The Microsoft Power Platform provides a low-/no-code development environment to developers, giving them a convenient way to build apps, workflows, and bots.
Within the toolkit, companies can access a host of powerful features, including Power BI, for making informed data-driven business decisions. There is also Power Apps for custom-built apps, Power Pages for web design, and Power Automate for seamless automated workflows.
Power Virtual Agents is another tool companies can leverage to design their own conversational AI.
As part of the annual Microsoft Ignite event, the leading technology company has announced a host of exciting updates to the platform, focused on taking the offering to the next level.
Updates to the Power Platform and Power Automate
First, Microsoft is introducing more automation features to the Power Platform.
Perhaps the most intriguing is a capability that allows users to describe what they want to automate with speech, and the AI system will build workflows based on this information.
From there, developers can edit the flow, set up the appropriate connectors, and finalize the solution within the “Flow Designer”. This feature is now in Preview for Power Platform users.
For Power Automate, Microsoft introduced several updates, including innovations for user engagement and robotic process automation (RPA). Enhancements include:
- Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit: Microsoft now offers a new CoE starter kit to help companies build a center of excellence for low-code workflows.
- Expressions by Example: Power Automate now offers expressions by example, so users can harness the logic of pre-built flows when reshaping data. They may also create models of how they want data returned to the flow and autogenerate that for future use cases.
- Native Power Automate Integration: A new native integration in Excel will allow users to access Excel-specific templates and keep their work within the Excel environment.
The New AI Builder
A new “Microsoft Intelligent Document Processing” feature powered by Power Automate and “AI Builder” allows users to manage end-to-end document processing without coding.
The solution includes a host of valuable features, including a feedback loop, which assists users in consistently improving the quality of the outputs received from AI models. Users can also take low-accuracy reviewed documents and retrain the model for improved performance.
Another new capability is Unstructured Docs, which delivers a new kind of document for AI Builder to extract data from, while semi-structured and structured document options are already available. Microsoft has also introduced further language support for text recognition, with 164 available languages.
There’s also a “Multi-table extraction” feature, which supports unstructured and structured documents, and can pull data from more than two pages tagged by a user. Once the table has been tagged on the first document, the model will process the document automatically, page by page.
Managed Environments for the Power Platform
The Managed Environments solution for Power Platform offers a collection of features to IT admins, allowing them to govern low-code solutions at scale with more visibility and control.
Microsoft introduced a variety of new components for Managed Environments, including:
- Weekly digest: This provides proactive insights into the most-used and least-used apps in low-code environments, allowing admins to remove less adopted solutions.
- Limit sharing: Admins can now reign in app sprawl with limit sharing controls to restrict who can use apps in a Power Platform environment.
- Environment-scoped DLP: New Data loss prevention policies allow admins visibility into environment-specific DLP policies.
- Simple environment activation: Power Platform admins can activate managed environments within Power Platform using the admin center.
Microsoft Power Pages Updates
The Power Pages solution within Power Platform is a convenient low-code development and hosting platform for website creation. The Power Pages offering is now generally available, with various enhancements, including a new “Design Studio” for making multi-step forms without code. Maskers can also add custom CSS and preview site pages on different screen sizes.
