If you’re looking for a collaborative and innovative suite of applications that empowers your organization to streamline, automate, and improve application development and management with little to no code involved, the Microsoft Power Platform is the answer for you!
The Power Platform provides efficient and flexible solutions that enable users to build new applications, optimize existing ones, improve digital transformation efforts, and enhance productivity across your workplace.
Read on to learn more about Microsoft Power Platform and how our senior-level Microsoft Dynamics consultants can help your organization maximize success.
What is the Power Platform?
Microsoft Power Platform is an easy-to-use platform that facilitates teamwork across the entire organization and improves data analysis, management, and visualization for critical data sources. It has various low and no-code tools to rapidly automate business procedures and build apps for different use cases.
The Power Platform combines highly accessible and inclusive capabilities for everyday business use, enabling the development of innovative, end-to-end business solutions that boost shareholder value and expedite company expansion. The Power Platform allows users to leverage business data and insights to drive business processes and improve accessibility across teams and departments.
The Power Platform has five primary applications:
- Power BI
- Power Pages
- Power Apps
- Power Automate
- Power Virtual Agents
These tools allow businesses to streamline operations, analyze data, create new websites, access virtual assistants, and customize applications to meet critical business requirements when used together.
Low-code solutions from the Power Platform seamlessly integrate with other Microsoft Cloud services, including Dynamics 365 CRM, Azure Cloud, and the Microsoft 365 Productivity Suite.
Through intelligent integration, users can increase the return on investment for their current cloud investments and extend the functionality of their existing technology solutions to achieve business objectives.
Applications in the Microsoft Power Platform
The five applications included in the Power Platform can be used separately or in conjunction with each other to foster creativity and improve efficiency and flexibility. Together, these tools use comprehensive, fully integrated security, management, and compliance features already in the platform.
Power BI
Power BI is considered the platform’s “Analyze” tool. It enables enterprise teams to quickly and intelligently extract actionable insights from various data sets to support well-informed business decisions.
Users can also leverage connections with other Power Platform products, like Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents, to capture data and improve analytics across systems.
Power Pages
Power Pages offers a straightforward method for creating a safe, low-code company website. Any business user can develop a professional website that leverages pre-made themes, lists, data forms, and example data visualizations to offer a positive, engaging site experience.
The Power Pages platform also included professional development tools, like those used by experienced website developers to create intelligent sites. These solutions, including Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and Azure DevOps, offer more sophisticated features and deeper functionality to improve web development and efficiency.
To maintain data security, Power Pages incorporates intelligent compliance and governance features and role-based access control (RBAC) to improve the design and development of critical business sites. Additionally, Power Pages integrates with Microsoft Dataverse, enabling users to gather, organize, and store visitor data and share it with internal and external stakeholders.
Power Apps
Power Apps is a collection of low-code tools for creating unique business applications. With the Power Platform’s PowerApps tool, any technical or non-technical business users can quickly and easily accomplish the following tasks:
- Create professional apps to solve specific business problems.
- Build automated workflows to improve the efficiency of critical manual operations.
- Establish connections with various data sources to support better decision-making.
- Integrate dashboards into apps to drive better, more transparent insights.
Power Automate
Power Automate, formerly Microsoft Flow, is a collection of no-code automation tools designed to automate corporate procedures and simplify tedious manual tasks. In addition to pre-built connectors, templates, and an AI assistant for quick, safe automation, the Power Automate platform offers drag-and-drop tools for enhanced data visibility and accessibility. Connectors increase the capabilities of all low-code Power Platform solutions and streamline business operations throughout the entire organization.
Business users can visualize and record end-to-end processes, enable more efficient process automation, and enhance task-mining operations with the help of Power Automate’s Process Advisor tool.
To design workflows without guessing which business areas to automate, the Power Automate tool also offers personalized recommendations for improved functionality and efficiency.
Its sophisticated, low-code AI Builder improves workflows and increases automation intelligence across the organization. With the AI Builder, users can incorporate robust language models into their existing technical landscape to design intuitive processes and develop original scenarios for various business operations.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents can be used to create intelligent chatbots that converse with both customers and staff members – no complex coding knowledge is needed.
With embedded AI capabilities and a user-friendly graphical interface, It’s quicker to design, test, and publish bots and adapt them for various languages and use cases. Chatbots can also be implemented in multiple digital channels, such as Microsoft Teams, social media, websites, mobile apps, and any other channel supported by the Azure Bot Foundation.
Power Virtual Agents enable safe scalability, dependable compliance and governance, and efficient data management by integrating security roles and maintaining uniform administration across environments. Organizations can also continuously improve their bots by using natural language processing (NLP) to enable self-learning AI and automatically monitor key performance indicators (KPIs).
The Common Data Model
Power Platform’s uniform data model makes data sharing between apps and organizational units simple. This approach combines existing data with intelligent business logic, enabling machine learning apps and AI algorithms to generate actionable and understandable insights. The Microsoft data model also uses intuitive metadata definitions for all data sources to facilitate better communication between teams, applications, and solutions.
The data model can boost business productivity on individual, team, and corporate levels while saving valuable time and money in the process. Users can leverage the common data model to create efficient, cutting-edge analytics applications that operate on a common understanding of data and utilize a standard schema to unify data and enhance insights.
How Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 Work Together
The Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate solutions can be used alone, but integrating them into a shared environment yields a far more robust user experience.
Companies can establish connections between Microsoft Office and Dynamics 365 programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Outlook. Power Platform also provides intelligent data connectors that combine Microsoft Power applications with other Microsoft products, like Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hub, Microsoft SQL, and Azure Data Lake.
Supporting Microsoft Business Applications
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem comprises all the applications that support companies across different industries and operate on different life cycle timelines.
Microsoft encourages a collaborative and connected workforce environment, offering pre-built integrations between critical Dynamics applications, including Finance and Operations, Sales and Marketing, HR, and other ERP applications.
With the Microsoft Power Platform, users can expand the functionality of their Microsoft landscape, build more applications within their current environment, and improve business performance.
Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Business Central
The Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Business Central work well together, offering embedded reporting, analysis, and retrieval functions to connect Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power BI in one unified technical landscape. Users can examine data on both platforms and generate real-time dashboards by integrating their critical Power BI and Business Central solutions.
Intelligent workflow functionalities in Power Automate can also be integrated with B=usiness Central, enabling users to develop automation flows from scratch, with a pre-built template, or from an integrated connector.
Users can create canvas or model-driven applications, share them with colleagues, or publish them online by connecting Dynamics 365 Business Central with Power Apps.
How Can We Help?
Whether you’re looking to get started with Microsoft Power Platform or want to learn more about the entire Microsoft Dynamics landscape, Surety Systems can help.
Our senior-level Dynamics consultants have the functional skills and experience to help you successfully integrate any of the Microsoft Power Platform applications into your existing Dynamics landscape. Even better, our support extends past your initial Go-Live date, ensuring all your critical business needs are met over time.
Contact Us
Are you interested in learning more about the Microsoft Power Platform or where our expert Microsoft Dynamics consultants can fit in your organization?
Contact us today!
