Top 12 FAQ - Microsoft Power Platform

1.    What is Power Platform?

Power Platform consists of four main products from Microsoft namely; Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents. This entire suit of solutions today can empower any organization to rapidly build business applications and deploy the solution to end users with enterprise level security in a short time.

Power Apps is a rapid low code development environment for building custom mobile and web applications for various business requirements. It consists of many ready to use components like connectors, services and data service (Common Data Service or Dataverse) for storing and retrieving information from existing data sources as well. Power Apps provides a simple user interface so that all users including business users and developers could create these apps without any prior coding experience.

Power Automate is used to create automated workflows between applications and services. It helps automate repetitive business processes such as communication, data collections, and decision approvals. Enterprises needs advanced workflow engines and Power Automate could handle Enterprise grade process automations. Power Automate can be used simple task automations in emails to complex data integrations with disparate systems. 

Power BI was in existing for many years now, it is a business analytics service that delivers insights for analyzing data. The tool can share those insights through data visualizations which make up reports and dashboards to enable fast, informed decisions. Power BI was added to the Power Platform set of products as the analysis and insights leg.

Power Virtual Agents assists 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.

2.    What are power applications?

People refer to Power Platform as Power Applications. Power Platform is the name of all the solutions including Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Bi and Power Virtual Agents.

3.    Is Power Platform part of Office 365?

Power Platform is an independent set of solutions sold by Microsoft as separate SKU. Microsoft has provided Power Platform to certain Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plans. Example M365 E3, E5 and Office 365 E1, E3, E5 plans are the main SKUs which provides the Power Platform to the customers.

These customers using Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plans can use Power Platform provided to them. There is no limit on the number of applications. Customers can continue to run standalone Power Apps applications to extend and customize Microsoft 365 using standard connectors.

4.    Is Power Platform SAAS or PaaS?

Power Platform is a low code/no code application platform that allows enterprises to digitize business operations by easily building line of business applications. Since it’s a list of tools which is provided to build your own custom applications, it is classified as Platform as a Service.

5.    What is common data service?

Microsoft has renamed Common Data Service(CDS) as Dataverse. Dataverse lets you securely store and manage data that's used by business applications. Standard and custom tables within Dataverse provide a secure and cloud-based storage option for your data. Provides out of the box features to easily create business rules, logic, integration capabilities required for rapidly building data models and services.

6.    What is a common data platform?

There is nothing called a Common Data platform. Common data Service or Dataverse is having the Common Data Model which includes a set of standardized, extensible data schemas that Microsoft and its partners have published. This collection of predefined schemas includes entities, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships.

7.    What is the benefit of building a model driven app?

Model-driven apps start with your data model – building up from the shape of your core business data and processes in the Dataverse to model forms, views, and other components. Model-driven apps automatically generate a pre-defined UI that is responsive across devices.

Key benefits are as below:

• Model driven apps as built with the data model defined in Common Data Service as back end.
• Its highly scalable as it uses the relational database for storing the data.
• User could define various business process flows and add complex business rules to the application with least effort.
• It renders a responsive UI and can work on any device.
• Comes with standard features like Search, Column Filters, Advanced AND/OR search, import/export data, audit log, etc.
• You could write advanced pro developer codes as well.
• A canvas app could be embedded in a Model driven App.

8.   What is the common data model?

Common Data Model which includes a set of standardized, extensible data schemas that Microsoft and its partners have published. This collection of predefined schemas includes entities, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships. Refer the below link to know more about Common Data Model.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/

9.    What are Microsoft Biz Apps or Microsoft Business Applications?

Microsoft business applications consists of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solutions. Dynamics 365 includes the CRM and ERP solutions with various modules like Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Marketing, Operations, Finance. Power Platform consists of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI & Power Virtual Agents which is a low code/no code application platform that allows enterprises to easily building line of business applications.

10. What is an example of a business application system?

Any software or programs used by business users to perform various business functions, by which the productivity increases and could perform business functions more effectively.

Examples of such applications are Order management application, Quality process check application, Inspection or audit application which performs specific business functions and improves productivity.

11. What are the upcoming features of Power Platform?

Microsoft maintains a separate section to share the planned features as per the Power Platform road map. These include features planned by the product team based on customer inputs. You could access the same from the below link.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2021wave1/power-apps/planned-features

12. What are the Power Apps licenses available?

Power Apps comes primarily in four variants out of which two are the actual paid SKU’s available for customers to buy from Microsoft with an agreement or on a monthly model.

• Per App Plan – Helps the business to assign each user to run one app at a time.
• Per User Plan – Helps the business to assign each user to run unlimited applications.
• Power Apps for Office 365 or Microsoft 365 gives the customers the capability to use Power Apps (both web and mobile apps), with the Office 365 applications as the back end data store.
• Power Apps for Teams would give the Teams users to use the Power App from within Teams on the Teams App on the desktop, laptop or mobile with Dataverse available in Teams.

For pricing information visit; https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

There is more such articles planned on Low-Code No-Code development shall keep you all posted. In the meanwhile please check out the Sysfore Blog for various interesting articles.