Why the Power Platform?

On Reddit, the Power Platform forms, and other various blogs, you see time and time again people asking the simple question of why the Power Platform. The answers people give are meh or just a copy and paste from Microsoft on the reasoning orginizations should move to the Power Platform. Hopefully through this post I can start giving some insight on “Why the Power Platform” from a solution architect who has worked in both “Pro-Code” solutioning and now “Low-Code/No-Code” solutioning.

I assume that you have a little bit of knowledge on what the platform is, but maybe not the scoop on what it can do or how to think of it. It’s pretty easy to get into the mindset that this might be to good to be true, or this is to easy. Don’t we all want development to be kind of easy?

Let’s answer that last question, “How does the Power Platform make development easy?”

Take a standard project, for example; you have a discovery phase in which you gather many requirements for a specific business need. There’s an end-user who needs to be able to input some data, a middle-of-office user who reviews some data, and a C-Suite user who wants reports (we all know they always want to see reports). In normal development, you would probably wind up creating a singular web app that may or may not be using microservices to do everything you need it to do.

The beauty of the Power Platform is it lets us start breaking down apps into small or large ones to fulfill the need of one type of business user. The end user inputting data would live in their app built for their need. We can do this because we can rapidly develop what they need using low-code; maybe you need to involve a PCF component which makes it more “Pro-Code,” but we can get into that in a bit. Most likely, this user would be living in a Canvas app, hopefully, connected to Dataverse, to store the data.

Then you have the middle office person reviewing data and possibly doing minor data manipulation, or maybe a lot. They would have their little app fulfilling their own need. These users are usually moved into a model-driven app that connects directly to Dataverse and makes viewing, editing, and reporting on data relatively easy.

This architecture right here is beautiful, in my opinion. I have come up with solutions for eight business users who all rely on a singular data source, all doing slightly other things, but all in their apps! To me, it’s incredible. The time to build 8 different apps was sub eight months, which included robust testing, end-user acceptance, and having fun.

So let’s get back to “Why the Power Platform?” The platform allows you to break down “Apps” (I like to view the app as the data source) into minimal apps that fulfill a singular user. What you get then is super easy to manage because you know user A is only using user A’s app, so if something goes wrong for user A, you know exactly where to look. You can also get highly creative solutions with the three baseline starts, Canvas, Model-Driven, and Power Pages. Each fits within the other, but the key is to start thinking about apps as users.

All in all, the Power Platform is powerful, and I mean it. Suppose you have any questions feel free to reach out. I love to chat about these things and am always willing to talk about misconceptions with people or guide them to being successful.