Power Platform is the future. As Microsoft continues to neglect any other workflow technology, the low code/no code capability of the Power Platform stands as a reasonable replacement. Including the expansion of Power Automate to include RPA attended and unattended.

Although Microsoft Teams gets most of the attention as the tool organizations have turned to for hybrid and remote work during the pandemic, the Power Platform has also seen significant growth in usage in the last 12 to 18 months, often hand in hand with Teams. There are now 10 million active users on Power Apps alone.

“People have been figuring out to do things quicker, faster, be more agile, using less to do more,” senior director for Power Platform marketing Richard Riley told TechRepublic. “We’ve seen customers do incredible things that they historically just wouldn’t have been able to do—at least, not as quickly and certainly the people that did it wouldn’t have been able to do.”

The app that T-Mobile used to reopen stores more quickly early in the pandemic by allowing staff to trade shifts as they moved between different locations would have taken pro developers one or two months to create using traditional developer tools, Riley estimates—by which time the opportunity would have passed. Using Power Apps, he said, “a business analyst and a developer managed to write that in literally a week.”

Similarly, Marks & Spencer said the desk booking tool it created in Power Apps to support social distancing as employees returned to offices and another app for help desk requests will save between half a million and a million pounds.

Increasingly, Teams is becoming a hub for app integration as well as a place to chat and share information; since the beginning of 2020, monthly usage of apps inside Teams (including prebuilt third-party apps like Jira Cloud or SAP Sales & Service Core and custom Power Platform apps) has increased almost tenfold while the number of apps available has doubled over the last year. Over the next few months, Microsoft will be introducing a range of new features to make building your own apps for Teams through the Power Platform easier and more powerful. Read On: