What’s new: Power Apps May 2023 Feature Update
Welcome to the Power Apps monthly feature update! We will use this blog to share a summary of product, community, and learning updates from throughout the month so you can access it in one easy place. A variety of new and highly anticipated features are now available which we are very excited to share for Copilot, Tenant Isolation and the new device preview for makers.
This month has also seen a lot of announcements for Power Apps made as part of Build. You can read more about our updates to AI assisted development in Ryan’s blog here, or check out the Build 2023 Book of News.
We are continuing to improve and simplify the platform, with updates in Trust, Maker and End User Productivity as well as new video and doc contents to help you adopt and optimize Power Apps within your organization.
Trust
- Power Platform Tenant Isolation is Generally Available!
- Power Apps makers can now proactively request premium licenses for their app users!
- Key updates for Pipelines for Power Platform
Maker Productivity
- Create pixel perfect responsive canvas apps for multiple device sizes using the new device picker in app preview!
- Copilot, Build apps through conversation, now available by default
Trust
Power Platform Tenant Isolation is Generally Available
We are excited to announce that tenant isolation for Power Platform is generally available (GA) in all clouds as of May 10th. Tenant isolation makes it easy for administrators to ensure that connectors used in apps and flows can be harnessed in a safe and secure way within the tenant, while minimizing the risk of data exfiltration outside the tenant.
Enabling tenant isolation is a best practice that we recommend all customers to follow. It complements other controls such conditional access, by restricting what tenants end-users are connecting from or to, an evaluation that is performed post connection authentication. With tenant isolation enabled, AAD based connections are restricted from other tenants into the target tenant (inbound access control) and from target tenant into other tenants (outbound access control), for connections established via Power Platform applications and flows.
Power Platform tenant isolation enforces restriction on connections only within the realm of Power Platform connections, including cross- cloud scenarios, without impacting cross tenant access to services outside of Power Platform. Depending on their business use case, admins have the option to specify an explicit list of exceptions and allow some tenants to either connect to or from the target tenant, or both inbound and outbound directions. When configured, these tenants will bypass tenant isolation controls. These configurations are available for admins via an easy-to-use experience in the Power Platform admin center.
Learn more at Restrict cross-tenant inbound and outbound access – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn
Power Apps makers can now proactively request premium licenses for their app users
Makers can request Power Apps premium licenses during the app share experience, ensuring a smooth end user experience by making sure their app users have the appropriate licenses. Once a request has been acted upon by an admin, the maker will get an email notification informing them of the status of their submitted request(s).
Learn more at New: Makers can now proactively request Power Apps premium licenses for their users | Microsoft Power Apps
Key updates for Pipelines for Power Platform
To provide makers and admin with more ways to customize their solution deployment processes, we released an update that includes scheduled deployments, extensibility with Power Automate cloud flows, deployment notes, and more. Now, admins have greatly expanded configurability for their pipelines to enable makers to deploy quickly and properly. Makers will be able to deploy when and how they want, without worrying about business disruptions or manually acquiring approvals from their admins. This makes it even easier and more in-reach for organizations to begin leveraging pipelines for their deployments through the ALM process and mitigates steps for citizen developers.
On top of these exciting new features, we also announced that pipelines is now available within the solution experience in the Power Pages portal, and sovereign cloud support for pipelines is coming this month.
Learn more at More power with pipelines in Power Platform | Microsoft Power Apps
Maker Productivity
Copilot, Build apps through conversation, now available by default
The AI assisted app generation experience on the Power Apps home page is now available by default to customers using environments with Dataverse in the US region. From the home page header, simply describe the app that you want to build, and AI will design a table with relevant sample data to get you started on your app. Confirm to create an app and continue building inside the designer!
Learn more at Build apps through conversation – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
Create pixel perfect responsive canvas apps for multiple device sizes using the new device picker in app preview
Many modern canvas apps need to work both at a desk and on the go. In the past, checking your app’s responsiveness has been a challenge that required you to either resize your browser window to approximate a mobile device, or crack open dev tools to try out certain device sizes. We’ve just made it much easier to create canvas apps that look great by adding a new device picker directly to our app preview experience.
The device picker allows you to quickly check the look of your app in multiple viewport sizes whether on the web, on a table, or on mobile. When used in combination with auto-layout containers or other responsive app authoring techniques, you can see how the content of your app will reflow as you switch through the different device types and change the orientation. This powerful new tool allows you to ensure that your responsive applications look just as you expect when you deliver them, no matter the app user’s device!
Learn more at Preview your canvas apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn
Video, Learning and Doc Updates
See new videos released by our Power CAT and Cloud Advocacy teams on Express Design and Custom Connectors.
 | GPT Enabled Chatbots – Microsoft Official Power Virtual EVERYTHING. The new Power Virtual Agents can chain together the capabilities of cloud flows, connectors, Bot Framework skills and plugins to take action. It will even develop a dynamic conversation plan to collect missing data from the user. Plus, see the new production features for Power Virtual Agent with Copilot, a new authoring canvas and the ability to trigger topics based upon interactions with search, a web page or more, and even redirect to a human when user sentiment is poor. |
 | M365 Copilot + Power Platform – Microsoft Official James Oleinik explains what’s coming and the important role Power Platform technology is playing in this approach to transform the way we all work. And how Microsoft works makes this technology safer for your organization’s use with content moderation, hallucination filtering, fairness & inclusiveness policies and adversarial testing. |
 | SAP – What is it? With Holger Bruchelt What is SAP, we have all heard of it but what is it really? It runs 97% of the world’s business and here Holger discusses what it is, how to handle your most important data and why you would want to integrate with the Microsoft Power Platform. |
 | SAP – Power Platform, SAP and the User Experience Learn how and why the Microsoft Power Platform is a great product to integrate with SAP. SAP is a powerful and important product for corporations. With all of that it also has a complicated user interface. The Power Platform can help you create apps which will simplify and streamline your processes and manage your data for your users. All in a in a low code / no code manner. |
 | SAP – Power Platform, SAP and the ERP Connector Connectors are an important feature of the Power Platform. In this video learn how to work with the Microsoft Power Platform SAP ERP connector and how it works with Power Automate and Power Apps to help create an application integrating with SAP data. |
We’ve also released new, and made updates to some of our documentation – see a summary before of some of the key updates:
Please continue sending us your feedback on features you would like to see in Power Apps. We hope that you enjoy the update!
