A Complete Guide for Migration to Power Platform: Introduction
Is it that your career requires a switch towards Microsoft 365! No clue on how it all starts and functions! Yeah! Then this post is for you!
Change is the only thing that never changes, this perfectly suits any software product. We all know how Microsoft has improvised SharePoint a lot since its inception and along with it many third-party tools (Nintex, K2, Microsoft has Infopath for forms and SharePoint Designer for workflow development) collaborated with SharePoint for the ease of designing the form and automating the tasks via workflow from the client-side.
There are several criteria in choosing an apt tool that fits your necessity. Some of them are productivity, flexibility, task automation, client-side development and so on. This worked well for the On-Premises environment, but when older versions of the SharePoint and CMS platforms like Lotus Notes got retired, organizations rushed towards SharePoint Online as it needs less infrastructure support and a platform to ease up with forms and workflows that can be created or converted!
Microsoft has Power Platform, a combination of four software PowerApps, PowerAutomate, Power BI and Virtual Agents, like the other BPM tools it is not only built for SharePoint it can work as a standalone app or it can be connected to numerous connectors from which it can store and retrieve data.
Advantages in choosing Power Platform over other BPM tools are
- Microsoft has invested and improved a lot in the Power Platform to last long time and there might be no effort needed in upgrading them frequently.
- Anyone can do the development since it is a low code BPM tool.
- It reduces the dependency on other tools because it is a consolidation of analytics, design, development and automation.
- It’s responsiveness allows you to work across devices.
- As it comes with Office 365 integration, most of the organizations will have Office 365 tightly integrated with its peers.
Any BPM or CMS Software will make the development easier when a new application has been designed and developed because the thought process will be within that tool and solutions can be given from the context of the tool.
But when it comes to converting from older to newer technologies it remains to be a pain point in the case of BPM tools. We have to think from each and every perspective of it like:
- Data migration
- Tool limitations
- External Integration
- Legacy business functionality analysis
- Time limitation
Being a part of large-scale migration projects, here is a list of few guidelines that one can follow for a successful conversion from older technology to Power Platform. The following is a high-level description on the conversion process:
Know your tool – Developers should possess a good grade about the Knowledge of the tool like the data structures used within the build, the tool limitations and its extendability.
Pre-Development Analysis– Before jumping into the development a thorough analysis of the source or legacy system should be documented like control level mappings, logic mappings with the OOTB solutions, reusable solutions, workaround solutions for limitations and the data mapping feasibility in case of data migrations have to be taken care.
Best practices – A set of best practices should be documented and followed with the note of addressing the limitations as well. For instance, naming conventions, unified design and behavior, resetting variables and forms.
Analysis & Development – Before developing any form or workflow it has to be thoroughly analyzed with respect to the behavior of the button and control, working of the design containers, application style, error handling has to be implemented in terms of Power Platform.
Deployment – Integral part in moving the Power Platform artifacts from one environment to another or from one site to another site.
This is a short introduction about the conversion process, please follow the next set of posts for the detailed process.
Please leave your valuable comments and suggestions. Happy building š
