Building A Better Web for Business
With all the "decentralized" hype around Web3, it can be difficult to remember the cycles that preceded the current web. Whether walled gardens or the open web, the biggest impediment to getting onto the internet for many consumers and businesses was the lack of an easy to use web page building experience.
Many tools came and went. (So long FrontPage!) Just as web sites became less filled with blinky text and more responsive, they began to transform from personal pages into something every corporation had by default. Folks moved from simple sites, to blogging platforms plus RSS and then to social media in herds, but the core need around building a web page remained, for both personal and commercial use.
At their heart, most websites are simply connective tissue linking individuals to the services or information offered by a provider. Stored on a database and served up via some middleware, the infrastructure itself has long seemed passe. But if websites are so easy to build, and organizations are still struggling with them, what's the blocker? The devil is, of course, in the details.
Microsoft's latest entrant into this space, built on top of Dataverse, begins to answer many of these questions. "Power Pages" - the latest in a line of "Power Platform" products (joining Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, etc.) - aims to make it easy for staff at most organizations to spin up quick sites, tied to business data repositories without needing to learn extensive coding or infrastructure.
It has been a long time coming - it's been seven years since Microsoft acquired Adxstudio and began this journey. Originally tied to Dynamics 365 instances, they were later positioned as merely "Power Portals" tied to the Power Platform. This latest refresh brings them front and center as a standalone way to quickly tie business information into a website that will solve a common problem.
That is, after all, what the entire premise of the "low code/no code" revolution has announced: that individuals inside an organization no longer need to be experts at identity, or databases, or networking in order to solve a business challenge. And the apps that they develop (including, yes, websites!) won't break the next time a service is changed. With a few button clicks, an individual can select a template and get running.
Don't know how the site works? Microsoft is happy to train these citizen developers as well on the underlying concepts. Simply pop into the "Learn" section to get up to speed on the tool itself, as well as Dataverse concepts to allow the site to really shine.
Importantly, learning includes sections on Security and Administration - but the thrust of both of those pages is to emphasize fairly high-level notions of access and consumption monitoring. Many of the common issues that bedevil web designers today, from a focus on securing front-end servers, to ensuring backend databases are kept at a secure patch level are all abstracted away in this model. A website may not sound like a "SaaS" product - but all the heavy lifting is being done on the platform side, without slowing the developer down.
Ultimately, that's what makes the "Power Pages" model so attractive - unlike simpler responsive web applications Microsoft has developed (e.g. Sway) - a Power Page isn't meant to simply tell a story - it's meant to solve a business problem by interacting with systems of record connected to Dataverse. That spans a diverse set of stakeholders and solutions: everything from a new employee onboarding checklist, to a event registration system for a conference, to an application submission system for new hires. Each of these involves pieces of data that live inside internal systems, that connecting them to websites might require a team of developers working for weeks to build a solution for.
Now you can do the same thing, but faster. And yes - you can change themes and colors easily. Some things about those early WYSIWYG days remain the same!