Today’s businesses rely on data to make informed decisions. This includes the entry of payroll data, documentation about current processes, and analysis of that data to reach conclusions. Budgets and IT resources can prevent people from trying new approaches and taking risks when it comes to innovation. Sometimes, there is not enough space for a new initiative.
Microsoft is the market leader in enterprise apps and tools because of its large range of tools. Microsoft has also developed Microsoft Power Platform, a no-code/low code suite of products that allows users to perform three data-driven processes: Act, Analyze, and Automate. Power Platform includes Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate (formerly Flow) as well as Power Virtual Agent and Power Virtual Agent. These three solutions work together to allow users at all levels to harness data’s full potential.
What is the Microsoft Power Platform?
Microsoft Power Platform is a powerful suite of applications that allows you to automate processes and develop solutions, analyze data, create virtual agents, and more. The idea for the Power Platform was born out of the realization that organizations have an increasing amount of data all around them. Power Platform is based on the belief that data can be used to gain insights and drive intelligent business processes.
The Microsoft Power Platform is made up of four components:
Power Apps – Allows you to quickly and efficiently create custom applications without having to learn programming skills
Power BI – A data-analytical tool that connects to data sources, visualizes data, and assists in gathering business intelligence
Power Automate (formerly Flow) is an automation template that can be customized and automated for common automation processes.
Power Virtual Agents – allows you to create your chatbots completely from scratch
Let’s take a look at each tool in greater detail and see what they can do to improve your company’s operations.
Power Apps
Power Apps is a way to build applications that don’t require extensive development and take only a few months. Power Apps users are able to build both low-code or no-code applications. It takes very little code to create a sophisticated, intelligent application that incorporates your business’s logic. These applications, along with the other Power Platform solutions, can be used on a variety of devices including Android phones or iOS operating system, your laptop, tablet or desktop, the internet, or anywhere online. You can create highly customized tasks that give you an immersive experience, starting with your data and model and continuing through your business processes. This includes consuming data across different devices and building model-driven apps or canvas apps from multiple sources.
Power Apps and the whole Power Platform are concerned with security. Power Apps offer high enterprise security, administration, control, and management. You can also manage them with Azure Active Director to implement multifactor authentication settings. The Power Platform applications have one key feature: you can connect almost any data and integrate it across your existing systems, so you can extend your solution. You can use the data in Dynamics 365 to connect it to an app you have created and then utilize the information you get.
Power BI
Power BI is a data analysis tool that allows you to connect to data sources, visualize data, and assist in gathering business intelligence. It can create simple charts, dashboards, dashboards, and maps from data. It does this to make it easy to understand. Power BI makes it easy to visualize data graphically. Drag and drop allows you to access a variety of visualization elements.
Power BI has common data sources. These include your SQL database, Dynamics environment or data coming from file servers such as Excel. All of these data sources and methods can be linked to create one image. Power BI dashboards can pull data from Microsoft platforms, but they can also integrate with other cloud-based services.
Automated Power
Power Automate allows you to automate basic tasks and eliminate any potential errors. Power Automateis a workflow automation tool that allows you to link multiple systems and transform data. These could be simple automation or more complex scenarios such as creating branches, having different trigger actions and responses.
Power Automate offers a variety of features. Some of these features are already available in the Microsoft Cloud applications.