What is the Power Platform?
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The Power Platform essentially is the home to four products under the 'Microsoft Power' branding. These four products each cover their own specialisations, utilising data to serve different purposes. So under the Power Platform umbrella you have:
Power Apps
Power Automate
Power BI
Power Virtual Agents
Power Apps is Microsoft's solution for rapid application prototyping that allows users to quickly spin up a custom application for their specific purpose. It features an interface that requires little to no code to get started, and allows creation of web applications (web apps) that can be used across all desktop and mobile devices.
It's this simple and friendly process that allows Power Apps to be so accessible to business personnel as now it doesn't require years of technical experience to build a simple app. This provides various benefits attributed to the nature of rapid prototyping, allowing businesses to deliver and present a subset of a solution in a very practical way. As such, Power Apps is extremely useful for businesses to experiment and customise solutions before investing time and resources into a final product.
Moreover, what makes Power Apps so desired is because of the immense needs of businesses now to have their own applications or processes that meet their internal needs to operate effectively. We all use apps everyday for not only our personal lives, but also for work. From Facebook to Microsoft Excel, this integration of apps into our lifestyle has made it essential that businesses speedtrack their application development process and empower all their employees with the ability to improve their workflow.
If you find yourself at work frequently having to do the same thing again and again, repeating the same menial tasks then there's definitely a better solution. Power Automate exists to fill in and help remove the need to waste resources on repetitive tasks. There's a reason why machines have become so common in place of human operators because of their ability to perform consistently and quickly especially when doing simple repeated processes.
In the workplace things like scraping through spam, sending identical follow up emails, setting up calendar events are examples of these extremely common tasks that become tedious and boring really quickly. Additionally, it'll take more time for a person to read through and delete those emails, conjure up a brand new one and change the date or set up another calendar invite than it will for a script to execute those instructions in mere milliseconds.
As such, Power Automate provides such means to simplify the automation process - taking away the requirement for users to learn complex macros or scripting syntax and provides a very simple flow interface for beginners and developers to set up automated events with. Having this ability definitely helps businesses thrive as individuals can push the grunt work to Power Automate and instead focus their attention to more interesting and impactful work for the business.
Power BI's name has become almost synonymous with data analytics as a Microsoft product that serves to create insights from analysing data. The important value that Power BI brings is its ability to take the data it is given, create meaningful insights from that data and then be able to create great data visualisations in the form of graphs and dashboards.
Having a solution that can transform giant sets of numbers into something visual and easy to digest is obviously extremely useful, but even more so for businesses to help them easily identify areas where they can improve on easily. By taking care of the complexity in the management and tranformation of data, again businesses can be free to focus their attention on making well-informed decisions.
In short, Power BI is essentially the data analytics and insights product of the Power Platform. And due to it being able to take business data and display it in a more logical sense, it has a strong place in many modern business operations. In fact, in the future with more advancements in data processing and transformation, Power BI could remove the need for in-person reporting on metrics such as company sales, customer retension and employee utilisation - some of which is already being automatically served on dashboards today.
Finally, Power Virtual Agents tackles a more focused specialisation in delivering a product that allows anyone to be able to create chatbots without requiring any data scientists or seasoned developers. Just like Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents provides a no-code graphical interface (GUI) that strips away the complexity of writing obscure lines of code and provides a visual centre to build and train your chatbot.
Again we find another example of Microsoft taking a technology that is quite advanced and making it accessible to users, removing a need for years of experience or study. In doing so, Microsoft has triumphed over many of the issues with other methods of building chatbots - simplifying the process for all individuals involved (for those who build, manage and use the solution).
