The second annual Microsoft Power Platform Conference took place in Las Vegas, NV from October 3rd to 5th, 2023. Senior thought leaders, product experts, and engineers behind Power Platform connected to share their insights and knowledge on how to achieve more in the modern workplace with Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.
The conference offered engaging hands-on workshops, tips, tricks, and best practices to help organizations save time and money. Let’s dive into the key takeaways we learned by attending the conference.
A Deep Dive into Power Platform and List Formatting
We attended a workshop that took a deep dive into Power Platform and list formatting training for SharePoint lists. Often, SharePoint lists lack visual appeal and seamless integration even though they are the primary data source for Power Platform. The comprehensive full-day training covered the basics of Column, View, and Form Formatting, as well as advanced techniques that integrate with Power Platform, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft Teams, and more.
The useful techniques shared will ensure that SharePoint lists can be transformed from a separate experience into solutions, offering seamless integration with the Power Platform to offer the best possible experience to our users. For example, the below screenshot displays advanced visualization of inventory in SharePoint Lists.
Key Takeaways from the Power Platform Conference
The focus of the Power Platform Conference this year was on Microsoft’s Copilot capability for building Power Apps and Power Automate flows to speed up the development process. The conference emphasized how Copilot can be used within Power Apps to build out skeletons for applications, taking care of a lot of the foundational groundwork that may otherwise be very tedious and time-consuming.
Like Power Apps, Copilot can be used to build skeletons for Power Automate flows as well. End users can also be given the ability to interact with Copilot to inquire about particular applications. With Power Platform being so intertwined with Dynamics 365 and Dataverse sitting underneath, all of these tools can be leveraged to bring together a common data model.
Utilizing Copilot in Power Platform
While Microsoft’s Copilot is great for laying a foundation, it doesn’t always lay the right foundation and largely depends on how you craft your queries. Essentially, when using Copilot to help with Power Apps or Power Automate, you are having a conversation with AI. In a conversation, you typically go back and forth, and this is what we found to be the best way to prompt Copilot.
Rather than feeding Copilot a bunch of information all at once, start by providing Copilot with a general sense of what you want, then feed it more information piece by piece and provide feedback so it can modify its output to better fit your goals.
Effectively Leverage Your Power Platform
This year’s Power Platform Conference and workshops provided valuable insights on how to elevate solutions built on Power Platform and elevate support provided to clients. With the insights we gained from attending the conference, we can continue to efficiently help organizations avoid a lot of the pitfalls that typically come with building out these solutions by educating them on best practices for the storage of data that will be submitted through a Power App or acted upon by a Power Automate flow.
Need help elevating your Power Automate usage? Reach out to the experts at Big Cloud Consultants.
