(upbeat music)
- Up next we have a special show
to look at the latest updates
to Microsoft's Power Platform that make building
low code apps and processes easier than ever
from AI assisted app development
through Express Design that lets anyone
move quickly from ideation, even on paper
to automatic Power App creation,
to how you can tie those apps
to business processes using natural language
to generate automated workflows in Power Automate.
And if you're in IT, we're going to show you
how the new managed environments provide the foundation
for better management and governance over data
that's used in your apps and flows, and much more.
And joining us to go through all the updates
with the Power Platform
is CVP Charles Lamanna, welcome back.
- Thanks, looking forward to it
and super excited to be in the brand new
amazing studio in person.
- And it's really great to have you back on,
because every time you join us
it's amazing to see just how quickly things are evolving
in the space of low code apps,
especially with the infusion of more and more intelligence,
into the app, and also the process,
and even bot creation experience.
- Right, this is a big focus for us
and we think this is a really unique place
where AI can make a huge difference
for users and customers.
There's a bunch of new capabilities in this area
that we've delivered over the past 18 months.
For example, we've integrated
the OpenAI GPT-3 natural language model with Power FX
to let you use natural language and build Power FX queries
without knowing any code at all.
Like what you're seeing right here with Power Apps Ideas,
which is now generally available.
And we also have a capability
called "Programming by example",
where you can just tell Power Apps
what your desired output is
and Power Apps will work out the formulas to get you there
using PROSE and natural language.
- And a fun fact, by the way,
this is actually using the same tech
that Flash Fill and Excel uses,
as well as Intellicode in Visual Studio.
- That's exactly right.
We're able to take advantage
of all this amazing technology from Microsoft Research
and Azure AI and even more recently
from the Open AI partnership
to really turbocharge these experiences.
- And to put this into context, you know, there's already
more than 7 million Power Platform developers,
so the easier that you and your team can make things,
the easier it's going to be to bring your ideas to life.
- And we know that because we're seeing it firsthand
how our customers are using the platform.
With new capabilities that we've enabled
like Express Design and natural language to Flow.
We're now at the point where if you can think of it
or dream of it, you can build it in the Power Platform.
Some of the best ideas, in fact,
start out in the back of a napkin.
So now you can literally take a rough sketch
or mock-up and build a working app from it.
Here's a piece of paper where I've hand designed
an app that we want to use
to manage a sign-up experience for a team morale event.
- I think I like where this is going.
- Yes, just wait, it's going to be amazing.
Earlier, I took a picture of this paper using my phone,
and you'll see it's pretty basic.
I have a name and an email field.
Below that is a dropdown to select a meal option.
And then there are two open write-in fields
for allergies or special requests and accessibility
or mobility needs.
I've added a question for whether
they would like a reminder email.
And finally I've added a submit button.
Now we can take my hand drawn app sketch
and convert it into a Power App.
In Power Apps Studio, I'll start an app from an image.
You'll see here that this is great
to build simple apps like mine.
Next, I'll give the app a name,
like Event Registration, and now I'll upload the image
we were looking at before.
It automatically recognizes that the image
is in portrait layout and recommends the phone format.
I'll stick with that.
And this will take a second to process the image.
You'll see it uses optical character recognition
or OCR to interpret my handwriting.
It's interpreting my text labels,
the text input fields, my drop-downs,
the radio button controls, and even the submit button.
I can easily make a few edits.
First, I want to change the name of one of these drop-downs.
I'll change this one to a toggle control.
And that's it.
- That's super impressive,
and I really have to compliment you
on your amazing handwriting as well.
So now we've built the app frontend
directly from that amazing hand drawn sketch,
but what about the app's backend
and the data you'll start to collect with it?
- So that's the next step,
and we can automatically generate
the data backend for you in the same process.
All I need to do is select the first option
to create a new table in Dataverse.
And if I'm not sure what data I need,
I could skip this entirely, but I'm going to go ahead
and let it set up my Dataverse environment.
When I do that, you'll see that we can
make edits to its predictions.
Here, I'll change this column's data type
to email so that it validates inputs in real time.
And I'll take one last look at the data fields.
Everything looks good, so let's create it.
That'll run for a moment,
so to save us time we'll speed things up a little bit.
And there's my app, complete with the data backend
from a hand drawn sketch.
- So now you just have to make a few tweaks
maybe to some of the design or the controls of the app.
- Exactly, for now, I'll keep the design as is
and take care of that later.
But the next thing I'm going to do
is to make sure that it has all the selections that we need.
So to complete our meal selection,
I'll add poached salmon, add a vegetable salad,
and it's making me hungry just writing this up
and wiring up this control.
And let's try it out.
I'll type in my name just to make sure our app is working.
And now each time an attendee interacts with my Power App,
it's capturing the data rows in my Dataverse environment,
so the team has the information on hand
to help plan the event.
- And of course, before the data starts to roll in,
it's probably a good time to
add whatever workflow that you need to automate
for a specific task related to your event.
- Right, and that's where the new AI capability
of natural language to Flow comes in.
It infuses AI into the workflow creation process
with Power Automate and Power FX.
In our app, we want attendees to get confirmation
that they're registered, and organizers to receive
an update on new registrations.
Let me show you how easy this can be.
I'll start by creating a simple flow
that responds to the app we just built
using a confirmation email.
Here you can see in Power Automate
I have this new option that says you describe it,
AI builds it.
I can build my flow using natural language,
and in this case I want to send an email confirmation
to each person who registers.
So I'll just paste in when a new record
is updated in Dataverse send an email.
The AI will suggest a flow to me,
and I can preview its actions and triggers.
- Optionally, I can enter a few fields here
to save time in the next step.
I'll search for and select
the event registration table I created earlier.
And I want to use dynamic content
in a second for the email's To: line.
So I'll leave that blank for now.
I will add a subject, though, saying registration confirmed,
then click create for my flow.
Now inside of my flow for the To: line,
I'll add the email that was entered
in our app as dynamic content.
There it is.
And in the body of the email
I can also use dynamic content to personalize email
with their full name.
And to save time, I'll just paste that in a simple message.
And that's it.
And these can get even more powerful, too.
Let's say, as the event organizer,
I wanted to get a daily update
of all the new registrations
that had been created that day.
I'll create a new flow,
and using the natural language input again,
but this time I'm going to say once a day,
get all rows from a Dataverse table and send an email.
The AI engine has given me a great flow
with a built-in recurrence for this to get started.
This flow has a few steps in it
to build a list of registrants.
And to save time,
I won't show the rest of the details here to finish it,
but here's an example of a status email
with all the information the organizer would need
to see a daily status and plan for the meal order.
So with Power Automate, you have the flexibility
to build simple or complex flows,
just using natural language to get started.
- So your app and your process workflow
were built without any code whatsoever.
So now you've shown us how anyone really
can take a paper prototype and bring that
into a fully functional app using Express Design.
But can it also work with maybe
a more sophisticated app design?
- Yes, it can.
And what we see sometimes is
these applications evolve when you want higher-end
and more professional design experiences.
And for that you may turn to a professional designer
who uses a tool like Figma.
So when this happens, Express Design lets users
and developers use the tools they know and love
to prototype app design and directly translate
from Figma into a Power App.
Here I have the next version of our event planning app
already designed in Figma.
You'll see immediately that it is a lot better looking
than our simple app from before.
Now from the Power Apps Studio,
I just need to connect to our Figma design.
And to do that I'll create a new app from Figma.
I just need to give it a name,
paste in the Figma URL for that particular app.
And of course this is designed to be secure,
so I just need to generate an access token
from Figma's settings, in this case,
and copy it over in my clipboard
and back into Power Apps Studio.
I'll paste it in, and I'll choose a format,
which in this case is still phone.
Now it's converting my design to an app.
There it is.
You'll see that each page here,
as I navigate through them,
is a pixel-perfect translation of my Figma design
in the Power Apps Studio.
And both of these Express Design methods
that I've demonstrated today are in preview now.
And you can go try it out now.
- So having built apps,
and what I really like about this is
that you know your app design requirements
and the implemented underlying code,
they're not going to be at odds with one another,
which really can accelerate development,
and also minimize the rework that would happen,
It's going to also encourage a lot more people
to build low code apps.
But that said, I know that there's probably
a lot of our IT audience watching,
dreading the thought of all these amazing apps
accessing their data.
- I hear you, and I hear the IT admins.
The number one request we get is
how do they have better visibility
and more control over the apps and flows
being built inside of their organization,
as well as the data that they access.
And while we've built a ton of controls
into the Power Platform admin center,
we're making things even easier
with a new governance capability
called "Managed Environments".
It gives you more visibility, more control,
and with even less effort.
First for visibility, here's something brand new.
It's a weekly email digest that the service automatically
sends you with trending activities,
potential things to clean up, popular apps and flows,
plus any environments that need licensing attention.
It's also providing recommendations to take action.
And if I scroll back up,
I can tap into this event registration environment
right here and it's linked me directly
to where I can take action.
If I tap into home, and here's
where I activate managed environments.
And once you've done that,
you'll see in the Managed Environment Insights,
I have this great dashboard with top makers, top apps,
and top flows as well as the least used ones.
And from here at the top,
I can also see a few licensing details
and make adjustments for license assignments.
- Right, and because this experience
finds the insights about all these different environments,
it's also going to make things a lot more proactive.
So what does it take then to make an environment,
maybe like the one we created
with our hand drawn sketched app,
into a managed environment?
- It's pretty simple.
All I have to do is,
I can convert through the admin center
any environment into a managed environments.
From the admin center, I just need to select my environment,
and hit enable managed environments.
And now I'm presented with options to limit sharing,
run security and reliability validations,
share usage insights, and more.
I'll start by configuring sharing limits
where I can restrict how widely canvas apps
and solution flows that use
sensitive information can be shared.
And I can also block sharing with security groups,
or I can restrict sharing to only security groups
or exclude them, which has been
one of our top requests from customers.
We also give you more control over
what apps get published into production.
I configure the solution checker,
which contains dozens of security rules,
and it will automatically run security
and reliability checks as I import solutions.
- And I can set this to warn or block
depending on what I configure.
And to get emails like I showed earlier,
I can opt into getting usage insights
for this environment and whether I want the insights
to appear on my admin center homepage,
as well as in the weekly email digest,
along with who will receive the email.
I can also add a welcome message
when first-time makers open the Power Apps Studio.
And I can set up data policies to help safeguard data
by limiting the connectors available to this environment.
And once I've got everything configured,
I just need to enable it.
And now this environment is a secure low code environment.
- And I think these are really going
to be welcome additions, especially for IT admins
that are watching.
And in fact we've got a dedicated show
coming up that will go even deeper on managed environments.
And for everything else you've shown today,
I'm really excited to see what's next.
- And there's a lot of great stuff coming
when it comes to app creation, or workflow creation,
or management of environments.
And we love to hear feedback from our customers and users,
so let us know what else you'd like to see.
There's just so much available right now.
For example, I also want to take a second,
it's worth mentioning,
we just added our fifth member to the Power Platform
with Power Pages, and it's now generally available today.
It gives you a new low code way of building your websites
and comes with a bunch of customizable layouts
to choose from along with colors and text styles.
And as I always say, don't just take it from me.
You can try everything I showed you today for yourself.
Just go to www.powerplatform.microsoft.com
to get started and you can check out my blog
for many of our recent updates this fall
at aka.ms/PowerPlatformIgnite22.
- Thanks so much Charles,
for stopping by and always keeping things interesting
and covering all the ground that we covered today.
And also, of course, be sure to keep checking back
to Microsoft Mechanics for all the latest updates.
Subscribe to our channel if you haven't already.
And as always, thank you for watching.
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