In this article, I will introduce Microsoft Power Platform in brief.
Introduction to Power Platform
In current situation of COVID-19, physically file transfer and approval from each role and department is becoming huge issue among organisation because they are running their business with work from home policies. Hence, there is high demand of business process automation and work flow management. Which can be solved through process automation application and business intelligence dashboard and reports.
On the other hand, in this tech savvy era, the rate of data production is rapidly increasing day by day. All these data will be more useful if we gain insights and meaning from it. Generally, application development, data analysis and automation process are carried out by IT and development Team. Which goes through various stages of application development as a result consume much time as well as becomes expensive.
To handle such situation and reduce cost, and effort of development, Microsoft’s Power Platform is a best option to choose. Microsoft out of the box solution can resolve these issues with less effort for instance SharePoint and Power Platform. Power Platform includes mainly : Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate.
Power Apps
Power Apps is an approach to build custom applications quickly without any development or programming knowledge with drag and drop options and build in functions. Using Microsoft Power Apps, we can develop mobile-friendly apps without code knowledge within short time and minimize stress on programmers as well. Data connection in Power Apps can be done from various applications for example, Dynamic 365, Office 365 and also third-party applications.
Power Automate
Power Automate is formerly known as Microsoft Flow. It allows us to create automated workflows between Microsoft services or third-party applications. It consists of pre-built automation templates for common automation process which we can easily use to customize and automate any workflow . Besides this, its automation process can connect various applications, such as SharePoint, Outlook, Dynamic 365 or non-Microsoft apps like Twitter, Gmail, MailChimp, and so on. We can set up triggers, alerts, automated emails, push notifications and much more without coding within minutes. In short, it saves time, reduces human errors to automate workflows and smooths business processes.
Power BI
Power BI is a analytical tool for data which has capability to connect to data sources, visualize data and helps to gain business intelligence. In Power BI we can connect with on premises data sources as well as Microsoft, and third-party cloud services to generate reports and provides business intelligence for end users and managements. It manipulates simple to complex data and graphically visualize data in the form of pie charts, bar graphs, dashboards, maps and many more forms which provides user clear insights. Additionally, it is easy to graphically represent data in Power BI and lots of visualization features are available within it. Thus, nowadays, it is most popular data analytic and reporting tool.
Power Virtual Agent
Power Virtual Agent is a platform to create your own chatbot. It empowers teams to easily create powerful chatbots using a guided, graphical interface with no-code as well as without the involvement of data scientists or developers. It addresses many of the critical issues with bot building in the industry. We can developed our own custom chatbot using Microsoft Power Virtual Agent for various business application such as instant customer service, product recommendation, marketing data collection and many more. It saves ample of time for customer support, increase engagement of customer to your services and products. Additionally, it provides automated and scalable support to customer as well as increase productivity of your team members in your organization.
Conclusion
This article introduced Microsoft Power Platform including Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate in short. In next part, I will explore features of Power Platform further with demonstration and examples.