INTRODUCTION TO POWER PLATFORM

What is the Microsoft Power Platform??

Power Platform is a strong business application platform that combines the strength of Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents to offer rapid and simple app creation and data insights. Although those are the four main applications, there are several supporting technologies that all apps can use, such as the AI builder and the Common Data Service database. Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365 are just a few of the secure and reliable Microsoft cloud services that Power Platform connects with low-code solutions.

Microsoft Power Platform ties together four best-in-class services: Power BI, Power Apps,?Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.

Power Apps?is a no-code / low code environment where you build mobile-friendly business apps. These apps connect to hundreds of popular third-party systems and even live in other Microsoft’s business applications, such as MS Teams.

Power BI?is Microsoft’s business analytics service. It provides real-time insights from data, dynamic or not, and it allows you to create rich visualizations and highly personalized reports on mobile and desktop.

Power Automate?is a workflow automation toolset. It allows you to automate business processes through templates, triggers, alerts, and RPA (Robotic Process Automation). All this can be done quickly and with no coding.

Power Virtual Agents?is a guided, no-code graphical interface where you easily create intelligent bots. These AI-powered capabilities help you deliver personalized bot conversations to resolve customer issues and automate common questions.

Benefits of Power Apps

Using the?Microsoft Power Apps Platform?is an excellent way to stand out among your competition and become more agile and efficient in your operations.?In addition, you will be able to use data and reporting to build custom applications. This, in turn, will help you automate business processes and personalize your operations.?The Power Platform provides several benefits for organizations include,

1. Increased Agility and Efficiency

Power Platform enables organizations to be more agile and efficient in their business operations. The platform’s?low code development environment?allows rapid application development through canvas and model-driven apps, which can help organizations get new applications and features to market faster.The platform’s cloud-based deployment model enables organizations to deploy applications and features quickly and easily.

2. Reduced Costs

The Power Platform can help organizations reduce application development and deployment costs. The platform’s low-code development environment enables organizations to develop applications without requiring expensive software licenses or hardware resources. In addition, it’s?cloud-based deployment model also eliminates the need for organizations to invest in on-premises infrastructure.

3. Improved Decision Making

The Power Platform’s business intelligence and data visualization capabilities can help organizations improve decision-making.

Power BI provides users with self-service data visualization and reporting capabilities that can help organizations gain insights into their business operations. The platform’s low-code development environment also enables organizations to develop custom applications that can help them automate and streamline their business processes.

4. Increased Customer Engagement

The Power Platform can help organizations increase customer engagement by allowing them to develop custom applications that meet the specific needs of their customers. The platform’s low-code development environment enables organizations to quickly develop and deploy custom applications. In addition, the platform’s cloud-based deployment model also makes it easy for organizations to deploy applications to customers.

5. The Power Platform Improves Employee Productivity

The Power Platform can help organizations improve employee productivity by allowing them to automate business processes. Power Automate is a cloud-based workflow service that enables users to automate business processes. The platform’s low-code development environment allows organizations to develop custom applications to help employees work more efficiently.

Microsoft Power Platform is a tool that allows businesses to create custom applications and workflows without coding. The platform comprises three main components: Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate.

Power App

Power Apps?is a nice and intuitive platform that provides users with a drag and drop feature to build a user interface for a mobile application. The users can add various controls to the user interface like textboxes, choice fields, etc. It can also allow users to use media devices like the camera, videos, etc. and other features necessary to build a modern mobile application. There is a feature to connect to various data sources using Power Apps and after the development is completed, the users just need to publish the app to be consumed in the organization.

Power Apps is offered more like a platform-as-a-service from the Microsoft Power Platform. This service enables the users to quickly build apps that can be run on any modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, etc. and on the native mobile apps using Android, iOS, or Windows. One important thing to note here is that using Power Apps, we can build mobile applications for internal users and not for customers around the world. As this platform is no code, developers won’t be able to control the UI elements or modify the underlying HTML codes to do any tweaking.

Power BI

Power BI is the self-service business analytics tool provided by Microsoft. This is considered a part of the Microsoft Power Platform together with the other tools in the bundle. Power BI has a few offerings starting from the Desktop version to the Power BI Service which is hosted on the cloud. It is usually used to connect to a wide range of data, by designing interactive reports, dashboards, or stories which are supported by compelling visualizations.

Power BI Desktop?is available for free download from the Microsoft Store and you can download the application on any Windows machine. At present, Power BI is not available for any other operating systems other than Windows. There is also a mobile application for Power BI, which can be installed on Android and iOS devices. This mobile app is used to visualize reports in a native mobile format rather than the specified desktop view.

Power Automate

Power Automate, formerly known as?Microsoft Flow?is a component of the Microsoft Power Platform that allows the business users to automate workflows within the organizations without writing any code for the same. Modern businesses always gearing up for a faster and automated environment to tackle most of the previously handled manual tasks. These tasks can be as simple as automating leave policies within an organization or sending an email once a task is completed in Jira.?

• Automated Workflow?– These types of workflows are triggered based on some other action. For example, send a mail when a task is completed
• Scheduled Workflow?– These workflows are scheduled to execute at specific times of the day, week, or month
• Button Workflow?– These workflows are triggered by the click of the button

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents is a new addition to the Microsoft Power Platform.?Virtual Agents?are the bot building services provided by Microsoft for business users. Using this, the users can build a virtual chat agent from scratch without having to write a single line of code. All the integration and logics can be implemented in the graphical user interface of the Power Virtual Agents portal.

Power Virtual Agents can handle the entire chatbot development life cycle, starting from the dialog creation to the deployment of the virtual agent to a channel like Slack, Skype, Teams, etc. This service is also integrated with the other tools within the Microsoft Power Platform such as Power Automate. Based on the user’s replies, the virtual agents are capable to trigger any workflow from the Power Automate and get the job done as intended.