| Anum Batool
Microsoft Power Platform - Beginner’s Guide
What is a Power Platform?
The power Platform consists of four key components. Let’s first discuss the Power Apps.
Power Apps
Power Apps are applications that you build that users can interact with. You build these applications using local techniques without diving into traditional developer tools like Visual Studio. It means they can be built by a broader set of people in the organization and do not have much maintenance as things change in the underlined platform.
Power Automate
Power Automate allows you to automate a series of steps. You can think of it as rather than doing work manually where you might forget one of the steps; Power Automate can automate that work in a repeatable sequence with a consistency of a robot.
Moreover, you can effectively connect multiple systems to the connectors, which we will discuss later in this blog.
Power BI
Power BI allows you to take the raw data we collect in an organization, turn it into beautiful visuals that we can get insights out of, and take proactive actions. We can also use natural language queries to poke at the data to get answers to our essential questions.
Power Virtual Agent
The final component is Power Virtual Agent, the latest addition to the Power Platform. Power Virtual Agent allows you to build chatbots without needing the underlined developer techniques. Hence, they are no-code virtual agents and can interact with users visiting a site or an application. They can also take action using Power Automate's capabilities, leveraging the best of both capabilities.
Common Data Service
These key components depend on some core services which enable the components to do their work. Almost all business applications need to store some other data they collect from users or might want to bring in data from the separate silos in the organizations of data that they want to bring to a central place to allow building applications automation easier.
The Common Data Service is an extraction across multiple Microsoft underlined data storage technologies bringing the best of all the services in this form of Common Data Service. The Common Data Service implements the common data model, which effectively takes Microsoft’s decade's knowledge of the business applications, structures, and formats of data and implements that in an open-source version that the CDS implements and allows you to store data in.
Connectors
Since Common Data Service won't be in the Common Data Service, Microsoft has implemented a concept called Connectors. They enable Power Apps and Power Automate flows to interact with data from other systems and services without knowing the APIs or developer interfaces. There are more than three hundred out-of-the-box connectors, and you can also build custom connectors by defining the existing APIs.
AI Builder
Modern-day business applications are expectedly more competent, more proactive, and less reactive to problems. One way to do that is by infusing AI into the applications, which conventionally requires a data scientist's background and a lot of sophisticated capabilities.
Hence, an AI Builder brings those capabilities, so they are easily achievable without having a solid data science background in power apps and power automate as part of the applications you build.
Join us next time, as we continue our journey of learning canvas apps.Click here to learn more about Imperium's Power Apps Services. We hope this information was useful, and we look forward to sharing more insights into the Power Platform world.
