What is the Power Platform?
Microsoft’s Power Platform is tipped by many industry commentators as being Microsoft's next big opportunity and could be more successful than Microsoft Office! But what is the Power Platform, and why is it so highly rated by Gartner and Forrester as leading business software?
The Power of a Platform
The Power Platform is a suite of constantly connected applications that enable and empower all kinds of actions, automation and analysis. All data is shared and accessible to these applications, meaning you have one source of truth and complete consistency across the various applications.The Power Platform refers to four core applications, each with its own benefits:
Power Automate
Power Automate is a giant when it comes to workflow automation, allowing you to simplify, streamline and automate repetitive tasks and drive innovative action throughout your organisation. Automation helps you spend less time on manual tasks, saving costs and reducing the risk of human error. Power Automate includes robotic process automation and machine learning capabilities that can make your automation smarter by automating document creation, processing approvals, detecting images and text, and more.With more than 500 external connectors, data can be handled across multiple applications. A recent Mercury webinar showed how the software could be used to identify positive NPS scores, extract the reviewer's comments, notify relevant people in Teams and automatically turn the reviewers' comments into a LinkedIn update for the marketing team to post.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents enables you to place intelligent conversational ‘chatbots’ in front of candidates and clients so you can respond quickly at any time. This always-on availability means you can have conversations on many channels, including websites, mobile apps, Facebook and Microsoft Teams. PVA’s natural language processing capabilities make the experience conversational and friction-free, while Microsoft’s self-learning AI works to continuously improve your bots.
Power Apps
Power Apps allows you to build custom apps tailored to your specific needs. You can connect multiple data sources and carry out complex calculations and actions. Your power apps can be used internally or available to applicants and clients via mobile and web. Do you have complex work that you currently export to Excel because you can’t do the calculations in your CRM? Power Apps is your answer.
Power BI
The ability to uncover the detail behind your data will uncover insights and empower you and your team to make better, data-driven decisions. PowerBI uses visual reporting to produce coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights using data from many sources.PowerBI lets you easily create and modify data reports and dashboards and share them securely across applications, including Teams.So that’s the Power Platform. More than a bunch of great features, this is a world of possibilities. At Mercury, we specialise in taking the strength of the Power Platform and ‘packaging’ it for recruitment businesses. We talk about the Power of the Possible because, in many ways, the only limit is your imagination. Importantly, all these tools work together and at scale. The size, breadth and complexity of your business can be accommodated by Microsoft Office and the Power Platform. Depending on your Microsoft Office licences, you may have many already have some of these tools! How you choose to leverage them, is up to you.Get in touch to see how Mercury and the Power Platform can help your business.Daniel Fox, Marketing Manager at Mercury