Stop just building Canvas Apps! The Power Platform has so many tools you can use

quit building everything as a power apps canvas app because that's what you know right I'm guilty of it I love power apps canvas apps I'm awesome at them so I try to build everything as them but in reality the Power Platform is full of a bunch of different tools and so the fact that we're not familiar what those tools are good and not good for really is a challenge for a lot of us so this video is to solve that problem we're going to go through all the different types of power apps all different types of power automates we're going to go through Power Pages powerbi we're talk about Microsoft forms for a second we're even to cover power virtual agents I mean co-pilot Studio what right we're going to try to put all that stuff into the context of why it's important to you and how you can build Better Business apps by understanding all the solutions of the Power Platform instead of just being razor focused on canvas apps we're going to do all that by showing you lots of examples and keep in mind as we go through this stuff like yes if you have a team of ninjas and crazy people like you might be able to find caveats and workarounds right but all my general guidance is coming from the standpoint of hey you just want to have a foundational knowledge and we as a company built thousands of apps and reporters and power pages and all those stuff and we just know the common use cases we see and the common mistakes we're seeing that's what drove this video so don't overthink it don't be like oh but I know that that's a little bit different Shane you probably do it's okay also keep in mind that you know I'm going to kind of mention licensing along the way I'll say hey this needs premium licensing to do X or Y but we're not going to get into those details we're happy to help you with those you can leave comments I can chime in on that contact us powerapps 911.com for that but the licensing conversation would just take us down to me rabit so enough of the blah blah blah let's just switch over my desktop and take a look okay so let's start what we know right the idea here is that we want to jump over here to make. power apps.com and from this place right we know we can do lots of stuff but what I really want to dive into is you click on create I feel like this experience still articulates it the best and you click on blank app you're going to see that there's three different things here right so these are the three different products that are power apps which I think is a major point of confusion for people like I know what power apps and I'm be like oh yeah what do you know about power Pages like I don't know that right what a lot of times it really is is I know canvas apps or I know model driven apps or I know power pages right they are three distinct products even though they all fall under the umbrella of power apps I'm very guilty of this usually when I say power apps I mean canvas apps but in reality they're three different products so canvas apps this is where we all like to start for most of us we get a free usage of this through our Microsoft 365 or Office 365 whatever they call it this week subscriptions and so we can build those custom apps now generally speaking I think of canvas apps is they are great when we want to talk to a wide range of data sources right we've got in the Power Platform like 1200 is data sources today so we can talk to everything from you know the Office 365 stuff like SharePoint and exchange all the way through SQL and Oracle and Azure and YouTube and Twitter and I mean like they're just everything is out there sap custom apis there is literally 1,200 different connectors so canvas apps are really great because they can interact with all of those data sources without you having to jump through a lot of Hoops and typically what we're building here is we're building small apps that are you know for taking in information maybe editing that information maybe searching filtering and then saving that information right like working with information often times when people looking for ways to start with these I'm like hey go find an excel-based process today where you pass on Excel spreadsheet and turn that into an app now keep in mind like we all started these small apps but we have seen power apps that have literally cost a million dollars to build right power apps can become very large very scalable we have this whole concept of no Cliffs where we can introduce custom developers in there if we want to start adding our own controls interacting with third party services that aren't in that 1200 that are available right there's a lot that we can do there now typically speaking we thinking canvas apps is targeting internal use cases right so like here at power apps 91 we've built our CRM system on power apps we've built our time sheet on power apps I use a lot of automation like for working with my University students through power apps we use it to kind of build custom solutions to solve internal problems technically speaking power apps canvas apps can be used as external it's possible it's not a great use case it just becomes a little wonky donkey because you know as external scenarios well they've got to have an account they got to have a license and who's managing all those pieces you know if you come to me and say Hey I want to build something that's going to be externally facing for a large external audience a lot of times we're not going to go to the canvas app R now we have right like one of our customers uses it with all the their clients uh throughout the region where they want to do a bunch of ordering and stuff right they're kind of taking orders to it but it's still a controlled list they know who the people are right they're all named accounts and then they're using some of that pay as you go licensing so there are external scenarios but when you're jumping off here think about this as an internal tool next up in the middle there we have model driven apps so model driven apps these are something that is kind of an offshoot from Dynamics 365 if you know the whole history of Power Platform you know we kind of evolved all from the Dynamics world and so model driven apps if you have familiar with Dynamics are going to feel very familiar to you but these are apps that you can quickly build and I I call them forms over data so they can do a lot of the same things that we saw in the canvas app you know we can filter search look at the data one of the key differences though is that model driven apps are only built on top of data verse and instead of starting with that blank white screen where you go through and you kind of assemble all the pieces right like in the canvas app if I want something there I literally have to add it build it customize it do it myself with mono driven apps you basically say hey here's my data verse tables I want to add you know it understands the relationships understands all that and then you say okay I want to use the form that comes with that I want to use the view I want to use the charts right all that's kind of built at the dataverse level so building a moner of an app is really just kind of a bunch of checkboxes hey click this this this this this boom it spits you out an app making it very powerful right if you're on this it can create you an app in an instant one of the challenges though is with model driven apps they are not easily customizable so if you want to make it do things that it doesn't want to do sometimes you just can't sometimes you can get someone that knows things like JavaScript to get them to kind of write some crazy customizations like it gets a little complicated pretty quick but if the core thing does what you want it is super powerful keep in mind that the licensing that you have with your Microsoft 365 does not typically include model driven apps so you're going to need additional licensing for that now if you're a Dynamics customer you might have the licensing also the same way that we didn't think that canvas apps are very good for external entities model driven apps also not ideal if your your use cases I want to work with a bunch of people all over right they're typically internally focused apps the third one that shows up over here power pages right so whereas we think of canvas apps and model driven apps as apps right business solutions that are applified power Pages it's a website right like I love to put the word website there and that's what it's going to be it's going to be for you to build a website it could be internally facing it could be externally facing right so we keep talking about if you want to work with people outside it's a great way to do it or it can even be anonymous so you could in theory or not in theory if you want you can even build your public website on power pages I don't know anyone's doing that but it is a full tool for building websites now these websites are going to be backed by dataverse once again right and they are covered under a different licensing but for the most part the licensing works one of two ways either it's if you want to only use it internally then you can buy power apps internal licenses named users that type of stuff or if you want to use it externally then you're going to just pay for the usage right so you can pay for the number of calls number of page views that type of stuff right so you it's a much more interesting solution like when you want to build something that's publicly facing maybe you're trying to collect information from applicants or you're trying to you know do some type of thing where you know you want want people to come in create an account because it also supports not only just you know our aure ad accounts like all the other two tools did but it can do its own authentication it could use Facebook or Google authentication Microsoft accounts it has a lot of different flexibility around authentication it's truly a platform for building websites now I will say that they say hey create a no code website that is true you can technically create this thing with no code I would say that every single customer that we have built one of these for we have had to you know use a prodev right we've had to do liquid or I forget typescript like a bunch of Devy like code languages to really get the customizations we need so yes you can build it without code but every production implementation I know of ended up using some Pro code to really make it do what they wanted okay so that sums up the different types of power apps right so there's actually three of these now you will see that Microsoft continues to try to do what they call Convergence of trying to kind of get this so it's less three products but here as I stand at the end of 20 23 they are three distinct products three distinct licensing three distinct tool sets right just because I am awesome at canvas apps doesn't make me anything at Power pages right like I I barely know my way through Power Pages model driven apps and canvas apps they are a little bit closer they're starting to get closer to being converged so my canvas app skills kind of transfer a little bit there but still they are different tools different customizations and so I wanted you to kind of see that you know there they're different options but reality you should be familiar and be able to at least articulate you through the three all right so next up I want to take a quick little side step out of the Power Platform for a second right so if we go over here this is forms. microsoft.com once again this comes with your Microsoft 365 subscriptions typically and the reason I point this out is because no it's not part of the Power Platform but a lot of times we use this as a way to get that external data right so if you're thinking about getting stuff from the outside we just talk about the different ramifications of those tools sometimes we just just want oneway information and we need to get it into the system so for us for example if you go over to power apps 91.com and then you go here to our um you know careers and then you apply so our job application process is actually a Microsoft form okay because all we want from an applicant is them to get this information but we need into one of our business systems so they come in here they use Microsoft forms and it's a lot like Survey Monkey right like you come in you tell you what different types of questions you want uh you know how what way are the answers going to be structured how long are they are they required you can do branching not we're not trying to teach you Microsoft forms right now but it's a good way to get information in because then when this information gets filled in someone adds an applicant here when they do this it then triggers a power automate flow which we're going to learn about in just a second and so that cloud flow then takes the information from here stores it into SharePoint online for us and then it takes and notifies us that says hey we've got a new applicant and so then the right people can start to review and then our business process of you know reviewing applications interviewing all that is facilitated with the data store in SharePoint okay so keep that in mind if getting external information one way is all you're trying to do forms is a great solution so we personally use it here we've got customers that do it for onboarding new clients they send them this the uh client puts in all the information that triggers that cloud flow that cloud flow says hey were you expecting Susie to fill out this uh onboarding I was you hit approve and then it starts the process of creating Susie the accounts sending her the documentation the contracts all of that we automated all of that but because we can make this purely Anonymous and available on the web to anyone it's a great way for us to get information in to then kick off the business processes we need so just a little side note here but Microsoft forms is sometimes the answer to your external problems hey if you're starting to feel overwhelmed from all these tools that we're running through remember over at training that power power apps 911.com We've Got The Power Platform University there is a six-month immersive program it has a mentor it has Hands-On projects it has live classes on demand classes it is a all-encompassing thing that is going to teach you all the different facets of the Power Platform to make you a more effective worker when it comes to using all these Solutions so don't go this alone if you really are watching this you're overwhelmed don't worry I got a training class that can help you for that just go check it out over at training. powerapps 911.com Switching gears over here to power automate right so make. power automate and so here if we do the same type of thing we go to create we're going to see that there's like six buttons up here at the top in reality I think of this as three things right so these first four these are all Cloud flows Cloud flows are your traditional workflows right I want to have some type of trigger so when something changes like when I get an email when a file changes when an item gets deleted or on a schedule so every day at 8: a.m. the last day of the month the first day of the month every half hour or when someone presses a button whether it's a physical button or a virtual button like a power app right someone triggers it but there's some type of trigger that says hey run an automation do a workflow so we trigger it and then we have one or more actions and actions where we go and interact with one of those 1,200 data sources we already talked about so maybe it's hey when someone sends me an email with this then log it into teams and then take the attachment and upload it to SharePoint or when someone presses a button create me a PDF go hit this third party uh subscription service that we get use their API to pull in data supplement that and then take that and distribute that to everyone right those are the type of workflow automation so if you've done like SharePoint designer workflows in the past or any type of just you know we have a way to trigger it cause it to start and then run that's what cloud flows are and that's what those first four buttons really do is they create you a power automate Cloud flow Cloud flows are great because the same way that canvas apps came with your Microsoft 365 subscription cloudflow is interacting with The Office 365 Microsoft 365 ecosystem those are also included so we see customers building hundreds of these to do all types of those backend automation processes they want to have take place now if you start to want to stretch the boundaries you can get into scenarios where you need premium licensing that could be because you're doing a lot of scale or you want to interact with a custom data source right there's both premium data sources standard data sources and custom data sources so premium and custom those are both going to requ require premium licensing to interact with those um you know when you think about these when it comes to internal versus external people like I don't think of it that way at all it can definitely send things to external you can be triggered from external so like these I don't really think of the same way as we did with the power apps where we worri about internal or external these are really just about automating business processes let machines be do What machines are good at and add some automation into your world okay next up we have the desktop flows so desktop flows are a newcomer um so desktop flows as you can guess they are workflows that run on a local machine right so I think of them running on my PC for the most part they are included if you just want to write a desktop flow that runs on your PC and just interacts with your PC that is included with your windows Licensing in a lot of cases desktop flows are part of what is called RPA robotic process automation like things like UI path you know those type of vendors where you want to take and you want to automate a process on the desktop that maybe doesn't have an API so for example like we've seen people use it to log into Legacy systems you know it says Hey log in here log in there and then go to screen six then go to screen 12 and then type in the invoice number and then whatever's over on this part of the screen grab that out and then capture that into an Excel file send me an email log it do something with it right so automating those repetitive desktop based tasks if you think back in the old days of like you know macros right recording that's what it is a screen it can be a screen recorder that emulates your clicks on a local PC now with desktop flows we talk about they're kind of included if it's just in your desktop but if you want to start triggering these with Cloud flows having them interact with larger Business Systems or you want to have these hosted so they're not just running on Chan's literal PC like I want to have them running on a hosted PC Microsoft's got additional licensing options there there's a lot of really interesting scenarios here though especially those of you got Legacy systems that there's not an API but you need a way to programmatically get the data out like I used it one time to click a button for me 64 times I wrote another one that would take an image that I would attach to it through a dialogue box and then it would open up my image editing tool it would grab the whole thing and then whatever text I put in that same dialogue box it would write it on the image save the image for me and then upload it to my file store right there's a lot of cool personal automation you can do and system business automation if you start to get into some of those premium licenses with this lastly over here on the far right we've got process mining process mining this is the ability to look at a process right so if you wanted to say like remember operations management if you ever did any of that like you know you take raw inputs and like what is the process that's got to go through and the factory to become a widget and so we know like it had to go from you know here it go to this station to this station we had to kind of move them around and so what process mining does is you can show it the logging of that type of stuff and it can say hey here's what your process looks like here's where the bottlenecks are here's the average runtime oh you want to speed things up remove this piece of the puzzle or optimize this workstation right and so like I always think of it in the factory context but it can work with your invoice history so if you want to have it help you with your accounts payable and trying to move things through the old accounts payable or accounts receivable processes better you can use it for that basically any type of structured process where it under where you can show it like hey this is where we're at in the process this is when it got here this is when it leaves here this is where it goes if you have a data set that is like that it can you know you just give it the data set and it's going to build out the mappings it's going to build out all the visuals like it it really is just like hey here's my Fields Boop and all the stuff you're seeing will happen so process mining it does have its own licensing it's its own Critter I I've not done a lot with it honestly like I mean we've done it for one client I've played with it enough to kind of be dangerous with it we've got some people here that know a lot more about than I do but it it's still one that hasn't really taken off but it is a pretty interesting tool if you've got those structured processes you want to visualize find the bottle neck so there you go that's the power automate uh tools right one of the things to keep in mind is that you know just like power apps right there basically there's three distinct tools here so the way that you do things the language you use the tooling that you use between these three tools they are different so it's once again power automates the umbrella but there's really three separate products in here and where as I told you on the canvas app and model like Microsoft's kind of converging more of this we're not seeing converging here right we I mean I'm sure at some point maybe in the future but really it's Cloud flows desktop flows process mining they're just three different tool sets to solve the different business needs you might have so now that we've talked about how to you know build an app to work with your data how to automate your data now you want to visualize your data and that's going to be powerbi right we can do visualizations over in power apps right like I've made some there and they always just feel like you know I did it but if you truly are looking to build visual dashboards reports interact slice dice that type of stuff powerbi is going to be the right tool for you now powerbi is free if you want to build reports for yourself right you can use this powerbi desktop you sign in you can build a report pull in your data do all your things and run it here no no problems right the thing with powerbi is that you start to look at sharing data having uh reports ran on schedules all of those type of really cool like actual business scenarios right simp if you're going build a report because you want to share it with a bunch of people all of those are going to require different licensing there are some of those licenses are included with that E5 level with the uh Microsoft 365 but once again we're not get into the details either way just think about that powerbi we can build them for free but as we start to get them out we're going to have to get a little bit into licensing now what you're going to do with powerbi is when you're in here you can start to build out visualization so you're going to pull in data you can transform the data clean up the data which is often the hardest part of the projects and they've got all these different visuals for slicing dcing and making the data Dynamic powerbi can also talk to a lot of different data sources it can have static data sets it can have them on demand it can have you know ones that run on schedules there's a lot of really interesting stuff you can do here but this is one of those key elements a lot of times like when we start talking about building the app to pull in all that information about our manufacturing process right and then we're building you know power automates to facilitate all that working through now the last step of that project is typically going to be hey we want to be able to visualize it right the executives don't want to work with they just want to see what you did and so typically you're going to use powerbi in those scenarios also you're going to see like they're using the Microsoft fabric name in here more and more like so it's kind of transforming but while it's not as direct as power apps and power automate which are like you know real close in the same product powerbi is in the family um and it should be part of your business solutions also keep in mind that it's the only one that has a desktop product like this that we're actually using to build and then you publish it to the web and then that's where you start getting the sharing the internet connectivity you can build out there but a lot of times you're going to start with powerbi on the desktop and then push it out to the powerbi on the web or power behind the cloud I don't know whatever we want to call that last but not least we have power virtual agents or that's what it was called a month ago now we call it co-pilot studio right so power virtual agents which is part of the Power Platform evolved in the co-pilot studio so everything you could do with PVA can now be done inside co-pilot studio and what you're primarily going to be doing today is you're going to be building chat Bots right and so the the same way that I can go chat with chat GPT or Bing chat I can build a bot here that I can chat with it can also use generative AI so we can take it and say Hey I want you to get information from the this SharePoint site right or get the from this website so we can pull in information and instead of building topics like so typically when you think of a chat bot you're like all right if I want to be able to say you know what is a shark so I would have to go make a question a topic for that what is a shark that'd be my trigger phrase and then down here I would fill in here's the details of what a shark is so someone to ask it it would trigger that topic and it would go now what I can do is just feed it a bunch of content about animals and then not create a topic and so then the idea is when I say tell me what you know about sharks it would say well there's no topic for that so then let me look in the data set oh look there's information about sharks in there it'll pull it out and site that information very helpful ways to build more robust Bots right so the same way we can build gpts over in chat GPT we're going to build co-pilots here to do this chatting but not only can we do the generative answers we still can also create those topics so in one of the demos I did this week I had an HR bot and so that HR bot was really pulling generative information in but then I said okay but if they say how much PTO do I have I had a specific topic for that that would then take their uh user ID go look into my data source look up their amount of information and respond back because I could integrate a power automate flow so the chatbot here it's doing generative stuff it's doing hard-coded stuff but those hard-coded topics can even use power automate to call Custom actions to go and get information and provide it back or another one we did for a customer they were using it for IT Help Des so you kind of did your troubleshooting here if the bot couldn't help you then you could say create me a ticket and then it would just trigger that flow action it would create them a ticket and service now boom they were off and running so they didn't have to go to another system to create a ticket and then they had the chat information as well so lot of really cool stuff you can do co-pilot studio is becoming more and more important as Microsoft rolls out more co-pilots when you know Microsoft 365 co-pilot rolls out you're going to be able to use co-pilot Studio to customize it so even though this doesn't really seem like it's power the power platform today it is it came from us it still does a lot of things for us and it's a chance for us to evolve into that copilot story I don't know what you guys but that was a lot right hopefully though this gives you an idea that man there's a lot lot of different tools out there we're not just a onetick pony here if you really want to be good at this whole low code no code thing you've got to understand the difference between power apps and the different ones there the power automates where does power Pages plug in where does powerbi come in can I build a chat bot to just facilitate this whole conversation would Microsoft forms augment my whole solution so I don't have to worry about going to Y right there's so many tools here so by watching this video hopefully that's got you grounded on what is possible with each one so you can start to say hey I have an interest I have a need for that let's go explore it if you have questions or comments leave them below I always use those to kind of figure out what those future videos are going to be or if you're just like man Shane I really need more help with this stuff I need help planning our businesses rolling out of the Power Platform or which one of these tools to use hit us up over at power apps 911.com right we've got all types of Consulting Services mentoring Services we have training classes we can help you with this if that's really one of the challenges you have and with that I'm going to say thanks and have a great day

Channel: Shane Young

Views: 25,223

Keywords: Shane Young, powerapps911, PowerApps, Power Apps, canvas app tutorial, model driven app in powerapps, power pages, microsoft forms, what is the power platform, power automate, cloud flows in power automate, desktop flow power automate, desktop flow vs cloudflow, power automate process mining, robotic process automation with microsoft power automate, power bi, copilot studio, what is, power platform microsoft overview, overview of power platform, what is power platform microsoft

Id: 0SZuRKPjOks

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2023