Microsoft Power Platform: 2021 release wave 1 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 1 describes all new features releasing from April 2021 through September 2021 for Power BI, Power Apps, Power Apps portals, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, AI Builder, 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 1 PDF (last updated October 25, 2021).
2021 release wave 1 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 continues to invest in three key areas that drive a data culture: amazing data experiences, modern enterprise BI, and integrations where teams work. Power BI Embedded delivers a new generation of the product helping customers increase their ROI, scale rapidly, and get up to 16X faster performance. Customers will also get visibility into utilization at the workspace level, enabling consistent utilization analysis and cost management. Power BI Premium continues to deliver features that help organizations accelerate the delivery of insights at scale, meeting the most demanding needs of an enterprise. This release adds flexible licensing models for organizations to choose between per user and per capacity licensing options. Power BI Pro delivers AI infused insights to help everyone easily discover insights. Authoring Power BI content is easier than ever through the new quick create experiences.
Power Apps combines the flexibility of a blank canvas that can connect to any data source with the power of rich forms, views, and dashboards modeled over data in Microsoft Dataverse. This release adds duplicate detection to the Unified Interface experience, improved accessibility for business process flow in mobile, enhanced global relevance search experience and in-app notifications for model-driven apps.
AI Builder will introduce new AI functionalities in preview as well as form processing improvements. New capabilities include new region availability and signature detection in form processing in order to detect if a signature is present at a specific location in a document.
Power Apps portals enhances Power BI integration in order to support Microsoft Azure Analysis Services live connections and Customer Data Power BI function to send additional context for personalizing reports and dashboards for users.
Power Automate enhancements to cloud flows adds a trigger when an action is performed in Microsoft Dataverse. This feature improves working with the common events model and provides better integration with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Desktop flows improve our support for UI automation on Citrix environments by having a runtime inside the target Citrix environment. New for this release, process advisor, a process mining capability in Power Automate that reveals insights into how people work, provides rich visualizations where users can identify repetitive, time-consuming processes best suited for automation. Users will be able to record repetitive, manual processes with Power Automate Desktop.
Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with list variables, topic suggestions from bot sessions, adaptive cards, and more. Also included is Power Automate integration with better error handling and new topic trigger management in order to improve your bot's triggering capabilities.
Microsoft Power Platform offers a range of governance and administration and ISV experiences capabilities that span Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse. These capabilities are designed to help the administrators, ISVs and IT pros in the organization to help build, set up, secure, manage, govern, and monitor the use and adoption of the platform and its components across the enterprise.
- Data integration provides built-in connectivity to the Microsoft Power Platform and more, with data across hundreds of business systems, enabling rich and intelligent experiences. There are many new capabilities in this release wave in areas such as enrichment through integration with Azure Maps, gateway diagnostics, improved error management, visual data prep for Power Query Desktop, and security improvements.
Important
The Dynamics 365 features coming in the 2021 release wave 1 have been summarized in a separate release plan.
Key dates for the 2021 release wave 1
This release plan describes functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).
Here are the key dates for the 2021 release wave 1.
| Milestone | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Release plans available | January 27, 2021 | Learn about the new capabilities coming in the 2021 release wave 1 (April 2021 – September 2021) across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. |
| Early access available | February 1, 2021 | Test and validate new features and capabilities that will be a part of the 2021 release wave 1, coming in April, before they get enabled automatically for your users. You can view the Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 1 early access features now. |
| Release plans available in 11 additional languages | February 23, 2021 | The Dynamics 365 and Power Platform release plans published in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, and Swedish. |
| General availability | April 1, 2021 | Production deployment for the 2021 release wave 1 begins. Regional deployments will start on April 2, 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 user 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 1.
Let us know your thoughts. Share your feedback on the Microsoft Power Platform community forum. We will use your feedback to make improvements.