Microsoft has recently worked on promoting their power platform and has implied the existence of “internal makers community”. All their COE ideas come from their community discussion as fusion teams make sense there. This community is made to bring ease to citizen developers work. If you want to set it up then you need to:

• Go to Admin Panel and make sure you are visible as an advisor

• Next, in the maker portal open Power Platform Settings
• Join Advisory Program

Once in, you can ask Virtual Agent questions; you may need to use a different account as it is difficult to seek help being “yourself”; and most importantly once a Virtual Agent hits a roadblock it can increase your problems.

Or, alternatively, Virtual Agent could display a link to a Teams group if that one were configured in the admin center:

The result is good or bad is irrelevant here. It is basically another feature that can be useful. I have not been able to find any organization so far which has introduced its internal community to each other to benefit from Power Platform. This is actually disappointing because it is such a powerful feature of Microsoft that everybody should benefit from. If you want to surface advisor contacts you can email anyone anytime. Users can go to teams and post a question and anyone can assume the role of an advisor to answer.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us anytime.

Whenever someone logs in to a portal, they are usually greeted by a bot asking very basic questions like ‘What Do You Want?’ or ‘Do You Need Any Help?’ this is followed by almost all the log ins. These are basic automatic questions intended to help the user without knowing their identity. Since the information in question is generic the bot does not require any specific identity. However, when a user gets into conversation with the bot and seeks specific information, there always follow the process of identification. In order to yield some specific information, the bot needs to make sure that the person to whom the information is to be given is the relevant person. Sometimes the process of identification starts with the requirement for logging in.

It simply means that a bot will only need specific personal information when the information required from the bot is specific. For basic, generic information, it does not need any information. Specific questions like the information about the leave balance o a particular person, location of a parcel or the status of an issue rose with customer care; the bot will require personal information for identifying the person seeking the information. These scenarios can be controlled through various ways. The bot can be restricted to a specific group of users, followed by authentication in bot implementation coming in the form of a picture. The users do not need to be issued any license. People having the link of the bot can simply access it provided that it is authenticated.

The process of authentication can be controlled or customized by using Manage – Security. Some of the options that can be used are given below.

• No Authentication – Anybody who has the link of the bot can access the bot
• Only for Teams- this bot is available for access only through the Microsoft Teams app
• Manual (For any channel including Teams)-supports AAD or Auth2 identity provider

The checkbox requiring the user to immediately log in as soon as they interact with the bot can also be added. Once only the Teams is enabled/allowed to be given access to a particular bot, only Teams users will be able to do so.

A visual representation of the steps is given below:

Next The Following Steps will take place:

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us anytime!

Data consumption plays an important role in Power Virtual Agent PVA licensing. It is important to keep a check on the data storage requirement of PVA implementations. You should know how the data is calculated because PA has special storage requirements for all of its conversations with usual configurations. You just need to keep a check of conversations of the chatbot and any other attachments which are uploaded in the conversation.

Moreover, you should also be familiar with the tables which store conversation transcripts. All the conversations are saved in the PVA bot which has conversationtranscripttable. It is for forecasting data storage that you need to be mindful of the conversation and expected conversation. However, it all depends on the complexity of the conversation.

You can refer to any existing implementation on the table and check its size; once assumed you need to validate it during the operations. Generally, a forecast is done for sizing and licensing costs of one year. It is multiplied above size per conversation with the total number of conversations which are expected in a year. Once you have the number you can calculate the forecasted size of the dataverse that you need for implementation.

In addition to the conversation transcript, you need to check the requirement in which you are expecting users to upload attachments. You also should keep a check of plugin trace logs, audit logs and data consumption. While calculating the size, you should also consider that the data retention policy is an important requirement. There is one bulk deletion job which runs every day and deletes conversations every day too. This is helpful because it optimizes storage requirements.

Power Virtual Agents in a Day is a training course offered by Barrhead as a component of its Power Platform Enablement Services, and it provides learners with an overview of Power Virtual Agents and its elements. 

Power Virtual Agents in a Day seminars are free one-day events that teach you how to develop, incorporate, expand, launch, and supervise chat bots. We’re thrilled to welcome clients and stakeholders to participate in Power Virtual Agents in a Day (PVAIAD) workshops and receive firsthand experience with the software! 

What does it offer? 

Employing a supervised, no-code UI, Power Virtual Agents allows you to create effective conversational bots. You can incorporate workflows in your subjects using Power Automate to interface with relevant enterprise services, resulting in a bot that can initiate measures to fix client complaints.

Your bot may be created easily across a range of sources, with designed metrics to deliver data and assist you to optimise and enhance your bot to handle regular client service concerns while passing more complicated questions to your operators. 

Power Virtual Agents will teach you how to build effective chatbots in less than a day, whether you’re a commercial master or an IT professional.

In a single day, PVA will be updated 

The new year heralds a slew of new features! The material has been updated, as shown below.

• Customer Testimonials

• Determine who in the company has access to the chatbot department.

• The Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) module has been updated to include supplying bots. 

2 additional alternative laboratories have been added, as well as fresh content.

• Optional:  Lab 15 – Use Bot Framework Builder to modify your bot
• Optional: Lab 16 – Using AudioCodes, add a phone number to your bot

How can I become a member?

The full schedule of events may be seen at https://aka.ms/PVAIADevent.

Please check back as we continue to add more regions.

All businesses are invited!

If you are interested in hosting future PVAIAD programs, please sign up here and contact xiadevents@microsoft.com with any concerns. 

This project aims to help you develop knowledge, demonstrate your Power Virtual Agents support to clients, and cultivate the ideal customer-partner relationships.

You can watch the train-the-trainer event to discover how to conduct a session like this. You may listen to the recording here. 

Are you interested in self-teaching?

There’s a happy opportunity! The PVA in a Day content can be downloaded directly from the URLs provided below.

Instructor: https://aka.ms/PVAinaDayPackage 

Student: https://aka.ms/PVAinaDayPackage 

Check out these resources for additional information about Power Virtual Agents:

Recent market trends – Bot development in the future

According to analyst estimates, Microsoft has been awarded a Leader in IDC MarketScape for the World Wide Web. Platforms for General-Use Conversational AI

Economic impact studies – Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents’ Total Economic ImpactTM

Features of the new product — What’s new at Ignite with Power Virtual Agents?

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents facilitates bot building for you. Virtual Agent allows to create bespoke chatbots using a guided, no-code graphical interface. Chatbots may be designed specifically for customers’ requirements and linked with current products and services. Using AI and data-driven insights, virtual agents may also be continually monitored to enhance performance.

When you design your virtual agent, generally known as a “Bot,” you have the option of deploying it to a test website or obtaining an embed code for your own website. So, as a Power Platform expert, my first instinct is to try to get the Virtual Agent functioning on a Power Apps Portal.

The first step is to sign up for the Power Virtual Agent preview here:

https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/en-us/

Backstory

We used to implement chatbots into our website by obtaining “Copy or share the code” and using IFrame. As of now, this is the only way to incorporate it. However, it is now altering the method we implement.

And now there is a new portal component called “Chatbot” for the portal.

Capabilities

•  You can add bot on all pages.
•  Or you can add the bot on specified pages (UI to select pages)

Create a bot.

You must first create a bot before adding it to a Power Apps portals page. To make the bot, go to Power Apps.

After you’ve constructed your bot and added streams of intelligent conversations, the next step is to activate and deploy it.

You can test it on a sample website, but you can also deploy it on your own website, which might be a Power App Portal!

Add a chatbot to the page (s)

• Edit portal using portals Studio
•  From the left navigation, choose the components
•  Choose the Chatbot component.
•  Choose your bot

“Chatbot visibility” is set to “All pages” by default. As a result, when you explore the website, you will see that the selected chatbot appears on all portal pages. We may change the visibility option to “particular pages” and pick the pages where we want the bot to reside.

Navigate to the website to see the bot on the portal.

Configuration Advanced

A web template named Power Virtual Agents is used to render the chatbot component.

Within the “window.PvaEmbeddedWebChat.renderWebChat()” function, you may adjust the width, height, header text, and various styles.

ADVANCED CONFIGURATION

Parameter Value

width Uses variable “chatWidth”. To change width, update the width in pixel: let chatWidth = “320px”;

height Uses variable “chatHeight”. To change height, update the height in pixel: let chatHeight = “480px”;

headerText Title of the bot. By default, uses the bot’s name. To change, add “headerText” parameter with the bot header value: “headerText”: ‘Contoso chatbot’;

webChatHeaderStyleOptions Determines header style for the chatbot component, such as the color of font, and background. To change, update “webChatHeaderStyleOptions” parameter with the values for “fontColor”, and “backgroundColor” properties: “webChatHeaderStyleOptions”: {“fontColor”:’black’,”backgroundColo