Hello Power Platform Friends. Spring has finally sprung here in Ohio spring, so I am dying to get outside and will keep this short.
Start them early!
Nisha Sinha is a sixth-grader in Vancouver, Canada who wrote a kudos app for her school using Power Apps. Now students and teachers can send each other creative Kudos like “Faster than a cheetah!” and “You have a heart as big as a frigate bird!”. Check out Nisha’s app and learn more about someone who is “Smarter than Mary Poppins!” here.
Microsoft Ignite
Another Microsoft Ignite has come and gone and we got some exciting updates as Microsoft continues to invest in the Power Platform. If you missed it, catch my Ignite recap where I discuss Microsoft’s announcement regarding Power Fx and Power Automate Desktop.
Licensing is hard!
Starting April 2nd, Power BI Premium Per User licenses will be available as an option to the per capacity license. This is good news for organizations that needed Power BI Premium but only for a small group of people. Check out the FAQ to learn more.
In other licensing news, the Power Platform admin center will soon provide more information around Power Automate licensing and usage.
Enhanced Governance and Administration
Microsoft announced many new features and enhancements to help you keep on top of the Power Platform. There is something for everyone from new tenant-wide reporting on usage to greater control over what connectors can access. Find out more here.
Looking just around the corner
Look for these features to make their way into General availability in April.
- Have you ever changed a Power BI dataflow and then realized you were stuck waiting on validation to finish? Well no more with background validation for dataflows.
- Sometimes I create a Power App that works in concert with other Power Apps. Let’s say I have one app that users select from various templates depending on the task, and another app to create and edit those templates. When it came time to publish them to Teams, I had to publish each one separately. A pain for me and extra steps for my users to install. Now I can choose to publish an entire solution made up of apps, flows, and more as a single app in the Teams app catalog. Convenient for me and simple for my users to install.
Search records in Microsoft Dataverse using Relevance Search available in March
For those of you who have an early access test environment, you can try building cloud flows that search Dataverse using fuzzy search. Think of fuzzy search as a way to find information that doesn’t exactly match, but it’s close enough. For example, finding an address where the street or city may be misspelled.