When you first encounter Microsoft Power Platform’s low-code, no-code tools, you may feel intimidated by their seemingly daunting complexity. However, Microsoft’s online resources can help you make sense of these valuable tools.
In this post, we’ve drawn on our experience with Power Platform’s low-code, no-code tools and Microsoft’s wealth of free online resources to answer the five most common questions we get about these transformational tools for non-IT employees who see how automation can make work easier and more efficient.
With a little help, developers can quickly close the gap between how your employees expect fast, automated solutions to solve their business problems and what their current processes can do. Once that happens, your company can start safely improving daily tasks for everyone while delivering the necessary metrics to run your business efficiently and profitably. To help you get started, we answer some common questions we hear from clients.
1. Power Platform looks great, but all the low-code, no-code tools are overwhelming. Is there an overview that can break it all down for me?
Sure. For starters, understand that the low-code Microsoft Power Platform is not one tool but a suite of solutions – Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Bl, and Power Pages – that are all based upon Microsoft Dataverse’s cloud-scale data store technology and can be used separately or together. In-house and citizen developers can collaborate on business solutions by tapping the platform’s extension capabilities with code.
Let’s take a quick look at each part of the suite:
Power Automate
Power Automate allows everyone to automate organizational processes and coordinate activities across different services that use custom or integrated connectors. User-friendly graphic interfaces and prebuilt blocks of code let you automate by simply using a mouse in a drag-and-drop environment. There’s no need to have advanced artificial intelligence or machine learning knowledge. Power Automate lets you create cloud flows, which run when a specific event happens, such as creating a record or at a specific time, or desktop flows, which automate repetitive interactive tasks.
Power Apps
Power Apps enable everyone to build custom apps that solve business challenges. Similar to Power Automate, this doesn’t require extensive coding experience to build apps. There are two types: Canvas apps, which can navigate between multiple screens and embed into SharePoint, Power Bl, Teams, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications, and model-driven apps built atop Dataverse.
This puts data-driven insights into everyone’s hands through interactive data-driven visualization and sharing tools. Power Bl’s power lies in its ability to generate meaningful metrics in combination with speedy automation solutions and app-building.
Power Pages
Power Pages is a low-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting, and administering external-facing business websites. Developers can quickly design, configure, and publish websites that operate effectively across web browsers and devices.
Microsoft Copilot Studio, formerly Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents had been within Power Platform. As of November 2023, PVA rebranded and integrated into Microsoft Copilot Studio, a conversational AI solution that lets users develop customized so-called co-pilots with natural language or a graphical interface. These former PVA chatbots allow users to get the information they need quickly, without being put “on hold,” navigating a call center, or tying up a help desk agent — again, with no coding required.
You can begin to understand all these tools and more with Microsoft’s Power Platform Fundamentals Learning Path. In this nine-hour (12-module) course, developers will get hands-on experience by building a Canvas App, a model-driven app, an automated solution, a simple dashboard, and a basic chatbot.
2. What types of projects work best with Power Platform low-code, no-code tools?
Power Platform is generally best for automation projects since these involve simple, objective, low-cost tasks that deliver valuable solutions quickly.
These may require simple task automation, such as notifications or approvals. Or, they may be workflow automation problems that require connecting multiple systems. More complex problems may demand reasoning automation tools such as machine learning or chatbots.
Here are some ways in which Power Platform low-code, no-code tools can create value in critical operations and for particular stakeholders and audiences:
- Customer service. Chatbots can improve customer results and satisfaction by answering common questions, supplying information, and settling issues. Apps can allow customers to book appointments, make payments, and offer feedback. Workflows can automate customer satisfaction, follow-through, and issue escalation. Dashboards can keep track of and measure customer service performance metrics.
- Sales and marketing. Apps can help sales and marketing teams manage leads, opportunities, and campaigns. Workflows can automate email marketing, social media posting, and contract-signing activities. Dashboards can visualize and interpret sales and marketing data such as revenue, conversion, and ROI.
- Employee engagement. Apps can let employees access and update their personal and professional information, ask for leave time, and submit expenses. Workflows can automate onboarding, training, and recognition. Dashboards can closely follow and reward achievements, goals, and health and wellness.
- Operations management. Apps can help operations managers plan, schedule, and delegate tasks, resources, and inventory. Workflows can automate procurement, delivery, and quality control processes. Dashboards can analyze and optimize costs, risks, and performance. Whatever your needs, it’s best to start small and work your way up as developers become more comfortable with Power Platform.
Note, however, that projects involving your most strategic, critical business applications – such as ERP, supply chain, or foundational client applications – typically are too difficult and are best left to IT pros or professional developers.
3. How do I make sure my Power Platform implementation goes smoothly?
Launching a powerful tool like Power Platform is a big change. That’s why you should start slowly and let your Power Platform low-code, no-code initiative evolve organically over time. By launching small-scale projects first, you’ll learn lessons that apply to the bigger pain points a fully mature Power Platform deployment can relieve.
Right from the start, however, you must have enterprise-wide buy-in from your C-suite and departmental leadership, non-IT developers, IT, and all other employees. You can achieve this more easily if management understands that Power Platform is an overarching strategy with clearly defined goals to streamline daily work, relieve pressure on IT, and allow business users to build the solutions they need.
We recommend adopting a center-of-excellence (CoE) model for your Power Platform low-code and no-code plan to achieve this. A CoE provides the network of people needed to oversee the technology, processes, and metrics needed to help your Microsoft low-code and no-code users thrive.
For your people, start by building a community of practice that identifies leaders among both your citizen developer and IT ranks and facilitates understanding of your documentation. (We’ll have more to say about documentation further down.) The CoE can then administer the technology, be a clearinghouse for all potential citizen development projects, and become a centralized reporting place for data and metrics.
The devil, however, is in the details: An effective Power Platform low-code and no-code implementation depends upon careful planning, design and governance to ensure that Power Platform tools are appropriately and securely used for optimal results. The following best practices for these instruments can help businesses put high-value, reliable solutions in place:
- Define the business problem and goal. Before you can build a solution, you must clearly understand your business problem and goal, who your target audience is, what they need and expect from a solution, and the value proposition of that solution. This will clarify the scope and priorities for your solution and sync it with your business strategy and objectives.
- Design and test the solution. After you select your Power Platform tool and how you want to use it, design and test your solution. Start by applying Power Platform design principles and proven methods, such as using reliable and intuitive user interfaces, implementing data validation and error handling, and augmenting performance and scalability. Then, test the solution – for functionality and reliability – with the platform’s testing and debugging tools, such as the app checker, monitor, and formula bar, and fix anything wrong.
- Deploy and share the solution. Next, use Power Platform’s deployment and distribution tools, including the solution checker, the solution packager, and the app catalog, to deploy and share your solution with the relevant users inside and outside the organization. Verify that they have the right permissions and roles to work with your solution. Deploy it in the environment where it belongs, such as development, testing or production, and make sure it conforms to your business quality and security standards.
- Monitor and improve the solution. Finally, track how well your solution performs and improve it when necessary. Monitoring and analytics tools include the Power Platform admin center, the Power Bl service, and the Power Apps portal. Check out your solution for performance, usage and feedback, analyze the resulting data and insights you obtain, and – based on that data and insights, plus the feedback you get – improve it. Going forward, iterate and update the solution, and deploy and share the new versions.
One more thing to cover is documenting and sharing the distinct roles of Power Platform users and IT personnel. Administration is a big part of that documentation and includes vital governance responsibilities such as security, compliance, and data loss prevention policies. Microsoft’s Power Platform Administration documentation includes a host of valuable tips and resources.
4. Once Power Platform is running, how do I take it to the next level?
To realize Power Platform’s full potential over time, it’s absolutely imperative to pursue continuous performance optimization – i.e., relentlessly monitoring, analyzing and testing performance efficiency over time. This involves regularly reviewing your performance metrics and adjusting to ensure efficient workload capacity. Overperformance wastes money, while underperformance impairs users.
There are several strategies a business can adopt to make performance optimization a reality:
Create a performance culture.
In a performance culture, continuous improvement is the norm. It flows from workload teams having the right skills and attitude to effectively respond to shifts in demand, giving those teams the time necessary to monitor and correct performance issues and clearly communicating and establishing expectations for performance targets, baselines and baseline deviation thresholds.
Assess new platform features.
From time to time, you’ll want to add new functionalities and features that can make performance more efficient, including optimized ways of querying data, modern controls, or caching mechanisms. Keep current on the latest platform features being introduced and, if you add any of them, consistently monitor their feedback and performance metrics.
Anticipate and pre-empt problems.
Take steps to improve workload performance before any potential performance issues emerge. These include detecting possible bottlenecks, tracking performance metrics, and optimizing to keep the workload operating efficiently and fulfilling performance goals. Such optimizations might involve code changes, configuration updates, or infrastructure adjustments.
Detect and repair deteriorating components.
As the nature of the workload and usage patterns change over time, workload components can suffer a falloff in performance:
- Database growth can lengthen query run times and slow down data retrieval
- Different types of usage may lead to suboptimal query design
- Queries may become inefficient
Proactively identifying and addressing workload performance issues can keep things running at peak performance levels. Hence, you might consider implementing performance-tuning methods or optimizing resource distribution.
Pay close attention to critical user and system flows.
The most critical workload workflows are critical user and system flow. Know which flows are most important, monitor them and the most frequently used parts of the application, and find ways to improve their efficiency.
Confront technical debt.
Technical debt describes development process inefficiencies, poor design choices, and corner-cutting that can impair performance (e.g., unclear code and overly difficult implementations). Identify where the debt is occurring and eliminate it; possible solutions might include refactoring code, optimizing database inquiries, enhancing architectural design, or introducing best practices.
Optimize databases.
You should determine and implement optimizations to guarantee your databases can handle workloads, yield quick response times, and economically use resources. This will improve application performance, decrease downtime, and improve the overall user experience.
Rewrite database queries that retrieve wasteful amounts of data and eliminate the complex subqueries, nested queries, and excessive functions that can slow down running speed. Review the data model design so that it meets specific application requirements.
Note that automating performance optimization processes can save time and make optimization more efficient, consistent, and less error-prone. Tasks you can automate in this regard include performance testing, deployment, monitoring and alerting systems, incident management, diagnostics, remediation, and recovery.
5. How do I motivate employees to continue learning about Power Platform low-code, no-code tools?
Encourage employees to explore the free training demos on Microsoft’s website. Then, for a modest fee, they can take the Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals certification exam to document their chops!
There is also a Power Platform Community where people can engage with others like themselves, user groups, and experts in forums covering products such as Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Pages. The content within the Community is available to all visitors, but members can also post to forums and join user groups.
Yes, You Can Learn and Master Power Platform Low Code and No Code
While mastering Power Platform low code and no code may not be easy, it doesn’t have to be difficult or put your organization at risk. By learning the basics of Power Platform with Microsoft’s free tools and gaining the expertise of a Microsoft Gold Certified company by taking advantage of a Microsoft consulting team, you can build a modern organization that fully embraces the benefits of low-code or no-code software solutions.
Still not sure about the latest Microsoft Power Platform’s latest features? Don’t be afraid to embrace the change. Our experts are here to help. Contact us