DEV Community: Chibuzor Opiti

Introduction to Microsoft Power Platform: Benefits, Risks, and Implementation

Chibuzor Opiti — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 13:13:02 +0000

What is Microsoft Power Platform?
The Power Platform is Microsoft’s Saas offering of business productivity tools that can be used to create solutions that deliver value to businesses in the form of applications, data analytics, and workflow automation.
The Power platform offers significant benefits in terms of usability, scalability, and integration with multiple proprietary systems.
Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem comprises Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot (formerly known as Power Virtual Agents), and Power BI. These are all easy-to-use applications as no deep technical or programming expertise is required to start churning out business solutions for organizations. We shall discuss each of these applications subsequently.

Benefits of The Microsoft Power Platform
Different organizations benefit differently from the Power Platform suite. Here are some of the benefits of the power platform ecosystem.

Buy one get all: Access to the Power platform suite comes bundled with the Office 365 license. What that means is that with an Office 365 license, one can start building Power Apps applications and Power Automate workflows on the go. This is possible because the Power Apps and Power Automate license that comes bundled with the Office 365 package allows you access to all standard features in your application or workflow.
Ease of Use: The power platform stack is targeted at citizen developers and users with little or no coding background. Its drag-and-drop feature is suitable for both seasoned developers and normal business users who want to explore the Power platform to enhance business operations.
Implementation and Maintenance cost: With the Power platform, citizen developers can rapidly build business solutions in less time than native developers would. Businesses will not worry about high development costs, lengthy development periods, and maintenance costs for outsourced projects as the solutions can be managed in-house, thereby giving organizations 360-degree control over the solutions. Business users can build multiple solutions for specific needs without having to worry about development costs as compared to outsourcing such projects.
Seamless Integration with Different Data Sources: The Power Platform has its native Data Source known as Dataverse. However, you can easily connect Power Platform solutions to several 3rd party Data sources such as Salesforce, Google, and Trello, amongst others; and if you don’t find a connector for your specific data source, you can build a custom connector for your use.
High Availability: The power platform is a software-as-a-service, and so Microsoft handles the infrastructure and security of the platform promising high availability in terms of service uptime so businesses don’t have to be wary about system downtimes or other security concerns.

Meet The Power Platform Suite:
Power Apps: A low-code tool that allows users to build business applications that empower their daily functions. Individual Business units can build applications tailored to their specific needs, leveraging powerful AI capabilities, and also integrating with Power Automate. A Licensed user can navigate to make.powerapps.com to familiarize themselves with the tool using pre-made templates before building an application that suits their needs. The template applications can be connected to the business data and the application would be ready for use. A typical use case would be an application to capture employee clock-in and clock-out times.
Power Automate: This is an automation tool used to build workflows that perform certain tasks handled by humans. This way, employees can free themselves of mundane and repetitive tasks to focus on more important issues. Business units can save man hours, reduce employee redundancy from repetitive tasks, and increase efficiency as automated systems eliminate error-prone manual processing. Licensed users can navigate to make.powerautomate.com to utilize the template workflows. Business users can either customize existing workflow templates or build their workflows from scratch. A typical use case would be sending reminders to Task owners when a task is due or expired, gathering task owners’ feedback, and storing the data in the database.
Copilot Studio: Formerly known as Power Virtual Agents, Business units can create AI-powered chatbots to help out with tasks such as information sourcing, and interaction with employees or business customers. Businesses can leverage these chatbots during off-business hours. The bots can respond to questions, provide information on certain topics, and even log complaints or inquiries from business customers. This way, employees can focus on more important tasks, while the bots attend to this side of the business. Navigate to the copilot studio via copilotstudio.microsoft.com to build copilots leveraging several pre-defined topics, and publish your copilots to a demo site for testing. A simple use case would be FAQs and providing KB articles to users.
Power BI: This is the data analytics side of things. With Power BI, businesses can analyze business data and build reports and dashboards to facilitate Business decision-making. Business users can download and install the Power BI desktop application from the Microsoft Store,
build reports, and publish them to the Power BI service. A typical use case would be a productivity dashboard that monitors product sales across different regions.

Power Platform Integration:
Each Power platform tool can be integrated with one or more other tools. For example, a Power BI report can be embedded within a Power Apps application alongside a Power Automate flow. This seamless integration across the platform makes it a powerful and exciting suite for businesses.

What is Required to Utilize the Microsoft Power Platform?
The first requirement here is a License. The License could either be a stand-alone License or a License bundled with the Office 365 License. A business email account is needed to access any of the Power Platform tools.
For business users that build complex solutions or extend the Power Platform tools with other systems, a Premium license or additional capacity may be required, depending on the use case. The official Microsoft license guide covers all additional features and capacities that qualify for premium usage. The premium licenses can be assigned to individual business users, while capacity add-ons can be assigned to specific environments.
The Power Platform is a low-code suite, meaning no prior programming experience is required. Business users can simply drag and drop certain components across the screen, write simple functions or expressions to give life to their solutions and add the desired functionalities.

What Are the Risks Involved with Using Microsoft Power Platform?
The major factor to consider is the licensing cost. The cost may outweigh the benefits for small-scale organizations if they intend to build such complex solutions that require extra licensing or additional capacity.

HOW TO CREATE A BIRTHDAY WORKFLOW USING POWER AUTOMATE

Chibuzor Opiti — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 12:56:27 +0000

i. Introduction
ii. Requirements
iii. Prerequisite setup
A. Formatting the Data Source
iv. Building the workflow
A. The trigger
B. Retrieve the Birthdays
C. Evaluating today’s date to see if there will be a birthday tomorrow
D. Sending Email notifications
v. Save and test the workflow

Introduction:
This workflow will remind the welfare team to prepare a greeting card for birthday celebrants a day before their birthday.
You can further customize the workflow to send a direct birthday wish to the celebrant on their birthday.
This workflow is intended to send a reminder to a welfare team or planning committee one day before the celebrant’s birthday. This team can then prepare a surprise package or birthday message for the celebrant.

Requirements:
To execute this project, you will need the following setup:
A work email account with Power Automate or Office 365 license
A data source with names and their birthday – we shall use an Excel sheet for this project.

Formatting the Data source:
• Enter the desired Names and birthday
• Add a column to extract the Month value of the birthday using this expression: =MONTH(B2)
• Add a column to extract the Day value of the birthday using this expression: =DAY(B2)
• Wrap the entire dataset in a table.
Your table should look like this:

Fig 1. A sample Dataset.

• Upload the file to a OneDrive folder. This is important as Excel files on local machines are not accessible via the Excel connector on Power Automate. We can only access Excel files hosted on OneDrive when using the Excel connector on Power Automate.
Now we have all the requirements in place, let’s build out the flow.

Launch Power Automate and Create a new flow.
A. The Trigger: We shall use a scheduled trigger for this flow because we want it to run at a specific time and frequency.
Set the interval to one, and the frequency to ‘day’. This would trigger the flow every day.
Select your time zone and the expected start time for the flow’s go-live date; then specify the hour and minute for the flow’s daily run.
The trigger should look like this:

Fig 2. A sample flow trigger.

B. Retrieve the File containing the Birthdays:
Add an Excel ‘List Rows Present In a Table’ action and specify the file location; pick the file using the file picker, and specify the table name.
The action should look like this:

Fig 3. A sample file retrieval action.

C. Add a condition to check if the Birth Month is the current month and if the Birth Day is the next day:
• Add a ‘condition’ action
For the Month check, we will use an expression to convert the month value retrieved from the Excel sheet into an integer. This is necessary for a smoother comparison handling in Aower Automate.
To achieve this,
• On the left-hand side of the condition, select the ‘month’ field from the dynamic content.
• Hover over this dynamic content and spell out what we refer to as the internal name or code behind the action: items('Apply_to_each_2')?['MONTH'].

Fig 4. Retrieving the internal name of a dynamic content.

Notice that the condition is immediately wrapped inside an ‘apply to each’. This happens because the field selected from the dynamic content references an action that retrieves multiple items (the ‘list rows in a table’ returns multiple items).
• Convert the dynamic content into an integer. We can simply do this by wrapping the internal name of the ‘month’ column in a simple expression:
int(items('Apply_to_each_2')?['MONTH']) – this will be for the left-hand side of the first row in this ‘condition’ block.
• Clear out the ‘month’ field previously selected into the left-hand side of the ‘condition’ and switch over to the expressions tab.
• Paste in the expression formed above thus: int(items('Apply_to_each_2')?['MONTH'])
• Click ‘ok’.
The expression should look like this:

Fig 5. A sample expression to convert the month value into an integer.

• Set the operator to ‘is equal to’
• Set the right-hand side of the condition row to: int(formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'MM'))
• Add a new row to the existing condition and set the logical operator to ‘AND’
• For the Day check, use this expression on the left-hand side, repeating the same steps used to retrieve the internal name of the ‘month’ column and convert it to integer thus: int(items('Apply_to_each_2')?['DAY'])
• Set the operator to ‘is equal to’
• Set the right-hand side of this condition row to: int(formatdatetime(adddays(utcNow(), 1), 'dd'))
The condition should look like this:

Fig 6. A sample condition to evaluate birthdays.

D. Send Email Notification:
For the ‘If Yes’ branch of the condition, add a ‘send an email’ action and configure its properties.

Fig 7. A sample send email action.

An action can be added to the ‘If No’ branch of the condition or left blank. In this case, we shall leave it blank.
The whole condition block should look like this:

Fig 8. A sample condition block.

Save and test the workflow:
Before testing the flow,
• Ensure that you have a birthday that corresponds to tomorrow’s date on your Excel sheet.
• Close out the Excel workbook if it is currently opened as Power Automate will not be able to access the file if it is currently in use.
You should have all greens and receive an email when you test the flow.