We're excited to announce new features that enable the creation of more powerful applications while providing more governance control through amazon Q Apps, a capability within amazon Q Business that allows you to create ai-powered generative applications based on data from your organization. These features enhance application customization options that allow business users to tailor solutions to their specific individual or organizational requirements. We've introduced new governance features for administrators to support user-created apps with app verification and organize app libraries with customizable tag categories that reflect their organizations. App creators can now share apps privately and create data collection apps that can collect input from multiple users. These additions are designed to improve how businesses use generative ai in their daily operations by focusing on administrative controls and capabilities that unlock new use cases.
In this post, we examine how these features enhance the capabilities of amazon Q Apps. We explore new customization options and detail how these advancements make amazon Q Apps more accessible and applicable to a broader range of enterprise customers. We focus on key features like custom labels, verified apps, private sharing, and data collection apps (preview).
Support quality apps and customize tags in the app library
To help with the visibility of published amazon Q Apps and address questions about the quality of user-created apps, we have launched verified apps. Verified apps are endorsed by administrators, indicating that they have been approved according to your company's standards. Administrators can support published amazon Q Apps by updating their status from Default to Verified directly in the amazon Q Business console. Administrators can work closely with their business stakeholders to determine criteria for verifying applications, based on their organization's specific needs and policies. This administrator-driven tagging capability is a reactive approach to supporting published apps, without limiting the publishing process for app creators.
When users access the library, they will see a distinctive blue check mark icon on any app that has been marked as Verified by administrators (as shown in the screenshot below). Additionally, verified apps automatically appear at the top of the app list within each category, making them easily discoverable. For more information about app verification, see Understanding and managing verified amazon Q apps.
<img class="alignnone wp-image-94696 size-full" style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 0px;border: 1px solid #CCCCCC" src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Amazon-Q-Apps-supports-personalization-and-governance-of-AI-powered-generative.png" alt="Verified apps in the amazon Q Apps library” width=”936″ height=”468″/>
The next feature we discuss is custom labels. Administrators can create custom category tags for app users to organize and categorize apps in the library to reflect their team's roles or organizational structure. This feature allows administrators to create and manage these tags in the amazon Q Business console, and end users can use them in building apps and discover relevant apps in the library. Administrators can update category labels at any time to tailor them to specific business needs based on their use cases. For example, administrators managing amazon Q Business application environments for marketing organizations can add tags such as Product Marketing, PR, Ads, or Sales only for use by users on the marketing team (see the following screenshot ).
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-94692 size-full" style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 0px;border: 1px solid #CCCCCC" src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/1734120557_997_Amazon-Q-Apps-supports-personalization-and-governance-of-AI-powered-generative.png" alt="Custom labels in the amazon Q Business console for amazon Q Apps” width=”1292″ height=”391″/>
Marketing users creating apps can use custom tags to place their app in the correct category, which will help other users discover apps in the library based on their focus area (as shown in the screenshot below) . For more information about custom labels, see Custom Labels for amazon Q Apps.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-94690 size-full" style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 0px;border: 1px solid #CCCCCC" src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/1734120558_328_Amazon-Q-Apps-supports-personalization-and-governance-of-AI-powered-generative.png" alt="Custom tags in the amazon Q Apps library” width=”1920″ height=”958″/>
Share your apps with selected users
App creators can now use advanced sharing options to create more granular controls over apps and facilitate collaboration within their organizations. When sharing privately, you have the option to share an app with select people or with all users of the app (which was previously possible). Sharing at any level will still show the app in the library, but with private sharing, it will only be visible to users of the app with whom it has been shared. This means that the library is still the place where users discover applications they have access to. This feature unlocks the ability to enable apps only for the target audience and helps reduce “noise” in the library of apps that are not necessarily relevant to all users. App creators have the ability to test updates before they are ready to release changes, helping to ensure that app iterations and improvements are not shared before they are ready to widely release the revised version.
To share an app with specific users, creators can add each user using their full email address (see screenshot below). Users are only added after an email address match is found, ensuring that creators don't unknowingly give access to someone who doesn't have access to the amazon Q Business app environment. For more information about private sharing, see Sharing amazon Q Apps.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-94685 size-full" style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 0px;border: 1px solid #CCCCCC" src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/1734120558_635_Amazon-Q-Apps-supports-personalization-and-governance-of-AI-powered-generative.png" alt="Share privately on amazon Q Apps” width=”1292″ height=”675″/>
Unlock new use cases with data collection
The last feature we share in this post is data collection applications (preview), a new capability that allows you to record input provided by other app users, resulting in a new genre of amazon Q Apps, such as team surveys and project retrospectives. This enhancement allows you to collect data from multiple users within your organization, further improving the collaborative quality of amazon Q Apps for various business needs. These applications can further utilize generative ai to analyze collected data, identify common themes, summarize ideas, and provide actionable insights.
After publishing a data collection app to the library, creators can share the unique link to invite their colleagues to participate. You must share the unique link to receive submissions for your specific data collection. When app users open the data collection app from the library, a new data collection is triggered with their own unique sharing link, of which they are the designated owner. As the owner of a data collection, you can start new rounds and manage controls to start and stop accepting new data submissions, as well as reveal or hide collected data. For more information about data collection apps, see Data Collection in amazon Q Apps.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-94679 size-full" style="margin: 10px 0px 10px 0px;border: 1px solid #CCCCCC" src="https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Amazon-Q-Apps-supports-personalization-and-governance-of-AI-powered-generative.jpg" alt="amazon Q Apps data collection application” width=”82″ height=”53″/>
Conclusion
In this post, we discuss how these new features for amazon Q Apps on amazon Q Business make generative ai more customizable and governable for business users. From custom labels and verified apps to data collection and private sharing capabilities, these innovations enable organizations to create, manage, and share ai-powered apps that align with their specific business needs while maintaining appropriate controls.
For more information, see Building purpose-built amazon Q Apps.
About the author
Tiffany Myers is a Product Manager at AWS, where he leads the addition of new capabilities while maintaining the simplicity of amazon Q Business and amazon Q Apps, drawing inspiration from the adaptive intelligence of amphibians in the wild to help customers transform and evolve their businesses. through generative ai.
