The Power Platform Spring 2020 Release notes are here, and they are full of new and exciting features that will enhance usability, efficiency, and integration with a variety of software and devices. Some of these features are not available yet. If you need the most up-to-date information, please refer to the Microsoft Release Notes.
Deidre Riehle – Project Lead
Favorite Feature: Start creating apps directly from Microsoft Teams using your existing SharePoint data
Why I love this feature:
Clients are always looking for tools to help with team collaboration and productivity. Microsoft has numerous offerings in their O365 applications to address clients' functional requests, but consolidating these tools to be available under one umbrella and clarify for clients where to go to access which tool to do what task is a huge PLUS! For example, SharePoint is the background storage structure for Microsoft Teams and OneDrive. Clients have their content stored in libraries and lists in SharePoint – whether they want to use SharePoint or not (let’s be honest, SP has not always been known to be easy to use for end users, and doesn’t typically generate excitement when mentioned). This new Power Suite release includes the ability to develop a Power App from within Teams based on a SharePoint list or library. This will empower the more tech=savvy end users to dabble in Power Apps and further remove users' need to interact directly with any SharePoint list or library.
Bernie Thibeault – Solution Engineer
Favorite Feature: Save standardized PDF documents to Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft SharePoint
Why I love this feature:
Every user will be able to streamline their workflow by automatically saving their sales related documents right to SharePoint. Previously, it took many steps to perform this process and I’m glad Microsoft is now giving users the capability to do it from the press of a button.
Brooke Appe – Managed Cloud Services Engineer
Why I love this feature:
Right now, clicking a related record will open a new page in the same tab. This can become laborious when going back and forth between related records. The ability to open it in a modal on the same page to reduce time clicking to and from these records is a huge time-saver. Modals for the win!
Brian Thomas – Business Analyst
Favorite Feature: Power BI Desktop Drillthrough buttons
Why I love this feature:
With its core functionality to provide interactive visualization of data; Power BI brings us face to face with data through meaningful reports and dashboards. To many, paralysis by analysis is all too familiar as we are presented with KPI after KPI, report after report. To that end, user navigation and ease of access to data is what sets a strong reporting tool apart from others. With the addition of drillthrough buttons, Power BI is strengthening its navigation options and allowing for a more guided tour through our reports and dashboards.
Gary Levine – Solution Engineer
Favorite Feature: Power Apps Test Studio for canvas apps is now generally available
Why I love this feature:
As a Solution Engineer, testing what I build is critical even before we get to QA. This feature will allow me to test repeated processes over and over for load and efficiency testing. A big plus will be support of custom controls for the testing automation. Sometimes I don’t have the full testing needed to work through the efficiency of one of my controls, and now I can do that.
Dan Sonneborn – Partner
Favorite Feature: Connect bots to voice and phone call interactions
Why I love this feature:
I love Bots, so this feature is right up my alley. We can now embed Microsoft Cognitive Services to interpret speech and text in order to relay important information during support chat and call situations.
Beau Cameron – Technical Architect
Favorite Feature: SAP ERP connector for Power Apps and Power Automate
Why I love this feature:
Many of our clients are using SAP and have simple use cases that could leverage these new connectors for Power Apps and Power Automate. I'm excited that we can now extend their use cases to their ERP system. It opens up whole new departments that to date had not been able to use the Power Suite.
Dave Fisher – Partner
Favorite Feature: Improve and adjust forecast accuracy
Why I love this feature:
I love this feature because I will be able to update our sales teams forecast with ease in Dynamics 365. The solution was not as flexible previously, so I'm happy that I can adjust our pipeline based upon deals that I know are in the pipeline but may not have made it into D365 Sales yet.
Kate Berry – Adoption Manager
Favorite Feature: Canvas and model-driven apps run on a single mobile application
Why I love this feature:
This feature will be important for better adoption of Power Apps and Dynamics. Users won’t be confused by having to navigate to different places in order to get to the apps they need to use every day.
Ben – Account Manager
Favorite Feature: Sales Team Member app module
Why I love this feature:
In the past, managing user’s permissions and licensing has been a hassle. I love this feature because someone who needs simple Team Member permissions now has an app that will streamline their Dynamics Sales experience.
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