What on earth is Power Platform?

How would it sound to create your own business applications quickly and cost‑effectively? Or to automate repetitive processes with workflows and agents? Power Platform enables all of this and much more – without you necessarily having to write a single line of code.

Power Platform is Microsoft’s low-code platform. Low-code means that development does not require traditional programming skills; even with more limited expertise, you can go a long way. If you know how to create PowerPoint presentations and use simple formulas in Excel, you can likely get started easily with building your own business applications as well.

Power Platform consists of five different tools: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio, and Power Pages.

Power Apps

Power Apps enables a fast and lightweight way to create customized business applications without deep programming expertise. With Power Apps applications, you can collect, present, and share data across different devices, such as smartphones. It uses a visual user interface and ready-made components, making application creation and modification easy.

With connectors, Power Apps can connect to various data sources such as Dataverse, SharePoint, or SQL Server.

Power Automate

Power Automate enables streamlining and optimizing business processes without deep programming expertise and makes it easier to automate manual tasks and move data between different systems. With Power Automate, you can also integrate third-party services via APIs.

Approval processes, batch jobs, integrations, and recurring workflow steps are all best left to Power Automate to handle.

Workflows can also be triggered from agents created with Copilot Studio. An agent can, for example, send an email formatted in a specific way or update a database using a workflow when needed.

Power BI

With Power BI, business data stored in data warehouses can be analyzed and visualized in a format better suited for end users. Finished reports can be published directly to the Power BI portal or embedded for viewing in other systems.

With Power BI, everyone in the organization can make decisions based on up-to-date analytics and data.

Also see: Power BI Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

Copilot Studio

You can respond quickly to customer or employee needs with your own agents. Using the design tool, building customer service agents and internal assistants without code is within everyone’s reach. With generative AI, an agent can solve a user’s problem based on the instructions and data sources provided to it.

An agent can also use various tools, such as agent workflows and connectors to other Microsoft 365 services and third-party systems. These make it possible to securely build autonomous agents for process automation across the entire organization.

Power Pages

With the Power Pages tool, you can design, create, and publish business websites that work across all web browsers and devices. It offers a visual design tool and versatile, customizable site templates. You can use the same business data stored in Dataverse on your sites that you use with other Power Platform tools.

Power Platform offers tools for many use cases, but it is a platform, not a finished product. Sometimes it can be difficult to identify where Power Platform tools could help. It is often easier to listen to business pain points and start shaping solutions to problems from there

To support ideation, you can use questions such as the following:

• Which process frustrates or burdens end users the most?

• Which process is unreasonably complex?

• Which process takes a significant amount of time to complete?

• Which process still relies on Excel files (or even paper forms)?

• In which process does information fail to reach all participants?

• In which process do the most errors occur?

One example of such a business pain point could be onboarding a new employee. The problem might be that there is no clear process for new hires at all, that process steps get stuck or are forgotten entirely, or that there is no overall view of the process status. Another issue could be that onboarding does not produce measurable data for reporting purposes.

For this challenge, you could offer, for example, the following solution:

• Create a Power Apps application through which a manager enters a new employee’s details and can also track the progress of the process.

• Use a Power Automate workflow to trigger the onboarding steps, such as ordering accounts, procuring necessary equipment, scheduling training, arranging access badges, and other similar steps.

• Automatically notify the manager (or, for example, the HR team) of process progress as part of the workflows, and send reminders if the process does not advance within the agreed timeframe.

• With a Power BI report, you can monitor process progress and also compare processes with one another. Through reporting, you can, for example, identify if a specific part of the process is not working as intended and adjust operating practices accordingly.

• An automated feedback survey at the end of onboarding, so that process smoothness and quality can be measured numerically.

Once the employee has been onboarded and familiarized with the company’s processes and ways of working, it is time to focus on development discussions, career path planning, skills identification, training plan creation… Power Platform tools can be used in all of these phases as well! Various HR assistants are also among the most popular agents created with Copilot Studio. They search extensive documentation to find exactly what a new (or even an experienced) employee needs.