As always, the Microsoft Ignite conference is the place for new and shiny things to be announced – well this year is no different, except some things got a slight rename too…here are my top 2 update categories..
1 – Power Platform Stuff…
Firstly thanks to Shane Young for a summary video on the PowerApps and Flow (not flow) changes – click here to watch it – then scroll down for the rest 🙂
Renaming Announcements
Flow is now Power Automate – a tool where you can create flows (not at all confusing, I’m sure we’ll get used to that) – For more info check out the new Power Automate video from Microsoft.
PowerApps is now Power Apps – this one makes me laugh as I was just in a conference in Dublin last week debating the space / no space and it seems I use both regularly so no apologies for not revising all my past articles!
Functional Announcements
Power Automate (see totally used to that already)
- More connectors for Teams – See details in your own tenant here
- More Bots (Power Virtual Agents as they are now known) – much like the whole Power Platform the ability to self-serve with low code development of useful tools. See the Announcement at 2:28 here
- More UI considerations – new UI Flows, in fact some exceptionally useful tooling on its way to us – check out the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) blog here. I’m keen to play with this to test out where “customers can record step-by-step UI actions such as mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry, and then replay those actions.” Sounds a bit like a macro so let’s see how that develops. To access the preview of this click here
Power Apps (<—there is a space)
- More integration with Microsoft Teams – ability to Pin Apps (nice!)
- Organisational App Gallery surfaced in Microsoft Teams (very cool to be able to designate “official company apps”
- More options in AI Builder with new model types more details here;
- Sentiment Analysis
- Text Recognition
- Language Detection
- Key Phrase Extraction
2 – Project Cortex
This one is huge – this is knowledge as a service – leveraging the tooling within the super connected platform that is Office 365 to surface knowledge about…well anything – please see the Announcement at 2:45 here for context and then the lunch of Project Cortex and keep watching Ignite for more on this fully integrated SharePoint based innovation. For more details and the Project Cortex blog announcement go here – or the full Project Cortex website here and to sign up for the private preview.
All these are great starts to what promises to be a really impact-full Ignite 2019 conference, with some great new features and services on the way.