The 2023 Release Wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform is here, and it brings new innovations that provide significant capabilities to transform your business.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 release contains hundreds of new features across several Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce, among others.

The Enhanced Data Model for Power Pages is currently in preview, which means that Microsoft intends to release it at some point in the (hopefully near) future for general use.  This is a major change for Power Pages (formerly Power Portal) customizers as one of its many benefits is solution-aware website configurations.

Configuring a Power Page site (formerly called a "Power Portal," or "portal" for short) can be difficult, even for those who are experienced in Power Platform configuration.  While a Power Page site is considered an individual, separate app (similar to the way model-driven apps and canvas apps are separate apps from one another), a builder will commonly use two different interfaces for configuration: the Power Page design studio and the Portal Management model-driven app.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides end-users with a robust set of tools to easily access, review, and relate their data.  It also gives customizers an incredible amount of flexibility when it comes to configuring the system, especially with the Power Platform.

Power Automate provides a set of incredibly robust and powerful tools for business process automation, especially when used in conjunction with Dynamics and the Power Platform as whole.  To that end, we can leverage Power Automate to locate an environment's GUID (globally unique identifier) in the first few steps of a flow run.

Forms in Dynamics 365 provide end-users with a clear and structured method for which to input data.  Tabs, sections, and even embedded forms (i.e., a form within a form) give customizers a nearly endless range of configuration options to work with when designing and implementing a form structure that fits a client's needs.

For quite a while, the in-app notifications feature was in preview mode within Power Apps.  Now, it's a full-fledged component of Power Apps and allows customizers the ability to work with the Notification table within the Dataverse.  Records on this table can be displayed to app users as notifications from a dedicated notification area within a model-driven app.

It's official: as of October 12, 2022, the Microsoft Power Portal is now Microsoft Power Pages.  Pages has been in preview since at least May 2022, but it was expected to replace Portal at some point in late 2022.  Now that Pages has been released and is officially replacing Portal, Microsoft is working hard to update their documentation around this incredible Power Platform component.

Power Automate provides some incredibly powerful capabilities around business process automation, especially within the context of Dynamics 365 and the Dataverse.  From automating simple tasks such as automatically generating subfolders whenever a parent folder is created to tasks requiring complex conditional logic, Power Automate flows can handle the brunt of your automated business processes and so much more.

Microsoft Power Automate provides rich and powerful tools, connectors, and logic to automate many common business processes within Dynamics 365 and the Dataverse as a whole.  With flow functionality slowly replacing legacy Dynamics 365 workflows, Power Platform administrators and customizers now more than ever have the ability to build automations up and across to other products and solutions using various data connectors.