Today at the 1st day of the MS Ignite The Tour in London, we had a great session in which we went through actual and upcoming features and functionalities in the Power Plaform.

What is Power Platform ?

Power Platform as many of us think of is the new name Microsoft decided to use when referencing previously known as Power Apps + MS Flow + Power BI.

In addition to these three services, Power Platform includes:

– The Common Data Service, more about the CDS at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/common-data-service/data-platform-intro.

– The set of Data connectors

– AI Builder.

Power Platform and Azure

Power Platform is meant to be used by citizen developers (who are also known as high level developers, or people who are able to easily and quickly build fairly simple solutions using the available controls & functionalities by simply customizing them).

When you add Azure to the story, the possibilities are endless.

We might want to include Azure if we want to develop custom connectors, micro-sevices, end points (WebApis)…etc.

Canvas Apps, Model Driven Apps & Portals

The speakers went through the different types of solutions that can be built with the Power Platform

Canvas Apps are more flexible in term of customizations and data we can manipulate with.

In Contrary, Model Driven Apps are more restricted and built around the data they are meant to manipulate.

Portals are still a new concept, but in a nutshell are web portals that can be used to supply users with web applications to access data from the Common Data Services (Read more)

AI Builder !!

Omg, the AI builder opens doors to unlimited possibilities, the speakers did a quick demo in which they built an AI model in two seconds which will recognize PDF documents fileds.

A flow was than created to consume this AI Model as follow:

• When an email is received (with certain criteria)

• Loop through the attachment

• Each attachment is fed into the AI Model

• The JSON result is than fed into a JSON formatting actions which will parse the properties.

• The properties are than used to create an Adaptive card

• The card can be added to a teams channel.

The whole flow took about 3 mins to create, and the end result was just amazing.

Power Apps Component Framework

With this PAC Framework, we can build custom reusable components which typically can be customized without a limit. Using custom components we can literally build limitless solutions. More details at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/developer/component-framework/create-custom-controls-using-pcf