As this year’s Microsoft Build event comes to an end, we look at the more noteworthy announcements and how they could benefit your organisation.
What is Microsoft Build?
Microsoft Build is an annual event, first held in 2011, presented by peers and experts worldwide, aimed at those working with Microsoft technologies, including the Power Platform, Azure and Windows. It is often used to announce upcoming products and new features for existing products.
Rather than detail all the event’s announcements, we summarise the changes that could have the most impact for your business.
Further Copilot expansion
Predictably, AI featured in many of Microsoft’s announcements at the event, with their AI offering, Copilot, being introduced into many areas of the Microsoft ecosystem:
- Copilot in Power BI – Currently in preview, this will take the power of large language models and apply it to an organisation’s data to help uncover and share insights faster. Reports can created and customised in seconds, with generated DAX calculations and narrative summaries.
- Copilot in Edge – currently in private preview, Copilot will be natively integrated into Microsoft Edge, the AI-powered browser for the web. Microsoft 365 Copilot will bring powerful work-based capabilities to answer questions, complete tasks and more to the Edge sidebar.
- Copilot in Power Pages – currently in preview, users can speed up the website building process by generating text, creating complex forms, contextual chatbots, and web page layouts simply by using natural language inputs and intelligent suggestions.
- Copilot in Power Apps – a number of enhancements to Copilot in Power Apps include:
– the ability to create complex multi-screen apps through natural language conversation and design and update beautiful user interfaces.
– the addition of data processing capabilities to help developers clean and prepare data before they start building an app.
– bring the power of intelligence to model apps with intuitive data understanding and convenient navigation. Copilot control in canvas apps also gets a significant boost in understanding Dataverse data.
– The ability to generate descriptions for complex apps and multi-component solutions with apps, data tables and automations.
Microsoft Fabric
Now in preview, Fabric delivers an integrated and simplified experience for all analytics workloads and users on an enterprise-grade data foundation. It brings together:
- Power BI
- Azure Data Factory
- Azure Synapse
in a unified software as a service (SaaS) offering to give customers an affordable and easy-to-manage modern analytics solution. Fabric has a range of AI-enhanced functionality, including:
- data integration
- data engineering
- data warehousing
- data science
- real-time analytics
- applied observability
- business intelligence
Power Platform enhancements
A number of improvements were announced for the Microsoft Power Platform, the most notable ones being:
- Excel to App – Builders can rapidly create solutions in Power Apps by simply dragging and dropping or linking to a data source like Excel, and then build the UI on top of that data.
- Custom plugins in Dataverse using Power Fx – Power Fx, the language behind Canvas Apps continues its spread across the Power Platform with the ability to write business logic and Dataverse rules that will let them define triggers and actions. Dataverse plugins can be used to replace actions that exist in a source system, for example SQL Stored Procedures. This plugin stores the action identifier, configuration, and authentication information in Dataverse, enabling direct use in an app or Power Automate flow.
- Data hygiene suite – With just a few clicks, developers can build smarter and more contextually aware apps using more accurate data, using smart data validation, deduplication, and native content AI experiences.
Summary
It is always exciting to see the new developments that are announced at the various Microsoft events, and Build is no exception. We look forward to these new developments being used to further extend Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform’s already wide-ranging set of functionality and will cover further developments in due course as the functionality matures and evolves.
