Power Platform Community Conference Top Announcements

This year I attended the Power Platform Community Conference for the third year in a row. The event took place in Las Vegas, Nevada which was the same place the conference took place last year and the same place where it will be held next year. The conference is always a hub of innovation, collaboration, and learning, showcasing the latest advancements in the Power Platform ecosystem. The highlight of the Power Platform Community Conference for me is always the new features that are being announced during the keynote sessions. This year also did not disappoint! For this article I put together my personal top features that I want to share with you, so let’s dig in!

Build Agents in Copilot Studio, M365 BizChat or Sharepoint!

The first thing I want to mention is that the new name for custom Copilots has been changed to ‘Agents’! Yes we went from Power Virtual Agents to Copilots, to now (back to) Agents. With the name change also comes a lot of new functionality! Agents can do a lot more than the Custom Copilots we are used to, as these guys can handle specific business processes. For example an Agent that handles helps onboard new customers, or an Agent that handles an order process, with steps like checking current inventory and submitting an approval if the PO amount is over $500! Another thing to note is that Agents can be triggered by events, not just the start of a conversation. During the demo Microsoft showed that we can now pick a trigger from the list of Power Platform triggers, similarly to a Power Automate flow triggers! So for example it can be triggered when an email arrives or when a row is added in a database!

An Agent can consist of multiple actions, documents and more, something that we’re already familiar with. The orchestrator inside the Agent will use the instructions to determine the correct order of the steps that is needs to complete! The history tab in the Agent shows the history of all the times the Agent was triggered and ran through the steps. If there are runs that weren’t completed, the Agent can recommend changes and/or updates to the Agent so that it won’t fail the next time. For example, if an email wasn’t sent because there wasn’t an email address available, the Agent can suggest to send an email to a team member notifying them that there is an email address missing. Pretty amazing stuff right?!
Microsoft is also launching a new light weight experience for users to build Agents directly from within Microsoft 365 Copilot chat! With this new experience you can describe what you want the Agent to do in natural language, choose with knowledge sources it should use, like a SharePoint site, documents and/or tables in a database. When ready, the Agent can be shared with a group of users or deployed to an entire organization! Pretty existing stuff right?! Microsoft also announced that the same lightweight experience will be available in SharePoint, allowing users to build an Agent directly from within SharePoint! When you’ve built an Agent, you’ll see some additional options available in the canvas. We will be able to see the different steps that the Agent uses, including the thought process and reasoning of the Agent. If you can’t wait to get your hands on this, don’t worry, Microsoft stated this is rolling out in GA to all customers through October!

Copilot Pages

Another feature that I am super exited about is Copilot Pages. This is an brand new feature that lives inside of BizChat in Microsoft 365 Copilot. This feature allows users to compile information from a chat inside of M365 Copilot into a separate page. and collaborate with team members. For example a user could start out asking M365 Copilot a question.

The user can then create a page with Copilot’s responses stored inside the page. Copilot Pages is a rich canvas experience, that users can edit, format and add to. Once ready, the Copilot Page can be shared with other team members, which can start to collaborate on the page immediately. If you’ve seen Microsoft Loop before then some of the components inside of Copilot Pages will look very familiar. It looks like it uses some of the Loop components inside of Copilot Pages, but I haven’t received confirmation on that. All and all it looks like a great tool that will be very helpful in the workplace!

Generate a plan with Copilot in Power Apps: Plan Designer (Preview)

Plan Designer is another feature I am very excited about! If you have built apps before then you’ve seen Copilot inside the app builder. The functionality for this new feature utilizes the same Copilot that we’re used to, but there is a lot more that it can do with this new feature! Makers can now start the process of app development by typing in what the business scenario is, while adding data for Copilot (or Plan Designer as it’s called) to use, like screenshots from other applications, documents, process diagrams, etc.

Based on this information you might think Plan Designer will take it’s best shot on design an app, but this is not the case. It will start to build a plan! As part of the plan building process, it will think through the business problem at hand, by identifying user roles, tasks that need to be completed per each role, user stories, etc. and it will start to build out requirements and assets for the plan based on the information you provided! For example, it can suggest data models with tables and columns, it can suggest apps to be build, business logic like Power Automate flows and so much more! Pretty cool new feature that will make building solutions so much easier!

Smart Filtering and Smart Paste

The last two new features I wanted to discuss also completely blew me away when I saw the demo. The first feature is called Smart Filtering. This reminded me a bit of PowerBI, when you access a PowerBI report and have the ability to ask questions about the data in natural language. With Smart Filtering, you won’t have to manually adjust the filters in a view anymore. Instead, you can just enter in natural language what you are looking for, and Copilot will automatically generate the filters for you!

At any time you have the ability to remove any of the filters that you don’t need by clicking the X next to the filter name. Another feature that might seem small, but I think will be a game -changer, is the Smart Paste feature. I had several requests from customers for ways to quickly enter data into the system, which is where this feature comes into play. Ryan Cunningham showed us the functionality in one of his demos. He showed a very long email in outlook that had a lot of information in it, then he opened a form in a model driven app. He then copied the text from the email and focused on the model driven app.

He then showed how the data on the clipboard is copied into the correct fields in the form in the model driven app when the ‘Paste’ short cut was used! This demo showed us that the end-user will no longer have to search through the text in the email and match the data to the columns in the form in the model driven app, Smart Paste will take care of that! Talk about time savings! Obviously this functionality works hand-in-hand with the form fill assistance functionality, which you can try out today. Since this is AI, we will still need to check to confirm the information was filled in correctly, but that will be a lot faster then having to manually get the information from the email into the correct column in the model driven app! I can’t wait for this to be available! I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!