Microsoft Ignite highlights

This week the virtual event Microsoft Ignite was held. During Ignite we can expect announcements, demos and customer stories being told. I watched a few sessions and some of my colleagues wondered if I would write a summary about it so I thought I will do just that. In this blog post I will summarize the highlights for Power Platform and Dynamics 365.

Satya Nadella opened up together with and Alex Kipman, delivering the keynote. Microsoft Mesh was introduced with Alex Kipman appearing in an underwater world. Microsoft Mesh is a new mixed-reality platform powered by Azure. You can read about it here and here. Wait a minute, I just said I was going to summarize highlights related to Power Platform and Dynamics 365, how does Microsoft Mesh fit in to that? Well, there will be integration to Microsoft Dynamics 365!

There were sessions called featured sessions, during which we could expect announcements to me made. Charles Lamanna and Julie Strauss had the featured session What’s new and what’s next for the Power Platform, where they introduced a new open source low code language – Power Fx, Power Automate Desktop is to be included in Windows 10 and there are several new features coming related to governance.

Ryan Cunningham and Clay Wesener had the session Roadmap for high productivity development in Power Apps where they talked a lot about Power Fx. Make sure to check it out if you want more details about it! Julie Strauss had a whole session dedicated to Governance: Enhancing the Admin experience with Power Platform Governance. Sessions are available on-demand and these few that I have mentioned here are just a small part of what is available! All sessions can be found here. There is also a YouTube channel for Ignite!

Introducing Power Fx

The formulas we have been writing in Power Apps Canvas apps now have a name – Power Fx. Power Fx is being introduced as an open source low code language for expressing logic across Power Platform. We already have it in Canvas apps and during Ignite the roadmap for expanding Power Fx to other parts of the platform was presented. It’s coming to Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, model-driven apps and I even spotted “Formula based Dataverse plugins, known as Data Components”. Will be interesting to see how that works.

Power Fx is already in Microsoft Docs: Microsoft Power Fx overview. You can also find two articles about it on the Power Apps blog: What is Microsoft Power Fx? and Introducing Microsoft Power Fx: the low-code programming language for everyone.

Power Automate Desktop to be included in Windows 10

Power Automate Desktop is now available to Windows 10 users without no additional cost. Read more about it here: Automate tasks with Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10—no additional cost.

Governance and DLP news

Charles Lamanna introduced new capabilities related to governance and Data Loss Prevention and Julie Strauss showed us the news in action in a demo. Among the news we find endpoint filtering, connector action controls, tenant isolation and tenant wide analytics. During the demo we could see how you can use these new features in order to make sure that your makers e.g. can only connect to a certain instance of SQL Server from their cloud flows, can use the Twitter connector but as a read-only connector and examples of tenant wide analytics.  

Other news

Also read about the Dynamics 365 highlights here. You will e.g. find new integrations between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams.

By the way, we also now have a new icon for Microsoft Dataverse. Important stuff. 😉 Have a look at the new icon in the below picture.

You find all announcements in the Book of News.

Also read this blog post Announcing new Power Platform capabilities at Microsoft Ignite which gives a great summary of the news related to Power Platform.

All pictures are taken from Microsoft Ignite sessions.