Microsoft Power Platform: 2021 release wave 2 plan
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to the Microsoft Power Platform documentation. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
The Microsoft Power Platform release plan for the 2021 release wave 2 describes new features releasing from October 2021 through March 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 2021 release wave 2 PDF (final update May 6, 2022)
The Dynamics 365 and industry clouds features shipping in the 2021 release wave 2 have been summarized in a separate release plan as well as a downloadable PDF.
2021 release wave 2 overview
Microsoft Power Platform enables users and organizations to analyze, act, and automate on 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 three primary areas to enable organizations to drive a data culture:
- Empower every individual with instantly familiar experiences and AI-infused insights. Power BI continues to advance creator experiences making it easier than ever to work with data. By leveraging the AI advancements from Microsoft Research, Power BI helps users find patterns in the vast amounts of data with readily available insights.
- Empower every team with BI woven into the fabric of where teams work by integrating Power BI deeply with Office 365 – Microsoft Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, and more. Power BI integration in Microsoft Teams will continue to mature, deepening the integration in channels, chats, and notifications within Teams.
- Empower every organization to meet the demanding needs of the large enterprise customers by providing centralized administration, governance, and industry-leading security capabilities. Power BI premium offers enhanced capabilities that help accelerate the delivery of insights at scale such as pay-as-you-go pricing and Microsoft-owner resource management, in addition to providing interactive experiences over big data.
Power Apps
Power Apps brings major improvements for makers by improving the sophistication and usability of apps that can be created across the web and mobile devices. With these improvements, makers can now publish their canvas app as standalone mobile apps. The unified and modern Power Apps designer will be generally available, to quickly build modern apps as well as take advantage of intelligent authoring, using AI and Power Apps Studio, for rapid app development.
Power Apps portals
Power Apps portals focuses on the advancements of capabilities that allow makers to enable more out-of-box scenarios, use developer capabilities and tools to enable advanced customizations and configurations, features that allows makers to create custom UI elements within forms and web elements and general availability of support for CI/CD of portals configuration using Power Platform CLI.
Power Automate
Power Automate continues to invest in these primary areas as part of this wave:
- Microsoft Teams integration - Integration with Microsoft Teams to provide collaborative scenarios and allow admins to push solutions that contain flows across their organization.
- Power Automate Desktop - Provide migration support for existing Softomotive and UI flow customers with secure credential management and much more.
- Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI, and Microsoft Dataverse - Provide a seamless experience for professional developers and users to deploy solutions on Microsoft Power Platform with deeper integration.
- AI Builder - To leverage AI Builder's capability for automation and scaling, we're investing in content intelligence for understanding where to add support for multiple layouts, working with form controls and expanding support for more languages.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with variable passing between topics, list variables, inline images and videos, regular expressions in custom entities, and commenting. Also included is bot creation from templates, sharing bots with security groups, and new AI capabilities to build your bots automatically from website content.
AI Builder
In 2021 release wave 2, AI Builder is adding new functionalities focused around intelligent document processing experiences, which include the ability to extract a broader set of content types in documents such as checkboxes, signatures, typed fields like date and currency, and support for more prebuilt models in the document automation solution. Improving the AI model discovery experience, as well as improving performance metrics and simplifying the authoring experience, are also the primary focus for this release.
Governance and administration and ISV experiences
Microsoft Power Platform governance and administration introduces many new capabilities in this release wave that helps IT professionals and administrators to set up, secure, and adopt the governance and administration of the platform across the enterprise.
Microsoft Power Platform ISV experiences enable Independent Software Vendors (ISV) to build applications leveraging the available Microsoft Power Platform capabilities. ISVs can create unique user experiences by extending their applications across Azure either using Azure Services or through custom code. Additional capabilities include enhancements to the current ISV Studio and more application management capabilities like tenant-level application usage metrics, and an opt-in feature to automatically update third-party ISV applications.
Data integration
Data integration is focused on key areas for this release including enhancements to data integration by enabling analytics to Data Lake in Common Data form, Office data integration to improve Data Export Service, enhancing Gateway for enterprises and Robotics Process Automation (RPA), enabling end-to-end diagnostic capability for fixing issues in queries or gateway, and enabling the dataflow experience in Dataverse in Teams so that data can be easily built.
Key dates for the 2021 release wave 2
This release plan describes functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (go to Microsoft policy).
Here are the key dates for the 2021 release wave 2.
| Milestone | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Release plans available | July 14, 2021 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2021 release wave 2 (October 2021 – March 2022) across Dynamics 365 and Industry Clouds and Microsoft Power Platform. |
| Early access available | August 2, 2021 | Test and validate new features and capabilities that will be a part of the 2021 release wave 2, coming in October, before they get enabled automatically for your users. You can view the Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 2 early access features now. |
| Release plans available in 11 additional languages | August 13, 2021 | The Dynamics 365 and Industry Clouds and Power Platform release plans are published in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
| General availability | October 1, 2021 | Production deployment for the 2021 release wave 2 begins. Regional deployments will start on October 1, 2021. |
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 2021 release wave 2.
Let us know your thoughts. Share your feedback in the Microsoft Power Platform community forum. We will use your feedback to make improvements.