A Complete Guide for Migration to Power Platform: Know your tool
Power Platform, such a fancy name powers all the big industries right from retail to large-scale business. Why is everyone moving or switching towards it? What sort of features are offered? What difference does it make from the other technologies? How is it helping the organizations?
It is the fantastic four that make it more powerful and meaner than others. It is a consolidation of analytics, design, development, automation and bots. It can be connected to Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and hundreds of other apps to build end-to-end business solutions. This makes it stand out from other BPM tools like Pega, Nintex, Appian and K2.
But it is still in its early stage, with the Power Platform team frequently releasing updates to the product. A lot of new features added in the aspect of usability and development. It has a strong growing community where all the problems, solutions and ideas are discussed. Most of the legacy implementations are moving towards Power Platform. Let see one by one in detail
PowerApps
PowerApps is a low-code approach to custom app development, allowing users to quickly create apps with a ‘Point and Click’ approach that can be used in both mobile and desktop applications. Both developers and non-developers can create apps within PowerApps as it works in a no-code environment. However, more technical users are able to extend capabilities by using Azure functions or creating custom connectors and integrated solutions.
It comes in two characters like in movies one is introvert (Model-driven) and the other is extrovert (Canvas). Let’s see them descriptively
Canvas App
The Extrovert, a conventional Microsoft trademark drag and drop design structure. For logic and behavior of controls, can be implemented from Excel-like expressions instead of any confusing coding language. It can be connected with Office 365 connectors and for any external data source, custom connectors can be used.
Model-Driven App
The Introvert, Model-driven design is a component-focused approach to app development. It does not offer UI flexibility like the canvas app, an app can be created in three easy steps: model the data, define business processes and compose the app. It comes with a default database called Dataverse and it cannot be extended with any external connectors
PowerAutomate
Previously known as Microsoft Flow, later it is tied with Fantastic four (Power Platform). This seems to be the most powerful and flexible tool we have ever encountered so far. Automation can be created by connecting to various applications, such as Outlook, SharePoint, Dynamics 365 or non-Microsoft apps like Twitter, Asana, Gmail, MailChimp etc.
There are 5 types of flows available: Automated, Instant, Scheduled, UI flows, Business process flows. Each flow type will be covered in a detailed post.
Power BI
It is a business intelligence and analytics tool which provides you with real-time insights by presenting your data in a variety of interactive visualizations that are placed within dashboards and reports. We can connect Power BI to the data that is stored within the CDS, or a large number of other data sources, such as Excel or SQL databases or third-party sources such as MailChimp or Google Analytics.
Use natural language to query data and get results (i.e. “show me our sales pipeline for 2018 by month, by salesperson”). Overall, allowing us to easily analyze and make sense of complex data to enable continual improvement.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents allows us to create bots that can help with answering questions from the customers, employees, or viewers of a website. These powerful chatbots use built-in content building blocks, trigger phrases, and pre-authored bot conversations to keep us connected in real-time.
This is a short introduction about the Power Platform tool, please follow the next set of posts for a detailed post.
Please leave your valuable comments and suggestions. Happy building 🙂
