Since 2022, the conference has been bringing together professionals, enthusiasts, and experts. We take a look at the event’s more significant announcements.
What is the Power Platform Community Conference?
Since its inception in 2022, the conference has focused on sharing the latest advancements, best practices, and innovative solutions within the Power Platform world, covering tools such as Copilot, Power Automate, Power Apps and Power Pages. This year’s event was held in Las Vegas, running from September 18th – 21st. As well as the various workshops and presentations, Microsoft also took the opportunity to announce some interesting changes and new functionality.
Copilot has been renamed
From September 16th, Microsoft’s Copilot offerings now fall under the brand name of Microsoft 365 Copilot. This means that:
- Microsoft Copilot is now Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Microsoft Copilot for Sales is now Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
- Microsoft Copilot for Service is now Microsoft 365 Copilot for Service.
Copilot Pages
This is the first step in Microsoft’s new design system for knowledge work. Copilot Pages is a dynamic, persistent canvas in Copilot chat designed for multi-user AI collaboration. With Pages, your insightful Copilot responses can be turned into something more durable, with a side-by-side page that you can edit and, when ready, share with your team to collaborate on further.
Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence can work with Copilot directly on the page when opened in full-screen. In a multi-user approach, work with Copilot together as a team to improve and expand responses, learn from your colleagues prompts, and organise complex information.
For more information on this announcement, click here.
Copilot Agents
Now generally available. Agents are AI assistants designed to automate and execute business processes. They range in capability from simple, prompt-and-response agents that replace repetitive tasks, to fully autonomous agents. With Copilot agents, this can all be achieved in the flow of your work. You can also leverage pre-built agents such as the new Visual creator agent, enabling you to create AI-generated images, designs, and soon videos.
To make it even easier to build Copilot agents, a new Agent Builder has been announced; a simplified design experience, powered by Copilot Studio.
Copilot enhancements in Microsoft 365
Numerous Copilot improvements for Microsoft’s office products were also announced, including:
- Copilot for Excel is now generally available. Enhancements to the original functionality include the ability to work with data that hasn’t been formatted as a table, support for more complex functions such as XLOOKUP and SUMIF, conditional formatting, and the ability to use Copilot on visualisations like charts and PivotTables to fit your needs.
- Copilot in Excel with Python has also been introduced, bringing the power of Python – one of the world’s most popular programming languages for working with data – to Copilot in Excel. However, you don’t need to be a developer – natural language via Copilot is used to perform advanced analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualising complex data.
- Narrative Builder in Microsoft PowerPoint helps you work with Copilot, iterating together to build a great first draft in minutes while keeping you in control of the creative process. It does this by using your prompt to build an outline with topics that you can edit and refine to create a first draft of your presentation. Also with the new Brand manager functionality, Copilot can utilise your company’s branded templates, so your presentations are always on-brand.
- Copilot in Teams now has the ability to combine what was said in meetings and written in chat to provide a complete picture of what happened, meaning that no details are missed.
- Coming to public preview later this year, Prioritise My Inbox within Outlook analyses your inbox based on both the content of your email and the context of your role, automatically generating a concise summary of each email, including why it prioritised the message, along with top insights.
- Copilot in Word can now allow you to quickly reference not only web data and work data like Word, PowerPoint, PDFs, and encrypted documents but also emails and meetings, all without leaving Word.
- Copilot in OneDrive can analyse your files quickly to find the information you need, making it easy to gain insights, summarise, and compare up to five files with a clear summary of the details and differences within your files—all without opening a single file manually.
Power Automate enhancements
A range of improvements were announced, for both cloud and desktop flows:
- Currently in preview, AI Recorder simplifies the creation of desktop flows by reducing potential errors when recording clicks and keystrokes. It offers a ‘show and tell’ experience, making it even easier for users to record desktop flows.
- Currently in early access, Power Automate generative actions with inline cloud flows enable users to create and manage cloud flows directly within their workspace.
- Currently in preview, users can now build Desktop flows using natural language simplifying the automation process and improving accessibility.
- Users building flows can now benefit from accessing two action panes at once in the Power Automate designer, providing additional flexibility and making it easier to copy data between actions when editing their flows.
Power Apps enhancements
Improvements were also announced for Power Apps:
- Now generally available, co-authoring allows multiple editors to work on separate areas of a canvas app at once, improving app build times.
- Currently in limited preview, it is now possible to generate detailed plans for Power Apps projects.
Summary
Microsoft events often lead to a raft of new announcements and this year’s Power Platform Community Conference was no exception. Unsurprisingly, there was a heavy Copilot and AI influence on the new and planned functionality and it will be interesting to see how organisations apply this wide range of tools to streamline their own business processes. If you are an existing Strategy 365 client and want to discuss how Microsoft 365 Copilot or any of the other new and upcoming functionality can assist you, feel free to get in touch with one of our experts.
