What is the Microsoft Power Platform & What Can It Do for Your Company?

Have you ever wanted to take better advantage of technology in your business? Such as building your own internal app that matched a workflow specific to your team or finally getting rid of several manual tasks through smart automation.

Many small and mid-sized business owners wish they could do more, but they feel that the cost is out of reach. The time and cost investment to have a developer build them a custom app, for example, doesn’t seem in reach for them.

But cloud technologies have been enabling new DIY capabilities in areas that you may not have been aware of. Microsoft has been a leader in this and has democratized several technology tools that used to take experts to use.

Why is it important to continually optimize and take advantage of digital tools to improve your business? Because it’s what sets companies apart from the competition.

One study of small business use of technology found that those that were digitally advanced outpaced their less advanced peers in several ways. Including: 

• Experiencing revenue growth nearly 4x as high
• Earning 2X as much revenue per employee
• Being nearly 3X as likely to be creating jobs over the prior year

Just because you may have a smaller business doesn’t mean you can’t dream big and do things that will enhance your bottom line, without costing you a lot of money.

One of the cloud services that can help you reach some of those dreams is the Microsoft Power Platform.

What is Microsoft Power Platform?

The Microsoft Power Platform brings together four individual cloud tools that Microsoft offers into one powerhouse of digital capabilities. It covers everything from data visualization to AI-based live chatbots to custom applications.

It can be used with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and hundreds of other applications. Each piece of the platform works together to improve your effectiveness in a different area.

Power Automate

Eliminate those redundant manual tasks and reduce data errors by automating your business processes. Power Automate has a low-code, drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to connect various processes and automate your repetitive tasks.

And you don’t have to go through trial and error to find the best process automation. The tool includes a process advisor that allows you to record and visualize processes before you put them into place. This eliminates guesswork and improves efficiency.

Power Apps

If you’ve ever been frustrated because you couldn’t find a cloud tool to do exactly what you needed for one of your internal business processes, then Power Apps can help.

This tool also uses an easy drag-and-drop interface and allows you to build out custom internal apps that your team can use on their computers and mobile devices.

Power Apps has templates you can leverage to get started right away. It allows you to enable your teams to put together the perfect apps to accomplish various workflows, and there is no developer needed. 

All Power Platform images are from Microsoft.

Power Bi

One thing that enables smarter decisions by managers is a good understanding of their operations. To have this requires detailed data visualizations where they can cross-reference different KPIs to see correlations.

Power BI is designed to provide “self-service” analytics for SMBs that are at an enterprise scale. This includes things like security risks, multiple solution scenarios, and more.

The tool has hundreds of pre-built graphs and other visualizations as well as custom data connections so you can connect all your data sources and bring all that information into one dashboard.

Power Virtual Agents

67% of consumers have interacted with a chatbot in the last 12 months. Using a website chatbot can be like adding a 24/7 customer support rep/salesperson to your team.

If they’re programmed well, consumers find them helpful. Some even prefer the speed of getting answers from an automated chatbot to having to call and potentially be on hold with a company.

Chatbots can also free up your team from answering common questions multiple times per day (such as “What are your hours?”). 

Power Virtual Agents gives you the ability to easily program a custom chatbot for your website, Facebook page, or mobile app that will continually add to its knowledge using AI and machine learning. 

You can even expand your reach internationally by deploying it in different languages. And there is no programming or training required, the interface is designed to be easy for anyone to use to build their chatbot.

Conclusion
It’s clear Microsoft 365 is a powerful suite of tools for working online and can help workers stay connected to each other and aligned with the organization’s strategic goals and more.

For more info on Microsoft 365 visit – Seven IT Pro – Power Platform Experts
To book a free consultation for Microsoft power platforms related queries -Book a free consultation Meetings (office365.com)