What are Microsoft Power Platform benefits?

The Microsoft Power Platform consists of three applications—Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate. These three applications are designed to let users analyze their data, act on their findings, and automate business processes. Each component is built on the Common Data Service (CDS), which is a database hosted in Azure Cloud. The advantage of this is that all your data exists under a unified data model, allowing the applications to interact with one another seamlessly. The Power Platform is a flexible platform and can be used with Dynamics 365, Office 365, and other third-party applications.

This blog post will discuss Power Platform benefits and how you can use each tool in your business.

Power BI is a business intelligence solution that collects data from a variety of sources and turns it into visually compelling charts, graphs, and reports. Using sources such as Excel, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and social networks, users can create live interactive visuals that provide a 360-degree view of their business activities. The visualizations can be embedded in your existing applications such as Dynamics 365, and they will always display the most current data due to the underlying common data model. For example. you can embed Power BI data into Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.

By taking advantage of Power BI’s analytics abilities, organizations can gain insights from their data that can lead to better decision-making. When data exists in disparate locations, it can be hard to make sense of it all and identify trends or patterns. But with Power BI, it is easier than ever to combine and analyze all your business data through an intuitive and visually compelling user interface.

Power Apps is a suite of applications and services that provides businesses with a development environment to create custom apps. You can create three types of applications: canvas, model-driven, and portal. Canvas apps are used to create a tailored user interface from a blank canvas, which you then connect to your choice of over 200 data sources. Model-driven apps start with your data model, building off of your business data in the CDS to create forms, views, and other components. Portal apps are external-facing websites that allow users outside of your organization to interact with business data.

All applications are able to be created without the use of code, and all can run in both browser and mobile devices. Power Apps provides a way for businesses to more accurately meet their business needs through custom development. As it can be used by users without extensive coding knowledge, the application-building experience is more accessible than ever. Because Power Apps uses the Common Data Service to store data, organizations can build applications directly against core business data used within other applications such as Dynamics 365, without the need for integration.

See examples of how to use Power Apps at your organization. Rand Group offers comprehensive support for Power Apps including training, app building, and integration services.

Power Automate, previously known as Microsoft Flow, turns mundane activities into efficient and automated business processes. This tool has many capabilities such as document approval, data entry automation, and lead entry generation. With more than 220 services and apps available for connection, Power Automate can help businesses manage data in the cloud or on-premises, in sources such as SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server. As it built on the CDS for data storage, it can be used alongside Power Apps to design logic for your custom applications. Power Automate can greatly improve your organization’s efficiency, as it can be used to automate almost any business process. It can automate flows between your favorite applications and services, sync files, receive notifications, collect data, and much more. Automating repetitive tasks into multistep flows can help to meet current and future business needs.

The Microsoft Power Platform benefits are far ranging as its tools give your users the power to create their own efficiencies. Explore pricing here.

To start using Power Platform at your organization, or for support with existing visualizations, apps, and automations, contact our team of experts. Rand Group is a Microsoft gold partner with extensive experience implementing and supporting the Power Platform and a variety of Microsoft technologies.