PPCC Feature Highlights

I recently had the opportunity to attend as well as speak at the 5^th annual Power Platform Community Conference (PPCC) held at the end of October in Las Vegas, USA. It is a multi-day, in-person event focused entirely on Microsoft Power Platform. It brings together product leaders, MVPs, and industry experts who actively build solutions using Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, Dataverse, and Copilot.

Keynote

We heard directly from Charles Lamanna, Executive Vice President, Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, about how there are now 80 million monthly active Power Platform users! We also heard from Ryan Cunningham, the CVP, Power Platform and Copilot Studio. Along with them, multiple product experts featured live demos showcasing new features and industry applications. We also heard how people with very diverse careers and backgrounds got into Power Platform and the human impact they made along the way.

I had the privilege to present a brand new session with Lindsay Shelton, another BizApps MVP, about how IoT devices can help us control CRM apps through our voice. So a geeky fun mix between Copilot Studio autonomous agents, Power Platform tools, CRM apps and some pro-code AWS magic!

Throughout the conference, there were multiple tracks and an extensive double-digit selection of sections  each hour! This made it for quite the exciting make-your-own-journey situation. So many choices to be made each hour, and each participant created their own schedule.

It was a tough call to choose sessions and even tracks. My personal focus spanned between three distinct areas: Dataverse, Copilot Studio Architecture and Governance. The reason is very simple: Albeit I am quite focused day-to-day as a Functional Architect on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform as well as agents, there are new features we must be proficient on. New data connectivity patterns, access and security management have become more important than ever for CRM solutions. With multiple tools to manage Dataverse data as well as build the right agentic solutions on top, these three tracks captivated my attention.

In this blog post, I am highlighting some of those features and what they mean in our day-to-day.

Canvas Apps

Ok, this was a bit of an outlier in many ways. But I have to give praise where it is due. Whilst I am not as involved in Canvas Apps (an MDA nerd through and through), we witnessed at PPCC the longest Canvas App demoes with some cool features!

Feature	Summary	Example	Preview Status	MS Source
Canvas Studio authoring agent	We get to co-author with AI inside the canvas studio using natural-language instructions and our GitHub account (token spend implication)	Imagine asking the agent to create a customer search screen and suggest the controls and formulas needed e.g. the facet filter in one line!	US Preview	Link
Canvas authoring agent plugin	Allows supported external coding agents to create and edit canvas apps through an agent-driven development workflow. The plugin gives agents a dedicated toolset through an MCP server and all team members can collaborate on the same canvas app through them.	A maker who uses the plugin to apply organisational branding to a canvas app, including colours, fonts and visual styling, ensuring a consistent look and feel. So much time saved.	Generally available	Link

Agents & AI

How are agents becoming more autonomous, contextual and capable of orchestrating work?

Feature	Summary	Example	Preview Status	MS Source
Copilot Studio agent memory	Allows GitHub Copilot Harness agents to retain useful information across interactions, preserving context and personalizing future responses. A massive step up considering what other competitors are doing and of course the fact this previously could only be done in Foundry.	A preferred summary or report format to avoid annoying repetition. What is fascinating is that memory is transparent and user-controlled. Each user can review and remove what an agent remembers about them, and makers can't view end users' memories.!	Production-ready Preview	Link
Microsoft Entra Agent ID	Gives agents a dedicated identity in Microsoft Entra ID to support registry inclusion and authentication, access control as well as governance.	IT admins will be able to manage an agent's identity independently of its human maker, with appropriate access controls.	Preview	Link
Power CAT Skills	Reusable AI skills for Power Platform development, Dataverse, migration and governance. Compatibility: designed for the new harness, such as GitHub Copilot CLI, instead of the standard Copilot Studio harness.	This can save a lot of time for Power Platform devs who can use these specialized skills e.g. to investigate performance issues.	Available in public repository and constantly updated	Link

Dataverse and Business Applications

How do we give AI the context and access it needs to work with enterprise data?

Feature	Summary	Example	Preview Status	MS Source
Business Apps in Work IQ	Can provide business apps data from D365 and Power Apps in conjunction with other M365 data through a single Work IQ MCP Server. This is for Copilot Studio GitHub Copilot Harness agents.	A great use case for creating agents needing context from different D365 or MDA’s the user has access to, with a filtered selection based on which apps have specifically been allowed for sharing	Preview	Link
Dataverse semantic model	Helps AI agents and Copilot experiences understand Dataverse relationships, business glossary, terminology and data meaning, rather than relying only on table and column names/ descriptions which are often missing, out of date or AI generated.	A Sales Manager wants to a list of the time sensitive opportunities and the agent instead of making assumptions about what that terms means using the filtered definition of the system view aligned to it. This is a system-inferred signal the model uses.	Preview	Link
Dataverse Ask APIs	Enables applications to ask natural-language questions against defined semantic models and receive data-backed answers. The Dataverse Ask APIs complement the Dataverse Web API. The Dataverse Web API is for when an app needs precise create, retrieve, update, delete, or query operations. The Dataverse Ask APIs are for when the input is a natural-language question and the app needs the service to determine how to answer it from a defined set of tables.	Imagine going through the lost pipeline deals in the last year and being able to page through larger result sets by using paging tokens.	Preview	Link
Dataverse plugin for Cowork	Connects Cowork to D365 and Power Apps data so users can query and work with business data through natural-language requests.	Asking for all the relationships relating to a specific table when there is a complex data model	Preview	Link

Governance

How do we manage, secure and govern an increasingly agent-driven Power Platform estate at scale?

Feature	Summary	Example	Preview Status	MS Source
Power Platform Admin plugin for Cowork	Conversational insights into environments, apps, flows, usage, governance, capacity and licensing.	An admin asking which environments contain inactive apps	Preview	Link
Dataverse agent users	This complements the concept of an Entra ID for agents by also allowing agents to be assigned Dataverse security roles and access packages. This covers scenarios where agents need to operate within a specific context only. Plus, allows for a clear audit history between human and agent users.	A user asks for a consolidated summary from 3 documents but the agent only processes the 2 as the 3rd one is classified as Highly Confidential so could not be processed due to conditional access.	Public Preview	Link
Changes in developer environments	Various changes/ deprecations are coming up such as the stop of the free developer plan provisioning Dataverse, use of unmanaged dev environments plus the shift towards personal developer environments.	Not an example per say, but admins need to plan for their managed environment strategy	Staged deadlines coming soon	Link