Microsoft Business Applications Summit Announcements

Over the past week, the Microsoft Business Applications Summit has seen some big announcements made across the Power Platform to help customers drive a data culture in their businesses by empowering everyone to use data tools. So what are the headlines?

Having taken feedback from the user community and Ideas forum, updates aim to improve the user experience with new UI for the Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service, shortcuts for Siri and improvements to visual level filters and personalised visualisation panes.

Azure Cognitive Services and Azure ML dataflows are now generally available for integration with Power BI. Models can be used to gain insight from images, analyze positive and negative sentiment in text and extract key phrases. These models can now be easily shared and consumed by end users. Collaboration between analysts and data scientists is easier with an intuitive point and click user interface and easily managed permissions. Microsoft has also announced several features that are ‘coming soon’, including new AI visuals, expanded text analytics capabilities with entity detection and handwriting recognition, export to Azure ML, and extended natural language capabilities.

PowerApps Portals have been announced; a solution to sharing low-code apps with people outside of an organisation that users have been eagerly awaiting. With PowerApps Portals, you now have the ability to build low-code, responsive websites which allow external users to interact with the data stored in the Common Data Service. Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement application portals will also get this same benefit. PowerApps Portals will be available for Public Preview in July 2019, you can sign-up to hear more about availability here. Read more on the details about PowerApps Portals capabilities on the Microsoft blog.

This is just a small fraction of the announcements that were made at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, you can read a more detailed summary here and access recordings of sessions delivered at Microsoft Business Application Summit here.

If you’d like to talk about integrating Power BI into your data systems, get in touch with our team who will be happy to talk through your requirements: +44(0)13654 655100 or info@greymatter.com.