By Talha Zubair, Team Lead Share point at Smart IS International In Modern days, businesses run on data. Users interact with data for their daily routine tasks, managing their payroll, control their existing processes, and analyzing data to make decisions. In our technology-driven world, users can be empowered to gain insights from and interact with data all while automating those menial responsibilities that seem to be more burdens than job tasks. Power Platform automates your business solutions and allows you to customize technology to help everyone, from the higher management to the front-line workers. It drives the business with data. Power platform provides solutions for your daily problems and necessary activities. Using this platform, you can minimize your development time and cost, you can automate your daily business processes. You can create dashboards, reports, and insights. This all can be achieved in less time and in a better way. Power Platform combines the power of PowerApps, Power BI, and Power Automate into one powerful business application platform. It provides a quick and easy app building process and data insights. Each component of the Microsoft Power Platform is built on the Common Data Service for Apps and is dynamic by itself. Power Platform is comprised of four key products:

1. 1. 1. Power Apps:

  Power Apps is a no-code/low-code app building platform. You can use Power Apps to build simple solutions like leave management system and status reports or complex business solutions for purchasing processes and inventory management. If you plan for an app to solve a business problem, then you can use your existing skills to build it. Common Data Sources and Connectors: There are more than 275 data connectors and some common data connections. Some common data sources include:

• Common Data Service
• SharePoint
• Dynamics 365
• SQL Server and Azure SQL
• Office 365

Types of PowerApps: There are different types of PowerApps: Canvas Apps: you can create your own app from scratch using this type, can create tablet and mobile compatible apps in the canvas app model. Model-Driven Apps: You can create apps using common data services, here is an example of these apps: Portals: Attractive Portals can be developed with no/low code solution in PowerApps.      

2. Power Automate:

Power Automate is all about automating your business processes, your flows, approval processes and all the manual activities using the Microsoft flows, same as Power Apps power automate can connect the external data sources and common data services provided by Microsoft. Some of the common data services are below:

• • Common Data Service
  • Salesforce
  • Dynamics 365
  • Google Drive
  • Office 365
   

   

3. 3. Power BI:

  Microsoft Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights and dashboards. Whether your data is a simple Microsoft Excel workbook or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses, Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, clean, and model your data without affecting the underlying source, visualize what's important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want in your organization or out of it. Here is another example of the Power BI chart, you can show the status of your daily issue using a pie chart to track the progress of your issues. Parts of Power BI: Power BI consists of a Microsoft Windows desktop application called Power BI Desktop, an online SaaS (Software as a Service) service called the Power BI service, and mobile Power BI apps that are available on phones and tablets. Power BI Desktop Power BI Service:  

4. 4. Power Virtual Agents:

Power Virtual Agents empowers teams to easily create powerful chatbots using a guided, no-code graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers. Power Virtual Agents address many of the major issues with bot-building in the industry. It eliminates the gap between the subject matter experts and the development teams building the bots, and the long latency between teams recognizing an issue and updating the bot to address it. Reference: Microsoft Power Platform