Introducing Microsoft Power Platform

Low-code/no-code development platforms are being provided by many technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, and they enable people who don't have professional development skills to be able to build solutions for the needs of their organization.

As mentioned in earlier sections of this chapter, there are two major benefits of these platforms:

• A shallow or almost non-existent learning curve for training new folks
• The speed (productivity) at which these solutions can be built and deployed

One such promising platform is Microsoft Power Platform. Power Platform is a low-code/no-code platform that consists of a suite of products that enable organizations to not just accelerate digital transformation but also spread the viral adoption of these skills across the organization. It is a suite of low-code/no-code products, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 1.3 – Microsoft Power Platform Components

Here are the important constituents of Microsoft Power Platform:

• Power BI: Empowers you to visualize and discover insights hidden in your data with Microsoft Power BI.
• Power Apps: Enables everyone to build and share business apps quickly, using no or very little code.
• Power Automate: Helps you to configure automated workflows that can be triggered on demand or scheduled to execute at set intervals to take care of business needs or enforce business logic.
• Power Virtual Agents: Provides everyone with a platform to easily build intelligent chatbots without any coding.
• Microsoft Dataverse: Easily structures a variety of data and business logic to support interconnected applications and processes in a secure and compliant manner.
• AI Builder: Democratizes the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance your apps and business process, without having to write any code. Just bring your data, train the model, which is generated by the platform, and start integrating it into your applications. AI Builder is available as a feature within Power Apps that enables you to add intelligence such as object recognition, prediction, and form processing into your apps.
• Data connectors: You can easily integrate with various data sources within the organization through 350+ built-in data connectors.
• Portals: Power Apps portals enable you to interact with your customers, who are external to your organization, as well as enable internal employees to interact with business data stored in Microsoft Dataverse.

Given the entire suite of products included in the Power Platform, a citizen developer has enough tools at their disposal to carry out a world of transformations.

So, who is a citizen developer, and why are you, or may you soon become, a citizen developer?

Becoming a citizen developer

Citizen developer refers to any set of employees who may not have been hired to write code or work on traditional development tasks as their daily job, but with low-code/no-code platforms and limited professional support from traditional developers, these employees can build solutions for their organization, its customers, or to boost their own efficiency.

The term was originally coined by analysts at Gartner and is now widely adopted to refer to anyone who uses these low-code/no-code platforms.

As an organization, there is no more worrying about a dearth of skilled employees to kickstart an organization's digital transformation and, in fact, you will be converting and adding more resources to the pool every day.

As a citizen developer, you will enjoy the new-found freedom of being able to create a new solution without a steep learning curve, and trust us: once you are hooked, it is pretty addictive!

Besides this, once you have acquired skills as a citizen developer, you will have the confidence to sign up for bigger and bolder challenges as part of the digital transformation journey in your organization.

Now that you are aware of citizen developers and Microsoft Power Platform, it is time to introduce Microsoft Dataverse for Teams.