Learning Microsoft Power Apps

Chapter 2. Introduction to Power Platform and Dataverse

The goal of this chapter is to provide you with an understanding of the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse. Power Platform helps you create innovative end-to-end business solutions with low-code, no-code tools. Power Apps is one of those tools, while Dataverse is a robust, cloud-based database that stores business data in a secure and compliant manner, along with providing various components to write complex business logic.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand the business value of Power Platform and Dataverse and their integration with Power Apps and other Microsoft services.

The Power Platform

In the last chapter, you learned about Microsoft’s ambition to develop a low-code, no-code development platform and that one of the initiatives to accomplish that purpose was Power Apps. It works well for designing business applications. Nevertheless, there are situations where creating a business application’s user interface alone is insufficient to create a complete business solution. You often need the following features as well:

• Complex business logic for different database integration and data activities

• Business analytics for dashboards and reports for data visualization and business decision making

• Conversational chatbots that can respond to customer inquiries

• A customer-interactive, self-service website for online use

So, the innovation and advancement of low-code, no-code development platforms ...