Why Invest in the Microsoft Power Platform?

Many organizations’ initial experience with the Power Platform is through their Microsoft 365 plans. Power Apps and Power Automate seeded licenses come with many M365 SKUs, allowing users to leverage low-code tools to improve the processes in their day-to-day operations.

While these seeded licenses help get users started, they only include a portion of what the full Power Platform can offer. In this article, let’s look at some of the benefits of going all-in with the Power Platform.

Do more with Power Apps

Seeded licensing only offers basic Power Apps canvas app usage, whereas premium licensing also includes model-driven app usage. Power Apps model-driven apps are backed by a data model created in Dataverse. Unlike canvas app development, much of the user interface is designed for you based on the components you add into the app – like tables, forms, business rules, business processes, charts, and dashboards. This method of app development focuses on the data model, speeding up the build process. Having the option to build canvas apps as well as model-driven apps allows your users to choose the right app type for their scenario.

Do more with Power Automate

There’s a whole new side of Power Automate that can be used with premium licenses: Robotic Process Automation. Many of us are familiar with cloud flows (Digital Process Automation), where we automate using API-based connectors. However, many companies use services that don’t offer APIs and cannot participate in cloud flow automation. This is where Robotic Process Automation can be leveraged: RPA uses “bots” to perform tasks just like a human would. Power Automate Desktop is our RPA tool to create desktop flows that run on a user’s machine or on a virtual machine. With both automation options, you can automate against whatever services you use every day.

Access the full connector library

The Power Platform leverages connectors to integrate with data sources. With over 800 connectors, this growing list contains connectors to M365 services as well as 3rd party services. With your seeded licenses, you can access the standard connectors – many of which are within the M365 sphere. Some commonly used standard connectors include: SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, RSS, Gmail, Twitter, etc.

When upgrading to Power Platform premium capabilities, you can access all connectors, including premium connectors. Some commonly used premium connectors include: Dataverse, SQL Server, Azure Services, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, etc. Along with that, these licenses will give you access to custom connectors.  Custom connectors can be created for other API-based services when there isn’t an out-of-the-box connector to the service.

Leverage the power of Dataverse

With premium licensing, users can access Dataverse: a robust data platform built into the Power Platform. Dataverse stores and manages data that is used by your business applications. Backed by the power of Azure SQL Server, Dataverse includes a set of visual designers to create, edit, and interact with data. This makes it easy to quickly define the tables, relationships, business rules, forms, and workflows that represent your business without requiring traditional database admin skills.

Getting Dataverse into the hands of your Power Platform super users is critical to building secure and scalable solutions. Many organizations have super users building important Power Platform solutions that are butting-up against their licensing limitations. This leads to users creating workarounds that sacrifice performance, security, and scalability. When you enable these individuals to build on Dataverse, you empower them to choose the right data platform for their solutions.

Build intelligent solutions with AI Builder

Fully investing into the Power Platform enables you to use AI Builder within your Power Platform solutions.  With AI Builder, you can leverage pre-built and custom AI models to optimize your business processes. There are several types of models to help you address different scenarios, such as: document processing, text recognition, category classification, entity extraction, prediction, object detection, etc.

You can also leverage the Document automation toolkit. This is a pre-built toolkit for setting up a robust document processing solution that can process whatever documents you work with – whether its structured documents like invoices and purchase orders or unstructured documents like contracts and statements of work.

Secure and scale with Managed Environments

This benefit of premium Power Platform licensing focuses on administrators of the platform. Managed Environments is a suite of capabilities that assist admins in managing the Power Platform at scale with more control, less effort, and more insights. The list of capabilities continues to rapidly grow, including features like usage insights, licensing reports, sharing limitations, and pipelines – to name a few.

Final Thoughts

These are just some of the benefits that come along with investment in premium Power Platform licenses. This allows you to take low-code in your organization from a personal/team productivity-focused initiative to a widespread practice of success where individuals are empowered to rapidly solve their business problems.