What’s New with Microsoft’s Power Platform in November 2022
Published: Dec 01, 2022
After a series of exciting Power Platform announcements from Ignite in October, Microsoft has been focusing on its Power Automate desktop app this month with a new client update and process mining features. In November, we’re also getting a preview of a PowerFX formula repair tool and Power Apps developer tools. Microsoft also had an exciting announcement for everyone in the logistics and warehousing industries with its Supply Chain Platform.
Power Automate Desktop Update
The November 2022 update for Power Automate for desktop brings some new UI changes. The desktop interface now includes a home page that displays helpful links and guides users through the desktop console.
The update also brings in more SharePoint connection actions such Get Lists, Get file content, and Get file metadata. Additionally, warnings will now be displayed in the Power Automate desktop app in pop outs and via the banner.
Lastly, license requests to admins can also now be sent using the desktop client as well as prompting trials or extensions. Capturing UI elements is also receiving a performance boost.
You can download the latest release (version 2.26) here.
Power Automate Process Mining
Back in March, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Minit, a provider of process mining solutions. Since then, Microsoft has been working to incorporate Minit’s technology into Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents, and new process mining capabilities are now available in preview.
Process mining is not a new feature by itself: users have been able to track user steps in manual processes and report on those tracks and receive suggested changes to improve efficiency. However, with this new Minit integration, users will be able to leverage out-of-the-box templates for fast deployment and common use cases such as accounting functions in SAP. The preview features also include deep process analytics and customizable reporting.
Power Apps Formula Repair
Writing functions in PowerFX is usually an easy task with the help of the existing IntelliSense suggestions. However, if you miss a comma or semicolon, it can be difficult to track down why you’re being bombarded with red squiggles in the formula bar.
With Formula Repair (currently in preview), Power Apps will suggest where you may have gone wrong and get you back on track with the click of a button. In this preview, there are three main types of repairs: Missing parenthesis and missing quotes, typos, and misuse of delimiters or missing operators.
Power Platform Developers Tool
Microsoft’s Power Platform developer tools received some exciting features that developers have been asking for a while. The first one is a C# class generator in the PAC CLI. This feature was possible with a 3rd party tool but is now included directly in the CLI. These generated classes are also .net core compliant.
There are also fixes for the pack, unpack, and sync commands: The pack and unpack commands now support PowerFx formulas in .yaml for Tables. Moreover, this update brings GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps management into your CI/CD pipeline in the same way you can bring D365 and ISV applications from a previous update.
Microsoft Supply Chain Platform
In November, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform as well as the preview of its new Microsoft Supply Chain Center. The combination of these new solutions will allow organizations to jump string into the Power Platform (as well as all the other Microsoft 365 offerings) to leverage the low-code/no-code technologies and integrate with their existing systems including SAP and Oracle.
In the same way that Microsoft has created Dynamics 365 applications such as Customer Insights allowing organizations to kick-start modernization and cloud application adoption, Microsoft’s Supply Chain Platform will allow logistics and warehousing industries to do the same while reaching outside of the Dynamics ecosystem.
Existing Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management customers will automatically gain access to the Supply Chain Center as part of their current agreements. The Supply Chain Center includes pre-built modules that address supply chain disruptions across supply and order fulfillment. Those modules include the supply and demand insights module, order management module, Teams integration, and partner modules.