You may have heard the name “Microsoft Power Platform,” but perhaps not about what it is and the benefits. Today, we’ll take care of that by focusing on its main elements, breaking it down in simple terms, and providing two case studies to show its potential benefits.
Overview
Microsoft Power Platform helps an organization streamline team collaboration and workflows by empowering “citizen developers” to quickly build intelligent, low-code, cross-platform apps to automate day-to-day activities and processes. It adds services for business intelligence, app development, and app connectivity. By enabling “citizen developers” the IT overhead like traditional development platforms would.
What’s a Citizen Developer?
A citizen developer is a person within the business who uses Power Platform to create new applications to solve everyday business problems. Power Platform enables these citizen developers to rapidly build and deploy applications and automation without ever writing a line of code. So, you don’t need training or coding experience, but you do require a deep contextual understanding of how your organization’s processes work, and can pinpoint the repetitive tasks that require streamlining.
Power Platform includes:
- Power BI: Analyze your data to discover hidden insights and make more informed business decisions.
- Power Automate: Build and streamline workflows between your apps and services to automate repetitive tasks and paperless processes, including synchronizing files, getting notifications, and collecting data or approvals.
- Power Virtual Agents: Act on your collected information and data by building powerful chatbots to engage in conversations with customers and employees.
- PowerApps: A suite of apps, services, connectors and a data platform that create an application- development environment to help you quickly build custom apps with no code expertise.
The platform also integrates with Office 365, Dynamic 365, and Microsoft Azure – and there are hundreds of connectors (RSS, Gmail, Twitter, Dropbox, MSN Weather) – to build an end-to-end solution to link your data with your business objectives.
Two Case Studies
- GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
In Microsoft Mechanics November vlog, host Jeremy Chapman asks Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Power Platform CVP, to provide a hands-on demonstration (at 2:29) of how an organization uses Microsoft Power Platform. Here’s a summary:
GSK created a mobile and desktop app as part of its Zero Accident Promotion program. The app can record safety risks and hazards, send them to head office, and take actions against them; it includes a map with geo-tags to show the risk location, a form to record the date and time the risk was reported, who reported it, a description of the risk, the risk score, and what action was taken to mitigate it. You can also place a virtual hazard cone at the exact risk location.
What’s really cool is that it’s integrated into Microsoft Teams, so you can manage the risk in a Teams chat. You simply type, “I want to manage my tasks.” The zap bot (Power Virtual Agent) comes back with a series of questions, so you can select an action to manage the risk.
- San Diego Workforce Partnership
San Diego Workforce Partnership empowers job seekers to meet current and future workforce needs.
When COVID-19 forced its offices to shut down and everyone to work remotely, it needed a way to serve its high volume of workers displaced by the pandemic.
Using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Power Virtual Agents, it digitally transformed to enable remote collaboration between team members, allowing them to respond quickly to the community, engage with people in need of support, and ensure they got help from the right person, right away.
Read the full case study here.
We Can Help
This is only the beginning. Now that you know just a few of Microsoft Power Platform’s capabilities, you can identify tasks to customize and automate your workflow for better decisions and processes within your team and for your business.
We can help transform your digital workspace by helping you optimize your team’s day-to-day work experience with the best tools to get the job done. Contact us today.
