The modern-day enterprise is all about harnessing the power of data. With efficient data utilization, a firm can predict user sentiment and demand and respond accordingly. But organizations go beyond just harnessing the power of data; they automate repetitive tasks and use modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive efficient business processes. The Microsoft Power Platform is one such enterprise business solution.
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
The Microsoft Power Platform is a powerful suite of applications that allows you to automate processes, build applications, analyze data, and create virtual agents. It is a set of business applications that includes app development, business intelligence, and app connectivity software applications.
The big idea behind creating the Power Platform comes from recognizing data’s significance in a company’s success. Firms worldwide are gathering data in huge volumes, one way or another. But most of this data is not harnessed and therefore cannot provide insights that can translate into efficient and intelligent business processes.
Data not leveraged to enhance business growth and performance is of no use to a company. This is where the Microsoft Power Platform comes in.
This article will discuss the different components of the Microsoft Power Platform. It will also explain how your firm can leverage the power of data, automate processes, and build applications and virtual agents using the Power Platform.
Moreover, we will talk about how the Microsoft Power Platform can profoundly impact your business processes, making them efficient and streamlined.
The Five Components of Microsoft Power Platform
- Power BI
- Power Apps
- Power Automate (formerly known as Flow)
- Power Virtual Agents
- Power Pages
Microsoft Power BI
BI is a business intelligence tool that gives you insights and lets you use interactive real-time dashboards in one place. It empowers you with critical business insights irrespective of where your data resides. Also, it connects and consolidates data to give you a 360-degree view across your business.
Moreover, Power BI is cloud-based and creates data visualizations using Microsoft systems like Excel, Azure, and SQL. It was launched in 2013 as an add-on to Microsoft Excel. Being a Microsoft product gives it an edge as it is easily integrable with other Microsoft products.
Here are some of the top BI products:
- Power BI Desktop – This is a free data analysis tool developers use to create new models and reports. It can connect to more than 70 on-premises data and cloud sources. It allows reports to be shared on the Power BI cloud service. Users can easily access these reports via the Power BI mobile app or web browser.
- Power BI Pro – This product is a premium cloud-based tool that allows users to share and collaborate on data visualizations. It comes at a monthly cost of $9.99 per month.
- Power BI Premium – Power BI Premium offers even better features than Power BI Pro. It is also flexible enough to allow users to share reports across the company without needing multiple individual licenses.
Power Apps
Power Apps is all about enabling you and your team to make cutting-edge applications in a brief period. It empowers you to build apps using prebuilt AI components and templates, drag-and-drop, and quick deployment.
Moreover, Microsoft Power Apps provides advanced functionality to developers to seamlessly extend app capabilities using Azure functions and custom connectors to on-premises systems. Most importantly, Power Apps empowers anyone to make no-code or very low-code applications.
The applications built using Power Apps are intelligent and deployable on any device, whether a desktop, a tablet, or a mobile. It also allows your team to make continuous app improvements on a needs basis.
Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate enables you to automate paperless, repetitive, and mundane tasks using hundreds of prebuilt connectors. It thus allows you time to focus your attention on what matters the most. So, you can use the Process Advisor – the task and process mining feature in Power Automate – to break down workflow bottlenecks and improve efficiency.
Power Automate also offers the AI Builder feature, used to build and manage AI models. It lets developers extend AI capabilities using built-in connectors to Azure APIs. Moreover, users can easily create and publish AI models using a guided process and templates. You don’t need to write any code!
Power Automate was formerly known as Microsoft Flow. It also enables automation capabilities across mobile, web, and desktop.
Power Virtual Agents
The Virtual Agents lets you create conversational bots without writing any code. So, these intelligent virtual bots communicate with your customers and employees at scale, meeting their needs efficiently.
Moreover, these powerful bots are deployed across multiple channels and websites (Facebook, Microsoft Teams, mobile apps, etc.) in numerous languages. These Virtual Agents automatically keep track of critical bot KPIs and employ AI with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to constantly enhance bot performance.
Also, AI-powered chatbots are used for multiple reasons, ranging from responding to simple queries to carrying out complex dialogs. With Power Virtual Agents, you don’t need to hire a resource to manually do tasks that your virtual bots can do more efficiently.
Power Pages
The Power Pages component of Microsoft Power Platform allows you to build sites that deliver services and information to customers quickly. These low-code business websites offer various services, including licensing, permitting, outage reporting, and grant applications.
Moreover, your team can easily use the prebuilt templates given in Power Pages to create engaging websites that deliver an enhanced user experience (UX). Moreover, Power Pages keeps your site content and data secure via role-based access controls. Microsoft Azure also helps keep data safe through its control and compliance mechanisms.
What Xavor Can Offer
We can make power Apps for your business in days rather than months. Moreover, these apps are codeless, easy to use, and easily integrable with any database. Therefore, we can also connect them with SharePoint Lists, Excel, and natively with Microsoft Dataverse. Moreover, they are accessible on any device like a phone, tablet, or desktop.
You can use Power Platform for:
- Team Management
- Office Management
- Sales Management
- Library Management
- Clinical Operations
- Hospital Management
- School Management
- Society Operations
- Store Management
- Leads Management
The all-encompassing AI-powered features of the Microsoft Power Platform make it a handy tool in any organization’s armory of competencies. So, in a data-driven world, use the Power Platform and its fantastic components to drive efficient business processes.