We are all familiar with the Sales Copilot and its time-saving features. In the previous blog, we have seen how copilot helps to boost sales efficiency in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. In addition to it, users can now customize Copilot to generate a summary and recent changes list based on the columns that matter the most to them according to their business needs.

Now, let’s explore the capabilities included in the latest feature:

Updated UI:

• The first thing is the updated UI

Summary:

• Previously for generating summaries, you had to select the views and columns then the summary used to be created using the first seven columns from the selected view.

But now you no longer need to select the view and you can configure up to 10 columns for generating Lead and Opportunity summaries. You can even add the columns of the Related table for summary as shown below:

 

You must select at least 4 columns, up to a maximum of 10. If you add/select more than 10 columns then clear the checkbox or select columns that you don’t need and click on the Delete icon or else you will see the warning at the top and the Save button will be disabled as shown below:

 

 

Recent Changes:

• Now you can configure up to 10 columns for compiling a recent changes list for Opportunities and leads.

Note: When you add a column from a related table that doesn't have audit history turned on, Turn audit on appears in the notification bar. Select it to turn on auditing for the table. If you remove the column later, you need to turn off the audit history for the table manually.

 

 

What’s new with my sales records?

• What’s new with my sales records prompt of Sales Copilot lists the records that were updated in the last 7 days and the list is generated from the audit history of respective tables.

 

To get the list of records updated,

• For the Lead and Opportunity table, the columns you have configured in the Recent Changes list are considered. For instance, if you've set up 3 columns from the lead table and 7 from the related table, only changes to those 3 lead columns will be utilized to identify updated lead records.
• For Account records, the criteria involve Contacts, leads, and opportunities created for the account in the last seven days, along with changes to columns in the Quick Find view of the account table. If you wish to track changes to additional columns, simply add them to the Quick Find view of your account table.

Conclusion:

This enhancement resulted in users prioritizing leads more efficiently, being updated on recent changes, focusing on high-potential opportunities, and dedicating more time to meaningful customer engagement.

Adaptive Cards are like little info boxes you can add to bots in Microsoft Copilot Studio. These cards can also be shared with other apps and services. You make them using a special code called JSON. With Adaptive Cards, you can put in text, pictures, and buttons to make your bot conversations more interesting. They work on different platforms, so you can customize them easily.

You can create Adaptive Cards using a special Adaptive Card Designer tool or by writing the code directly. When you use an Adaptive Card in Copilot Studio, it can have buttons for users to click and fields where they can type something. Copilot Studio saves what users type so you can use it later in the conversation.

There is a setting in Copilot Studio where you can decide what happens if a user types something wrong or if the conversation gets interrupted. The Adaptive Card is mainly used for cards where users need to interact, unlike regular messages or questions where users just read the info.

Before using this feature, it is important to be familiar with Creating and Editing topics in Copilot.

To add an Adaptive Card node, follow these steps:

To add an Adaptive Card node, first, click on the “Add node (+)” button. Then, choose “Ask with Adaptive Card.”

Next, you can expand the properties pane for the node by selecting the card icon or by clicking on the Node Menu (…) and selecting Properties.

While composing or replying to emails, Copilot for email suggests content, thus saving you time and effort. It generates AI-based drafts by considering your input, recent emails, and relevant information. You have the option to choose from predefined responses or input self-text, and the AI shall generate the suggested content.

With the dynamic duo of Microsoft Power Automate and Copilot, automation becomes accessible and efficient for users of all levels. From effortless flow creation to handling parameters, Copilot streamlines the process, making Power Automate a user-friendly powerhouse for enhanced productivity. Embrace the simplicity of automation and empower your workflows with this innovative pairing.

This feature enables users to have efficient email conversations with customers in just a few clicks, tailored to their business needs with the help of Copilot.

This feature allows us to track progress, make informed decisions through risk assessments, and optimize the execution of the project.

Using Copilot, we can create a website conveniently and even create a sub-component of a website using a low code process.

Today, we are excited to unveil new features within Power Platform that incorporate next-generation AI, in including conversation boosters with Power Virtual Agents and AI Builder introducing a create text with GPT model. These features bring both a new way for developers to solve business problems and a new way for end-users to leverage AI in the flow of their work to be more productive. This is a glimpse of what’s to come as we continue to ramp up our investment in AI across Power Platform.

Check out this month featured user group leaders!

We'd like to invite you to join our ever-growing Microsoft Power Platform Community LinkedIn group where you will be able to discover the latest platform-wide ideas, insights, events, and helpful resources.

We are excited to share the ‘Power Platform Communities Front Door’ experience with you!

Front Door brings together content from all the Power Platform communities into a single place for our community members, customers and low-code, no-code enthusiasts to learn, share and engage with peers, advocates, community program managers and our product team members.

There are a host of features and new capabilities now available on Power Platform Communities Front Door to make content more discoverable for all power product community users which includes

• Forums
• User Groups
• Events
• Community highlights
• Community by numbers
• Links to all communities

Users can see top discussions from across all the Power Platform communities and easily navigate to the latest or trending posts for further interaction. Additionally, they can filter to individual products as well.

Users can filter and browse the user group events from all power platform products with feature parity to existing community user group experience and added filtering capabilities.

Users can now explore user groups on the Power Platform Front Door landing page with capability to view all products in Power Platform. 

Explore Power Platform Communities Front Door today.

Visit Power Platform Community Front door to easily navigate to the different product communities, view a roll up of user groups, events and forums.

Omar Aftab, Microsoft Vice President of Conversational AI, announced the Public Preview launch of this exciting new feature of Power Virtual Agents on Thursday, November 10, 2022.

Get the efficiency of low-code speed and the advanced design, development, and security tools usually offered by more traditional and complex development platforms. 

Since launching our communities, one of our ongoing goals has been to create a “home” where we could easily feature some of the most-used or looked-for pages, as well as simplifying how users could find what they were looking for. Our team has been working on a “front door” to all the incredible tools you are looking for when you visit our site, providing you with the best experience, including findability and a one-stop-shop for all things Power Platform. 

Join us for an incredible in-person event in Orlando, September 20-22, 2022. 

This post talks about making your bot accessible by adding Speech capability as well as surfacing to the famous Telephony channels

This post talks about the latest features and capabilities announced for Microsoft Power Virtual Agents at the Build 2022 conference.

If you are attending the Microsoft Build event May 24th to May 26th 2022, then you might be aware of some of the new capabilities that are coming to Power Virtual Agents! Microsoft is leveling up the Power Virtual Agents application and taking it to new heights! There were several exiting announcements made regarding the new features and functionality of the application and in this article I will give you a high level overview of some of the most important items that were mentioned. I am super excited about the new Power Virtual Agent features, and hopefully you will be too after reading this article and watching my video below! Keep in mind I haven't had a lot of time to play around with most of these features, but I am planning to write additional, more detailed articles on these features at a later time.

Microsoft has long had a thriving technical community. From members here on the Microsoft Tech Community forums to in-person events and more around the world, the community has supported learning, career development, and personal development. Community initiatives, like SharePoint Saturdays that were already evolving to embrace more Microsoft 365 services, were deeply impacted by the pandemic. Those of us committed to supporting community, like Jeff, myself, and others, have been discussing the situation for some time and those discussions have led to the creation of this new Community Initiative.

Organizations face new challenges every day. Priorities change, markets shift, opportunities emerge—the pace isn’t slowing down. As your competitors transform their business models and customer expectations evolve, your future depends on how well you can empower your teams to adapt, innovate, and make a positive impact every day. You need to be ready for disruption, to embrace constant change, and, most of all, be fast on your feet.

Join us on April 6 for the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event. You’ll hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications & Platform, along with senior Microsoft engineers and leaders as they guide you through the latest advancements in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and how they’ll help you:

If you are using your Power Virtual Agents in Microsoft Teams, it is possible to have the bot send a message to a user proactively. That means, rather than waiting for the user to chat to the bot, the bot can be the first one to message them. This can be achieved by using the Post a message in a chat or channel Microsoft Teams action in Power Automate.

PVA Tip: Move Return value(s) to Power Virtual Agents flow action earlier in the process to give control back to the chatbot faster and reduce customer wait time.

When we are building a solution whatever we want, accessibility is a key part of the process. You need to include people in your app, flow, bot, or anything that you are developing.

#BotSquad #PVACommunityChallenge

Microsoft has introduced a new feature called RegEx entities in Power Virtual Agents. This blog shows how you can use RegEx entities to validate a UK Postcode input of a user who interacts with a Power Virtual Agent.

With Power Virtual Agents, you can streamline calculations. The bot will ask the user certain values and a standard formula can be created in Power Automate. It will take the user inputs for the calculation, and return the result back to the user. This article will show an example of a flow that can tell a user what their weight on Mars would be, based on the user's input of their weight. 

In this post, we will learn how to build a PVA Bot which will give users link to Power App and allow them to submit user feedback, bugs, or enhancement requests.

We will use Power Automate to get list of all Apps as they are created into a Dataverse table and then Power Virtual Agent to query URL for the multiple Apps or submit feedback against any of the Apps.

In this post we'll learn how to create a Power Virtual Agent bot based on unstructured documents thanks to the new Custom Question Answering feature (public preview) in Text Analytics and accessible through QnA Maker.

In some scenarios your Power Virtual Agent will respond with a set of results. This blog will demonstrate how you can use mark down to nicely format that response. In this example we will use a Power Virtual Agent to retrieve a list of relevant FAQ articles for the user from SharePoint Online list. With mark down we will format that list to a table.

Hello Community Members!  I have loved working on this project with our community success team here at Microsoft.

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform User Groups!

We are super thrilled to announce that Dynamics 365 and Power Platform communities supporting user groups. If you are a leader please check out the links below and request the creation of your group in this new experience. If you are looking to join, give a look to see if your user group has been requested if you are already a member of one. We hope to see many existing user groups being to join this new experience over the next few weeks and into the Summer. 

Dynamics 365 

Power Platform user groups

Power BI user groups

Power Apps user groups

Power Automate user groups

Power Virtual Agents user groups

If you would like more information on the user group program, please read our user group program FAQ before you request the creation of your group. 

For any additional questions, you can always reach out to our user group coordinators at d365ppc@microsoft.com.

We look forward to seeing you on your user group pages.