Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog

Focused Views for all entities

Focused views, which was originally introduced as part of the Dynamics 365 Sales app allows viewing and managing records and their associated activities on a single page. It provides the ability to not navigate back and forth between screens.

Pipeline and Solution updates in Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1

In the last few weeks there have been various updates to Pipelines and Solutions in the Power Platform and Power Apps as part of the 2024 Release Wave 1. In this post, I will provide an overview of these three updates and links to additional information about each of these.

Updated Bootstrap version and modern lists for Power Pages in Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1

In the last few days, we have seen a few updates in the Power Pages blog site that we have been waiting for. These are the creation of new Power Pages sites in Bootstrap version 5.2.2 and the Public Preview of modern lists for Power Pages. Let’s go over these updates.

Changes to Release channels for model-driven apps

Microsoft provides new and updated features for model-driven apps on a regular basis. Until recently, those feature updates were rolled out in two release waves called the semi-annual release waves, which is the default setting for all of the existing apps and environments.

Masking sensitive data in Dataverse

As part of the 2024 Power Platform Release Wave 1, Microsoft has released (currently in Public Preview) the ability to create secured fields and mask either all or parts of the field based on regular expressions. This would allow us to show parts of the secured fields (such as the last 4 digits of a social security number) on the form without having to deal with custom scripts and not having the ability to export the full data of those fields.

Blocking unmanaged customizations in Dataverse

Today, Wednesday, December 14th, 2024m Microsoft announced the preview of blocking unmanaged customizations in your environments. This new feature will prevent users from making unmanaged changes in the test and production environments as well as restrict the import of unmanaged solutions into production.

The all new Microsoft Copilot experience in Microsoft Teams

Today, February 12th, 2024 Microsoft will start rolling out a new Copilot experience in Microsoft Teams. This new experience is an improved version of the Copilot app in Teams (formerly known as Microsoft 365 chat). The feature includes the same functionality and content of the current app, but also includes some additional benefits.

Connecting to other Dataverse environments from Microsoft flow

Although this feature might have been out for a couple of months (at least in preview), I recently noticed that the new Dataverse connector (non-legacy), has some new actions that can be performed against other environments, and not only the current environment as was previously named Common Data Services Connector (Current Environment).

Complex Exporting to Excel using Power Automate

While working on a recent project to replace a low code platform with the Power Platform, one of the requirements that we had was to replace some of the Excel export and import functionalities that the existing system had to be able to send large Excel files into various other systems to be analyzed and consumed.