Introduction
In the current situation of COVID-19, physical file transfer, and approval from each role/department is becoming a huge issue among organizations, since they are running their business with work-from-home policies. Hence, there is a high demand for business process automation and workflow management which can be solved through process automation application and business intelligence dashboard and reports.
On the other hand, in this tech-savvy era, the rate of data production is rapidly increasing day by day. All these data will be more useful if we gain insights and meaning from it. Generally, application development, data analysis, and automation process are carried out by the IT and development teams, which go through various stages of application development. As a result, it consumes much time and is expensive.
To handle such a situation, reduce costs and effort of development, Microsoft's Power Platform is the best option to choose from. Microsoft's out of the box solution can resolve these issues with less effort for instance SharePoint and Power Platform. Power Platform includes mainly: Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate.
Power Apps
Power Apps is an approach to build custom applications quickly without any development or programming knowledge with drag and drop options and built-in functions. Using Microsoft Power Apps, we can develop mobile-friendly apps without code knowledge within a short time and minimize stress on programmers as well. Data connection in Power Apps can be done from various applications, for example, Dynamic 365, Office 365, and also third-party applications.
Power Automate
Power Automate is formerly known as Microsoft Flow. It allows us to create automated workflows between Microsoft services or third-party applications. It consists of pre-built automation templates for a common automation process that we can easily use to customize and automate any workflow. Besides this, its automation process can connect various applications, such as SharePoint, Outlook, Dynamic 365, or non-Microsoft apps like Twitter, Gmail, MailChimp, and so on. We can set up triggers, alerts, automated emails, push notifications, and much more without coding within minutes. In short, it saves time, reduces human errors to automates workflows, and smooths business processes.
Power BI
Power BI is an analytical tool for data that has the capability to connect to data sources, visualize data, and helps to gain business intelligence. In Power BI we can connect with on-premises data sources as well as Microsoft, and third-party cloud services to generate reports and provides business intelligence for end-users and management. It manipulates simple to complex data and graphically visualizes data in the form of pie charts, bar graphs, dashboards, maps, and many more forms that provides user clear insights. Additionally, it is easy to graphically represent data in Power BI and lots of visualization features are available with drag and drop options. Thus, nowadays, it is the most popular data analytic and reporting tool.
Power Virtual Agent
Power Virtual Agent is a platform to create your own chatbot. It empowers teams to easily create powerful chatbots using a guided, graphical interface with no-code as well as without the involvement of data scientists or developers. It addresses many of the critical issues with bot building in the industry. We can developed our own custom chatbot using Microsoft Power Virtual Agent for various business application such as instant customer service, product recommendation, marketing data collection and many more. It saves ample of time for customer support, increase engagement of customer to your services and products. Additionally, it provides automated and scalable support to customer as well as increase productivity of your team members in your organization.
Conclusion
This article introduced Microsoft Power Platform, including Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate. I hope, it has provided knowledge on understanding Microsoft Power Platform shortly. In the next part, I will explore the features of Power Platform further, with some demonstration and an examples.