Microsoft Power Pages: Enhancing business websites with AI-powered features and experiences

We’ve had such an amazing year connecting with so many of you—customers, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), and partners. The feedback we’ve received at the Power Platform Community Conference (PPCC) and other events has been fantastic and insightful. At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we’re showcasing the latest innovations and capabilities of Microsoft Power Pages, many of which are a direct result of the feedback we’ve heard from you over the past year. As part of the Microsoft Power Platform suite, Power Pages helps businesses create secure, data-driven business portals with ease. This year, we’ve packed in new features and enhancements that use AI and intelligent solutions to make operations smoother and improve user experiences. Join us to see how Power Pages can speed up your business portal development, boost security, and transform customer experiences in the age of AI.

Introducing new intelligent and maker-focused improvements for Power Pages

First, we’re excited to unveil the ability to build agents within Power Pages portals. These autonomous copilots are now in preview and are designed for use cases beyond internal applications, ensuring secure workflows for interactions with customer using your portals. Secured by role-based access controls and authentication, these agents can be easily created using Microsoft Copilot Studio, leveraging existing Power Pages forms and other components in the near future.

Another improvement we’re announcing is enhanced list AI insights for Power Pages. This feature empowers makers to harness AI’s full potential and is now in preview. These UX enhancements drive smarter decision-making and streamlined workflows while also allowing creators to interact with AI-generated insights, customize prompts, and align components flexibly.

Additionally, site copilot enhancements are in preview, bringing structured Q&A and ALM support. These updates simplify deployment with managed solutions, enabling administrators to maintain robust and intuitive interactions with website data. This ensures that those interacting with the portals experience a seamless, informative platform.

These advancements are set to elevate the capabilities of Power Pages, making it more intuitive, secure, and efficient for everyone involved.

Streamlined portal creation with natural language

We’re boosting speed to production with our new ability to create portals using natural language, now in preview. This feature leverages an in-context agent to transform your natural language inputs directly into polished portals, significantly enhancing productivity. Imagine if building a portal could take you most of the way there without needing to dive into complex coding—this feature does just that by providing low-code tools that keep you within the studio environment.

By understanding context and intent, this feature empowers makers to create content more efficiently and effectively. These advancements are designed to make Power Pages smarter and more efficient, ultimately providing a seamless and intuitive experience for creators and end users alike. This means businesses can quickly develop high-quality portals, improving overall efficiency and user satisfaction.

We’re also bringing another maker-focused feature to Power Pages, the Visual Studio (VS) Code preview, which allows users to preview their sites directly within VS Code on both web and desktop. This integration streamlines the development process, providing a seamless environment for coding and real-time previewing, boosting efficiency and enhancing the overall user experience.

Enhancing security, governance, and user experience with the modernized Power Platform admin center

We’re excited to unveil a suite of new security enhancements for Power Pages, designed to provide robust protection and streamline security management for our customers and partners. The dedicated security view offers an intuitive experience for managing settings and monitoring threats. This update is part of our Power Platform admin center (PPAC) initiative, which integrates new hubs like the security hub and copilot hub, along with overall improvements in user experience, theming, and styling. Admins can now proactively update authentication keys and secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates and perform deep scans to identify and address vulnerabilities, gaining valuable insights and control over their environments.

Support for Microsoft Azure Key Vault has been added to store payment integration keys, enhancing the security view with detailed information about payment integrations for sites within a tenant. This allows users to manage settings seamlessly and ensure secure, compliant transactions. Additionally, we’re introducing inline actions to enable the web application firewall (WAF), our most viewed recommendation from the recommendations panel, enhancing site security against common web vulnerabilities. Further, we’re adding more recommendations to guide users in migrating from the standard data model to the enhanced data model and staying updated with the latest web standards. The new security scan feature further fortifies site resilience by detecting and addressing security vulnerabilities.

We’re unveiling another major update to the PPAC designed to elevate user experience and productivity. This reimagined platform is introducing new “jobs-to-be-done”-based hubs, allowing users to seamlessly navigate specific Power Pages product experiences such as inventory, security, and analytics dashboards, along with a comprehensive licensing view. These features streamline administration and provide valuable insights, empowering users to manage their Power Pages environments more efficiently. These enhancements mark just the beginning of our ongoing commitment to improving user experience and operational efficiency.

Last, we’ve also invested in more advanced governance controls, allowing administrators to make sites internal-only by disabling anonymous access and all external authentication providers, except for Microsoft Entra ID. This ensures that organizations can tightly manage access and maintain a secure environment, perfectly aligning with their internal security policies. These updates are designed to empower users and administrators, making Power Pages more secure, intuitive, and efficient.

Stay tuned for more updates from Power Pages

Thank you for joining us on this journey through the latest enhancements and features of Power Pages, unveiled at Microsoft Ignite. From AI-powered intelligent solutions and robust security enhancements to streamlined deployment and governance, these updates are designed to empower our customers and partners to create secure, efficient, and intuitive web applications. We’re committed to continuously improving your experience and operational efficiency with Power Pages.

Ignite session recap and next steps

We’re thrilled to share the exciting sessions planned for this week’s Microsoft Ignite, showcasing the latest developments and features of Power Pages. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can look forward to:

• Enterprise scale: Administer and govern Power Pages websites with ease | November 20, from 8:30 AM CST to 9:15 AM CST: Learn how to govern Power Pages websites with ease using the administration and governance capabilities offered in the platform.
• Build next-generation intelligent portals with AI and Power Pages | November 20, from 9:45 AM CST to 10:30 AM CST: Learn how Power Pages can help accelerate building web applications connected to your line of business systems using Copilot-driven experiences.
• Mastering enterprise website building with Power Pages | November 21, from 3:00 PM CST to 4:15 PM CST: Learn to build Power Pages sites from the Power Customer Advisory Team experts. Take your skills well beyond the self-paced Power Pages in a day course by diving into complex business processes using multi-step forms, add font-end code, APIs, and server-side logic. Learn from requirements-based tasks. You’ll use Power Pages studio, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Power Platform CLI, Power Pages Web API, liquid code, JavaScript, and more. Walk away armed to take on real-world projects. Understand applicable architecture patterns.
• Build mobile applications for your frontline workers with Power Apps | November 19, from 4:45 PM CST to 6:00 PM CST: Learn about building mobile-centric intelligent apps and pages end-to-end.
• Redefine customer experience of your enterprise portal using AI and Power Pages | November 20, from 3:30 PM CST to 4:00 PM CST: Learn how you can utilize generative AI to redefine customer experiences in your portals built with Power Pages.
• How to secure your Power Pages portals | November 20, from 1:00 PM CST to 1:30 PM CST: Learn how to secure your enterprise portals built using Power Pages. In this session, we will cover common security issues as well as their solutions.

To learn more about Power Pages and stay updated on our latest activities, please visit our Power Platform website. Dive deeper into our innovations, explore additional resources, and see how Power Pages can transform your business. We look forward to seeing you take full advantage of these powerful tools.