Microsoft Power Platform
Powering your app dev and automation needs
What is the Microsoft Power Platform?
The Power Platform is a low-code PaaS (Platform as a Service) offered by Microsoft. The Power Platform offers five main components to be used by app developers with and without programming experience alike:
- Power BI for Business Analytics and Data Visualisation
- Power Apps for Business App Development
- Power Automate for Process Automation
- Power Virtual Agents for Chatbots other interactive NLP-based services
- Power Pages for allowing users even outside an organisation to interact with Business Apps of the organisation, either by logging in or anonymously
The best part is that these platforms can be used independently or even in combination with each other!
Why should you use the Power Platform?
Let’s consider some cases in which you’d like to use each of the components of the Power Platform, either together or separate from each other.
Power BI
Business Scenario 1: You have a huge dataset in an RDBMS (like SQL or even BigTable by Google Cloud), and you want to analyse and show your manager the Year-over-Year Sales and Revenue data for the products sold by your organisation
Business Scenario 2: You want to create an interactive dashboard for an important meeting held by the Board of Directors, where business decisions will be made by taking into consideration the data analysed by you
Power BI is the perfect solution to such tasks. Power BI has a plethora of tools and services which may be used:
- DAX Measures: Calculated attributes derived from the data
- Visualisations: Bar Graphs, Pie Charts, Bubble Charts, Line Plots, Scatter Plots and many more
- Python/R Visuals: Visualisation Objects programmed in Python/R imported into PowerBI
- Data Management: Star and Snowflake Schemas, Relationship management panels
- Global and Local Drill-Down: Zooming in and out of a chart or visual, or applying custom filters on the data used to make the visuals
- Dashboards: All visuals can be published online on a Dashboard with hierarchical security access levels. Viewers can also ask questions in Natural Language and Power BI will filter out the results using NLP
Power Apps and Power Pages
Business Scenario 1: You want to create an inventory management application for your Logistics and Supply Chain organisation, where you can monitor, update and share details and status of your warehouses within your team
Business Scenario 2: You want to share this portal with your suppliers outside your organisation, but want to limit their access level and actions they can perform on the app
Power Apps is the perfect platform for these tasks. It offers multiple features and customisations such as:
- Multiple Screens and Layouts: Responsive Layouts for both Landscape and Portrait viewport devices
- Canvas Apps: If you want to be in control of each and every step of development and how your app will look and function, Power Apps allows to start with a Blank Canvas and build the app from scratch
- Data-Driven Apps: If you already have a database with your data, you can ask Power Apps to generate its own basic application based on your data, then modify it as you need to include or remove features and actions
- Model-Driven Apps: If you have a certain dataset which you want to keep as the basis of your application and also allow updates through this app, Power Apps allows you to create an app based on a data model
- Portals: If you want to share your application with users outside your organisation, you can integrate the Power Apps with Power Pages, and create an app allowing external users to perform a controlled set of actions on the app
Power Automate
Business Scenario 1: You receive huge amounts of data in the form of bills and invoices from manufacturers who request raw materials from your organisation. You want to automate the processing of these bills and storing the important information into your database with minimal human involvement
Business Scenario 2: You want a sequence of actions to be performed automatically on your local machine or desktop when a certain trigger event occurs
Power Automate allows you to perform such tasks, by setting trigger events on Power Automate, either online or on your desktop. It offers two categories of event flows:
- Cloud Flows: Can be triggered manually or based on particular events such as New Material Request Received, then Power Automate can generate an automated Email replying to this request stating that the materials request has been successfully posted
- Desktop Flows: Can be used to perform similar automation tasks on the web or browsers, or on desktop applications
Power Automate can also be integrated into Power Apps, just like Power BI and Power Pages
Power Virtual Agents
Business Scenario 1: You need to develop a bot which facilitates the training and onboarding of interns at your organisation. You want this process to be easy to understand and set up, while also requiring minimal human intervention from your end during training.
Business Scenario 2: You want clients and/or customers on your website to be able to get answers to their questions using Natural Language, just like they would speak with one of your client-facing representatives
Power Virtual Agents allows tackling both of these problems by offering the Microsoft Bot Framework and a low-code development environment to build and manage these bots. The capabilities of the bots may also be extended by
- Building Bot Framework Skills
- Using the Bot Framework Composer
Conclusion
We see that the Microsoft Power Platform is a robust set of tools on a well-integrated platform, on which each component can function independently and also in combination with others.
The full potential of the Power Platform can be unlocked with subscriptions to each service being used for the Business Logic and App Development, but for learners, just a Microsoft 365 Account or Outlook Account can also be enough.
If you think your business can benefit from using the Power Platform, feel free to go through the free resources offered by Microsoft on their blogs and documentation, or even videos online to learn how to make the best use of the PaaS.
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