Explore the Power Platform Capabilities: The Complete Guide

Just like the iconic Avengers possess unique superpowers, the Microsoft Power Platform harnesses the combined forces of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Pages. As a pioneer in adopting the Microsoft Power Platform, Rishabh Software is fully-equipped to help you extract the maximum potential of these low-code tools to automate your operations, digitize workflows and deliver feature-rich apps – all with absolute ease.

Did you know?     

• More than 5687^[1]business verticals use Microsoft Power Apps for application development.
• Power BI alone is a $2 billion^[2] annual business
• By 2026, 75% of new apps^[3] will be developed with the help of low-code development tools.

When these game-changing components of Power Platform are integrated with other Microsoft capabilities such as Azure, Office 356, SharePoint, or Dynamics 365, you can build & deliver sophisticated business solutions swiftly & cost-effectively. So, get ready to accelerate innovation and automate business processes with the help of Microsoft Power platform capabilities!

Table of Contents

• What is Microsoft Power Platform?
• Why Power Platform?
• How Does Power Platform Work?
• Power Platform Components
• How Rishabh Can Help You Adopt the Microsoft Power Platform

It is an all-inclusive, low-code SaaS platform comprising many tools and technologies to accelerate innovation. Power Platform is more than the sum of its parts, as it enables you to automate key business processes, extract actionable insights, visualize real-time data, and quickly develop custom business apps and websites! With more than 275 pre-built data connectors, the Power Platform makes data integration from disparate sources an absolute breeze. 97% of Fortune 500 companies use this comprehensive suite of services to solve their business problems^[4].

Microsoft Power Platform is designed to offer low-code automation, data-driven applications, and customizable business logic, enabling businesses to optimize their processes, systems, and workflows. Here’s how:

• This enterprise application SaaS platform enables business analysts, citizen developers, and IT professionals to quickly collaborate and create custom apps and automated workflows without extensive coding.
• The five tools within Power Platform capabilities seamlessly connect with each other and Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and hundreds of other third-party applications to build end-to-end business solutions.
• Leveraging a library of 600+ connectors and Microsoft Dataverse, you can easily connect with hundreds of data sources to enable data-driven decision-making.
• Power Platform’s tools are natively extensible across the Microsoft Azure cloud.
• Power Platform enables interoperability, enhances productivity, and unifies data for modern apps and analytics by leveraging standard schema and metadata definitions.
• The adaptable components within the MS Power Platform, including apps, automation capabilities, and visualization dashboards, efficiently meet unique business needs across industries.
• Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents seamlessly integrate with custom or legacy systems and existing technologies to maximize your tech return on investment.

Power Platform works as a data model that combines key components of business data, operational processes, user interface, and software architecture. Depending on the specifications of a project, the required tools can be seamlessly integrated with cloud services, custom or legacy solutions, on-premises systems, and enterprise-grade products.

The Microsoft Power Platform is a low-code technology suite of five components that allow you to be more productive, make informed decisions, and drive better business outcomes in today’s data-centric landscape. You can use these components of Power Platform independently or together to create efficient and agile solutions for business use. When used cohesively, these components use the platforms’ inbuilt security, governance, and compliance capabilities.

Power Apps

Turn business ideas into enterprise solutions by connecting Power Apps across the Microsoft Power Platform.

Power Apps allow you to build end-to-end business solutions faster by reducing the overall development cost. It also allows you to seamlessly integrate with other third-party apps to boost your work efficiency and automate the workflows. At Rishabh Software, our proficient Power Apps development team can assist you with model-driven apps, canvas apps and secure apps by leveraging CDS and Azure Active Directory.

Benefits:

• Allows you to arrange and customize elements within your app interface with pre-built UI components like data tables, forms, and buttons.
• Drag-and-drop functionality saves a ton of your time when refining an app’s functionality and user experience.
• Time-saving features eliminate the need for extensive coding to achieve the same level of functionality at a fraction of the cost.
• Pro tools enable developers to leverage their existing skills and preferred tools to create and extend the functionality of Power Apps.

Types of Power Apps Explained:

You can infuse your business solutions with intelligence to automate workflows and gather insights from the data residing in your Power Apps. And if you can’t find a pre-built connector for your trusted legacy system, no problem! You can easily create your very own connector to start transforming your workflows. There are two Power Apps:

• Canvas apps where you have complete control over the design with the ability to leverage mobile device features, including GPS, camera, and microphone.
• Model-Driven apps that are fully adaptive and use Dataverse as their primary source of business data.

Power Automate

Drag-and-drop workflow-based automation software designed to automate manual and repetitive tasks.

Orchestrate your existing mobile apps and software solutions to put your mundane, time-consuming tasks on autopilot mode. Our Power Automate consultants can help you design and implement time-saving flows in Power Automate by harnessing the power of AI & RPA to boost productivity, cut costs & increase profits.

Benefits:

• Power Automate’s flows enable you to streamline your repetitive tasks, focus on key initiatives, and address crucial issues.
• Self-service automation capabilities reduce the possibility of human error while ensuring consistent processes and precise data.
• Advanced low-code AI builder fosters a culture of ongoing optimization by embedding powerful language models for enhancing various business tasks.

Overview of the Flows in Microsoft Power Automate:

Streamline repetitive tasks and business processes with the help of this powerful flow engine. Power Automate flows can be further classified into the following three categories:

• Cloud Flows with capabilities for integration with the other platform tools using connectors for commercial services or products. These cloud flows can be triggered automatically to orchestrate complex processes.
• Business Process Flows that direct users to perform their tasks through defined processes and eliminate the need for user training with a visual indicator that tracks progress.
• Robotic Process Automation flows for executing desktop flows on Windows virtual machines, mainly focused on manual web actions or legacy solutions.

Power BI

Make intelligent, informed decisions with data-driven insights.

This tool captures real-time data from other components within the Power Platform to help you uncover timely insights and make informed decisions. With our Power BI development services, we can help you build intuitive dashboards and on-demand custom reports using data visualization.

Benefits:

• Enables businesses to collect, consolidate and interact with large datasets and extract key insights for data-driven decision-making.
• Operations managers can track and analyze performance data in real-time to find and fix bottlenecks, optimize processes, and minimize costly downtime.
• Intuitive collaboration features allow teams from different departments to sync and share reports and dashboards to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Types of Reports Can be Created Using Power BI:

This BI data visualization tool leverages data from disparate sources to create insightful dashboards and generate accurate reports. It has transformation, visualization, and modeling capabilities that can be published on the cloud.  Power BI can be utilized to develop beginner and advanced analysis such as,

• Marketing campaign insights analysis
• Loan application analysis
• Healthcare sales analysis
• Airport authority data analysis
• Construction permit data analysis

Power Virtual Agents

Build conversational bots to engage employees & serve customers.

Free up your chat reps to focus on high-value customer interactions & let a virtual agent answer their queries 24/7/365. Our skilled developers can help you build intelligent bots faster with almost no coding! These conversational chatbots can be added anywhere – to your website, business app, or social channels to keep your business accessible to customers even beyond business hours!

Benefits:

• PVA helps HR professionals, sales reps, and employees to level up their support functions using chatbots to provide instant responses to a wide range of employee queries
• Automation saves significant effort spent on repetitive customer interactions and frees up valuable time for handling critical customer issues.
• Sales reps can use PVA to provide product/service information to website visitors, engage potential customers, and answer their questions.

Types of Bots Can be Created with Power Virtual Agents:

PVA allows you to create conversational bots that can be published on Power Pages, Microsoft Teams, Mobile apps, social channels, web applications, and any other channels compatible with the Azure Bot Framework.  Let us briefly walk you through where and when bots can be utilized.

• Customer service
• Sales and marketing
• IT support
• Finance
• Operations
• Human resources

Power Pages

Design, configure, and publish external websites across web browsers and devices.

The new member-in-power platform family allows you to create external-facing fully-responsive websites leveraging low code capabilities. You can select your page templates, personalize them, edit the layout, add site navigation, choose from a wide range of themes, and customize the colors to go with your brand guidelines. You can also use Visual Studio to extend the capabilities of Power Pages.

Benefits:

• Ready-to-use, customizable templates simplify and speed up the development process by enabling developers to build compelling sites while avoiding the developer’s block.
• Pro development capabilities and integrated tools like GitHub, Visual Studio Code, and Azure DevOps enable developers to inject advanced functionality into websites.
• Easy-to-use web-building tools significantly reduce development time and accelerate time to market.

Power Pages Capabilities:

With the help of Microsoft Power Pages, you can quickly create responsive, secure, and scalable professional websites. These extranet websites use the data residing in Dataverse to enable the visibility of information to stakeholders outside of the enterprise. Power Pages allow you to build,

• Community service web apps like licensing, permitting, and outage reporting.
• FAQ pages for services, products, policies, and procedures
• 24/7 customer support services to answer support inquiries, warranty registration, and schedule appointments.
• Partner operation websites for supplier onboarding, sustainability tracking, and vendor support

Having delivered profitable business solutions based on Microsoft Tech for two decades now, we’re here to guide you on your digital transformation journey every step of the way.

New Capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform

AI Builder is a Microsoft Power Platform capability to add intelligence to the apps by creating custom AI models within Power Apps. AI Builder offers smart AI models designed to optimize your business processes. Need sentiment analysis or want to predict future business outcomes? Consider it done with AI Builder!

Microsoft Dataverse is a cloud-based data management SaaS (software as a service) for storing business data. It swoops in to integrate all your data into a single unified storage unit that can be used across different Power Platform apps.

If you want to explore how the MS Power Platform can digitally transform your day-to-day business operations, check out this insightful read on Microsoft real-world Power Platform use cases that drive impact.

Many industry leaders and progressive tech giants are leveraging the MS Power Platform capabilities to be agile & efficient to expand at a larger scale. At Rishabh Software, we understand the importance of the Microsoft Power Platform in your digital transformation strategy.

As a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, our proficiency lies in developing custom solutions that leverage all the capabilities and components of the Microsoft Power Platform. Whether you need help integrating automation capabilities, developing low-code apps, building customizable websites, creating real-time dashboards, or implementing AI-powered bots, we’re ready to get you started!

Leveraging our Microsoft Power Platform consulting experience, we’ve helped several clients to develop data-driven business solutions with Microsoft’s no-code/low-code suite of tools.

Success Story

Digital Advertising Performance Dashboard Development Using Power BI

A US-based multi-bouquet advertising agency turned to Rishabh to develop a custom performance dashboard to overcome the lack of visibility into their ad campaigns, CTR, profitable channels, and traffic from different sources.

We helped them develop a comprehensive Power BI dashboard that enabled real-time visibility into their conversion rates, clicks, impressions, and more across regions and channels. The dashboard integrated analytics to keep the client on top of ad spend and revenue in real-time.

Key Benefits Delivered:

• 100% faster decision-making with real-time campaign performance data
• Automated reporting eliminated 90% of manual, error-prone analysis
• Increased focus on customer needs leads to 3x better market performance.

At Rishabh Software, we are backed by a team of skilled and experienced Microsoft Power Platform developers who can help you develop and deploy low-code projects fulfilling your custom business requirements. Having delivered enterprise-grade business solutions for the past two decades, we are here to assist you in navigating your digital transformation journey from planning to execution. Gain in-depth insights on how we helped digital marketing agency with a performance dashboard using Power BI on various channels and client engagement.

Footnotes:

1. https://6sense.com/tech/application-development/microsoft-power-apps-market-share
2. https://msdynamicsworld.com/story/power-platform-now-2-billion-business-microsoft-tempers-dynamics-growth-guidance
3. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/05/23/the-future-of-app-development-with-microsoft-power-platform/
4. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2020/06/16/imagine-build-and-deploy-solutions-with-microsoft-power-platform/