Microsoft Power
Platform Solutions

Power Platform is an independent set of solutions sold by Microsoft. Microsoft has provided Power Platform to certain Microsoft 365 or Office 365 plans. Example M365 E3, E5 and Office 365 E1, E3, E5 plans are the main SKUs which provides the Power Platform to the customers.

Power Platform is a low code/no code application platform that allows enterprises to digitize business operations by easily building line of business applications. Since it’s a list of tools which is provided to build your own custom applications, it is classified as Platform as a Service.

Common Data Service (CDS) or now Dataverse lets you securely store and manage data that’s used by business applications. Standard and custom tables within Dataverse provide a secure and cloud-based storage option for your data. It provides out – of – the – box features to easily create business rules, logic, integration capabilities required for rapidly building data models and services.

Model-driven apps start with your data model – building up from the shape of your core business data and processes in the Dataverse to model forms, views, and other components. Model-driven apps automatically generate a pre-defined UI that is responsive across devices.

Key benefits are as below:

• Model driven apps as built with the data model defined in Common Data Service as back end.
• Its highly scalable as it uses the relational database for storing the data.
• User could define various business process flows and add complex business rules to the application with least effort.
• It renders a responsive UI and can work on any device.
• Comes with standard features like Search, Column Filters, Advanced AND/OR search, import/export data, audit log, etc.
• You could write advanced pro developer codes as well.
• A canvas app could be embedded in a Model driven App.

Common Data Model which includes a set of standardized, extensible data schemas that Microsoft and its partners have published. This collection of predefined schemas includes entities, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships. Refer the below link to know more about Common Data Model. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/

Microsoft maintains a separate section to share the planned features as per the Power Platform road map. These include features planned by the product team based on customer inputs. You could access the same from the below link.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2021wave1/power-apps/planned-features

Native integration with other flagship solutions from Microsoft’s portfolio is one of the strengths of the Microsoft Power Platform. It seamlessly works with all these solutions. Few examples.

• Microsoft Power Automate allows you to seamlessly forward e-mail inquiries sent via website to Microsoft Dynamics 365 that offers a full range of CRM platform capabilities.
• By designing an application with Microsoft Power Apps and Azure Active Directory for managing and securing identities, it’s possible to create a solution accessed from Microsoft Teams messenger, in which a built-in chatbot responds to employee inquiries.
• Microsoft 365 simplifies creating reports based on data from Microsoft Power BI and multiple Office applications.

Power Apps comes primarily in four variants out of which two are the actual paid SKU’s available for customers to buy from Microsoft with an agreement or on a monthly model.

• Per App Plan – Helps the business to assign each user to run one app at a time.
• Per User Plan – Helps the business to assign each user to run unlimited applications.
• Power Apps for Office 365 or Microsoft 365 gives the customers the capability to use Power Apps (both web and mobile apps), with the Office 365 applications as the back-end data store.
• Power Apps for Teams would give the Teams users to use the Power App from within Teams on the Teams App on the desktop, laptop or mobile with Dataverse available in Teams.