Microsoft’s Power Platform – combining quality to deliver excellence

During the recent Microsoft Build developer conference, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella highlighted a collection of products known as the Power Platform, which has been tipped for a successful future given the growing cloud demand.

Described as a powerful business application platform, it effectively combines Power BI, Power Apps and Microsoft Flow, providing services for business intelligence, app development and app connectivity.

Giving businesses the opportunity to customise cloud products, the platform allows customers to get deepening value out of Microsoft’s investments, bringing together three dynamic components to provide one masterful service.

With Power Platform already being used by some of the world’s most successful organisations, the tools can unlock a wealth of exciting opportunities for all individuals, not just the technically savvy developers.

Component one: Power BI

The first key component of the Power Platform is Power BI, a business analytics service that features regularly within our blog.

Allowing users to make sense of their data through interactive, real-time dashboards, the app is responsible for delivering important insights that are critical to the success of your business.

Transforming data into informative reports, Power BI can be used to display key information about sales, customer service and other important business functions.

These dashboards and reports can then be published on websites, SharePoint, Teams and other apps, informing individuals of results and emerging trends.

Component two: Power Apps

Rather than taking months to build important apps, Power Apps allows users to develop them within days, using Excel-like expressions to add logic and run on the web, iOS and Android devices.

Instead of requiring the expertise of trained developers, users with very little experience of building apps can use the programme to create simple applications for standard business needs.

Featuring a point-and-click approach, users can choose from a large selection of templates or start from a blank canvas, giving businesses greater creative license during the development process.

Pro-developer extensibility is natively built into the platform, allowing developers to seamlessly extend app capabilities using Azure functions.

Component three: Microsoft Flow

The final component is Microsoft Flow, an App which allows users to include powerful workflow automation directly into their Apps with a no-code approach that connects to hundreds of popular apps and services.

These workflows can be used to synchronise files, receive notifications, integrate and update data, making it possible to transfer info from one system to another.

There are over 200 apps and services, including Common Data Service for Apps, that work with Microsoft Flow and this number is constantly growing.

Place the power in your hands...

While Power BI, Power Apps and Microsoft Flow are effective apps within their own right, combining all three can unlock a wealth of exciting opportunities for your business.

Instead of spending significant time and resources developing apps, users can create them with ease, using Microsoft Flow to transfer important data between systems and utilising Power BI to display important insights.

With the demand for cloud growing, the need to implement a comprehensive platform that offers a full range of services is becoming more important than ever.

If you’re interested in implementing the Power Platform, contact our team of experienced consultants and research the solutions available to your business.