Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog

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.

Calling Dataverse actions directly in Power Fx

Until recently, if we wanted to call a bound or unbound action from a Canvas app, we would have to create a Power Automate flow that would be triggered from the Canvas App and would then call a bound or unbound action from Power Automate. Not any more…

Cards for Power Apps are solution aware

Although cards for Power Apps were made Generally Available in March 2023, they were not available from within solutions, which made the deployment process more complex. Last week, on November 2nd, Microsoft announced that Cards for Power Apps have become solution aware.

Standard vs Virtual PCF Controls

A while back (April of last year) Microsoft introduced the concept of Virtual PCF components. Although there are a lot of benefits of using this new type of component adoption does not seem to be too high. When looking at the components that are available in the pcf gallery for example, the majority of the components are still Standard

Deprecation of Send an HTTP request in Office 365 Groups connector

If you are keeping track of changes in some of the connector actions, you might have noticed recently that Microsoft marked the Send an HTTP request action as deprecated and mentioned to use the Send an HTTP request V2 action instead.