Table of Content
The 2024 Release Wave 1 of Microsoft Power Platform is packed with enhancements that will further enable organizations to automate data analysis in Dynamics 365 solutions. These improvements will also help users accelerate decision-making and work more efficiently in their mission to deliver products and services to customers.
The platform comprises five products across which Wave 1 contains hundreds of new features:
In addition, joint functionality with Microsoft Dataverse will streamline governance administration. Here’s a quick rundown of what to look for between April and September:
Power BI and data integration have moved to Microsoft Fabric, an all-in-one analytics solution that covers data movement, data science, and real-time analytics. With this transition, Power BI enhances the Copilot experience so everyone in your organization can make confident decisions when meeting customer demands. The data integration component, now called Data Factory, focuses on broadening connectivity options and enriching the transformation library to enable real-time data replication when running analytics in data lakes.
Power Apps improvements focus on integrating Copilot artificial intelligence with natural language to accelerate custom app development. This will also enhance user reasoning and data insights. In addition, Microsoft is simplifying app creation through contemporary controls, responsive layouts, and collaboration features. Developers and admins can now expand apps across your organization with improved guardrails and quality assurance tools.
Power Pages, with an interactive Copilot feature, now supports every step of website building as you create designs and page layouts. You can also streamline content editing, data binding, chatbots, and accessibility checking. Microsoft has enhanced site security controls as well, which will allow remote users to connect to data through a control library.
Power Automate will add Copilot capabilities across cloud flows, desktop flows, and process mining. This allows your users to tap into natural language to discover optimization opportunities, build automations, troubleshoot issues, and manage the overall automation estate. Maintenance is also easier—with improved notifications on product capabilities.
Copilot Studio offers native capabilities for generative AI actions and extends the general availability of Copilot to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Norway, Korea, South America, and South Africa. Microsoft is also introducing capabilities to integrate with OpenAI GPT along with new channels such as WhatsApp and software lifecycle capabilities such as topic-level import/export and role-based access control.
Microsoft Dataverse and Governance Administration improvements focus on the developer experience by improving app-building productivity infused with Copilot capabilities, seamless connectivity to external data sources, and AI-powered Enterprise Copilot in Microsoft 365. Governance administration functions will provide tools that introduce capabilities to scale low-code asset management and security capabilities.
| Milestone | Date | Description |
| Release plans available | January 25, 2024 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2024 release wave 1 (April 2024 – September 2024) across Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry. |
| Early access available | February 5, 2024 | Test and validate new features and capabilities that will be a part of the 2024 release wave 1, coming in April, before they get enabled automatically for your users. You can view the Microsoft Power Platform 2024 release wave 1 early access features now. |
| Release plans available in 11 additional languages | February 19, 2024 | The Microsoft Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry release plans are published in 11 additional languages: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
| General availability | April 1, 2024 | Production deployment for the 2024 release wave 1 begins. Regional deployments will start on April 1, 2024. |
All these Wave 1 enhancements from Microsoft will further improve your ability to leverage the Power Platform to customize, extend, and build mobile apps while also developing automatic workflows to enhance your Office 365 and Dynamics 365 solutions. By leveraging the integrated AI and the business intelligence reporting model, your teams can take advantage of personalized dashboards that provide top-to-bottom real-time visibility and predictive analytics.
To help you navigate all the 2024 Release Wave 1 enhancements of the Power Platform, Velosio is here to help. We are among the largest and most recognized Microsoft partners, with thousands of active customers. Many years as a recognized leader in ERP, CRM, cloud productivity, and business intelligence solutions have repeatedly landed us in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics Partners worldwide.
We will be glad to advise you on when each Power Platform enhancements will be available, which enhancements make sense for your environment, and how to sync them with the functions you already rely on. Contact us today to learn more.
