Business Application
POWER PLATFORM OVERVIEW
Microsoft Power Platform is a product family that delivers innovative business solutions across one
seamlessly integrated platform. Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents allow
any business to analyze & visualize real-time business performance, quickly and easily build custom apps, automate workflows and integrate AI capabilities.
Power Platform provides a low code interface for any user to quickly create custom apps while
simultaneously providing robust tools for pro developers. This makes it possible to integrate innovative
solutions across Azure, Modern Workplace, Dynamics 365 and standalone applications. At the intersection of these products lies digital transformation – giving the customer the power to innovate anywhere, while unlocking value everywhere.
The Power Platform includes several key concepts/components you should be aware of, for many of them we will dive deeper into as we progress forward in the whitepaper. Here are some of the key ones to get started:
Power AppsPower Apps is the toolset for low-code app development. There are three styles of applications: canvas, model-driven and portals. Power Apps canvas applications can also be embedded into SharePoint, Teams, PowerBI and model-driven applications. Portals enable makers to build lowcode, responsive websites which allow external users to interact with the data stored in the Common Data Service.
Power AutomateAutomated workflows that orchestrate across services using connectors. Automations can be triggered to run when events occur in other systems and services or scheduled to run at a specific time. Users can start instant flows on demand from within the mobile app on the go or from the context of selected items in other apps. Business process flows can be used to help guide users through a process. UI flows add robotic process automation (RPA) to automate repetitive tasks performed through a browser or user interface of a Windows app without use of a connector. Automations can quickly be created from templates or designed in Microsoft Visio, or by starting from blank in the portal designer.
Power BI Power BI offers capabilities to help you discover and explore insights from your data including automated machine learning for predictive modelling, new AI visualizations with decomposition trees for detailed root cause analysis drill downs, and easier ways for everyone to interact with their
data using the new Q&A visualization.
Power Virtual AgentsPower Virtual Agents empowers teams to easily create powerful bots
using a guided, no-code graphical interface without the need for data scientists or developers. It eliminates the gap between the subject matter experts and the development teams building the bots, and the long latency between teams recognizing an issue and updating the bot to
address it.
Common Data Service (CDS) A mature data platform to manage data used by business applications,
CDS is the platform that sits under the Dynamics 365 Sales, Service and Marketing business applications and is offered as a service to the Platform. An initial schema is defined by the Common Data Model. CDS
provides built-in capabilities for business rules, workflows, calculated and rollup fields and more. CDS secures data using a configurable security model, that offers hierarchical, row level and field level security and auditing capabilities.
Common Data ModelAn open-sourced definition of standard entities that represent commonly
used concepts and activities. Every CDS database starts with the entities defined as “core”. Through industry accelerators the Common Data Model is extended for verticals like banking, healthcare and others. Application builders can add their own custom entities to support specific
business scenarios.
Connectors There are 300+ connectors that make it easy for application builders to connect to both Microsoft and 3rd party services, from Dynamics 365 to Dropbox. The connectors allow canvas apps and flows to easily use API (application programming interfaces) services without any developer
knowledge. Custom connectors can also be configured to allow use of APIs that aren’t covered by the public connectors.
AI BuilderAI Builder is a platform capability that allows easily adding AI to Power Automate, Power Apps and Dynamics 1st Party Apps. This enables makers to automate tasks and predict outcomes without having to involve data scientists.
On-Premises Data Gateway On-premises data gateway allows Power Apps, Power Automate and
Power BI to reach back to on-premises resources to support hybrid integration scenarios. The gateway leverages Azure Service Bus relay technology to securely allow access to on-premises resources.
Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) Power Apps component framework empowers professional developers and app makers to create code components for model-driven apps and
canvas apps (experimental preview) to provide an enhanced user experience for the users to view and work with data in forms, views, and dashboards.