First, let’s go ahead and start by enabling these new features. As with previous functionality that I wrote about, enabling the new collaboration features is done via the Power Platform Admin Center. Navigate to your Power Platform Admin Center, select your environment and Go to Settings and Features. Within Features, you will see a section called Collaboration at the bottom of the page (currently). The Enable preview of the modern link sharing UI, co-presence, online status in model-driven apps is going to be set to Off by default. Change this setting to On in order to enable these features.

You can also set the time of the refresh interval for Co-presence, which is set by default to 60 seconds. Don’t set it to a number that is too small or it might have some performance implications. The screenshot below shows you these settings in the Power Platform Admin Center.

Once we have set this option let’s go ahead and navigate back to our Model Driven app. We will open to browser windows with two different users logged in and accessing the same record. What we will see on the screen is that on the right hand side of the command bar, it will display the initials and presence of the other user or users that are logged into the system accessing that same record. This will allow us to quickly connect and collaborate with these other users. The image(s) below show two users logged on to the same record and being able to see that the other is accessing the record.

When you click on the bubble of the one of the users, you will have a couple of options to start collaboration with them. You will be able to Send the other user an email, Start a Teams chat or open their Contact card and start collaboration from there. See these options in the following screenshot.

The next enhancement that is coming out is how the Owner of the record is presented. With this new release plan, the owner will have the presence bubble next to their name. Hovering over their presence will pop up their presence card contact information and list of recent files, and the ability to expand and see their full ownership information. The screenshot below shows some of that information.

Next, we can see that next to the bubble of the other users accessing the record, we have the Share button. This allows us to share and manage the access to this record with other users.

Once we click on the Share button, we will be able to select the users and/or teams that we want to share access to this record with, and provide them with the appropriate Read/Write permissions as required. We can see this in the image below.

There are likely to be additional collaboration changes that will be coming up in the new future to Unified Interface, but for the meantime, I hope you will enjoy the enhancements to this Wave Release.

The post Collaboration enhancements in 2022 Release Plan Wave 1 appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

By default, the legacy Advanced Find functionality will show up after the 2022 Wave 1 is enabled, unless it is configured in the Power Platform Admin Center. To get the modern experience enabled, navigate to the Power Platform Admin Center to the environment that you want this enabled, and click on Settings, and in the Settings page select Product and then select Features. When the Features page will open up, you will see a section called Advanced Find options as shown below

There are two options that can be enabled for the new Advanced Find. The first is the new modern experience, and the second will allow users to hide System views from their list of views that they usually see in their view selector. Now let’s take a look at this modern experience.

When you click on the Advanced Find button in the navigation bar, it will pop up a panel, where you can select the table that you want to search by.

Once you select the table, the page will redirect to the table home page with the default view and the Advanced Filters panel open for filtering. In here you can edit the filter and this will display the results on the page that you are looking for.

The view that you now modified (including the column updates and new filter) will show up with an asterisk (*) next to it. When you open up the view selector, you will notice that at the bottom of the list of views, you have two new options: Save as new view (which was previously available on the Command Bar under the Create View command) and Manage and share views as shown in the image below:

The Save as new view will simply pop up a window asking for the name and description of this new view, and by clicking Save will create this view to be selected as a Personal view.

The Manage and share view will open a panel with options to determine the Sort order of your views (System before Personal, Personal before System or just in alphabetical order). In addition, each view will have the option to be hidden. This will allow end users to hide System views from their list of views in order to have a short list of Most Commonly used views. There is also the option to set the default view from here.

For personal views (which are followed by a user icon), there are additional options which include Sharing, Assigning, Deactivating or Deleting the views.

If you have Dataverse search enabled in the Power Platform Admin center, you will no longer see the Advanced Find button on the navigation bar on top. Instead you will see the dataverse search bar on top. When you click on the dataverse search bar, it will pop up with default search results, and at the bottom of the search bar you will see the option Search for rows in a table using advanced filters. Clicking on this option will open up the Advanced find panel with the options to select a table as previously shown. The image below shows the Dataverse search window with the link for Advanced filters

The one main thing that I can see is still pending is the ability to Export the Fetch Xml, especially for people who are using this for development. I am sure that this functionality will be coming soon, as it is highly requested. If you have multiple environments, you can definitely enable this in your higher environments for your end users, and leave it as old interface in lower environments for development so that you can get the Fetch Xml.

Hope you will enjoy the coming changes.

The post Modern Advanced Find in Unified Interface – 2022 Release Wave 1 appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

By default, when the 2022 Wave 1 is enabled, the grid that will show up under the Controls tab for the Entity that you want to enable the grid is the Read only grid (Default). This is the grid that was enabled as part of the previous Wave with a few enhancements. The image below shows you the look and feel of the grid that was available as part of 2021 Wave 2.

Once your instance has been upgraded, you will be able to see some changes to your grid control. Theses changes include the labels next to the buttons for Edit columns and Edit filters, the grid title bar design is slightly different, the row selectors have been slightly modified, and at the footer of the screen you will see not only the number of records, but will have the pager visible (regardless of the number of records on the screen). The screenshot below shows the 2022 Wave 1 Read Only Grid as it is out of the box after the upgrade.

In order to get some of the additional functionality in the grid, we will need to use the Power Apps Grid instead of the default Read Only Grid. The Power Apps grid contains some additional properties call Jump bar, Reflow behavior and Allow filtering, which we will discuss in a bit, but first, let’s enable the Grid.

As parity is not yet available between the modern solution designer and the classic designer, we still have to configure PCF controls from within classic interface. In order to do this following the steps below. This will be demonstrated on the Account table, but can be done for any of the entities.

• Navigate to a solution containing the and click on the Accounts table, and click on Accounts
• On the command bar click on Switch to Classic
• Once classic window/tab has opened for the Account entity, click on Controls
• You should see there the Read Only grid control.
• Click on the Add Control link under the list of existing controls
• In the Add Control window, look for Power App Grid, and click on the Add button
• In the Controls section you will now see both PCF controls, the Read Only grid and the Power Apps grid.
• Make your Power Apps grid the selected one by selecting the radio buttons under Web, Phone or Tablet

Before we go back to the Accounts view, let’s look again at the properties that are available to be modified for the PCF control.

Jump bar: Jump bar is disabled by default and display at the bottom of the grid the selectors to allow to filter the results by any alphabetical letter, but numbers or seeing all the results. This has been available for a long time, but now can be selected whether it should be visible or not.

Reflow behavior: The reflow behavior determines how we want to control the flow of the grid/view. There are three available options for selection in Reflow:

• Grid Only – will show the rows in a grid view regardless of the width of the screen
  
• List Only – will show the rows in a grid as a list regardless of the width of the screen
  
• Reflow – will show the rows in a grid view when space is available, and when the width gets decreased so that it is not properly viewable, it will automatically change to a list view.

Allow filtering: This option sets weather filters are available on the individual columns or not.

Finally, there are also a few settings that are set on the environment scale which are available on your Environment -> Settings -> Features. In the Grids and views section, you will notice that you can set if you want to use the Modern Grid experience, as well as whether the Edit columns button and the Edit filters button are visible on the views.

The post 2022 Wave 1 Release Power Apps Read Only Grid appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

The main issue that is encountered by many organizations relates to the retention policy of audit logs. Until this new changes, there was no retention policy for auditing, and auditing would be kept forever unless manually deleted by the system administrator.

With the new changes, administrators can not select a retention period, so that the audit records will be deleted automatically once that retention period is over. The available options for retentions vary from 30 days to 7 years (30 days, 90 days, 180 days, 1 year, 2 years or seven years). There are also additional options for setting a custom retention period in days or set a forever retention period. The screenshot below shows the default setting prior to making changes to the auditing retention.

The following screenshot shows the available options that are available for selection:

When selecting the Custom retention, the screenshot below shows the option to select a custom retention period and enter the number of days that you want to save your audit logs.

This is a great option when trying to save your log capacity, an issue that I had in the past that required having to go into each environment every 3 months and removing the latest audit log file.

If your tenant is managed by your own Customer Manager Key (CMK/BYOK), this feature does not seem to be available at this time.

The post Audit Retention enhancements in Power Platform Admin Center appeared first on Aric Levin's Digital Transformation Blog.

In the post, I will demonstrate how we can enable co-authoring, and show how collaborating works when multiple users are trying to work on the app at the same time.

In order to implement this, there are a couple of prerequisites. We need to connect Power Apps to a Git repository and share the app with the other users that will be co-authoring. In order to connect to a Git repository, we first need to configure it. Currently the supported repositories that can be used are Github and Azure DevOps. In this post, we will be using Azure DevOps to demonstrate how this works.

Configure Azure DevOps:

If you have worked with Azure DevOps before, this should be pretty simple. You will need to create a new repository to use for the Canvas App and generate a Personal Access Token.

Let’s start by configuring Azure DevOps. Navigate to dev.azure.com to your organization, and open the project where you want to create the Repo. If you don’t have a Project yet, you can create a new Project. The url that you should see on your screen should look like:

https://dev.azure.com/ORG_NAME/PROJECT_NAME, where ORG_NAME is the name of your Azure DevOps organization, and PROJECT_NAME is the name of the project you are working on. The screenshot below shows what you should be seeing on the screen:

Click on Repos to start creating a new Repo. Click on the Plus sign next to the Project Name on the left navigation, and select New Repository. This will open a Panel on the right hand side. Enter the name of the Repo, and click the create button. Make sure that that Add a README checkbox is checked. The screenshot below shows this steps.

Once the Repo has been created, you can either copy the name of the Repo from the address bar.

For instructions on generating a personal access token, you can read the following post from a couple of years ago:

/Azure/Post/calling-azure-devops-pipeline-flow-canvas

You will not need to use GitBash to convert the token to base64 for this implementation.

Next let’s go back to our Power Apps. If you have not already done so, please make sure to share the app with the other users that will be co-authoring. Make sure it is shared with the other users as co-owners and not just users.

Now, as the owning user, open the app in edit mode. Click on Setting from the App main screen, or you can go to File menu, and click Settings from there. Within Settings, click on Upcoming Features, select Experimental and look for Show the Git version control setting. Turn this on.

Once this is turned on, within the popup you will see on the left navigation. Click on the link, which will show a window to connect to the Git Version control.

Click on the Connect button, and then enter the Git repository URL, Branch and Directory Name

Next you will get a repo authentication window requesting your username and password. Enter your user account email in the username field, and the Personal Access Token that you created and copied as the password. If you get a message that the directory was not found, just let the system create the directory for you.

Once you have finished configuring this, you will that there is an additional button added to the Canvas apps command bar, shown in the image below. This is the Commit changes and check for updates button.

Now that we have enabled the Git version control in our app, we can try and test out Co-authoring. You will probably have to log out and log back into the app for this to work.

The video below will show you the app open in two separate windows. We will make a change to the app in one of the windows, and click on the Commit changes and check for updates button. Once done, we will click on the same button on the other window (logged in as a different user), and you will see how the changes are updated in that window as well.
NOTE: If the video does not full show in your browser, right click the video and select Open in new tab.

This is one of the long awaited features, and although still experimental, and I am sure will improve over time, this is a great start for co-authoring. I know that it is something that I will be using shortly.

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