What is The Power Platform?

Technology is changing rapidly; it’s hard to keep up with the latest gadgets, developments, and software releases. 

Microsoft is constantly updating and creating new products and solutions. With Office 365 used by over one million companies worldwide, it’s not surprising that people can get confused by the constant changes.

One of Microsoft’s latest ventures is The Power Platform, a line of business intelligence, app development, and app connectivity software applications. 

In this short blog post, we’ll explain exactly what the Power Platform is, why you should use it, and how you can get it.

Power Platform

Microsoft Power Platform is a family of software products created to design and build complex business solutions. Through Power Platform, you can analyse, act, and automate business processes quickly. 

Built on Azure, Power Platform has a no-code/low-code approach giving non-developers the tools to build apps, create workflows, or leverage AI to solve problems. It’s made of five separate products.

In this blog, we will focus on the three most commonly used products: Power BI, Power Automate (previously known as Flow) and PowerApps.

Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft’s business analytics tool. It allows any company, no matter how big or small, to easily organise and manage its data. 

Power BI can design interactive reports, dashboards, or stories and display them with easy-to-understand visualisations in graphs and charts.

By taking all this raw data from multiple sources and displaying it in ways that are easy to see, users can see patterns, forecast, analyse and plan future strategies accordingly.

Power Automate

Power Automate allows business users to automate organisational workflows without writing any code. Creating workflows allows staff to avoid repetitive tasks, saving valuable time. 

In power automate, you can set up an action to happen automatically based on a specific trigger. For example, you can set up a workflow that saves all attachments from a particular email address into Dropbox. 

Power Automate can connect different Microsoft applications, such as Outlook, SharePoint and Dynamics 365, or even non-Microsoft apps like Twitter, Asana and Gmail.

Automate already comes with several pre-defined workflow templates, or you can design your own from scratch. The result is the same – a streamlined process that saves time and reduces human error.

PowerApps

Power Apps are applications you can quickly build, allowing other users to interact with them. You can build these applications using low code techniques (drag and drop) without having to know how to use traditional developer tools like Visual Studio. 

The simplicity of PowerApps means anyone can create mobile-friendly apps quickly and without development knowledge, allowing more people in your company to crack on without involving the IT department.

How the power platform can transform your business

Well, let’s start with the most obvious one – it’s everything you need under one roof. 

By using Power Platform, your analytics, sales, user interfaces, mail, workflows, customer information, and practically everything else are all in one system, and that one system is all under Microsoft. 

There’s no need to use different tools from different companies, resulting in compatibility issues and multiple user interfaces. Everything works together and acts the same, exactly what you want for your business.

On top of that, Power Platform is so easy to use, creating applications, workflows and automation in no code/low code approach so that almost everyone in the company can use it. This frees up time and resources in the IT department. 

Power Platform streamlines your business and improves productivity. It can be used across multiple devices by numerous people, all at the same time. After the pandemic, many, if not most people are still working from home. With Power Platform, you can always connect with your remote team members through the cloud, desktop apps, and more.

How much does the Power Platform cost?

Microsoft licensing is infamously complex. This is probably why they’ve recently tried to simplify it by bringing in pay-as-you-go options and monthly subscriptions.

As the Power Platform is made up of different products, you can buy licenses for all of them, mix and match, or even just one if you think that’s all you need. All of them, however, are available for free for 30 days.

As an effective tool to drive your business, Power Platform is without peers. To build business solutions, you can use PowerApps, whereas to automate specific business processes, Power Automate is the tool for the job. 

Using Microsoft Power BI, you can analyse data and build visualisations from many data sources, giving you a single source of truth and increasing operational transparency. 

We can implement Power Platform as part of a broader Microsoft Dynamics setup or add it to your existing tool kit. If it’s right for you, the business value and benefits will be immediately apparent, so don’t delay.

Our implementation includes an initial, stand-alone discovery process to help us understand how the Power Platform can improve your organisational workflow, reporting and productivity. After this process, we can show you exactly how we think the suite of products could best work for your business. 

Contact us today if you have questions about the Microsoft Power Platform or how it can help your business. One of our friendly experts will be happy to answer any questions.