New features and automatic update

[fernandosilva]

Hi there,

As a new wave has been released, the actual chatbots will be updated automatically with the new features or all of us need to dig deep into the bytes and bytes of online pages to find out how to do it.

Kind regards,

Fernando

[HenryJammes]

Hi @fernandosilva,

We're in the process of creating and publishing guidance on transitioning Power Virtual Agents chatbots to the new unified authoring canvas, but I can share the below to help you.

As of today, there is no planned automatic transition of existing chatbots to the new unified authoring canvas, and there is no obligation to migrate either. Chatbots created on the previous version of Power Virtual Agents will continue to work even after the unified authoring canvas becomes generally available. If that changes, announcements will be published with sufficient notice and guidance.  

That being said, we strongly encourage you to evaluate the new unified authoring canvas for your use cases and transition your chatbots to it once it's generally available (May 2023 timeframe), because all new features will only come to this version, and it will be easier and faster for chatbot makers to customize their chatbots, as the Bot Framework Composer will no longer be needed (nor available).

You can start today in your development or test environments, by creating new unified authoring chatbots from existing chatbots by following these steps: Create a preview bot from the content of an existing bot (preview) - Power Virtual Agents | Microsof...

If you had been using Bot Framework Composer (BFC) dialogs, please check this guidance to map previous BFC capabilities with modern alternatives:

Key concepts for Bot Framework Composer users (preview) - Power Virtual Agents | Microsoft Learn

During a cloning operation of an existing chatbot to the unified authoring canvas version, BFC dialogs will be created as empty topics, with the same inputs and outputs. So, to make your chatbot fully functional again, you will need to recreate the BFC dialog logic in the new unified authoring experience. This should be straightforward for things like suggested options, adaptive cards, and variable managements.

On the upgrade process itself, it involves cloning your existing chatbots into new ones that use the unified authoring canvas (or creating new ones from scratch). There are no plans - again, as of today - to support in-place upgrades, so it's important to note that transitioning to the unified authoring canvas will lead to the creation of new,  distinct, chatbots, so you’ll need to update your client to point to the new chatbot.

On a side note, chatbots created on the previous and on the new version of PVA can co-exist with the same environment.

Let me know if that helps

Henry

[fernandosilva]

Hi Henry,

Thank you for your reply and info about the updates.

As a PVA user in the company I work for, we have chatbots up and running on our websites as a customer support feature and they have a lot of topics and a lot of forms created from Bot Framework Composer in conjunction with Power Automate.

On your reply you mention that all BFC stuff will have to be replaced with the new feature on the new version, which is the adaptive cards. So, at the time of the full release, all my forms created on BFC won't be working anymore?

Also, what stops the actual bot to be updated to the new version?

If the release is just gonna affect new bots and new users, what's the point of the long wait release of new features if we can't use on our actual chatbots?

This is very frustrating as all the users on the planet have to re-do everything over again, test all over again, fix bugs all over again, because the update doesn't update.

[HenryJammes]

Hi @fernandosilva,

That's correct, but, as of today, only the customizations you had created in PVA using Bot Framework Composer dialog will need to be redesigned in the unified authoring canvas. The rest (topics, trigger phrases, messages, questions, condition nodes, entities, etc.) will be automatically converted.

So, you don't have to recreate everything, and for Bot Framework Composer dialogs, what we do right now is that we create the corresponding topics with same input/output contract, but these topics are empty. In this way, users only need to update the content in these topics, and don't need to re-wire all dialogs. You can of course choose to update the calling topic (for example to design an adaptive card) versus calling a topic specifically for this. 

There is no automatic migration of Bot Framework Composer dialogs because there isn't a one for one mapping between Bot Framework Composer features and the new unified canvas. For example, in Composer, variables can have multiple types but in PVA it's only one type. Similarly, there isn't a simple path to convert Adaptive expressions into Power Fx, etc.

If you think we should support at least some Bot Framework Composer scenarios, can I ask you to detail them here, by submitting a new idea? https://aka.ms/pvafeaturerequest 

We're hoping customers see sufficient value and investments in the new unified authoring canvas to explore transitioning their existing chatbots to it. But as said earlier, chatbots created on the current version will continue to work and as of today there is no deadline.

On your question, "what stops the actual bot to be updated to the new version", are you asking for in-place upgrades of existing bots?  

Same, it'd be super useful if you could summarize why this feature is crucial for your organization using this: https://aka.ms/pvafeaturerequest 

Thanks

Henry

[fernandosilva]

Hi @HenryJammes ,

The main questions now are:

The Bot Framework Composer will still be working after the release of the new PVA version?

The Forms from my bots made with BFC and Power Automate will still be working after the release of the new PVA version?

- If not, we need a proper How to Guide (document and video) of how to implement this "new version";

- New version specific detailed and with all how to guides.

It's not much to ask as these tools are very expensive and as a user we have to take many hours to dig into everywhere on the site, community, youtube, stack overflow, just to find out how you guys at Microsoft decided to do the new version, etc.

It's really annoying that you can't overwrite the existing bots.

We have bots connected to Omnichannel and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, we have bots on our websites with dozens of topics, but seems now that we need to look into every single topic to find out if there is a form or anything else and adapt to the new version.

That's really is not an update. I'm sorry. These platforms are not straight forward to use and now every single details can be very complicated to change and can break anything down the pipeline of the project.

[HenryJammes]

Hi @fernandosilva,

Yes, Bot Framework Composer dialogs will continue to work for PVA 1 bots (unified authoring canvas bots can't be extended with BFC). As I said, as of today there is no deadline for PVA 1 bots. So, it isn't mandatory to upgrade.

For adaptive card forms, they are planned to be supported in a future update of the unified authoring canvas, but I don't have an ETA to share.

We hear you about migration guidance and we're working on this.

Thank you for the feedback and please also submit feature requests like in-place upgrades to https://aka.ms/pvafeaturerequest

Henry