Power Platform – is it that powerful?2 min read

The internet has already gone wild a bit in regards to recent Microsoft Power Platform features and how business sharks like Pepsi saved up to $500k having created an auditing app with no app dev experience. Pretty cool, right?

But before you, our dear reader, can jump right into Power Platform, let us give you a quick rundown on what it’s that, its capabilities and some of the best scenarios of usage. Then, we will let you dive in or assist with guidance!

What is Power Platform?

Power Platform connects Power BI, PowerApps and Power Automate together (or Flow, if you like) as well as hundreds of other apps to eventually help organizations to build end-to-end custom business solutions.

Same as Dual Write, it uses Common Data Service (CDS) to unite data flow between apps in a biderictorial way, which makes Power Platform accessible through Office 365, Dynamics365, and other MS apps.

What’s under the hood?

There are four products under the Microsoft Power Platform:

  • Power BI – Quality reporting has roots in detailed preparation. Utilizing PowerBI helps users to seamlessly connect to different data sources, create charts, dashboards etc. what makes data analysis and reporting easy. Supercharge your team with metrics they need to do the job avoiding data wrangle.
  • Power Apps – allows your team to build custom, however for internal usage only, apps with no code knowledge needed – quite useful if you are willing to develop an app to optimize costs by improving accounting data flow (remember Pepsi case at the beginning?) and don’t want to involve an already busy IT team.
  • Power Automate – more things you automate, less you are risking catching a human error in your process. Microsoft Flow provides organizations with workflows to create and automate your MS services as well as third-party apps. 
  • Power Virtual Agents – chatbot solutions for external communication. 

All things combined, Power Platform decreases the level of knowledge needed to do more, knowing less – non-technical users can seamlessly analyze, build, automate and “chat” without coding skills.

Does it fit with your D365 system?

We’ve already mentioned that you can connect Power Platform to different third-party apps like Twitter, Google products (i.e. Analytics) however the real magic happens once you connect it to either D365 or Office products.

It’s hard to tell how far you can go with Power Platform and D365 once combined, as PP is fairly new and is to be regularly improved and updated as the product scales. Nevertheless, it’s worth trying, and implementing, and testing how far you may go once started utilizing PP.

Finally, what are the costs?

Now, you can only subscribe to each product separately – there is no way to buy a bundle. And that’s, to be honest, quite weird. But, a good thing is you can try trial and test if the solution fits your needs.