Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft Power Platform allows your business teams to work together effectively on challenges by analyzing data, building technology solutions, automating processes, and creating virtual agents.

Overview of Microsoft Power Platform

Power Platform combines the robust power of PowerApps, PowerBI, and Power Automate into one powerful business application platform. They provide the means to help people easily manipulate, surface, automate and analyse data and can be used with Office 365 and Dynamics 365 (as well as other third-party apps and other Microsoft services). The Power Platform is possible thanks to the Common Data Service (or CDS), which is essentially the underlying data platform that provides a unified and simplified data schema so that applications and services can inter-operate.

Microsoft Power Platform Components

Power BI is a business analytics tool which allows you to easily connect to data sources, create visuals and gain business intelligence quickly. It allows you to:

  • Click and connect with Microsoft and third-party cloud services, as well as on-premise data sources
  • Easily manipulate data and create visuals, such as charts, dashboards, maps and many more – so you can present your data in an easy-to-digest format
  • Use natural language to query data and get results (i.e. “show me our sales pipeline for 2021 by month, by sales person”)
  • Overall, allowing you to easily analyse and make sense of complex data to enable continual improvement

PowerApps is a low-code approach to custom app development, allowing users to quickly create apps with a ‘point and click’ approach. It allows you to:

  • Build mobile-friendly apps quickly and without development knowledge and reducing pressure on busy IT teams
  • Connect to and surface data from your business applications, such as Dynamics 365 and Office 365 (and also third-party apps)
  • Surface key data into a user-friendly app to help data entry – meaning users only see the information they need to fulfil a particular task

Power Automate allows you to create automated workflows between your Microsoft services or other third-party applications, which allows staff to avoid carrying out repetitive tasks and save valuable time. It allows you to:

  • Use pre-built automation templates for common automations (within the Flow Gallery)
  • Create own automations by connecting various applications, such as Outlook, SharePoint Dynamics 365 or non-Microsoft apps like Twitter, Asana, Gmail, MailChimp etc.
  • Set up triggers, alerts, automated emails, push notifications and much more – with no coding and in minutes.
  • Overall it allows you to save time, reduce human error and streamline your processes.

Power Virtual Agents allows you to create bots that can help answer questions from your customers, employees, or viewers of your website. These powerful chatbots use built-in content building blocks, trigger phrases, and pre-authored bot conversations to keep you connected in real-time.

  • Faster and better bot building.
  •  Build, deploy, host, and manage your bot – all using our intuitive web interface
  • Add your bot anywhere – website, mobile app, Facebook, Teams or more
  •  Connect to your backend with a few clicks using the hundreds of Power Platform connectors – or call APIs and custom workflows using Flow
  • Integrated with Azure Cognitive Services.

Why your organization needs Microsoft Power Platform

All Enterprise Business Processes in a Single Platform

Given the importance of data in our digital age, it’s critical for your organization to have a single version of truth from all of your data, reporting, and planning silos.

Whether this is a data warehouse or tabular data model, how do you unleash this huge potential across your entire organization, beyond the traditional “running a report?” Data-driven enterprises know they need a cyclical approach that includes business processes to Analyze, Automate, Act, and Iterate.

Microsoft Power Platform aids this difficult problem that many organizations struggle with, providing an enterprise-grade platform to empower any organization—even those who typically use multiple disparate tools.

Self-Service for Easy Adoption and Use

Traditionally, to make full use of many enterprise business applications, you end up leaning heavily on your IT department or IT-savvy people in your department. Previously the technical learning curve of business applications restricted non-IT professionals in finance, marketing, sales, etc. from fully unleashing the wealth of insights in their data. Using something like Azure on their own was out of the question.

With its no-code/low code approach, Microsoft Power Platform makes it significantly easier to generate deep insights from data, deploy rich applications, create powerful workflows, automations, and leverage AI.

These capabilities are intuitive and achievable through a simple drag-and-drop. Your citizen developers can easily start creating and deploying, while your end-users adopt and use all features with zero (or minimal) involvement from your IT department.

Benefits of Microsoft Power Platform

Power BI brings the business agility by enabling stakeholders quickly analyze business data. Power Apps provide point solutions for many manually performed processes, and Automate builds the connectivity to get the data from it is point of origination to the point of action.

Bring data from all your sources from every eco-system into one powerful platform. There is no need for custom components for these integrations. Moreover, you can make this data available to any other application.

Power Apps can employ business logic to make sure all form fields needed are filled out before the request is sent. We can provide users with dropdown fields or option choices Vs free text. The type of request can trigger who the form is sent to, ensuring accuracy and preventing forms from getting lost and/or being sent to the wrong person(s).

Many organizations face new or changing compliance needs. When we automate processes with Power Apps and Power Automate, we ensure a specific process is being followed. We can control access to the process and resulting data, and we can know exactly where all the data and records for that process reside. This makes it very easy to prove compliance with standards and modify the process if the standards change.

Rapidly creates custom, containerized, no-code / low-code applications that meet different business and user group needs. These apps work on both desktops and mobile devices.

Leverage the powerful Azure cloud to integrate and bring all your apps on the powerful cloud platform for stability, security, and scalability.

Learn more about Microsoft Power Platform?

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