Microsoft Power Platform: 2022 release wave 1 plan

The Microsoft Power Platform release plan for the 2022 release wave 1 describes new features releasing from April 2022 through September 2022 for Power BI, Power Apps, Power Apps portals, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and AI Builder, as well as Microsoft Power Platform capabilities for governance and administration, ISV experiences, and data integration. You can either browse the release plan online or download the document as a PDF file.

Download the 2022 release wave 1 PDF (final update October 21, 2022)

The Dynamics 365 and industry clouds features shipping in the 2022 release wave 1 have been summarized in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.

2022 release wave 1 overview

Microsoft Power Platform enables users and organizations to analyze, act on, and automate the data to digitally transform their businesses. Microsoft Power Platform today comprises four products: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. It also has two add-ins: AI Builder and Power Apps portals.

Power BI

Power BI continues to invest in empowering every individual, team, and organization to drive a data culture:

• For individuals, we're improving the create experience through the creation of measures using natural language and work sharing for easy collaboration using OneDrive. 

• For teams, we're bringing enhancements to goals focused on enterprise needs, integration with PowerPoint, and new capabilities to the Power BI experience in Teams. 

• For organizations, we're improving our experience with big data through automatic aggregations, data protection capabilities through DLP, and providing improved visibility into activity to admins.

Power Apps

Power Apps will continue to enable developers of all skill levels to build enterprise class apps for web and mobile infused with intelligence and collaboration capabilities. New built-in collaboration features will enable teams to work on an app simultaneously as well as merge and track changes for faster and more seamless development. Makers and developers will be more productive over Dataverse by leveraging intelligence to assist development with natural language to code powered by advanced AI models such as GPT-3 and PROSE. Most importantly, key updates will ensure that organizations can deliver flagship apps across the entire company faster and safer than ever, such as Power Apps mobile apps (allowing packaging of apps to be deployed on Android and iOS) and improvements to ALM and governance capabilities to ensure safe and scalable roll outs.

Power Apps portals

Power Apps portals continues to invest in bringing more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code / no-code development as well as for professional developers. Some of the salient capabilities for makers include converting portals into cross-platform mobile applications, option to use Global search that is powered through Dataverse search integration, enhancements for professional developers to do more with the portals using Power Platform PAC CLI tool as well as for admins to author administrative workflows using Admin APIs.

Power Automate

Power Automate is more accessible than ever before with integrations in Windows 11, Microsoft Teams, which helps in automating tasks no matter where you are in Microsoft 365. With increased customer usage of the robotic process automation (RPA) deployments, we are adding features to make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of your users and accounts. All features are increasingly automatable by default (adhering to the API-first approach), so that IT departments can manage their Power Automate infrastructure in whatever way they want. 

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with commenting, Power Apps Portals integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Microsoft Teams, and more. Power Virtual Agents gives anyone in your organization the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface, without the need for AI experts, data scientists, or teams of developers. A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and ultimately answer a user's questions.

Microsoft Dataverse

Microsoft Dataverse continues investment in Azure Synapse Link. Customers will be able to unlock deeper insights from Dataverse data using the power of Azure Synapse. Deeper integration with Azure Active Directory will simplify sharing while improving governance and security. Enhancements to Dataverse data modelling will allow customers to build new types of applications leveraging rich and intelligent data types.

AI Builder

In 2022 release wave 1, AI Builder is adding capabilities around document automation like the ability to process unstructured documents (such as contracts or e-mails). By extracting insights from the semantic understanding of the text in unstructured documents, we'll be able to extract key information from documents and process them automatically in an end-to-end flow using Power Automate. Increased capabilities include effectively managing the governance and lifecycle of AI Models. We'll focus on building out a Feedback loop process, enabling improvement of model accuracy by retraining models with data processed in production.

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration and ISV experiences

Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration Organizations can now connect their Azure subscription to an environment and pay for Power Apps and Dataverse as it is consumed across their organization. For simplified governance, we have enhanced out-of-the-box tenant level analytics, additional advanced Data Loss Prevention capabilities, and information protection policies to manage connectors and Power Platform assets. Lastly, we're investing in new capabilities like Lockbox for Power Platform to satisfy the new European Data Boundary (EUDB) regulations.

Microsoft Power Platform ISV experiences building on our platform are now able to service their customers at planet scale. Instead of servicing each customer with manual updates, ISVs can now have their customers opt in to receive automatic updates. With this update we are enabling ISVs to be much more agile and ship updates at the same high cadence as customers are used to from our Dynamics 365 applications. ISV studio offers a view into status of updates and how many customers have opted into auto updates.

Data integration

Data integration in this upcoming release wave, we will deliver improvements in our big data performance and high scale connectivity Dataverse, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Redshift. You can expect several enhancements across connectors, Gateway and VNet. New capabilities will simplify data prep through visual authoring environment and diagram view to create high-scale dataflows to Microsoft Cloud, supporting Power BI, Insights Apps and Power Platform.

Key dates for the 2022 release wave 1

This release plan describes functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).

Here are the key dates for the 2022 release wave 1.

Just like the previous release waves, we continue to call out how each feature will be enabled in your environment:

• Users, automatically – These features include changes to the experience for users and are enabled automatically.
• Admins, makers, or analysts, automatically – These features are meant to be used by administrators, makers, or business analysts and are enabled automatically.
• Users by admins, makers, or analysts – These features must be enabled or configured by the administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users.

You can get ready with confidence knowing which features will be enabled automatically.

We've done this work to help you—our partners, customers, and users—drive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. We're looking forward to engaging with you as you put these new services and capabilities to work, and we're eager to hear your feedback as you dig into the 2022 release wave 1.

Let us know your thoughts. Share your feedback in the Microsoft Power Platform community forum. We'll use your feedback to make improvements.