How to improve your business with the Power Platform

Unless you are a Microsoft partner or system administrator, we would not be surprised if you have never heard of Power Platform.

While most people are familiar with Word, Excel, Outlook and so on, Power Platform is one of the more overlooked features of Microsoft, with many people unaware of the benefits it can bring to their business. Many people are unaware of its existence.

There are a few potential reasons for its relative obscurity. One is its title; the title doesn't precisely explain its purpose or the impact it could have on you as a business owner. Another is that unlike Microsoft Word, SharePoint, or Dynamics, Power Platform isn't a single product. Rather, it is a range of integrated tools designed to unlock the potential of your other Microsoft applications.

Power Platform includes different services intended for various business challenges:

• Power BI – Make better informed, confident business decisions by putting data-driven insights into everyone's hands.
• Power Apps – Turn ideas into organisational solutions by enabling everyone to build custom apps that solve business challenges.
• Power Pages – Quickly build low-code business websites for delivering vital information and services to your customers.
• Power Automate – Boost business productivity to get more done by allowing everyone to automate organisational processes.
• Power Virtual Agents – Easily build chatbots to engage conversationally with your customers and employees – no coding required.

Benefits of Microsoft Power Apps for your business

The beauty of using PowerApps to build your own business application is it enables you to create a bespoke solution that best serves your organisation's needs. A few examples include:

• Staff holiday allowance: Create an app for employees to input their holiday requests. Introduce an approval procedure from Power Automate to approve or reject submissions.
• Event registration: An event registration app enables attendees to register and check-in, automatically collecting their details in your database.
• Employee expenditure: An employee expenses app allowing your employees to enter details of any costs and attach photographs of receipts for easy tracking.

The nature of Power Apps means that a solution can be built for any inefficiencies within your business.

Its low-code approach to app development is what truly sets Power Apps apart from other offerings. Essentially anyone can build an app, even without technical experience. Although it is worth noting that there's quite a learning curve for those who want to develop their own apps, unless you're an experienced developer, you should work with your Microsoft Partner to design and build anything complicated.?

Conventional app development can be costly and time-consuming in comparison to Power Apps. A recent Forrester study found that, due to its low-code capabilities, the average cost to develop an app is 70% less with PowerApps and Power Automate in particular. Another bonus of this low-code approach is that it is much faster to deploy an app than traditional development methods, as development time can be kept to a minimum.

But low-code is only part of the Power Platform story. By leveraging PowerApps with the Microsoft Office family: Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and SharePoint, you can leverage its broad capabilities like connectivity, creating and sharing emails, contacts, lists, libraries, calendars, files and data from anywhere and any device.

With all these benefits, you can expect to hear more about Power Platform in the years ahead.?

Is your business seeking a bespoke solution to the challenges facing your business? Visit our website, or contact us today at: 02036 952848