Microsoft Power Platform Partner

Why use the Power Platform?

Most mid-market businesses have a variety of business systems in place to serve their accounting, supply chain, time billing, CRM and payroll needs. Whilst each of these applications may serve the specific requirement that they were chosen for, the patchwork creates a number of issues.

Having a number of different apps from different vendors will inevitably lead to duplication of some data. Staff spend time managing this duplication (e.g. aligning lists of customers, staff or products). They struggle to orchestrate processes across the business (e.g. the creating of new customer accounts) and, when reporting, find it difficult to get to a single version of the truth.

Whilst their patchwork of apps may cover core business processes, many organisations will not be able to find the time, money or executive sponsorship required to buy or build an application to support every business process within the business. In the meantime, staff will quietly have found ways to solve their practical problem by building their own ‘apps’, and often creating and maintaining lists in Excel, Access or SharePoint, creating invisible compliance and control issues.

Data duplication, manual orchestration, unmanaged apps, no source of truth – these are all symptoms and sources of friction within your business, which in turn create inefficiency, frustration and errors. It all adds up to unnecessary expense.

With the Power Platform, all of these applications and their underlying data sources are condensed into one place. Connectors allow for live synchronisation of data, removing the headache of duplicating and maintaining data across multiple databases. The low-code nature of the platform facilitates quick development and deployment so solutions can be designed at a lower cost with less time commitment, and puts the power directly into the hands of the citizen developers in the business who will no longer need to resort to Excel.

Power Platform FAQs

What is the Microsoft Power Platform?

Living up to its name, Microsoft’s Power Platform offers your business the opportunity to turn great ideas into real-life solutions, without requiring much in the way of development experience.

With Power Platform, you (if you are that person) will have the ability to create, design and build apps, automate your processes, and report fluidly on data across an organisation in a fully visual format. This will allow you to connect departments in your business in ways they were unable to before.

What is Power Apps?

Power Apps are the building blocks for innovation and hand users the ability to develop solutions to task and role-specific scenarios. Using Power Apps, you can build your own custom apps that are powered by the data in Dataverse, or data held within applications like Excel or SharePoint.

With a drag-and-drop design, apps can be built in hours rather than weeks or months and controlled by your business without the need to spend and wait on custom software development. You can start with a pre-built template with a ‘model-driven’ or start from a blank ‘canvas’ app. Anything is possible.

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate takes out the manual effort of repeating the same tasks over and over, replacing the entire flow with one button.

As an example, you could get daily location-based weather reports delivered to your phone or email, or insert a row into a chosen Excel spreadsheet with the contents of a Microsoft Form submission. Rather than manually checking the Form submissions every hour, Power Automate would take the contents of the submission and copy it into the Excel spreadsheet of your choosing.

What is Power BI?

With Power BI, users can take data from as many different sources as they like and create beautiful, easy to decipher reports. Where a bunch of rows and columns in Excel may not mean a great deal at first sight, a Power BI graph could instantly transform these numbers into a line graph, making a ‘sales by category’ trend instantly visible to any user. This eliminates the need to go to a BI Developer every time a report is required and instead hands the power back to the individual.

Power BI can provide valuable insights into business data through a single model and then securely share the results. Within the Power Platform family, it provides the other applications with triggers on which to act. You can also embed Power Apps into Power BI using the integration object, so users can view Power BI reports with dynamically updated Power Apps right there beside the data.

What is Virtual Agents?

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents are intelligent chatbots that can be deployed with no coding required.

The chatbots can be trained to use natural language to respond with relevant content. They then look up and return information from Dataverse, prompt the user to provide more information, trigger a workflow in Power Automate, or hand the conversation off to a live user via Omnichannel for Customer Service.

Does my data have to be in Dataverse?

If you want to create Model-driven or Portal Power Apps, you need to use Dataverse. For everything else, Dataverse is optional.

What Power Platform connectors are available?

Examples of ERP connectors include: Salesforce, SAP, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, Commercient, Impexium

Examples of non-ERP connectors include: Bitbucket, Jira, Slack, Trello, Zendesk

What’s the difference between standard and premium connectors?

It is a matter of pricing/licensing. Standard connectors are available to users with an Office 365 Licence (the ‘free’ plan), whereas premium connectors require users to purchase a per-user or per-app/per-flow plan.