What is Microsoft Power Platform?
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
The Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of products designed to provide low-code access to data and services in Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure and many other services. A low-code approach means solutions can be built by power users and IT staff who are not professional developers; however, the rapid development environment that this platform provides also means that developers can benefit from using the Microsoft Power Platform.
Which products are included in Power Platform?
Power BI
The senior member of the Power Platform, Power BI, is probably the best-known component having been available for the longest time. Power BI's primary role is data visualisation, allowing users to manipulate and view their data in different ways with just a few clicks of a mouse.
Explore Microsoft Power BI training here
Power Apps
Another leading star of this platform, Power Apps,allows you to easily create apps (or user interfaces) to interact (view, create and modify) the data that you work with. These apps can be run on PCs, Macs, tablets and mobile phones giving great flexibility to users. As an example, a Power App can be an easy data-entry solution that runs on a mobile phone and can take advantage of the phone's camera and location services.
Power Automate
The primary uses of Power Automate (previously called Microsoft Flow) are to streamline repetitive tasks and replace manual paper-driven processes. Most often, Power Automate flows are used to copy or manipulate data, but they are also frequently used to notify users of data-driven events and provide a framework for approval processes.
Power Pages
Power Pages are covered on the course Microsoft Power Platform Developer (MPL400).
Copilot Studio
To help streamline interactions with your staff (and potentially customers and other external users), Copilot Studio allows you to easily build chatbots to engage in automated conversation and provide quick answers to frequently asked questions. These chatbots can then be used in different communications channels, including Microsoft Teams.
Explore Microsoft Copilot training here
Dataverse, Dataverse for Teams and Power Fx
Many Power Platform solutions will use standard Office 365 services, including SharePoint online and OneDrive for Business, to store data. Dynamics 365 customers and other Power Platform users with appropriate licensing can also use Dataverse, a cloud-based storage system. It provides tables to store data in, as well as built-in business logic and dataflows to help manage that data. More recently, Microsoft has also launched Dataverse for Teams, a cut-down version of Dataverse available to anyone with a Microsoft Teams license, allowing the same feature- rich storage environment within a team.
Although the Microsoft Power Platform is a low-code solution, there will still be solutions that require the use of functions and expressions. Currently each of the services uses a different expression language. At the recent Microsoft Ignite event, Microsoft announced Power Fx as a common expression language for the Power Platform. Power Fx is the expression language used in Power Apps (although until Ignite 2021 it wasn't called Power Fx), and over the next couple of years it will be rolled out to the other products within the Power Platform family.
Learn more about Microsoft Power Platform
Explore our Microsoft Power Platform training, or get in touch with our team today to discuss your requirements.
