Many businesses take a chaotic approach to managing daily operations: a mixture of spreadsheets, apps and manual tasks. What if instead there was an all-encompassing suite of tools out there for taking care of most of your business needs? The good news is that there is in fact something like that, and it's called the Microsoft Power Platform.
It lets you automate, analyze and build custom solutions for your business without writing a single line of code. It's far from a fringe-product, instead you'll be joining the majority of Fortune 500 companies in using a highly developed and widely supported platform.
What is the Power Platform and what are its benefits?
The Microsoft Power Platform is a collection of low-code tools and products that each serve a specific purpose, such as analyzing and presenting data, building custom business apps and websites, setting up automated workflows, and even designing AI-powered chatbots.
The Power Platform was created with non-technical as much as technical users in mind, and it aims to be useful even to people who don’t “know how to code” in the traditional sense. This can act as a great equalizer in many organizations, allowing non-developers (those involved in specific processes, such as field technicians) to directly implement their own solutions, rather than rely on the interpretation of specialized developers to be accurate. Cutting out the middleman, so to speak. After all, most people tend to know best that which they do every day.
The Power Platform is not an isolated system, but is instead an integral part of the wider Microsoft ecosystem, offering full integration with Teams, Dynamics 365, and Azure among others. Power Platform products can also be connected to several third-party services like GitHub, Slack, and Salesforce.
The Power Platform is not completely devoid of code, however. Instead it relies on Microsoft’s low-code programming language, Power Fx, to express logic. But don’t worry, Power Fx is still much easier to both learn and understand compared to traditional programming languages.
Products in the Power Platform
Power BI: All about analyzing and visualizing data using charts, graphs, dashboards and more. This process can help generate insights that support better business decisions.
Power Apps: Create custom business apps using low-code tools. Web and mobile apps that solve specific problems can often be put together quickly by simply combining the right ready-made components.
Power Pages: Similar to Power Apps, but the end result is custom, data-driven business websites. These tend to be external-facing (customer portals, partner hubs, etc.) compared to the more internal-facing nature of Power Apps.
Power Automate: A tool focused on processes and interactions between services — both Microsoft-owned and third-party. Perfect for automating repetitive tasks like sending an email to the right department after an invoice is paid.
Copilot Studio: (formerly Power Virtual Agents): low-code platform for building custom AI chatbots and copilots (agents) that can be connected with Dataverse, external APIs and Microsoft 365 apps.
Together, these products make up a powerful (no pun intended) toolbox for solving a wide array of business problems or just vastly improving processes that are already in place.
Dataverse: one Database to Connect them all
Dataverse is arguably the most important part of Power Platform, but its role is more of a supportive one for the other services in the suite rather than a standalone product. It's a relational database engine designed to be shared and connected not just to other Microsoft platforms but to external ones as well. Here you can store important business data like customer, product and sales records or any custom data your business needs to record.
This data is stored in tables which can then be accessed by the other Power Platform services: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Bi and Power Pages. Of course, every solution you design using these tools probably don't need access to all the data in your Dataverse - you can choose which tables to work with and ignore the rest. As a part of the Power Platform, Dataverse runs on Azure behind the scenes.
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