Over the past years, Microsoft’s mission is to help drive the cloud transformation process with Microsoft 365. Other than our daily productivity tools such as the Office 365 application suite and other security practices, Microsoft also supports us to create innovative business apps based on new set of “Power Platform” tools such as Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, and Power BI. They are simply available along with the subscription of Microsoft Office 365 Business Essentials or above plans. Today, we will highlight about what Microsoft 365 platform can be extended to build the next generation of business applications using the low-to-no-code development platform with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

What is PowerApps?

PowerApps is a rapid application development environment that includes a suite of apps, services, connectors and data platform. PowerApps allows people without any development skills and technological background to build applications based on their data. It enables you to build custom business applications that suit your business needs. Applications built using PowerApps contains rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform all your manual business processes into modernized, automated processes. 

What is Microsoft Flow?

Microsoft Flow helps non-technical users to #worksmarter by automating actions across various applications and services, hence creating a seamless “flow”. You can easily get notifications, synchronize files, collect data and more from a selection of templates – in other words, you may create workflows by customizing existing templates provided. Microsoft Flow has a deep integration with other Microsoft applications, such as SharePoint, Office 365 Outlook, OneDrive, Dynamics 365 and more.

Integrating PowerApps and Microsoft Flow

Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans include PowerApps and Flow to help organizations to go beyond Office 365 and extend its capabilities. To keep it simple, PowerApps is a cross-platform user interface design tool and Microsoft Flow is to create logic that performs one or more tasks when an event occurs in PowerApps. One of the best integrations of PowerApps and Microsoft Flow is used to digitalize legacy manual process. With Microsoft Flow, it replaces manual processing of paper-based forms with an automated platform that integrates with your Office 365 applications. For example, your boss would immediately get an email notification when a leave request is submitted, then to approve or decline the request immediately with all supporting information presented at the moment of approval, including any conflict with other staff in the team potentially causing manpower issue, either straight away in email, on mobile app or in web page.  This enhances overall employer and employee experiences in managing and planning staff availability, and greatly improve efficiency of departmental and HR administration in avoidance of handling forms and processing manual data.

Why Modern Businesses Need A Powerful App Platform?

From what we can see in the market now, there are lot of packaged business apps to support process automation, however the majority of packaged apps are not well integrated into the Office 365 applications that people are most common using daily, particularly in the journey of cloud transformation. Concerns such as the potential complexity of coding and system integration, budget, time and resource constraints, security and compliances requirements, etc., drives us away from following the path to a modern workplace. Hence, a power platform for app development rooted at the centre of Office 365 is our best solution because we can build and customize our business applications based on our needs.

With the rapid growth in technology, we are encouraged to reduce mundane tasks and empower the entire workforce to create and engage freely. Microsoft 365 is the core module of Microsoft’s Modern Workplace campaign, and during the cloud transformation journey it enables us to work smarter and innovate faster.

Is There Any Easier Way?

Having known the power platform application development tools being so handy from Microsoft 365, it is common to know that not every company, especially SME, has sufficient internal IT manpower and users equipped with needed knowledge for low- or no-code application development. There is much easier way to tap on the automation benefits, by just subscribing for an enhanced version of Microsoft Office 365. With the understanding of most SME customers need, we offer several useful automation add-ons such as eLeave and eClaim to increase cloud adoption and maximize benefits from cloud transformation. Customer can enjoy future ongoing enhancement when there are more advanced features ready such as more integration with different Office 365 modules, intelligent analytics and cognitive AI services. 

 

Superhub Point of Views Associated with our Products/Services:

·         Microsoft and Superhub is looking forward to bringing you these new ways to achieve more from unlocking creativity to advancing security for cloud transformation journey.

·        Superhub is committed to discover, develop and deliver the best of breed cloud business solutions with various options, specifically for maximizing modern workspace value of creativity, collaboration and productivity brought by Microsoft 365.