Power Platform – 2020 Wave 2 Highlights

The Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 2 Plan was published today and here are some of the highlights that caught my eye.

Power Automate RPA

Microsoft recently purchased the RPA product WinAutomation and added it to Power Automate to improve their desktop automation capabilities. WinAutomation is a well established fully functional RPA product and its initial integration with Power Automate was somewhat crude. This has been improved sustainably.

From Oct 2020 you will also be able to run automation scripts on virtual machines which will be of interest to organizations running Citrix and the like.

Power Virtual Agents

Some exciting changes are coming to Power Virtual Agents. The fist is small and you are now going to be able to auto trigger an opening chat with the user. Up to now, the chatbot user had to initiate the conversation.

Another improvement is that support for adaptive cards, images and videos will be added in Oct 2020. This will greatly enhance the user experience beyond the current basic chat experience.

You will also be able to deploy Power Virtual Agents as Alexa skills. I am interested in looking at this.

Power Apps Portal

From Feb 20201 you will be able to call the CRUD Web APIs directly from a Power Apps Portal. You will also be able to use PCF, Power Apps Component Framework, components in the portal enhancing the user experience.

CDS- Auditing

The Export to Data Lake service enables the continuous replication of Common Data Service entity data to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. From March 2021 you will now be able to include the audit data as part of this export.

Model-Driven App Designer

The App and Sitemap designer will be updated and makers will be able to add custom pages into their model driven app. Custom pages are no/low code canvas components.

AI Builder

AI builder allows non technical users to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence in their Power Platform solutions. Some new AI scenarios have been added, like text entity extraction, to AI Builder. An invoice processing starter kit will also be added in Oct 2020 which should garner a lot of interest.

Improved Global Search in Model Driven Apps

Global search will be moved to a more prominent position on the header as part of a number of new changes to global search. Relevance search will be the default search engine if it is configured on. There is an improved user interface including displaying recent searches

PCF for Canvas apps – GA

The ability to embed Power Apps component framework in canvas apps will go GA in March 2021. There is huge interest at the moment from pro developers in PCF so it will be interesting to see if demand for components meets expectations.