Power Platform Overview: A 15 Minute Intro for Beginners

this video covers the core concepts of microsoft power platform this is ideal for you if you're thinking about doing a fundamentals level exam if you're new to the microsoft business applications or power platform space or want to get into that area or if you've been hearing about this and just want to understand what on earth is this and how can i use it let me start by putting you in the right space here we are talking about a set of tools that allow you to build business applications now business applications are basically the tools and software that organizations use we're not talking about productivity tools here things like microsoft word teams excel outlook all of those things other microsoft 365 productivity tools this is now where we're getting into a space of apps that businesses use things that are like databases that store their customer information or workflows that automate approvals or send notifications those kinds of things and so the microsoft power platform fits in here this is a set of what we call low code tools that means you don't actually have to be a professional developer you don't need to be able to write code to use these which means that people who are experts in different areas of their business can participate in building applications or use these tools to do things that help them in their everyday work so power platform has four different components and i'm going to go through each of these as well as some of the other related concepts behind the scenes the first thing here is power apps powerapps allows you to build custom business applications this might be a mobile application it might be a full database application and there are actually three different types of things that you can do with power apps the first one is called a canvas app a canvas app is called that because it's a blank canvas you basically get a blank canvas on the screen and you can design right down to the last pixel exactly how you want that application to look and you use formulas using a formula language it's an expression language not unlike excel called power fx to determine the behavior of what goes on in that application you can connect this application to any data source there are about 470 at the time of recording different connectors that are available or you can build your own connector so essentially you can use a canvas app to build an application connected to another business data source and that can be things like perhaps giving an easier user experience for your sales people out on the road wanting to access customers or healthcare workers who want available information about a patient before they go to see them all of those kinds of things can be enabled with canvas apps the second thing we're working with here is called model driven apps and it's called a model driven app because it starts with a data model this is about starting with the concept of what types of data do i want to work with in my organization maybe you're doing office space management and you need to know you know what are the different buildings we have what are the different rooms we have what kind of capacity is in each room for each type of setup we might want to book those facilities and so on so we start to construct a series of data tables and we have relationships between those tables one building has many rooms one room can have many bookings and those bookings are associated with a contact or an organization that we work with and so we design out that data model and this is a relational database and then we can build that application this is a component way of building an application unlike canvas apps where we're starting with a pixel perfect experience right down to the last pixel we build out our data model and then we have components to display that data in the application so we can look at columns to show different views of that data and search and find things and then we click through and we open up the screen and we can see a form which displays the data in different components and different visual pieces on the screen the third thing that we can do with powerapps is called a portal and a portal is what you would use if you want to interact with your customers out in the world with your data so you might have a portal where people can log in and log a customer service ticket for instance or update their details or track where something is at that they're working with in your organization and this can be a portal that works with a partner that you're working with if you've got someone helping bring leads to your organization can be an employee portal or it can be something where you're working in a b2c environment with your customers now there are some crossovers here as well we're starting to see these app types merge together so we can do things like creating a canvas page that technology that allows us to have a blank page and put anything wherever we like and create that as a custom page inside our model driven app the second part of power platform that i want to talk to you about is called power automate we're in the blue area now and power automate does four different things the first thing it can do is cloud flows this is a trigger and action type automation when something happens do something else and this can include conditional branching so when i create a new record in my database then send an email notification to someone gets more complicated than that but essentially an action and a trigger and a series of things that determine those workflow rules really really great for automations of all kinds the second thing power automate can do is called a business process flow and i've got a whole video on that here if you're interested this is something that can guide users through the stages and steps of a process from start to finish reduce the need for training and help them understand what they need to do every step of the way and then allow you to get reporting and analytics on that this is useful if you're working through something like a sales pipeline or perhaps an hr onboarding recruitment type process where you want to be able to see where you're up to in the stages and determine particular steps that need to happen along the way the third thing we can do with power automate is robotic process automation this is also called in the platform desktop automation so what this is about is where we want to automate across systems where we can't connect to them programmatically it's using something called an api so this might be old web-based systems or legacy green screen applications things where you can't do that connection where you're actually recording your mouse clicks and your keyboard strokes and so on and then replicating them so if you've got like an old system perhaps in a healthcare scenario and you've got like a legacy system for your patient records and you're in an experience where you have to key that in and then re-key it again to another system because they can't connect with each other that's where robotic process automation can help you because you basically record the pattern of keystrokes and clicks and then you can run that and replicate that somewhere else and the fourth thing that we can do in power automate is process mining there's a feature in here called process advisor that allows you to analyze what's going on with your business processes identify bottlenecks and optimize those processes so you've got quite a package of things there that work in power automate and they can work together as well so you're not having to choose to say do i want you know a product that just does this robotic process automation or now i need a workflow tool you can actually use all of those things in combination with each other as part of that same tool set there the next thing here is power virtual agents that allows you to create chat bots with no code and we start to think differently about chat bots here because they can be things you put on your website in that traditional way of being able to say interact with our organization but they're also really really useful for internal scenarios you can put them inside teams but stay with me i'm going to tell you a little bit more about that later we see lots of different uses for chat bots and this technology allows us to build it really quickly and easily because it's a drag and drop interface and all of the conversational intelligence is built in so what i mean is you don't have to be an expert in all of that stuff with natural language processing and having the bot understand you give it a series of trigger topics five to ten things that the person might say when they're interacting with the bot and all of that intelligence underneath is able to understand the intent of what the user means select the right topic and then your bot can also take action on behalf of the user so you can authenticate users in by logging them in it knows who they are or even an anonymous way you can have them be able to put in a receipt number or an order number and retrieve their order information and then authorize a return within rules so lots of things there where your chat bot can actually help with questions and answers but also take advantage of being able to take action on behalf of the user and finally we have power bi power bi is used to gain analysis and insight on your data you can connect this to any data source and use it to slice and dice and understand what's going on with beautiful rich visualizations now the important thing here is that these are not standalone tools they all work together and you can start to leverage these things together in clever ways when i was telling you earlier about power virtual agents being able to take action that's actually using power automate cloud flows the bot is triggering an action and we're building out that flow in power automate to go and take action you can bring power bi tiles little charts and graphs and things inside your apps that you build to get that rich analysis and insight right inside your applications you can also start to bring power apps inside power bi so power bi is a system that allows you to gain analysis and insight but it doesn't do any kind of action embedding a power app in there means that you can actually go ahead and slice and dice your data and see what's going on and then you go oh i need to set up an appointment or set a reminder there and the powerapp is able to understand the context of what's going on and you can go ahead and set that right from in the context of your report so heaps of possibilities here with these tools and the thing to take out of this is this is a cohesive and connected set of tools that allow you to build complete applications and we're using the word application with this platform in the broader sense of the word everything from a mobile app through to chat bots and dashboards and charts so underneath all of this we have a capability called microsoft dataverse now the easiest way to explain this is that it's it's a database it's the platform that's sitting under all of this but there's a lot more going on than that what this is doing is allowing you to store your data in the most optimal way and to store different types of data so we've seen in the example when we talked about model driven apps before that you can have different types of data tables and relate them to each other that's far more complex than what you can do with something like excel or sharepoint as a data storage it can also handle file data types images files documents those kinds of things and log storage so you've got auditing capability and audit logs in there as well and under the hood it's using a heap of technologies in azure which is the microsoft cloud to optimize your storage and get the most out of it you don't need to know any of those things you don't need to go ahead and kind of understand how to set up infrastructure and optimize for the right kind of storage so you can just start with building your data model and putting those things together and all of that is taken care of for you another feature inside power platform that i want to make you aware of is called ai builder this allows you to bring artificial intelligence again in a low code experience through into your applications and workflows so there are built-in models here to do things like reading a document or a form of some kind and extracting the data from it and you can put it somewhere else it's got technology that allows you to do classification of like reading texts and determining what it's about pulling out the keywords and classifying it certain ways and a heap more there again if you want to get an overview of ai builder go check out my five minute video summarizing that now we talked about productivity tools earlier this is where these worlds come together because the other thing we can do here is dataverse for teams so we talked about dataverse which is this rich capability of storing your data and building all of these end-to-end applications on that platform we have a version of that that is available inside microsoft teams that makes all the things we've just been talking about available to you in microsoft teams included in your team's license by the way so you can build an app inside teams extending that experience of what you can do with teams so those collaboration type scenarios you might be organizing events and things and you've got a spreadsheet over here and a sharepoint list over there you can actually build an app inside teams in order to keep that in the flow of the work where you're already working and you've got a rich database storage underneath that can handle up to a million rows of data so if you're working something bigger than excel can handle that's something you can do we've also got power automate inside teams to do workflow automations and there's a bunch of templates in here which are just like point and click wizards to get started with common automation so you don't even really need to get in behind the scenes of flow to get started with using that and of course chatbots which i promised you i would come back to you can build a chatbot inside microsoft teams so if you've got scenarios in your organization where you have commonly asked questions things around hr or it support or those kinds of things your bot can be on hand 24 7 to give consistent answers to your employees about that and it can also take action it could log that it support ticket for you or put in that leave request and so on that's the microsoft power platform power apps power automate power virtual agents and power bi thanks for watching i hope that's been helpful

Channel: Lisa Crosbie

Views: 656

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: power platform overview video, microsoft power platform overview, power platform, power bi, power platform fundamentals, power apps, power automate, power automate desktop, canvas app vs model driven apps powerapps, power platform tutorial, power platform intro video, power platform introduction, power virtual agents, dataverse for teams, power virtual agents teams, ai builder power automate, ai builder powerapps, power platform overview, lisa crosbie

Id: ergBfAQqsgk

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 09 2021