Top 10 – Power Platform 2020 Release Plan

The Power Platform 2020 Release Plan was published here today. I had a read through the details and picked out the ten improvements that caught my eye. There are not in any particular order of preference.

1. The Save button is back. In model-driven apps the save button will now always be visible on the form edit toolbar. I remember the kerfuffle when auto save was introduced. I guess if you wait long enough everything comes back in fashion!

2. Responsive Reflowing Canvas Apps. Currently Canvas Apps are classed as pixel perfect apps which is coded language for fixed layout. Its is very challenging to create a canvas app that works well visually on different devices. Looking forwards to seeing this in action.

3. Create PDF from Canvas App. This sounds really interesting. You are going to be able to create a printable page in your canvas app and convert it into a PDF.

4 Power Apps Portals will be able to call the CDS Web API directly. This will please lots of people as previously you could just update entities on the Portal based on CDS forms. It was a real pain to do anything beyond simple updates.

5 UI Flows will go GA in June. UI Flows provide RPA, robotic process automation,  functionality within Microsoft Power Automate. UI Flows allow you to mimic the actions of an user  updating an application. RPA is particularly useful where you have a legacy application that is difficult or expensive to integrate with. 

6  Interactive adaptive cards support will be added to Power Automate. Adaptive cards are self contain snippets of  UI code that present information and allows users to take actions on that information. They are platform agnostic and how they are rendered depends on the channel in which they are surfaced. Looking forward to trying this with Virtual Agents to create more exciting chatbot conversations.

7  For model-driven Apps, including Dynamics 365,  the chart and dashboard styling has been improved and simplified. 

8 Modal updates for Related Updates. In model-driven apps users will no longer need to navigate to another form when adding or editing a related record. This is a great improvement reducing unnecessary navigation. The related record will now be displayed in a modal dialog.

9 Virtual Agents Customize when No Topic Triggered – when the users chat cannot be understood or a topic is not triggered you will be able to customize how the chatbot responds. This should make for a better user Spencerian.

10 AI Builder – a whole raft of functionality will become GA in 2020 including From Processing and Object Detection.

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