Everything You Need to Know About Power Platform – December 2020

Welcome to 2021. After a crazy year that saw the pace of change in Power Platform accelerate, December was a relatively quiet month. Which was nice and had visions of catching up dancing in my head. Well, that failed, I am as behind as ever. Anyway, you do not care. All you want to know is what happened while you, like Microsoft, was taking a break.

Power Apps Performance Recommendations

This blog post isn’t an announcement of any new feature, instead, it is a write-up to help you think more about the performance of your apps. If you have ever wondered how does data travel around in Power Apps or what are the common performance issues, then you should give this a read. It seems super nerdy so you might have to read it twice, but I think it is worth it.

Power Automate Desktop Now Generally Available

If you like building Desktop Flows aka UI Flows aka RPA Flows aka Robotic Process Automation Flows, then good news, the client has been updated. (Can you tell I think it has too many names?) In the update, you will find some nice additions to make testing easier and more importantly they have added some security. The ability to have sensitive fields and encryption will sure make you more trusting as you automate the un-automatable.

Github Power Platform Connector

I am going to be honest; I feel like I barely understand what Github is but if you are smarter than me and understand it, I think this is a big deal. The idea is now you can have your apps or more likely your flows talk directly to Github giving you more power to automate. Not only can you create a pull request, you can also trigger actions inside of Github. So, if CI/CD or ALM means something to you check this out.

Dataflows now have connectors

Dataflows are used in Power BI, Power Apps, and Dynamics customer insights to keep data up to date. Well, good news now you can use Power Automate. This is one of those updates that just makes sense. Want to get notified or better yet kick off a process every time a Dataflow refreshes? Now you can do that and so much more. Learn how to get started with this post.

New Connectors that have been released

Nothing crazy again, but still always good to plant seeds of what is possible. The list is here.

Guest access in Teams now enabled by Default

As reported by Brad it looks like Microsoft plans to Enable Guess Access in Teams by Default going forward. Makes sense, almost everyone uses Teams for both internal and external collaboration and since external was turned off by default, it surely led to a lot of support requests. Yes, I realize this is not Power Platform but Teams working better makes all of our lives better.