September 2025 Power Platform Roundup

It’s been a busy month for the Power Platform, with Microsoft rolling out some important changes that affect both makers and enterprise admins. 

Note: A “maker”, in Microsoft terms, is anyone building solutions in the Power Platform. From business users creating simple apps to professional developers designing complex enterprise solutions. In this roundup, we focus on updates relevant to pro developers building apps for organisations.  

At MPowerUp, we’ve pulled together a high-level summary of the key updates. What they are, why they matter, and our take on how the community might want to approach them. 

Power Apps: User Defined Functions are now available. 

Update: User Defined Functions (UDFs) in Power Apps are now GA (General Availability).  Source: Microsoft blog 

What this means: 

• UDFs let you package up formulas into reusable mini-functions. 

• Instead of repeating logic across controls, define it once and reuse it everywhere. 

• This makes apps cleaner, faster, and easier to maintain. 

Why it matters: 

• Fix logic in one place instead of everywhere it’s duplicated. 

• Apps save and load faster. 

• Governance improves when organisations can enforce consistent logic across apps. 

Our thoughts: It’s an important milestone in making Power Apps a more robust platform for developers. For new builds, we’d recommend adopting UDFs straight away. For existing apps, start small by refactoring the most duplicated formulas. Do set naming and usage conventions early, so your UDF library doesn’t turn messy. 

Dataverse Auditing: Strengthening Trust & Transparency 

Update: Enhancements to Dataverse auditing landed this month, focusing on privacy, compliance, and integration.  Source: Microsoft blog 

What’s new: 

• Audit events into Purview – logs can now feed into Microsoft Purview for central compliance oversight. 

• Masked sensitive data – audit logs hide sensitive fields in “read” events. 

• Improved retention & cleanup – better alignment with storage and lifecycle policies. 

• Choice labels captured – audits now record the actual option labels, not just internal values. 

Why it matters: 

• Stronger compliance readiness for regulated industries. 

• Easier to investigate issues with a clearer “before and after” in logs. 

• Helps admins manage audit storage growth. 

Our thoughts: This makes Dataverse auditing more enterprise ready. We’d advise testing masking and retention policies in dev/test before enabling broadly and updating governance templates, so these capabilities are baked in from the start. 

Personal Developer Environments: Secure, Governed Innovation 

Update: Microsoft has introduced Personal Developer Environments (PDEs), one per maker, to isolate experimentation and keep the Default Environment clean.  Source: Microsoft blog.

What’s new: 

• Every maker gets their own environment automatically when they start building. 

• PDEs isolate work from production, reducing risk. 

• Microsoft reports 32% month-over-month growth in maker activity after adopting PDEs internally. 

• PDEs are grouped so admins can apply consistent policies across them. 

Why it matters: 

• Safer experimentation where mistakes don’t affect shared assets. 

• Clearer ownership and lifecycle management. 

• Teams can implement safeguards at scale without stifling innovation. 

Our thoughts: This is a pragmatic balance between empowerment and control. If your organisation isn’t using PDEs yet, start planning now by preparing governance strategies around quotas, cleanup, and environment lifecycle. 

These updates show a clear theme: maturing the platform for enterprise-scale governance while still empowering makers. 

• UDFs bring discipline and performance gains for Power Apps. 

• Dataverse auditing strengthens compliance and privacy. 

• Personal Developer Environments balance creativity with control. 

At MPowerUp, we see these as positive moves that will help organisations scale the Power Platform more safely and sustainably, without losing the agility that makes it so valuable. We’d love to hear from the community: which of these updates are you most excited about, and how do you see them impacting your own projects or governance approach?