The Microsoft Power Platform in action

You’ve no doubt heard of the Power Platform, but you might not be sure how it could benefit your business. In this blog, we’ll feature a couple of our bespoke Power Apps that perfectly illustrate the kind of things that can be done to increase operational efficiency in your organisation.

Before we take a look at those apps in a little more detail, we should probably provide a quick introduction to the Power Platform. 

This is another great example of Microsoft introducing new products and solutions that give customers a competitive edge in the marketplace. The Power Platform is a collection of services that enables your business to be more insightful, collaborative and efficient.

• Power BI is a business intelligence and analytics service we use to provide customers with real-time data and present this in easy-to-understand dashboards and reports, which can then be published into Microsoft Teams
• Power Automate is the service we use to create automated workflows between applications and services. It enables customers to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and initiate automated actions
• PowerApps is the service we use to quickly create and deploy bespoke business applications that can be used on desktop and mobile devices (iOS, Android, Windows). Power Apps offers built-in connectors to more than 200 systems and services, the ability to create custom connectors and access data stored on-premises with the data gateway
• Power Virtual Agents is the service we use to create powerful chatbots for different customer use cases

Resonate can help you deploy Power Platform services inside your Teams environment to greatly enhance the experience of your users.

So, let’s look at the Power Platform in action in the form of two customised solutions, that make full use of the offering. 

Teams Voice Management App

The first is a user-friendly, fully automated solution to manage your Teams PSTN Voice functionality, which will save your IT team a great deal of time and expense.

There are two elements that make up this Teams Voice Management solution. The first is the Automated Request Process with integrated approvals. This enables users to request PSTN voice functionality with zero-touch provisioning from an IT Team.

The second element is the Power App Application which has been designed for IT Administrators to help save them time when handling user PSTN voice requests. 

The Teams Voice Management App offers the same functionality as the automated workflow, but with the added benefit of Power BI Dashboards. These dashboards provide reports on Number Range Usage, Phone System Usage and Requests made. The full list of benefits includes:

• Automated Number Provisioning 
• Simple Request Process
• Phone Number Management 
• Automated License Provisioning 
• Easy to Use App Interface
• Reporting Dashboards with Number Range Usage Report, Requests Report and Calling Usage Report 

IT Inventory App

This useful app enables you to record and manage the end-to-end journey of all your IT assets from the first day they’re used to the day they’re decommissioned.

In most organisations, recording the history of an asset would involve manually filling in spreadsheets each time an incident occurs, or a new user takes over the asset. Depending on the size of your company, this can be a daunting and time-consuming task. The big problem is often the lack of asset information that can be accessed centrally. This results in any amount of time being wasted trying to find the information you need. 

IT Admins also face the challenge of keeping track of renewal dates of warranties or when leases are coming to an end.  This inevitably puts more pressure on the IT team and can result in decreased productivity and an increased likelihood of errors.

Our PowerApp has been developed to support IT Admins by providing a single source to manage the end-to-end journey of every asset. This means assets can be quickly and easily assigned and unassigned to users, so you always know where everything is.

You can easily view and manage spare unassigned assets, which enables you to reduce the unnecessary purchases of IT equipment. You might also appreciate the use of a smartphone camera being able to scan barcodes to enter asset information into the application.

With custom automation, you can automate reminders for warranty renewals, lease renewals and other agreements.

Better still, you can use Active Directory integration to search for users within your organisation and ensure the safe return of all assigned assets and information, when required.

Leveraging the Power Platform within Microsoft Teams

There are a number of compelling benefits if you choose to extend the capabilities of your Microsoft Teams offering with the Power Platform. These benefits mostly derive from being able to weave together your business communication and collaboration tools in one seamless package; and then add to it, as and when you need. 

Mobile-ready and offering extensive opportunities for integration, including Office 365 and thirty-party integrations. The Power Platform is an advanced suite of tools that can provide you with significant savings in terms of time and investment. Best of all, all of the apps, automations, reports and chatbots that can be created are able to be integrated into your Microsoft Teams environment to put this functionality at the fingertips of your user community. This ensures they really do drive the desired efficiencies, rather than residing in blissful isolation from where your team are communicating and collaborating with one another. 

Resonate can help

The pandemic has resulted in a dramatic growth in Microsoft Teams usage as the lockdown and working from home led to a sudden increase in the need for video conferencing. 

If your company had to deploy Microsoft Teams in a terrific rush, it’s unlikely you’re making full use of all the benefits it can offer when you take a more holistic view of the role it could play within your organisation. 

That’s something Resonate can help you with. Among other things, we’re experts at developing customised business applications, automating workflows and creating BI dashboards to help you make sense of all the data that’s available to you.

If you’d like to speak to one of our friendly experts about the Power Platform please get in touch here.