Power Platform Weekly - Issue #139
Welcome to Power Platform Weekly!
Last week public preview of Power Automate cloud flow telemetry data 💙 Azure Application Insights was announced.
The August 2023 update of Power Automate for desktop was presented. The Power BI August 2023 Feature Summary was announced.
Copilot 💙 Power Apps, new features announced (Copilot for model-driven apps users & new capabilities in canvas apps).
You can now register for the Power Platform Global AI Hack. Hack together to learn about the new Copilot and AI features in Power Platform and don’t miss the digital swag.
365 Training has introduced AI in their learning material. Have a look at Julie’s post where she explains how it works and gives tips about free courses.
Have a great week and thanks for reading!
📰 Articles



Power Automate telemetry data with Azure Application Insights
🚀 Starting from this week there are important news for every Power Automate creator. The public preview of the integration of Power Automate flow telemetry data with Azure Application Insights. Stefano Demiliani is here to give you the tour.
Top 5 Extensions for Power Automate Developers
🦸🏻♀️ Although Power Automate has an incredibly user-friendly UI, there are still a few things that as a Developer we miss. Luckily there are a few free Chrome/Edge extensions out there to help fill the gap, and David Wyatt is going to show them to you.
Sales Sequences
🦸🏻♀️ Have you used the Sales Sequences feature of Dynamics 365? Neil Parkhurst had not until recently, so in this post he will explain the concept. Sales Sequences can be useful if you have a defined process involving consecutive activities that collectively progress a lead, contact, account, or opportunity towards a positive outcome.
Other articles
👩💻 Copilot for Power Pages Pro-developers! by Nick Doelman
🦸🏻♀️ When Dynamics 365 Marketing becomes Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys by Vivian Voss
🦸🏻♀️ Send Emails Using Different Lead Recipient Fields In Journeys by Megan V. Walker
🦸🏻♀️ Displaying The Event Host On An Individual Event Overview Page by Megan V. Walker
🦸🏻♀️ Getting an “object reference not set to an instance of an object” error when deploying a custom connector? by Alex Shlega
🧭 The Top-Level or Process Context Value by Carsten Groth
📺 Videos
🎙️ Podcasts



Dynamics Hotdish Podcast
🧭 Guest Heather Cook, Principal Manager at Microsoft, delves into the Power Platform Conference’s cutting-edge content. Heather sheds light on keynotes featuring Charles Lamana and other industry leaders, emphasizing the integration of Power Platform apps within Teams and the co-pilot functionalities spanning Microsoft 365.
Run As Radio Podcast
👩💻 What is Microsoft Fabric, and why do you want some? Richard talks to Andrew Snodgrass of Directions on Microsoft about Microsoft's recently announced Fabric product. Andrew explains that Fabric is an effort to integrate the various data products, including PowerBI, DataLake, Data Factory, and Data Warehousing, under a standard banner. It is early days for Fabric, but it's a great time to take it out for a spin for those who haven't dug into Azure data analytics products. But if you have existing implementations of PowerBI and many other data products, test carefully - the migration paths aren't simple!
MVP Show Podcast
🤵🏻 Ready to unravel the world of Dynamics 365 Business Central and the Power Platform? Join Mark as he delves into an insightful conversation with our distinguished guest, Gulshan Shubham, a triumph in the field and a proud recipient of the MVP award in 2022. Currently a Senior Advisory Consultant at IBM, he originates from India, a fact that flavours his intriguing journey in Business Central, his penchant for South Indian cuisine, and his hobbies that include series binging, cricket, and badminton. Listen to him articulate his evolution from a coder to a functional consultant and his unwavering commitment to disseminating his profound knowledge to the Dynamics community.
📅 Events & Webinars



CollabDays Finland
(📅 September 9)
Welcome to Collabdays Finland 2023, a conference dedicated to exploring the latest trends, tools, and technologies in the world of Microsoft 365 collaboration. Hosted by a team of industry experts and thought leaders, this event is designed to provide you with valuable insights, practical strategies, and hands-on learning opportunities to help you navigate the ever-changing landscape of digital collaboration.
Hack Together: The Power Platform AI Global Hack
(📅 September 14-28)
The goal of Hack Together is to build solutions in Power Platform that leverage 1 or more Copilot and AI features. You can use any of the AI features available in Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages and AI Builder.
It’s open to anyone who wants to explore the possibilities of using AI in the Power Platform, whether you are a beginner, advanced maker, admin or a professional developer – all are welcome! You can join solo or hack together as a team of up to 3 people.
Nordic Summit
(📅 September 23)
Nordic Summit will be taking place as an in-person event on the 23rd of September 2023 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
CollabDays Bletchley Park
(📅 September 27)
CollabDays is a community organised learning day offering you the chance to learn from some of the best Microsoft 365 speakers in the industry. We offer learning tracks covering SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Power Platform, and more. Each track is made up of one-hour sessions where you will have the chance to learn and ask questions that will directly benefit you and your organisation.
CollabDays events happen throughout the world, but this specific CollabDays event is held at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park!
Microsoft Power Platform Conference
(📅 October 3-5)
Get inspired by Microsoft’s senior thought leaders, software engineers, and community experts who are focused on uniting humanity and technology. You’ll also have the chance to hear from users that solve real business problems daily. Fantastic speakers are ready to share their insights on how to accelerate and transform your business with Power Platform.
South Coast Summit
(📅 October 13-14)
South Coast Summit focuses on all key pillars of the Microsoft ecosystem: Business Applications, Modern Work, Security & Compliance, through to Microsoft Azure.
Community Summit North America
(📅 October 15-20)
A months' worth of Microsoft business applications training and education delivered in 5-days by Expert Users, Microsoft Leaders, MVPs and Partners!
CollabDays Belgium
(📅 October 21)
Join us for a day of learning, networking and fun at this free community-driven event. Our focus is Microsoft 365 with some Power Platform and Azure sprinkled on top. Check our sessions and speakers and register your ticket now!
CollabDays New England
(📅 October 21)
CollabDays New England is the new and improved incarnation of SharePoint Saturday New England. We are very excited to be part of this community and to watch it grow beyond SharePoint and really focus on collaboration.
CollabDays Barcelona
(📅 October 28)
The event formerly known as SharePoint Saturday Barcelona. SharePoint, O365 and Azure administrators, end users, architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Technologies will meet for the eight event, fourth CollabDays Barcelona on October 28th, 2023.
It is a free, community-focused Microsoft related event dedicated to educating and engaging members of the community across all roles and all levels of Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Azure, and Artificial Intelligence.
Microsoft Ignite
(📅 November 14-17)
Join the next Microsoft Ignite event November 15–16, 2023, to catch up on the latest industry innovations. Sign up to be one of the first to know when registration launches.
CollabDays Lisbon
(📅 November 25)
Collabdays Lisbon is a one-day, non-profit event built on top of seven previously successful community-driven events. A Microsoft Cloud-focused event including topics like Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Microsoft Azure with inclusion by design.
European SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure Conference
(📅 November 27-30)
ESPC helps IT Pros, Developers, Makers & Business Decision Makers achieve project and career success with leading Microsoft technologies.
Cloud Technology Townhall Tallinn 2024
(📅 February 1-2, 2024)
CTTT is a Microsoft Cloud Community event with the purpose of bringing technology and community leaders to Tallinn to share their learning with the local community
Microsoft 365 Community Day Miami
(📅 February 2, 2024)
Get ready to be inspired and learn at the Microsoft 365 Community Day Miami! This event is all about unlocking the full potential of Microsoft 365, the Power Platform, and Artificial Intelligence. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a business owner, or just curious about the latest advancements in technology, this event is for you.
💙 Out of the Blue
Copilot brings the power of intelligence to your favorite Power Apps
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 Power Apps Copilot has been in preview for a little while now, but now some improvements have been introduced based on feedback. You can now use Copilot in Model Driven Apps. But that’s not all, you can also connect the Copilot control in Canvas Apps to Dataverse and ask questions about really large datasets, without limits! Keep the feedback coming!
August 2023 update of Power Automate for desktop
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 New updates are available as part of the Power Automate for desktop August 2023 update! There is a new logging action, a way of disabling sending screenshots on error, it’s not possible to edit primitive variable values during debugging and you can now reference Excel cells by name in the Excel actions. Read the blog for all the details!
Hack Together: The Power Platform AI Global Hack
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 April Dunnam announced the Hack Together Power Platform AI Global Hack! It’s open to anyone who wants to explore the possibilities of using AI in the Power Platform, whether you are a beginner, advanced maker, admin or a professional developer – all are welcome! You can join solo or hack toge
ther as a team of up to 3 people.
The goal of Hack Together is to build solutions in Power Platform that leverage 1 or more Copilot and AI features. You can use any of the AI features available in Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages and AI Builder.
Power BI August 2023 Feature Summary
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 Another Power BI feature summary, this time for August 2023:
There is a new layout switcher, updates to On-Object Interaction (preview), updates to the ORDERBY function, the Editor’s pick of the quarter for visualizations, and more. Make sure to read the blog!
Announcing the integration of Power Automate telemetry data with Azure Application Insights
🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 Customers can now leverage Azure’s market-leading application performance monitoring (APM) capabilities to diagnose and monitor their workflows running on Microsoft Power Automate. Customers would be able to leverage the out-of-the box capabilities available on Application Insights and directly use it to analyze cloud flow telemetry. This includes metrics dashboards, out-of-the box and custom alerts, performance diagnostics and custom analysis of cloud flow telemetry via log analytics.
Choose a launch item for your Power BI mobile app
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 This feature allows you to configure an item to display whenever you launch your mobile app instead of the home page. This is useful if you have specific content that you always go to when you open your app, and you want to save time by being taken directly to that content rather than having to navigate to it every time.
Dynamic subscriptions for paginated reports (Preview)
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 The Power BI team announced a brand-new feature this week for paginated reports (available in Preview): dynamic per recipient subscriptions! This addition is designed to make it easy to distribute a personalized copy of a report to each recipient of an email subscription.
Improving the communication performance of XMLA-based tools
👩💻 Microsoft has made some significant performance improvements to the XMLA-endpoint communication in Power BI. Specifically, they have switched XMLA-based communication from plain text XML to binary XML and enabled compression for the .NET client libraries. Make sure you upgrade to version 19.65.12.0 or later.
Announcing automatic scaling for dataset scale-out public preview
🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 Dataset scale-out is a feature that enables you to create read-only replicas of your datasets and distribute the query load among them automatically. A read-only replica is a dataset copy that can serve queries but cannot be updated by refresh operations. By having multiple read-only replicas, you can reduce the query latency and increase the throughput of your dataset. This is especially useful for scenarios where you have a high number of concurrent users or complex queries that consume a lot of resources.
Announcing new ways to create connected tables in Excel connected to Power BI
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️🚀 There are now more ways to create connected tables in Excel, which are connected to Power BI. You can easily do this without having to leave Excel, but you can also achieve this via the OneLake Data Hub.
💡 Suggest content
Do you have a blog, YouTube channel or podcast that you want us to track or do you know someone creating great content or community tools you think we should be aware of? Let us know about it!
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🕺 About the “Persona icons”
🤵🏻 Business User
🦸🏻♀️ Maker
🧭 Decision Maker
👩💻 Developer / Architect
🚀 Admin / Center of Excellence
🛠️ Tools
📅 Events & Webinars