What Is the Microsoft Power Platform?

hi this is David yakin in this video we're going to look at a common question I get asked when I tell people what I do is work and build things on the power platform the power platform consists of four key components the first we'll talk about is power apps power apps are applications that you build that users can interact with you build these applications using low code techniques without having to dive into the traditional developer tools like Visual Studio that means that they're able to be built by a broader set of people in the organization and don't have as much maintenance as things change in the underlying platform the next component is power automate power automate allows you to automate a series of steps think of it as rather than doing the work manually where you might forget one of the steps power automate can automate that work in a repeatable sequence with the consistency of a robot and effectively you're able to connect to multiple systems do the connectors that we'll be talking about a little bit later the next component is power bi power bi allows you to take the raw data that we collect in an organization turn it into beautiful visuals that we can get insights out of and take proactive actions as well as use natural language queries to poke at the data to get our answers to our important questions the final component is power virtual agents the newest addition to the power platform power virtual agents allows you to build chat BOTS but without having to know underlying developer technologies so these are no code virtual agents now these are able to interact and have conversations with users visiting a site or an application and they're able to take action using the capabilities of power automate leveraging the best of both capabilities now the key components that we just talked about depend on some core services these core services enable the components to do their work pretty much all business applications need to store some of the data they collect from users or might want to bring data from two separate silos in the organization's of data that they want to bring to a central place to allow building applications and automations easier the common data service is an abstraction across multiple Microsoft underlying data storage technologies bringing the best of all the services in this form of the common data service the common data service implements the common data model which effectively takes Microsoft's decade worth of knowledge of the business application structure and formats of data and implements that in a open-source version that the common data service implements and allows you to store data in because all data will not be in the common data service Microsoft has implemented a concept called connectors connectors enable power apps as well as power automate flows to essentially interact with data from other systems and services these allow you to do those interactions without having to know the api's or the developer interfaces that those services provide there are over 300 out-of-the-box connectors and you can build custom connectors by just defining the existing api's that services might define today's business applications are expected to be smarter more proactive and not reactive to problems that happen and one way you can do that is by infusing AI into the applications now traditionally that requires data scientists background and a lot of its sophisticated capabilities what a a builder does is bring those capabilities so they're easily achievable without having a data science core degree into power apps and power automate as part of the applications you build now Microsoft Azure plays two key roles in the power platform first most of the services are built on some aspects of Microsoft Azure leveraging all the great capabilities in terms of reliability scalability and so forth in the components that are built for the power platform now the other second pillar of how these are used is in terms of when you need to extend the power apps or power automate beyond what the capabilities are of the power platform itself you can reach out into the traditional capabilities of Microsoft Azure you would use to build any application from scratch if you were doing custom development that's why you can realistically start with the power platform and build all your applications dropping all the way down to Azure when it's necessary now it's no secret that at the heart of most business processes that there is email document collaboration as well as communications and Microsoft Office 365 provides those key services and integrates well with the power platform now on top of all this is where we build applications and this I we like to refer to as the overall Microsoft business cloud now at the top of this you have applications that are pre-built such as Dynamics 365 sails service field service and so forth that have pre-built business scenarios in them that if you match one of those scenarios you can start with that do some slight customization and you're ready to deploy in a record amount of time as opposed to if you had to build a custom now just like Microsoft independent software vendors can use the same Microsoft business application platform power platform to build applications so if you have an idea that's something different than sales service filled service and so forth they may be perhaps serves a vertical you can use the same capabilities of the power platform that Microsoft uses to build Dynamics 365 application to build your own vertical focused or horizontal focused ISV application that you sell now for customers that means that you can also just like you to look at Dynamics 365 you can look an app source at the applications that is v's produced to see if one already meets your needs without having to result in building it custom now the great part of this if Dynamics 365 or an ISV app doesn't meet your needs you can just build your own on top of the power platform these can be built by anybody in your organization from Johanne or sue in accounting to your professional IT staff that are building apps today for you and be able to do those building of apps in a record set a time without having to have the high maintenance that traditionally comes with normal app development thanks for joining us in looking at the power platform I hope you dig more into what the power platform is and how each of these components can work to solve your business challenges

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Length: 6min 0sec (360 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020