Microsoft announces improved Power Platform governance, app coauthoring

Over 7.4 million people now do some type of development work on Power Platform, Microsoft says, and the company will be improving the services with more robust governance, new SAP integration, co-authoring, and improved Cards development.

“The Power Platform loves governance,” Microsoft CVP Charles Lamanna told the Power Platform Conference audience today in Orlando. Power Platform is designed to work with IT administrators, he emphasized. “It is not adversarial, it is not governance versus creators. It is collaborative. It’s fusion teams, people that historically, if you weren't on the same side, when it comes to creating solutions, able to go work together over time”

The new Automation Center of Excellence toolkit will give Power Platform professionals new ways to demonstrate the service’s worth to executives, Lamanna said. It will track the use of apps, flows, and reports to give creators ways to demonstrate the value of their work. He explained:

[It provides] an easy experience to go track the impact and the value of every app and every bot and every dashboard that you create inside the Power Platform. And it gives you great visualizations. So you can go create a simple PowerPoint presentation of the millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars that it could save through the Power Platform.

Microsoft also announced two new Power Apps capabilities at the event: Cards for Power Apps, which is based on Adaptive Cards and provides a new interface option that can be delivered as “mini-apps” inside Teams, Outlook, and other interfaces, Microsoft said. In a demonstration, a card displayed to a group in Teams showed information on an applicant and gave each user the ability to provide their own ratings and comments. The aggregate inputs were ten compiled to determine the applicant’s progress.

Coauthoring in Power Apps is also coming and received a round of applause from the conference attendees. “A lot of hard engineering work went into it, so we’re super proud of it,” Lamanna said.

Microsoft MVP Asif Rehmani of VisualSP told MSDW that coauthoring has become a priority for many in the community.

“They are focusing on bringing the consumer-type of co-authoring into Power Apps, which I know that developers and app builders are super happy about,” he said. “That’s been a constraint when you had to wait for someone to get out before you could get in [when building an app]. There was a very good reception from the audience on it.”

Lamanna characterized the introduction of coauthoring as a major shift in the platform’s trajectory.

This is the biggest change for Power Apps Studio since you went from the Window Store app to web authoring. If you remember that, you're an OG Power Apps user, and this is something that we're really excited to go take more broadly over time.