the decimal.
Based on this, we have enabled the migration of Access Number:Single and Number:Double to the Dataverse Float data type. Customers will be informed in the tools that they have the option to migrate these types to Dataverse but that only 5 digits will be stored after the decimal place. If this is acceptable and the customer opts in, the migration will occur. If a field is identified as being over the min/max limit of Dataverse, the row will be held back from migration in an error table, the same way this is handled for any other data type field overage.
Learn more at Data types and sizes for Access data migration to Dataverse – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
End User Productivity
The new look for model driven Power Apps is available now in preview
Model driven apps are being given a new look, bringing a clearer design, that is optimized for action, an enhanced sharing experience, and new grid that supports faster scrolling and inline editing. The design has the familiar look and feel to apps like Office, Teams and Azure, making it easier for users to learn and use. .
The initial preview is launching with updates to the most heavily used model app experiences. The pages included in this initial launch cover 70% of scenarios in use today. We will be frequently updating the preview over the coming months.
Learn more at The new look for model driven Power Apps is available now in preview | Microsoft Power Apps
Video, Learning and Doc Updates
See new videos released by our Power CAT and Cloud Advocacy teams on Express Design and Custom Connectors.
 | Dataverse Environments For Everyone – New Developer Plan MK Bajwa talks about how anyone with access to Power Apps can get three Dataverse environments for testing out capabilities. Dataverse Developer environments support custom connectors, premium connectors and the ability to backup, restore and even copy out to a production environment, all without needing a premium license.. |
 | Easier Integration with Virtual Tables for Dataverse Virtual tables allow you to leave your data where it lives but access it through Dataverse. It’s now easier than ever to create virtual tables for Dataverse. Phil talks with Nathan Helgren the new capabilities for creating virtual tables in under 3 minutes. Use the Dataverse API across SQL Server and SharePoint, integrate across sources, trigger flows, write plugins and more. |
 | Power Apps and Azure Cognitive Services Demo Using a demo of an Online Marketplace System, see how to integrate Azure Cognitive Services capabilities like Computer Vision, Content Moderation, Translator and Speech Services directly into your Power App. Suparna Banerjee shows how to auto generate description of an image, restrict personal identifiable information and offensive language in an online content, on-the-fly translate the Search results and implement Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text in your Canvas App. |
We’ve also released new, and made updates to some of our documentation – see a summary before of some of the key updates:
Please continue sending us your feedback on features you would like to see in Power Apps. We hope that you enjoy the update!
