Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of integrated tools that help you streamline your business operations and do more with less.
Businesses of all sizes across industries can benefit from bringing Microsoft Power Platform into their workflows. Power Platform can help you unlock your company’s full potential with a suite of tools that help you build business apps. These business apps can help you with all kinds of business operations, from communication and workflows to data visualization and reminders, especially if you integrate the full suite of Power Platform tools. All of the separate tools combine together to make complex workflows that automate and support your business operations.
When applied correctly, Power Platform can help you improve your business outcomes with streamlined processes and workflows. Since everything lives under Microsoft’s suite of tools, you can combine essential automations and data reports right in the platform. You won’t have to search through all of your software to manage essential business operations.
Additionally, you won’t need to rely on external tools to bring your insights together. Power Platform covers many functions, which means you don’t need to invest in as many third-party solutions. Plus, as a Microsoft product, you can easily share information with other Microsoft Office 365 apps for maximum productivity.
The best part about Power Platform is that all of the tools are low code. While a developer experienced in this area is often needed for implementation and advanced functionality, the tools are meant to be used by non-technical people. This allows you to bring in experts from across your organization to participate in the building of essential business apps so you get exactly what you need. For the basic uses that help you streamline your operations, your existing team can learn and use Power Platform easily.
Power BI is an essential tool for data analytics and visualization. It allows you to bring data from disparate sources and gain insight from across your organization. It’s great for visualizing your data and compiling reports so you can make smart, data-driven decisions.
Power BI works with over 275 different data sources, plus custom API connections, so you can bring almost any data into the platform. Most importantly, you can bring multiple data sources into the platform and run reports across sources. This can help you get a total view of what’s happening in your organization with the powerful visualization tools.
For any company that wants to make intelligent business decisions, Power BI is a must. Its ability to unite data makes it an essential tool, plus its data visualizations are key to any data-driven company. With Power BI, you can work smarter and make all of your data work for you for intelligent, data-backed decision making.
Microsoft Power Apps lets you build custom business apps for your company across desktop browsers and mobile devices. The only catch is that it only works for internal business apps and it won’t be suitable for customer-facing applications. Still, Power Apps can help you expedite business processes and make your internal communications easier to navigate.
Power Apps are made of three essential components: Canvas Apps, Model-driven Apps, and Portal Apps. Together, these three building blocks create all the use cases you can use to build apps. The Canvas App gives you a blank canvas where you can design the look and UX of your app, then connect it to various data sources. The Model-driven App lets you take a data model and then build the application around it. It’s most useful for existing data models and creating relational databases. Finally, Portal Apps help you design web portals that help your employees and customers interact with your data. All of these Power Apps work together so you can build apps with complete functionality.
Businesses across industries rely on internal apps to get their work done. With Power Apps, you can build custom applications specifically for your needs to expedite all your processes. Plus, with Power Apps’ integrative power, you can design exactly what you need.
As with Power BI, Power Apps have robust data capabilities. You can connect almost any data source to Power Apps, making their uses nearly limitless.
Power Automate can help you and your team save time and resources with its automation capabilities. Like the other Power Platform tools, it’s a low-code solution for automating all kinds of business processes.
Power Automate is simple to set up, but it can handle complex automations. You just need to start with a trigger moment and pick an action to be performed. For example, you can set a form submission as your trigger and then send out emails to your team to respond to the form submitter as your action.
While Power Automate can handle more complex actions, the trigger and action are at the core of each automation. From there, you can create all kinds of actions using their four types of flows:
Power Automate brings the power of automations to your business without any complicated systems or third-party services. You can reduce human error, save your employees from repetitive tasks, and integrate other Power Platform solutions to maximize efficiency. Plus, automations can help you protect your data while benefiting from seamless automation.
If you’re constantly communicating with your internal team or external customers, Power Virtual Agents can help you automate those conversations with chat bots. As with all the Power Platform solutions, it’s a great low-code option that makes it easy to automate chat communications.
Unlike other automated communication solutions, Power Virtual Agents is based on natural language so anyone can easily create chat topics for Microsoft’s AI to respond to. You start by creating a few conversation topics, then the AI does the work and relates user inquiries to your prepared responses.
Power Virtual Agents is a great tool to improve your internal and customer experiences. Chatbots make it easier for teams to field requests with AI and automation while still providing helpful experiences to users.
To get the most out of Power Virtual Agents, you can integrate it with other Power Platform apps and automate actions directly from chat windows. You can make internal and customer experiences smoother with automations to help users authenticate logins, authorize product returns, and create notifications with the help of other Power Platform apps.
Power Pages is Microsoft’s newest addition to Power Platform. This is another low code solution that makes creating business websites easy. With Power Pages, you can expand on the capabilities of Power Apps and create sophisticated websites that are accessible from any browser or device.
The tool is flexible and lets you create sites from templates or completely from scratch with the Design Studio so you can have as much or as little control over your sites as necessary. The most advantageous part of using Power Pages over another platform is that it integrates with the other Power Platform offerings. Power Pages makes it easy to collect and compile data, then visualize it either in the app itself or exported into Power BI.
If you’re already using Power Platform and looking for a website, Power Pages lets you combine the strengths of all of Microsoft’s programs in a simple low code solution. Whether you need a simple out-of-the-box template site or a more sophisticated custom solution, Power Pages can help you get there while making the most of your data through Power Platform integrations.
