Understanding Power Platform

Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate are all backed by the best-in-class cloud services for enterprise developers and IT professionals to quickly extend capabilities for Power users and scale to enterprise-wide manageability easily at any time.

Let's have a visual overview of additional apps/services/tools that could be utilized to measure information, act upon the task, and automate as much as possible. The following screenshot shows the Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate apps and how easy it is to build on top of it:

Let's now explore all of these tools one by one.

Power Apps

Microsoft has provided the Power Apps service, which can be used to build the new web/mobile apps that can connect to business data. It is the foundation to build any web/mobile application on top of Dynamics 365 solutions without writing any significant code.

Power Apps is a very strong tool that can be used in many ways; some are as follows:

• Building new apps
• Automate process
• Connecting data between various applications
• AI builder
• Creating new portals

Let's have a glimpse of a sample mobile app built in no time and ready for use by the business. The following screenshot shows an app built on top of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and its data entities:

Use the following link to learn more about PowerApps: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/.

Power BI

Power BI is a powerful analytical visualization for Power users to quickly gain insights into information over the cloud or on their premises. It works with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to provide a self-service analytics solution. With Power BI built directly into Dynamics 365, you gain access to powerful business intelligence—real time on any device no matter where you are in the world—with rich visuals, charts, and graphics.

Power BI also has data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery, and interactive dashboards and can be embedded on most Azure Cloud platforms. Let's have a look at the following screenshot:

Here we see a sample dashboard from Power BI with several informational parts such as charts, trends, values, tables, and many more.

Use the following link to learn more about Power BI: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/.

Power Automate

Power Automate (previously known as Microsoft Flow) is the workflow engine of Microsoft Cloud, helping to quickly design any time-consuming task or process as either a complex multi-step process sequence or a simple one-step task. It is going to be seen more in areas of notifications, sync, and automating approvals. Let's have a look at the chain of events, which is very easy to establish in Power Automate, as follows:

Power Automate supports a wide variety of data sources to connect to external world applications seamlessly and the list is increasing as you are reading this book.

Use the following link to learn more about Power Automate (Flow): https://flow.microsoft.com/.

Common Data Service (CDS)

Common Data Service (CDS) is a shared database for storing business entities that connects to Dynamics 365, Flow, and PowerApps. It is the fabric behind Dynamics 365 and Office 365 to provide consistently structured entities across services spanning solutions within Dynamics 365 as well as external applications.

CDS gives a secure and encrypted business database, comprising well-formed standard business entities that can be deployed for use in your organization. It provides not only structured metadata, rich data types, auto numbering, lookups, and business data types such as address and currency, but also capabilities such as referential integrity through metadata configuration and cascade deletes, making a compelling functionality. CDS is licensed together with PowerApps as a stand-alone solution and is included in two different versions with Dynamics 365.

The following is a glimpse of managing entities within CDS with other tools such as connections, gateways, notifications, and others:

CDS makes it very smooth to communicate between different Dynamics 365 apps.

Microsoft AppSource

Think of an ecosystem in the cloud that can act as a single destination for business users to discover, try, and acquire line-of-business SaaS applications. That is what Microsoft AppSource is, and we see it as a great platform for partners having niche expertise in a specific subject to build, show, and sell their expertise and solution in the cloud.

Let's see how the AppSource landing screen looks. The following screenshot shows the AppSource search page along with solution offerings by partners related to one or many Dynamics 365 apps:

Consider AppSource an application store, where businesses will be able to find and try out line-of-business SaaS apps from Microsoft and its partners.

AppSource also provides a list of implementation partners who can assist customers in implementing these business apps. Currently, it hosts more than 80 apps for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

For customers, Microsoft AppSource is the place where you can find the apps from Microsoft and partners that drive your business. You can also request the trial through the implementation partner.

Microsoft AppSource is also a place for ISVs (short for Independent Software Vendors) to market your apps to business users. AppSource allows lead generation through using a proven system that Microsoft has built over several years. Use Azure's cloud services platform and tools to deliver differentiated apps to customers:

The preceding screenshot shows the AppSource landing page and solution across industry segments for ease in locating the perfect solution.

To learn more about it, you can visit https://appsource.microsoft.com.