Dynamics 365 & Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 2 – Power Pages

As Microsoft looks to make Power Pages more intuitive and increase functionality, they have new features rolling out in the following areas administration and governance, the design studio, Power Pages Copilot, and the professional developer experience. Let’s take a look at some of these new and upcoming features.

Administration and Governance

The first new features here are admin security and analytics views. These views will give admins the ability to audit and monitor their websites from a single location. Some of the highlights on the security views are website security scores, websites with anonymous data access enabled, and the authentication methods used. The views for the analytics show the website’s authenticated/anonymous monthly active users, daily active users, and service errors.

The second area we’ll look at includes the ability to disable external authentication providers in Power Pages. This is a nice update that allows admins to easily determine which authentication methods are allowed for access to Dataverse data from Power Pages.

The final feature in this area is the ability to disable anonymous access in Power Pages. While everyone should strive to protect data with proper web roles and permissions, mistakes do happen. Allowing admins to block anonymous access adds another level of protection.

Design Studio

The first feature here is the ability to Collaborate with commenting capabilities. This is a helpful feature that improves collaboration by showing comments on various pages within the design studio. You may be familiar with similar features now available in Power Automate.

The other new feature here are file upload enhancements for Power Pages sites. The main benefit is increased file size limits for file uploads. Users can also look forward to an improved upload experience, including a visual progress bar and error messages for file uploads.

Power Pages Copilot

Now let’s take a look at the copilot features we’ll see coming to Power Pages. The first feature we have here is the ability to get answers from website data using Copilot. This is a feature aimed at the website users. They can log in and use a chatbot to ask questions in natural language. The chatbot will then surface that info while still abiding by all roles and permissions.

The second set of features here are aimed at the Power Pages Makers. Copilot will now have additional features aimed at helping Makers build websites. Makers can tell Copilot what they want the site to look like and Copilot will then generate a sitemap, homepage layouts, and a site theme. This should save us a lot of time with the basic configurations so we can fine-tune the site quicker.

Professional developer experiences

Finally, we can look at the updates to the development experience. The first feature is a big one for users who are responsible for moving portal configurations between environments. Now we can manage Power Pages ALM using solutions. Meaning that portal configurations are now solution aware. So now we can move configurations with the solutions as developers are already familiar with and using for Dataverse customization. Just note that this will only be available for sites based on the enhanced data model. You can check which version your sites have in the Power Platform admin center.

There we have it! A breakdown of all the features coming to Power Pages in wave 2. There are plenty of features here that should make Power Pages more powerful and improve the quality of life for both internal and external users. You can get all of the updates, along with release timelines from Microsoft here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the features of Power Platform, take a look at our Microsoft Power Platform service page.

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