What’s new: Power Apps July 2022 Feature Update
Welcome to the inaugural 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:
- Simplify and streamline Power Platform governance with Managed Environments
- Auto updates for Power Apps & Dynamics CE
- Improve monitoring of Dataverse plugins using Application insights
- Find and replace in the Power Apps Studio
- Review feedback and ratings from your users
- Customizing forms with even more components
- Find your business data in Microsoft Search
- Power Apps on Windows generally available
- Seamlessly add your apps to Teams
- Expanded support for NFC, and markup support in MR controls
Trust
Simplify and streamline Power Platform governance with Managed Environments
This month we announced the preview of Managed Environments, a set of built-in governance capabilities that will simplify and automate IT administration of the Power Platform at scale. Managed Environments offers out-of-the-box simplicity with premium administration capabilities for low-code asset management at scale. It is designed to streamline governance, increase IT trust, and significantly reduce the burden on IT.
In this preview release, Managed Environments includes a weekly admin digest that provides proactive adoption insights, such as apps and flows that have not been active for a while and may need to be cleaned up. Sharing controls offer admins a simple way to block makers from sharing with security groups or specify how many people a canvas app can be shared with. Admins can activate Managed Environments in any environment from the Power Platform admin center with just a few clicks and immediately get more visibility, more control, with less effort to manage all their low-code assets.
Learn more at the original blog post or Docs
Auto updates for Power Apps & Dynamics CE
The new feature allows automatic updates of third-party apps installed through AppSource, helping both ISVs and customers keep software up to date in a simple and controlled way, with minimal administrative overhead. Customers can control whether to opt-in to enable the feature and indicate which publishers are permitted to automatically update apps in their environment, providing flexibility to pause auto updates based on their needs. Additionally, ISVs can leverage the analytics in ISV Studio to monitor the customers who have opted into the feature and are on the latest version of their apps.
Learn more at Auto App Updates (Preview) – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs | Share feedback.
Improve monitoring of Dataverse plugins using Application insights
We are excited to announce that Application insights is now Generally Available for Dataverse plugins. We learnt from our customers how important it is to have monitoring available out-of-the-box and to easily get started with samples and recommendations including effective alerts, optimal queries, and customizable reports. To ensure that you can monitor your production workloads anywhere in a trustworthy manner, we have enabled state-of-art monitoring solution built on the Azure Monitor ecosystem designed to help prodevs to diagnose plugin timeouts, create custom alerts and reports, monitor global usage, and automatically detect patterns and anomalies in the telemetry data using the built-in Smart Detection feature, thus helping you to keep it always available, reliable and performant.
Learn more at Improve monitoring of Dataverse plugins using Application insights | Microsoft Power Apps
Maker Productivity
Find and replace in the Power Apps Studio
In the past finding and updating things like variables and collections in your canvas apps often meant spending a lot of time digging through individual formulas across multiple controls and screens.
In July we introduced the “Replace” capability to the Search Pane, now in preview. This new addition to the Search Pane means you can now find and replace variables, collections, media, flow, formula content and more. This new pane allows you to be as broad or as granular with your search as you need – find all of the things you’re looking for in your canvas app or exactly the thing you are looking for.
And now you can replace as well! You can include as many or as few search results as you need to make updating your app as easy and efficient as possible. Rename variables and collections, update media references, replace text and formula values and more.
Learn more about how to use the Search Pane for fast updates to your app.
Review feedback and ratings from your users
We are enabling makers and organization administrators to view the app ratings and comments provided by app users. The feature is currently available only for model-driven apps as part of preview. The mechanism to capture feedback for the apps is completely managed by Microsoft and is compliant with all international privacy and security standards. The feedback is processed to generate satisfaction score of an app on a scale of 0 to 200 which is displayed to makers for their apps. In addition to app satisfaction score and trends, the feature also provides list of all comments provided by end users which makers and administrators can sort by satisfaction scale. The feature also provides integration with actions to improve your apps – Solution Checker, Performance Insights, Live Monitor and usability recommendations.
Learn more here.
Customizing forms with even more components
You can now add more components to your model-driven forms through the modern form designer! Try customizing the look and feel of your forms with custom components built by Microsoft or other providers available through the marketplace.
Learn more at Add, configure, move, or delete components on a form – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs
End User Productivity
Find your business data in Microsoft Search
Allow your Dynamics users to easily locate information from Bing.com, Office.com, and Sharepoint.com by enabling the Dynamics 365 connector. Make your Dynamics users more productive by eliminating switching apps to get to quickly needed business data.
Learn more at Dynamics 365 results in Microsoft Search | Microsoft Docs
Power Apps on Windows generally available
Find all your canvas and model-driven apps in one place. Just sign in, choose an app, and you’re ready to go! Use your apps wherever you are with or without network thanks to offline support. It works just like it does on iOS and Android. With Intune for application management, you can manage the devices and people in your organization that have access to Power Apps on Windows.
Power Apps on Windows gives you native experiences to make the most of your Windows device. Add media controls like audio and video, barcode scanner and file attachments to see these experiences in action.’
Learn more at Install Power Apps for Windows – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs
Seamlessly add your apps to Teams
We are excited to announce a new feature that will make your Power Apps and Teams integration that much easier. Currently, customers can add their favorite apps to Teams by using the “Add to Teams” button at make.powerapps.com/apps. We have extended this capability to our Web Player for canvas apps. Now, they can launch their favorite canvas apps and pin these apps in Teams straight from the Web Player’s header. This capability prevents a user from having to leave the app context & return to make.powerapps.com/apps to add the app to Teams. We believe this new feature will help you more seamlessly enjoy the apps that you use & love in Teams, increasing your in-context productivity & decreasing the amount you need to click. So, next time you are playing a great Power App, check out the button with the Teams logo on the Web Player’s header (see below).
Learn more at Embed an app in Teams – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs
Expanded support for NFC, and markup support in MR controls
| The ReadNFC() function has been improved to return all records on the NFC tag as well as the identifier. These records and identifier make it easy to build Power Apps around asset tracking, inventorying, and attendance tracking. Scan the NFC tag on a pallet to see what products are contained within. Scan the uniquely identified tags in products on a shelf to see what is currently available. Have participants scan their NFC-tagged badge to track attendance.
The Markup in MR control enables users to paint 3D lines and draw arrows in context of physical space on top of a device’s camera feed. These mixed reality markups can be used during inspections, audits, walkthroughs and more to point out features of the environment and certain objects anchored in space. Lines and arrows can be drawn in a variety of colors to highlight different areas. Learn more at Use the Markup in MR control in Power Apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs and ReadNFC function – Power Platform | Microsoft Docs |
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Learning and Doc Updates
We’ve also released new, and made updates to some of documentation – see a summary before of some of the key updates :
| For Admins | |
| For Makers |
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| For Developers | |
| For Users |
Meet the team at the Power Platform Conference!
Our team is excited to join the Microsoft Power Platform Conference in the United States sponsored by Microsoft, in-person, in Orlando, Florida, September 20 to 22, 2022. In addition to featuring more than 100 speakers and more than 150 sessions, conference-goers will have the opportunity to connect—and reconnect—with users from around the world, building their personal and professional relationships, while gaining valuable insight into what’s new and next for Microsoft’s business applications.
You can see an overview of the current sessions here. Click here to register: Microsoft Power Platform Conference |
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That is all for this month. Please continue sending us your feedback on features you would like to see in Power Apps. We hope that you enjoy the update!