Intro to Microsoft Power Platform

TL;DR It is sometimes hard to understand what exactly Power Platform is. This brief summary lists Power Platform components in hopes to illustrates their usefulness.

Modern businesses run on data. Users interact with data daily from entering their time for payroll, seeking guidance on existing processes, and analyzing data to make decisions. In our technology driven world, users can be empowered to gain insights from and interact with data all while automating those menial responsibilities that seem to be more burden than job task. Microsoft Power Platform enables your business to craft solutions while empowering you to unite customized technology to help everyone, from the CEO to the front-line workers, drive the business with data.

Power Apps

Power Apps provides a rapid low code development environment for building custom apps for business needs. It has services, connectors, and a scalable data service and app platform (Microsoft Dataverse) to allow simple integration and interaction with existing data. Power Apps enables the creation of web and mobile applications that run on all devices.

People use apps for every area of their lives, and business should be no exception. Most out of the box solutions do not 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

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, Power Automate 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

Power BI (Business Intelligence) is a business analytics service that delivers insights for analyzing 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 makes the most sense to users. A Power BI dashboard could potentially replace a standing meeting to report out on company metrics such as sales data, progress against goals, or employee performance.

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents 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.

Cross Cutting Features

Among the programs listed above, there are 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.

Data Connectors

Microsoft Power Platform is made powerful by its ability to leverage data across many platforms. To do this, components of Microsoft Power Platform use connectors. You can think of connectors as a bridge from your data source to your app or workflow which allows information to be conveyed back and forth. Connectors allow you to extend your business solutions across platforms and add functionality for your users.

Data Sources: the two types of data sources are tabular and function-based. Tabular data - A tabular data source is one that returns data in a structured table format. Power Apps can directly read and display these tables through galleries, forms, and other controls. Examples include Microsoft Dataverse, SharePoint, and SQL Server. A function-based data source is one that uses functions to interact with the data source. These functions can be used to return a table of data but offer more extensive action such as the ability to send an email, update permissions, or create a calendar event. Examples include Office 365 Users, Project Online, and Azure Blob Storage.

Connectors: Connectors are the bridges from your data source to your app, workflow, or dashboard. Microsoft Power Platform has more than 275 connectors available to common data sources. Connectors are divided into standard and premium. Some popular standard connectors are SharePoint, Outlook, and YouTube. Premium connectors require additional licensing for your app and/or users. A few premium connectors are SQL Server, Survey Monkey, and Mail Chimp. Connectors can provide input and output between the data source and Power Platform.

Data loss prevention, compliance, privacy, and accessibility

Data loss prevention policies

App users generally have good intentions, but they can easily overlook the potential for exposure from data leakage to services and audiences that should not have access to the data. You can create data loss prevention (DLP) policies that can act as guardrails to help prevent users from unintentionally exposing organizational data. DLP policies can be scoped at the environment level or tenant level, offering flexibility to craft sensible policies that strike the right balance between protection and productivity. For tenant-level policies, you can define the scope to be all environments, selected environments, or all environments except ones you specifically exclude.

Compliance and data privacy

To help your organization comply with national, regional, and industry-specific requirements governing the collection and use of individuals’ data, Microsoft provides the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings (including certifications and attestations) of any cloud service provider. There are also tools for administrators to support your organization’s efforts.

Data Protection

Data as it is in transit between user devices and the Microsoft datacenters are secured. Connections established between customers and Microsoft datacenters are encrypted, and all public endpoints are secured using industry-standard TLS. TLS effectively establishes a security-enhanced browser to server connection to help ensure data confidentiality and integrity between desktops and datacenters. API access from the customer endpoint to the server is also similarly protected. Currently, TLS 1.2 (or higher) is required for accessing the server endpoints.

Accessibility in Microsoft Power Platform

One of the things that Microsoft values the most is making sure that Power Platform is accessible and inclusive to all kinds of users all over the world. An accessible canvas app will allow users with vision, hearing, and other impairments to successfully use the app. In addition to being a requirement for many governments and organizations, following the below guidelines increases usability for all users, regardless of their abilities. You can use the Accessibility Checker to help review potential accessibility issues in your app.