Although we live in a data driven world, the business can find it difficult to take advantage of the data we have access to. Microsoft Power Platform can transform the way businesses work.
Power Platform is a low-code platform by Microsoft, relies on azure which leverages the potentials of Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents to create innovative business solutions. It allows you to analyse data, develop better applications, respond to the generated insights, and automate various processes without any deep technical expertise.
It helps everyone, from the CEO to the front-line workers, drive the business with data.
Why MS Power Platform?
Power Platform provides low-code tools for teams to stay agile and build solutions which requires minimal or no technical expertise that move your business forward.
- Connected tools
It comes with the ability to work easily together by integrating Microsoft cloud services, business applications, and other data sources using a set of available connectors.
- Security and compliance
All the tools in the Microsoft Power Platform are built on Azure, hence each inherits the same enterprise-grade security, certifications, and administrative controls trusted by businesses across the world.
- Limitless possibilities
Power platform has built-in connectivity to services like GitHub and AI Builder. So professional developer can develop custom applications that span a full range of complex requirements.
Successful solutions using Power Platform
In G&J Pepsi, Power Automate automates the repetitive tasks and processes and boosts productivity and increase efficiency. The company created efficiencies and saved $1.5 million by combining Power Automate with Power BI and Power Apps.
Toyota uses Power BI to drive confident decision-making through insights derived from their real-time data. By utilising the combined use of Power platform components, the company quickly created a travel approval, tracking, and reporting system.
San Diego Workforce Partnership assist more displaced job seekers by creating AI-powered chatbots with Power Virtual Agents that enable scaling of their mission. The virtual agents handling 75 percent of inbound inquires.
T-Mobile manages complex initiatives with low-code systems, employing Power Apps along with Power BI and Power Automate. The company manages and turn ideas into organisational solutions by giving everyone the tools to build apps.
The Core Components of Microsoft Power Platform
Power Platform has four major components:
Power Apps
It provides a rapid low code development environment for building custom apps for business needs. It allows easy integration and interaction with existing data, as it has services, connectors, and a scalable data service and app platform (Microsoft Dataverse). The applications developed using Power Apps can be run on both web and mobile devices across all platforms namely Android, iOS etc. Power Apps platform provides out of the box solutions which meet exact business needs or integrate well with other business programs. Power Apps eases users into app development with a simple interface so that every business user or pro developer can build custom apps
Power Automate
Lets users create automated workflows between applications and services. It helps automate repetitive business processes such as communication, data collections, and decision approvals.
Don't waste important productive hours on drafting the same email for a weekly update or walking approvals through. Not only for the individual user, but Power Automate also allows for the creation of enterprise-grade process automation. Power Automate's simple interface allows every level of user to automate work tasks - from beginners to seasoned developers.
Power BI (Business Intelligence)
A business analytics service that delivers insights for analysing data. It can share those insights through data visualizations which make up reports and dashboards to enable fast, informed decisions. Power BI scales across an organization, and it has built-in governance and security allowing businesses to focus on using data more than managing it.
You can consider Power BI as the analysis and insights leg of Microsoft Power Platform. It takes business data and allows you to display it in ways that make the most sense to users. A Power BI dashboard could potentially replace a standing meeting to report on company metrics such as sales data, progress against goals, or employee performance.
Power Virtual Agents:
It enables anyone to create powerful chatbots using a guided, no-code graphical interface, without the need for data scientists or developers.
It minimizes the IT effort required to deploy and maintain a custom solution by empowering subject matter experts to build and maintain their own conversational solutions. Power Virtual Agents is part of Microsoft Power Platform, therefore integration into existing systems is streamlined with out-of-the-box integration with Power Automate and its ecosystems of hundreds of connectors. Users can enable chatbots to perform an action by simply calling a Power Automate flow. Flows help users automate activities or call back-end systems. Users can utilize existing flows that have been created in their Power Apps environment or they can create a flow within Power Virtual Agents authoring canvas.
There are some cross cutting features which enable Microsoft Power Platform to be leveraged to its full potential. Some of these are:
AI Builder lets users and developers add AI capabilities to the workflows and Power Apps they create and use. AI Builder is a turnkey solution that allows you to easily add intelligence to your workflows and apps and predict outcomes to help improve business performance without writing code.
Microsoft Dataverse is a scalable data service and app platform which lets users securely store and manage data from multiple sources and integrate that data in business applications using a common data model to ensure ease and consistency to users. Microsoft Dataverse is the common currency that enables the components of Microsoft Power Platform to work together. It’s the foundation that enables the consolidation, display, and manipulation of data.
Connectors enable you to connect apps, data, and devices in the cloud. Consider connectors the bridge across which information and commands travel. There are more than 275 connectors for Microsoft Power Platform, enabling all of your data and actions to connect cohesively. Examples of popular connectors include Salesforce, Office 365, Twitter, Dropbox, Google services, and more.
The Power Platform Language
Why does a low code platform need a language? The truth is, point-and-click tools are great for quickly assembling experiences and workflows, but many real-world solutions need a layer of logic that goes beyond what is practical to drag and drop.
Microsoft Power Fx is a free and open-source low-code, general-purpose, strong-typed, declarative, and functional programming language for expressing logic across the MS Power Platform. The programming language was first announced at Ignite 2021 and the specification was released in March 2021.
Power Fx is expressed in human-friendly text. It's a low-code language that makers can work with directly in an Excel-like formula bar or Visual Studio Code text window. The "low" in low-code is due to the concise and simple nature of the language, making common programming tasks easy for both makers and developers. It describes business logic in concise, yet powerful, formulas that are independent. Most logic can be reduced to a single line, with plenty of expressiveness and control for more complex needs. The goal is to keep to a minimum the number of concepts a maker needs to understand—ideally, no more than an Excel user would already know.
Power Fx is a declarative language, just as Excel is. The maker defines what behaviour they want, but it's up to the system to determine and optimize how and when to accomplish it. To make that practical, most work is done through pure functions without side effects, making Power Fx also a functional language (again, just as Excel is).
An incremental compiler is used to continuously keep the program in sync with the data it's operating on. Changes are automatically propagated through the program's graph, affecting the results of dependent calculations, which might drive properties on controls such as color or position. The incremental compiler also provides a rich formula editing experience with IntelliSense, suggestions, autocomplete, and type checking.
Advantages of Microsoft Power Platform
- Allows You to Manage All Business Processes in a Single Platform
With the help of MS Power Platform’s end-to-end capabilities, you can integrate all your Office365 applications with additional external data sources to allow for seamless management of enterprise data.
- Allows You to Work across Devices
Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate can be used individually or collectively on any desktop, tablet, or handheld device as per your needs. You can also leverage native device capabilities like GPS and camera to your benefit when using the Microsoft Power Platform apps on them.
- Comes With Office 365 Integration
As you enable end-to-end capabilities with Microsoft Power Platform, the data collected can be managed using SharePoint, Excel, or any other Office 365 app depending upon your needs and preferences. This not only allows you to seamlessly manage enterprise data but also simplifies everyday business processes and tasks.
- Reduces Your Dependency on Third-Party Tools
MS Power Platform consolidates powerful analytics, design, development, and automation tools in one suit. It eliminates the need for separate software licensing and maintenance, which further eases the stress from your IT staff while keeping the costs in control.
- Designed for All Kinds of Users
They are code-free to allow all kinds of users without any weighty technical proficiency in designing and developing business applications to solve their existing problems. On the other hand, IT professionals can employ the tools to create advanced business solutions.
With its no-code/low code approach, Microsoft Power Platform makes it significantly easier to generate deep insights from data, deploy rich applications, create powerful workflows, automations, and leverage AI. These capabilities are intuitive and achievable through a simple drag-and-drop. In short, MS Power Platform gives everyone the power to innovate.
