Now that we’ve identified what the Power Platform is, let’s focus on the purpose behind and the benefits of the Power Platform. By leveraging the Power Platform, people from practically anywhere can rapidly improve their day-to-day solutions for whatever challenges they may come across. Furthermore, the Power Platform enables organizations to be more agile and effective in their business operations.
In this episode of Cherry Bekaert’s Digital Journeys podcast and the second part of our collaboration and workplace productivity series, Jim Holman, Director and Strategy & Operations Leader, and Trace Armstrong, Senior Manager of Digital Advisory, discuss best practices for integrating the Power Platform usability solution with Office 365, and implementing Dynamics as a simple way to get reliable data analytics and insights flowing in real-time.
Listen to learn more about:
- Capitalizing on your licensing allotment, enabling you to get the most features out of your Microsoft 365 subscription
- Scaling cloud interoperability and interconnection
- Maximizing your Microsoft investment by having a consultant or reseller incorporate proper governance in place with the Power Platform solutions
Stay tuned for part 3 of this series, when we will discuss collaboration and workplace productivity benefits and implementation of the Power Platform.
Do more with less. Contact us today to find out how the Microsoft Power Platform can help you accelerate your business processes. Cherry Bekaert’s Digital Advisory Practice will meet you where you are in your digital journey.
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HOST: Hello everyone and welcome to Digital Journeys. Today we're going to look at why the Power Platform. Our guests today are Jim Homman and Trace Armstrong. With that, I turn it over to Jim.
JIM HOLMAN: Thanks, Jerry. We're here with Trace Armstrong to discuss why the Power Platform. Trace, can you tell us why the Power Platform? It's a competitive market out there.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: The primary advantage of the Power Platform is cost. If you use something like Salesforce, which is a great tool, the licensing add-ons get tricky and the price can keep going up. Microsoft has add-ons as well, but most organizations already have Office 365 licensing.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: Whether you love them or hate them, organizations use Excel spreadsheets. I don't care what organization you are, you're using an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, so you're licensing users for that. At the very least, most organizations are paying about $10 per month per user for a basic Office 365 E1 license.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: I read a statistic that about 70% of organizations in the U.S. use Outlook for their business email. If that's true, you're already paying for these tools and not leveraging them. You really get the Power Platform for "free" unless you start doing more complicated integrations, which can have upcharges if you need to integrate into Dynamics 365 or automate with tools in Microsoft Azure.
JIM HOLMAN: Trace, given the deep integration with the Microsoft cloud and how common cloud solutions are now, does that deep integration hinder connectivity to competing clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Google, or IBM?
TRACE ARMSTRONG: It doesn't. That's a big change from 10 years ago, when Microsoft was hesitant about customers integrating with other cloud systems. They've opened that up because cloud environments are very interconnected now.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: For example, we had a customer using Microsoft for everything except real estate portfolio management, which they handled in Yardi. To get Yardi data for analytics and reporting, you can make API calls. Power Automate or a product in Microsoft Azure called Logic Apps can make API calls to Amazon Web Services, Google, QuickBooks, and other systems.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: Many of those connectors already exist in Power Automate; you often need a premium license to use them. With a premium license you can tap into these other systems, and the cost can vary.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: For Power Automate, a premium account is about $15 per month per user if you need an automated process that pulls from another system. The beauty is that if it's a service account, you avoid dealing with multiple users interacting directly. For that $15 per month you can automate and pull data from other systems and put it into Dynamics 365, SQL Server, a SharePoint list, or a document library.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: Some premium connectors require that you already have a license for the connected product. For example, if you use QuickBooks in the cloud you're already licensed for it; you can set up a service account to pull that data. In Power BI, you can also tap directly into your QuickBooks database. There are far more product-agnostic capabilities now than there were 10 years ago.
JIM HOLMAN: You mentioned licensing, and Microsoft licensing has always been complicated. How do you recommend organizations make sure they have the correct licensing levels based on what they want to achieve?
TRACE ARMSTRONG: That's where having a good consultant or reseller helps you navigate licensing. It depends on how you architect your solutions. For basic scenarios—basic Power Automate and Power Apps—you typically don't need help. For more complicated architectures, like writing to SQL through the Power Platform or connecting to Dynamics 365 and AWS or QuickBooks, you want a reseller or consultant to help architect it.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: I've seen customers build an application and add a data gateway to an on-premises SQL Server, not realizing that action converted their Power App to require a premium connector. Every user of that app then incurred an extra $15 per month. One customer received a $20,000 bill the next month because 600 users were using that app daily making calls to SQL. That's why you need guidance and a roadmap for licensing; there may be workarounds you're not aware of.
JIM HOLMAN: Power Platform solutions have a strong reputation for usability within an organization's domain footprint, but not as much when extending forms, tools, and automation to external business partners such as customers and vendors. Is that a valid observation?
TRACE ARMSTRONG: It's a very valid observation, and that's where things can get tricky. Understanding guest accounts in an Office 365 tenant is helpful. You can have a number of guest users in your tenant based on the number of paid users you have, and that number fluctuates. Talk to your reseller or consultant for specifics.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: Guest users can't have an email account in the tenant, but you can give them access to a Microsoft Team or a SharePoint site. They can add and edit documents and list items, and they can view information, but an unlicensed guest user cannot access a Power App.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: For Power Automate flows, if a flow is associated with a document library or list, the flow trigger is dependent on the process, not the user who triggers it. So if external vendors add requests or documents, those automated processes will still run for them. However, guest users do not have access to Power BI.
TRACE ARMSTRONG: Microsoft introduced Power Pages to address external access needs. In industries like construction or architecture, firms work with many different partners. They can create a Power Page for each vendor to interact with applications, view analytics, and use business processes. One or two users per vendor can have access to that Power Page for the extra level of business process. Guest users retain the ability to view and add or edit documents in SharePoint, and Power Pages can handle the Power Apps and Power BI access scenarios.
HOST: Thanks, Trace, for talking about why the Power Platform. Stay tuned for more with Trace Armstrong in part three of the series on collaboration and workplace productivity.
HOST: Thank you, Jim and Trace, for the discussion today, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Feel free to like and share this podcast. Stay tuned for more Digital Journeys.
