Overview PowerPlatform PowerApss

Editor's Notes

• #3: Power Platform is comprised of four key products: Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI and Power Virtual Agents. Power Apps Power Apps provides a rapid low code development environment for building custom apps for business needs. It has services, connectors, and a scalable data service and app platform (Common Data Service) to allow simple integration and interaction with existing data. Power Apps enables the creation of web and mobile applications that run on all devices. People use apps for every area of their lives, and business should be no exception. Most out of the box solutions do not meet exact business needs or integrate well with other business programs. Power Apps eases users into app development with a simple interface so that every business user or pro developer can build custom apps. Power Automate Power Automate lets users create automated workflows between applications and services. It helps automate repetitive business processes such as communication, data collections, and decision approvals. If you have ever been performing a repetitive task for work and think, “This is so easy a monkey could do it,” Power Automate is your new best friend. Don't waste important productive hours on drafting the same email for a weekly update or walking approvals through. Not only for the individual user, Power Automate allows for the creation of enterprise-grade process automation. Power Automate's simple interface allows every level of user to automate work tasks from beginners to seasoned developers. Power BI Power BI (Business Intelligence) is a business analytics service that delivers insights for analyzing data. It can share those insights through data visualizations which make up reports and dashboards to enable fast, informed decisions. Power BI scales across an organization, and it has built-in governance and security allowing businesses to focus on using data more than managing it. You can consider Power BI as the analysis and insights leg of the Power Platform. It takes business data and allows you to display it in ways that makes the most sense to users. A Power BI dashboard could potentially replace a standing meeting to report out on company metrics such as sales data, progress against goals, or employee performance. Power Virtual Agents Power Virtual Agents enables anyone to create powerful chatbots using a guided, no-code graphical interface, without the need for data scientists or developers. Power virtual agents addresses many of the major issues with chatbot building. It eliminates the gap between subject matter experts and the development teams building the chatbots. It removes the complexity of exposing teams to the nuances of conversational AI and the need to write complex code. It minimizes the IT effort required to deploy and maintain a custom conversational solution by empowering subject matter experts to build and maintain their own conversational solutions.
• #4: Power Platform is made powerful by its ability to leverage data across many platforms. To do this, components of the Power Platform use connectors. You can think of connectors as a bridge from your data source to your app or workflow which allows information to be conveyed back and forth. Connectors allow you to extend your business solutions across platforms and add functionality for your users, and Power Platform has more than 275 connectors with the ability to build custom connectors as well. It is important to note that premium connectors require a paid plan for use. The connector reference in the summary and resources unit lists all connectors and whether they are considered standard or premium. Custom connectors are also considered a premium feature.
• #5: Although we live in a data driven world, your business can find it difficult to take advantage of the data you have access to. Sales, customer, and employee data should drive our business decisions, but where do we even start? The Power Platform can add value to any business by helping you to analyze, act, and automate. Act by building custom apps in Power Apps, automate processes based on the data you collect in Power Automation, and analyze the data you have collected in Power BI. Consider a business that has IT equipment for general use. Currently equipment check-out is conducted by visiting the IT office and if the product is available, writing your name and the equipment name in a notebook. Employees may have to visit IT several times before equipment becomes available, and IT personnel must drop their tasks to check on equipment status or go to collect it for the employee. Sometimes employees hold onto the equipment longer than they intend and an IT personnel spends time tracking it down. In addition, important equipment information such as serial number, warranty details, and instructions for use are kept somewhere in the IT office. How can the Power Platform improve this process? Power Apps allows us to build an app that has all equipment listed, the status of that equipment, and even important details such as use instructions. This way employees can check out available equipment, walk to IT at a specified pick up time where the equipment will be ready, and even access the use instructions or flag an equipment malfunction from their phone or tablet. Power Automate can read when equipment needs to be returned and send reminder emails out, or even a warning that the equipment is late being checked in. Users can see when equipment is booked through the app and request check out for a future date at which time Power Automate can send them a reminder to pick the equipment up and IT a reminder to have it ready. Power BI can take all the data generated from the app and analyze it to help you understand what equipment is used most often and by whom. This way you can decide if you need additional equipment, if some users or departments need dedicated equipment, and when your equipment has reached the end of its usefulness. This is only one common scenario in which the Power Platform can transform the way businesses work. Consider your own business and what processes take up valuable time and are a burden to customers or employees. How can you leverage the Power Platform to improve them?
• #7: Do you have inefficient or legacy business processes that you would like to modernize? Are you still moving information around using paper or even a shared Excel workbook? Do you want to be able to perform these business processes from different devices like PCs or mobile phones? Then you need Power Apps. Power Apps is a no-code/low-code platform for building apps that builds off of concepts similar to formulas in an excel workbook such as SUM and TEXT. You can use Power Apps to build simple solutions like vehicle inspection forms and status reports or complex business solutions for purchasing processes and inventory management. If you can envision an app to solve a business problem, then you can use your existing skills to build it. Although this module is geared towards business users with little background in computer science and coding, Power Apps offers advanced functionality and the ability for seasoned developers to design complex applications with ease.
• #8: A video demo is available at the following link: https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/766053-heathrow-airport-travel-transportation-power-apps
• #9: A video demo is available at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RE4mPeJ
• #11: Power Apps Studio Power Apps Studio is the name of the web interface you use to build your app. With Power Apps, there is no client to download or install for building apps. Everything is done from the browser by logging into https://make.PowerApps.com. App format The first step in creating your app is to choose the format of your app: Mobile or Tablet. While both formats can be used interchangeably on a mobile device, a tablet, or a computer, each has different defaults around sizing of the screens and controls. Once you choose the format for an app, you cannot change it. Galleries The Gallery control is used to display records from a table of data. The display of a record is then defined by a template, which you can customize to meet your needs. This allows you to control which fields are shown and how they are formatted. Power Apps will then apply this template automatically to every record in your data. Forms Forms are focused on working with a specific record, often based on a selection from a gallery. In this experience, a user browses a gallery to find and select the desired record displaying the details on the form. Forms enable a user to not only view detailed information, but to save new records and edit existing ones. The various actions performed with forms are controlled by form modes allowing the form to serve many purposes. Input Controls To allow you maximum flexibility in customizing your apps, Power Apps has a large selection of Input controls. Text inputs, buttons, dropdowns, toggles, date pickers, and sliders are a few examples. You can add these controls to galleries, forms, and screens to build a functional and aesthetic experience for your app. All inputs have a multitude of settings for default data, formatting, and actions which allow you to build an app that has the right user experience for your business process. Intelligent Controls In addition to common inputs as covered above, Power Apps also provides a rich set of controls for more advanced operations. There are hardware-based controls which allow access to the camera, bar code scanner, GPS, and more hardware features. There are also service backed controls like the business card reader or object detector which allow you to add artificial intelligence to your app without writing code. Functions Functions are the glue that binds all these controls, inputs, and data sources together. You can use one or more functions to create formulas in your apps. These formulas are similar to the language you use in Excel and can be used for actions such as sending data to a data source, formatting information, creating animations, and more. No complicated code is necessary, simply powerful functions with straightforward inputs to enhance your app. Now that you have an overview of some of the rich functionality you can achieve with Power Apps, the next section will walk you down the path of building your first app.
• #12: This example uses Excel, but keep in mind that you can use data from many other sources, including the Common Data Service, Microsoft SharePoint, cloud services like Salesforce, and on-premises sources like Microsoft SQL Server. This gives you the flexibility to build your app from your data no matter where it lives.
• #13: Filter - This function is often used with galleries or tables of data to narrow down the records returned from your data source. You do this by specifying one or more columns in your data set to perform a logic test on, which will allow you to return data that falls in a certain date range, has a set value, or was created by the user for example. Match - This function allows you to check a value to see if it follows a given pattern. You can use this to check if the user entered a properly formatted email address in the input field and if they did not show them a warning that a valid email is required. This function serves well for conditional formatting. Distinct - This function allows you to return the unique values from a list of data, making it easier to build dynamic dropdowns that show users only the valid values for the given field. Math functions - Power Apps includes a range of math formulas for working with your data from the simple such as Sum or Average to the complex such as Atan and Sin to work with radians.
• #14: Now that you've created an app, you can share it with specific users, groups, or your whole organization. When you share an app with other people, they can run it in a browser, or in the players for Apple iOS and Google Android. Even better, you can give someone permission to update the app.