Power BI

Analytics are mission-critical for all ambitious businesses because data drives business decision making, after all.  

It’s all but impossible to consistently implement improvements without suitably assessing and understanding prior performance. Repeat what works and change what doesn’t: that’s how to get better and Power BI works as a powerful and versatile foundation for the entire process. 

With Power BI, your customers can quickly and easily create custom dashboards providing them a holistic and real-time view of their business. Connecting to various sources of analytics data (enabled by many integrations), it allows users to sort, select and format the useful data so they can see at any point the performance within each department of their organisation.

These dashboards can then be shared with the appropriate people, whether they’re internal managers or high-value clients.

Power Apps

Every business can benefit from the development of purpose-built apps. However, with the process of app development typically being long and expensive, it isn’t often economical to attempt the creation of apps (other than conventional customer-facing mobile apps). 

Power Apps was created to change how businesses viewed apps. It serves as an intuitive tool for quickly and logically assembling apps, providing a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to combine pre-built functions drawn from a massive range of templates. 

By attaching those functions to data drawn from integrations with other Microsoft services and empowering them with Azure processing, it makes it possible for beginners to rapidly design, iterate and roll out practical apps to solve numerous procedural issues. 

Power Automate

Planned and executed well, automation can be a business game-changer, massively driving up operational efficiency and freeing up valuable human resources to be put towards more challenging projects. The difficulty lies in the design and implementation: before it can assist you, the manual effort must be built into suitable processes to be carried out. 

Power Automate is a platform that codifies business automation, breaking it down into a broad set of templates, data connectors, and expected prompts and actions. The user doesn’t need any understanding of automation languages. They need only choose a type of ‘flow’ (for ‘workflow’) and follow the system from there. 

For example, your customer could create a workflow for the Sales team when requesting approval for a bespoke price on a deal. This sort of process can typically involve a number of staff members and can often be time-consuming. This could be automated within Power Automate, creating a workflow whereby ‘approvers’ are automatically notified when a document is generated within a SharePoint File that requires approval and then the submitter receives an automated notification once the approval is completed.

Power Virtual Agents

Whether used to field customer queries or internally by large businesses with multiple departments, chatbots can be supremely efficient and cost-effective. But building a good chatbot isn’t easy. While there are generic chatbot frameworks that can be found and used for free, those are largely hollow shells to be filled with the required calls and responses — and figuring out how everything is going to fit in sequence can be a real challenge. 

Power Virtual Agents follows the same no-code design principle of the other Power Platform tools, guiding users through the process of chatbot content design, and the key element is the level of integration: chatbot functionality demands integration, and being able to easily hook into actions and data from the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a huge bonus.