This week was an important one for the Business Applications teams with a summit dedicated to the new and upcoming features of the platform.
Some very exciting things were announced and demonstrated by the MVPs at the event including the AI Builder in PowerApps, which I’ll add my own blog post about later this week.
The sessions at the event have also been recorded and added online for those that could not attend and you can find these here- well done to Microsoft for pulling these all together and collating online so quickly.
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/MBAS-Gallery/bd-p/FL_MBAS_Gallery
So those announcements;
PowerApps
PowerApps really took centre stage for me, with the announcements of the AI Builder going live.
AI Builder is a tool to give “makers” (more than a power user but not a dev) tools to intuitively use the cognitive services engines with PowerApps.
The Service (live right now in a tenancy near you) is designed to work with data in one of 4 ways;
- Binary Classification – for predicting outcomes
- Form Processing – analysing pdfs
- Object Detection – for recognising objects in images
- Text Classification – AI tagging of data
The preview lets you chose which type to create and them walks you through building the model – I’m in the process of creating a Form Processing model as I’m writing this – one for another blog.
Now while this is also functionality that is also coming to Microsoft Flow, its presentation in PowerApps is far more impact-full and I predict a whole bunch of new apps will be showcased in the next couple of months from the excellent PowerApps community.
Microsoft have already built out the Business Card App for you to play with and I’ve just seen a tweet that Shane Young MVP is creating a YouTube video so I look forward to seeing that soon.
PowerApps Portals
Another HUGE announcement is the PowerApps Portal – Guest access – yes, you read that right GUEST access PowerApps. While these appear initially to be an extension of the Dynamics 365 family and speculation is rife that they will hold a similar licencing overhead, the ability to share a PowerApp externally has been one of the most requested features since I started working with clients to create PowerApp functionality.
I’m super excited to see how this pans out next month.
PowerBI
In addition there were a ton of PowerBI announcements and excitement around the new look (shown below) but there is more than I have space for here so pop over to the PoweBI Blog to check out the full list.
Community
In addition to the announcements, there were tons of great sessions including a Global Hackathon by the superb team over at #WeAreTDG – quick shout out to both Chirs Huntingford and Will Dorrington for their awesome community commitment!
