Ah yes, sometimes Australia is considered in the future, but that’s just because of time zones. No, I can’t see the future, but just like when you’re in a Software Development team or planning your week, so does Microsoft. They plan and are nice enough to make that planning public to help users.
The 2022 Release Wave 1 (aka April to September releases) was recently published for the Power Platform. What is the Power Platform you ask that’s
- Power BI
- Power Apps
- Power Automate
- Power Virtual Agent
- AI Builder
I will pre-warn you the PDF version of this release plan is 147 pages more than just some bedtime reading, but you can browse it online or download the PDF.
Some people wonder why I should care; well, just like years past when you would manage your servers and do patching, upgrade, and patch Windows on, you’d apply windows updates on your laptop or even upgrade your mobile phone. The cloud is being upgraded all the time, and new features come on board, changes to existing parts. You want to keep an eye on this for two reasons:
- Impact assessment on your environment, if functionality changes, will we be impacted
- New features – these new features you might use for upcoming work or refactor existing solutions to use the new features. Sometimes it’s handy to know when you get asked, hey, can we do this with that?
I was hoping for an improved UI experience in the Power Apps Advanced Settings menus (nope); it feels like I step back in time every time I am in there.
Anyways enough about the what/why of Release plans, let me share my favourites.
Power BI
- Hybrid tables – who doesn’t like something that improves performance
- Chargeback reporting for Power BI Premium
- Administrative insights with long-term historical tenant activity retention, central metadata, and built-in reports
That last one is AWESOME because, yes, you can get the information about your tenant through the API’s using Powershell, ADF, etc., but that means building those solutions, deploying, testing and maintaining them. Not everyone has a software developer on standby, and not all organisations can spend time on these background tasks. But when it’s a feature built-in, there’s a lower barrier to entry, and more people get those benefits.
Dataverse
- Scan, classify and label Dataverse data
This is great to see more data governance features rolled out across the platforms.
If you weren’t already aware, if you have functionality/feature changes or new features you’d like, make sure you jump on the forums and request them, or vote up if someone has already asked it.
Forum links:
To learn more, check out the complete Release Wave documentation at Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave one plan overview | Microsoft Docs
