power platform plan designer preview

 power platform plan designer preview:

Currently rolling out to preview environments is the new Power Platform Plan Designer, a tool that will allow you to use generative AI to describe, plan, and build your business solution using Power Platform technologies.

Read the announcement from Microsoft:

Build user-focused intelligent solutions in Power Apps, start with a plan.

Here is the video version of this blog post:

When designing a new app, it’s tempting to just start building your app on a blank canvas, but this isn’t an ideal approach as you need to consider the business requirements, user roles, data storage, and user experiences. Whether this is a full spec document, white board sessions, or collecting epics, requirements, and user stories in Azure Dev Ops, usually there is a lot of pre-work done before actually getting hands on keyboards and building apps.

The new plan designer will help streamline some of this process. Provide the planner with a description of your app, maybe some diagrams, and the planner will use AI to begin to create user roles, define Dataverse tables, and build apps and flows.

How to create a Preview environment

In order to try the the planner out for yourself, you will need to create a new preview environment. This is being rolled out to various regions, but I found it wasn’t (yet) available in Canada, so I choose the United States to setup my environment. Also be sure to set the Get new features early option.

Once your environment is ready, select the Try the new Power Apps experience.

Trying the Plan Designer

The plan designer will then appear on your homepage. Here you can describe your app as well as upload any diagrams to be used to create the plan and the app. I hope in the future to be able to also upload spec documents, RFPs, etc.

The process will first give the app a name, a description and begin to create user personas and corresponding user stories. You can continue to provide feedback an iterate on these roles before moving to the next step.

At this point you should like save your plan and also assign it to a specific solution and publisher. The plan will create a solution, but won’t create a publisher. You can use your own solution and publisher in the advanced settings.

The next step the process will create a series of Dataverse tables. You can use the prompts to make some adjustments to the tables, but the table designer within the plan designer doesn’t have all the same features as the new data modeler. The process also will NOT use any of the common data model tables like account, contact, etc. Again, hoping this feature will come in the fullness of time.

The final step will create apps (model-driven or canvas, no Power Pages, yet) as well as the ‘stubs’ for Power Automate flows. The planner will not create Power Automate flows at this time.

The new plan designer still has a way to go to be a full featured tool and is missing a lot of things we might expect (Power Pages, Power Automate flows, analytics, Azure Dev Ops integration, ability to generate plan documents), but the preview does show us a great vision of how we could build new business applications in the very near future.