Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals in 15 Minutes
Introduction to Microsoft Power Platform
This video provides an overview of the core concepts of Microsoft Power Platform. It is ideal for those who are new to the Microsoft business applications or Power Platform space, or want to understand what it is and how it can be used.
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
- Microsoft Power Platform is a set of tools that allow you to build business applications.
- Business applications are software tools that organizations use, such as databases that store customer information or workflows that automate approvals or send notifications.
- The Microsoft Power Platform fits into this space as a set of low-code tools, meaning you don't need to be a professional developer to use them.
- People who are experts in different areas of their business can participate in building applications or use these tools to help them in their everyday work.
Components of Microsoft Power Platform
Power Apps
- Allows you to build custom business applications, including mobile and database applications.
- There are three different types of things that you can do with Power Apps: canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals.
- Canvas apps start with a blank canvas where you design the application right down to the last pixel using formulas using a formula language called Power Fx. You can connect this application to any data source using available connectors or by building your own connector.
- Model-driven apps start with a data model where you construct a series of data tables and have relationships between those tables. You then have components to display that data in the application so users can look at columns showing different views of that data and search for specific items.
- Portals allow customers outside your organization to interact with your data through logging customer service tickets, updating their details, tracking something they're working on with your organization.
Power Automate
- Allows you to automate workflows across different applications and services.
- You can create flows that automate repetitive tasks, such as sending notifications or synchronizing files between systems.
- Power Automate has hundreds of connectors available for different applications and services.
Power BI
- Allows you to analyze data and share insights through interactive visualizations, reports, and dashboards.
- You can connect to hundreds of data sources, including Excel spreadsheets, cloud-based and on-premises data sources.
Power Virtual Agents
- Allows you to create chatbots that can answer questions from customers or employees.
- You can build chatbots without needing any coding skills using a guided interface.
Related Concepts
Low-code Development
- Low-code development is a way of building software applications with minimal hand-coding. It allows non-developers to participate in the application development process by providing them with tools that abstract away much of the complexity of traditional programming languages.
Common Data Service (CDS)
- The Common Data Service is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to securely store and manage business data used by your applications. It provides a standard schema for storing data in the cloud so that multiple applications can use it.
Microsoft Dataverse
- Microsoft Dataverse is an evolution of the Common Data Service. It provides a secure and scalable database service for building low-code apps on top of it.
Power Platform Overview
In this section, the speaker provides an overview of the Power Platform and its four main components.
Power Automate
- Power Automate is one of the four components of the Power Platform.
- It can be used for cloud flows, business process flows, robotic process automation, and process mining.
- Cloud flows are trigger and action type automations that include conditional branching.
- Business process flows guide users through stages and steps of a process from start to finish.
- Robotic process automation automates across systems where you can't connect to them programmatically using APIs.
- Process mining allows you to analyze what's going on with your business processes.
Power Virtual Agents
- Power Virtual Agents allows you to create chatbots with no code.
- Chatbots can be used for internal scenarios or put on your website for traditional interactions.
- The technology allows us to build chatbots quickly and easily because it's a drag-and-drop interface with all conversational intelligence built-in.
- Chatbots can take action on behalf of the user by authenticating users in by logging them in or even an anonymous way.
Power BI
- Power BI is used to gain analysis and insight into your data.
- You can connect it to any data source and use it to slice and dice data with beautiful rich visualizations.
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