Tag: Microsoft Power Platform

Join us! 18-23 September for the FIRST even Microsoft Power Platform Conference   #MPPC22

The first annual Power Platform Conference sponsored by Microsoft and Power Platform Conference is coming to Orlando for an amazing in-person event this September, with keynotes, sessions, breakouts and more—all dedicated to Microsoft Power Platform products: Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents.

Gain insights and understanding on the latest features and benefits of Power Platform from Microsoft’s senior thought leaders, software engineers, and community experts, all focused on uniting humanity and technology. Learn and connect with key innovators as they incorporate human-centered design and use discovery-based solutions to solve ever-changing business challenges. Kicking off on September 18 & 19 with pre-conference workshops, the event runs September 20-22, 2022.

In addition to featuring more than 100 speakers and more than 150 sessions, conference-goers will have the opportunity to connect—and reconnect—with users from around the world, building their personal and professional relationships, while gaining valuable insight into what’s new and next for Microsoft’s business applications.

Capping off the week is a conference-exclusive night at Universal Orlando, home to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter® and Islands of Adventure™!

Don’t delay—sign up for the Microsoft Power Platform Conference today! We can’t wait to see you in Orlando!

Unmissable Power BI sessions:

Power BI experts from around the world will be hosting sessions on a variety of topics including 101s, product deep dives, and hands-on workshops to suit your learning needs.

Check out this one-pager and all the links below to learn more about Power BI’s sessions in the Power Platform Conference.

Power BI sessions include:

Hands-on Power BI workshops include:

Featured Power BI speakers include:

See you there!

Kelly Kaye
Power BI Senior Community Program Manager

@MS_KellyKaye #MPPC22

Today’s unprecedented public health and educational crisis is creating enormous challenges for institutions of higher education. Chief among these are campus closures and the need to switch to remote or hybrid learning, concerns over the health and well-being of students, faculty, and the community, and the need to understand the impacts on academic research.

As higher education institutions prepare for the upcoming academic year, they will have to address the needs of their communities, while meeting operational requirements across the university. Some solutions can be found in new, agile low-code tools, which are helping institutions quickly meet specific challenges they face. Microsoft’s Power Platform allows users to address challenges and streamline processes across an institution through low-to-no-code apps, bots, and the automation of backend processes—all integrating with Microsoft Teams as a single hub for students, faculty, and staff.

We’re hearing incredible stories about how institutions are addressing challenges like student engagement and well-being, back-to-school requirements, and research in real-time with the Power Platform, including low-code apps with Power Apps, automated processes with Power Automate, powerful chatbots with Power Virtual Agents, and up-to-the-minute analytics with Power BI. That’s all happening without the need for developers or data scientists.

The Upstate Medical University story

Upstate Medical University serves 17 counties and nearly 1.8 million constituents in New York State. The institution recently released a back-to-school solution to ensure a safe return to campus. With limited staff to deploy as screeners, Upstate and Microsoft introduced a new, self-screening assessment tool to ensure the safe return of faculty, staff, students, and medical residents to campus.

To keep the campus safe early in the COVID-19 pandemic many staff members worked from home and campus buildings had only limited access. Individuals who did report to campus were screened for symptoms by an Upstate staff member.

However, with the use of the new tool, since June 8, Upstate has completed more than 8,500 screenings with more than  2,000 screenings completed on the first full day the tool was launched. As the campus begins to reopen, Upstate will need to provide symptom screening at more campus locations. This self-assessment tool assists Upstate in these screenings through allowing daily symptom checking online in accordance with CDC guidelines

Upstate Medical responds quickly to community during pandemic

At the outset of the pandemic this spring, Upstate Medical University launched a COVID telephone hotline on behalf of Onondaga County to provide information on COVID-19 to the public and to help triage symptomatic patients to the right location for follow-up care and possible testing. As the hotline call volume increased significantly, Upstate recognized the need to provide an additional method to address the public’s questions.

Working with Microsoft, Upstate quickly developed an online coronavirus assessment tool to enable users to assess their symptoms and determine whether they should seek testing. The health bot solution allowed for a quick remedy to the high call volume of the telephone hotline while continuing to provide the public with information. The assessment tool logged 8,000 users in its first week of operation. The success of the tool enabled Upstate to scale back hours for its telephone hot line, enabling the staff who volunteered to answer calls to return to their normal positions. Upstate Medical was able to reduce call center and testing center volumes optimizing human capital, resources, and facilities. 

Dr. Robert Corona, CEO of Upstate University Hospital, said, “There is much anxiety from the public, and understandably so, during this critical time. The coronavirus assessment tool, coupled with our COVID-19 triage line, can help the public get quick accurate information about their current health situation, and reassurance on next steps.”  

Understanding the financial impact at Purdue

Announced last month, Purdue University, a top public research institution in Indiana, partnered with Microsoft to create a Power App, the Higher Education Crisis Financial Impact Tracker, to help determine how the current situation is affecting academic research programs and provide an aggregated view of the financial impact on the university. Purdue researchers can access the application through Teams and input information on specific research initiatives and how they’ve been affected. 

In a recent press release, Theresa Mayer, Purdue’s Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships, said, “At this point, we have more than 1,100 faculty members on campus using the tool, and it is allowing us to get a clearer picture of how the COVID-19 event has affected our research programs. Until now, we have not been able to quantify impact at the research project level this efficiently.” Purdue University was the first university to implement the Higher Education Crisis Financial Impact Tracker. Microsoft announced that this Power App will soon be available to all universities. Learn more at https://aka.ms/educfit. 

ANS provides student engagement solution

To support student engagement, ANS, a UK cloud and digital services provider, developed a Power App solution to help improve student engagement and identify at-risk students during the COVID-19 crisis. The solution works by gathering various data from Microsoft Teams such as which students have virtually attended lectures. It then automates a workflow that helps the university pinpoint and address specific student needs, allowing them to act quickly to ensure the best outcome.

See ANS’ blog to learn more. And get the new IDC report, “Transform Student Engagement: Achieve Personalized, Efficient, Inclusive, and Accessible Higher Education with AI,” to learn more about top use cases for AI enabling student engagement.

Microsoft’s platform is flexible to assist higher education institutions in adhering to local guidance and requirements regarding faculty, staff and student privacy and safety. With the help of these tools, Microsoft aims to continue to be a resource for higher education institutions as they address the emerging needs of students, faculty, and staff across university and healthcare settings.

Learn more about Power Platform and Teams for Education and adapt quickly with agile, low-code tools available using the following solutions:

• Microsoft Power Apps empowers everyone, regardless of their technical abilities, to build low-code apps quickly and easily.
• Power Automate enables you to streamline repetitive tasks and paperless processes.
• Power Virtual Agents enables you to create powerful chatbots, like a crisis response chatbot—without the need for developers or data scientists.
• Power BI enables everyone at every level of your institution to make confident decisions using up-to-the-minute analytics.

For more information:

And see how a Tacoma, Washington school principal built a Power App to improve reading assessments.

There has been a lot of energy surrounding Microsoft’s Power Platform lately.

A couple of weeks ago during a presentation he gave on campus, Satya Nadella talked about the importance of the Power Platform and how it serves as a core offering for our customers.

Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform on top of what we’re doing with Azure is the core of what we are doing as a company vis-à-vis I would say our commercial customers – businesses of all sizes, whether it’s small business, large business, whether it’s in an emerging market or in a developed market.

The Power Platform is today comprised of three services – Power BI, PowerApps and Flow. While each of these services is best-of-breed individually, their combination as the Power Platform is a game-changer without equal for our customers.

I wanted to spend some time today introducing you to our vision for this platform and, more importantly, to highlight some of the people and organizations leveraging it to bring that vision to life.

An introduction to the Power Platform

Now more than ever, organizations have embraced the value of using data to drive business outcomes. They’ve adopted the cloud to store mass quantities of data and have become more efficient at harnessing data and signals coming from a multitude of sources such as web traffic, social media and business systems such as CRM/ ERP applications. But once they’ve implemented the infrastructure for harnessing data, how can they make that data work for them most efficiently? They need a layer atop that data that lets all workers, regardless of technical ability, leverage it in a straightforward way to drive business impact.

That’s what the Power Platform does. It is a system that enables users to do three key actions on data that help them drive business: Analyze, Act, and Automate. We do this with Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow, all working together atop your data to help EVERYONE, from the CEO to the front-line workers, drive the business with data.

While we believed what we were doing would make a positive business impact for our customers, none of us fully anticipated the impact it would have on the lives of those it touched.

Empowering a community of millions (and growing daily)

Last year Satya said something about those who come to Microsoft that really resonated with me.

“You join here, not to be cool, but to make others cool.”

More than anything else, this is power of the Power Platform.

For several years now our teams have been quietly developing and working with a community that has swelled to millions of monthly active users globally. We’ve been guided by a belief that magical things are possible when technology is made approachable and accessible to those in the best position to identify transformative applications – those who work on the front lines of a business.

There is a growing community of people who have discovered the Power Platform, leveraged it to drive transformational change for their organizations and in the process completely changed the trajectory of their careers and lives.

I’ve been fortunate to meet and to get to know some of these amazing people:

Nick Gill, a training specialist at the American Red Cross, who with no formal IT background taught himself how to use Power BI, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow then used them to transform a process that over 650 First Aid and CPR instructors use to order training class supplies. Nick has since been promoted to Manager of Logistics for the Preparedness, Safety, and Services department for the entire country. You can learn more about Nick and his work on the PowerApps Blog.

Ashley Culmsee, a psychology student with no IT experience learned to use PowerApps and Flow. With her father she built “the universal audit app” – allowing people across many industries to perform inspections and audits. Ashley’s story about how she got into building these apps is pretty amazing and inspiring. Growing up she suffered from anxiety and social phobia and in the Power Platform found an outlet and built a passion for technology. Today she works with her dad Paul Culmsee running hackathons and building Power Platform-based solutions for mining and engineering companies worldwide. Here is a blog from her dad that speaks to the impact the Power Platform has had on his daughter.

Martin Lee, was a dispatcher at AutoGlass, and built his first app to automate the process field technicians use to update their job status while out repairing chipped and broken glass on autos. As a dispatcher, Martin saw firsthand the inefficiency of their old process. In the summer of 2017, he taught himself PowerApps, built and deployed his first app into production within one month. By October 2017 he had singlehandedly deployed eight apps used by more than 1,500 technicians. Martin has since moved from his role as dispatcher to a dedicated technology role. He has since built 50 more apps and deployed them across the business to more than 3,000 employees. You can learn more on Martin by watching this video.

Brian Dang, was a third-grade teacher in Southern California who discovered PowerApps and used it to build some pretty stunning applications for his students, other teachers and for the school district. When I first met Brian we were preparing for an upcoming PowerApps technical review with Bill Gates. Knowing Bill’s passion for technology and education I invited Brian to join us in the meeting to show off his great work. My colleague Sameer Bhangar interviewed Brian when he came up for that meeting. A couple weeks after this video was produced Brian moved to Redmond and joined the team at Microsoft! Over the last year he’s helped thousands of others across the globe discover and master the Power Platform.

Each of these individuals is deeply engaged in the Power Platform community, helping others succeed as they have. To celebrate and recognize these champs, our Power Platform “Customer Success Team” created a set of trading cards. My growing collection hangs just inside my office door and helps me start each day focused on what really matters – the people we’re empowering to achieve more.

My growing collection of Power Platform champs trading cards as of January 2019.

Meeting up with some of our Power Platform champs in July 2018.

The “Triple-A Loop”: Analyze, act, automate

Our vision for the Power Platform started from the recognition that data is increasingly flowing from everything, and a belief that organizations that harness their data – to gain insights then used to drive intelligent business processes – will outperform those that don’t.

We also recognize there aren’t enough programmers, data scientists and tech professionals to go around. So our goal was to build a platform not targeting these technology experts but for people like Nick, Ashlee, Martin and Brian – and the millions of other frontline workers who see opportunities every day to create something better than the status quo, but who’ve never been empowered to do anything about it.

Our guiding vision was a framework we called the “Triple-A Loop” – a closed-loop system allowing users to gain insights from data (Analyze) used to drive intelligent business processes via apps they build (Act) and processes they automate (Automate).

The Microsoft Power Platform implements this vision via three cloud-based services: Power BI, PowerApps and Flow.

Let’s look at each component:

Microsoft Power BI

Power BI is a self-service business intelligence solution that makes it easy to connect, analyze and gain insight from the data that runs your business – wherever that data may be: in the cloud, or in your own data center; in an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list, an Oracle database or in an SAP or Salesforce application; or in any of the hundreds of other systems with built-in support by the Power Platform. Power BI was the first Power Platform service delivered, entering preview in January 2015.

In just four short years, Power BI has been adopted by tens of thousands of companies and millions of users. Every single month the service has been updated and improved.

Some of the service metrics today are just stunning: Power BI is available in 43 languages and used across 18,000 cities spanning the globe. Nearly 10 petabytes of data are uploaded to the service each month with more than 10 million report and dashboard queries executed against that data every hour (!) on behalf of users.

But insights without action are little more than idle chatter, so, while we were busy pushing toward general availability with Power BI we were simultaneously creating the services that would make Power BI’s insights actionable: PowerApps and Flow.

Microsoft PowerApps

Selection of PowerApps built by London Heathrow Airport

PowerApps is a “citizen application development platform” – allowing anyone to build web and mobile applications without writing code. The natural connection between Power BI and PowerApps makes it effortless to put insights in the hands of maintenance workers, teachers, miners and others on the frontline, in tailored and often task-specific applications that supercharge their productivity and make their work perhaps a little less tedious.

Like Power BI, PowerApps connects to hundreds of business systems and databases, making it easy to connect workers with the existing processes and data that makes the business tick. And all the data captured in PowerApps can make its way right back to those very systems for further analysis in Power BI creating a closed-loop process for continuous improvement. Additionally, PowerApps comes with a built-in, fully-managed, enterprise-grade datastore called the Common Data Service (CDS) for those applications that generate data not destined for a legacy system – and Power BI and Flow have deep connections to CDS making it that much easier to get even more value from data stored there.

I can remember like it was yesterday a meeting that really cemented for me that PowerApps was going to be a game-changer for our customers. In the Spring of 2016 I met with Integrated Power Services – a company that traces its roots to 1904. Sitting in a conference room in building 44 on our main campus IPS told me how they’d built a PowerApp that transformed their core business process – inspecting and repairing large electric motors and generators from a variety of manufacturers. Turns out there’s not “an app for that” and before PowerApps the technical hurdles to build such a solution put it far beyond their reach.

I’ve never had a customer so completely energized and excited by one of my products. For them PowerApps was like magic – they’d transformed an error-prone collection of manual processes into a tablet-based app their repair professionals could use to fix motors faster, with fewer errors and while keeping their customers informed of the process in a way never before possible. And they built the app right on the shop floor at one of their depots, with the repair personnel who now use the app.

Microsoft Flow

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is garnering a lot of interest and attention in the market – with pure-play vendors raising enormous sums of money at astronomical valuations. By automating simple tasks, RPA solutions promise to lower costs while reducing errors. Microsoft Flow is an intelligent process automation service that goes beyond simple task automation, allowing non-technical users to automate complex business processes and workflows without a complex IT deployment.

Through a simple and intuitive interface, users can create automated workflows that can be triggered by insights from Power BI, leveraged via apps built with PowerApps (e.g. a user action in a PowerApp might kick off an approval process) and integrated with events from any of the hundreds of systems the Power Platform natively supports. The workflows run completely in the cloud and are fully managed and secured by Microsoft.

The power of three = The Power Platform

Power BI, PowerApps and Flow each represents best-of-breed solutions in their individual categories, but their combination as the Power Platform is a game-changer without equal for our customers.

Power BI unlocks insights and intelligence, PowerApps converts that intelligence into action through transformative applications built in record time, and Flow makes business process orchestration an easy point and click exercise … with further feedback to Power BI creating a powerful system of continuous improvement.

Putting this power to “analyze, act and automate” in the hands of individuals who know their business best, with built-in connectors to all the systems and sources of data in an organization, creates previously unimaginable transformation opportunities for our customers.

SNCF operates France’s national rail service and is a global leader in passenger and freight transport services. With 270,000 employees spread across 120 countries, it aims to become the benchmark for mobility and logistics solutions in France and worldwide. SNCF is a great example of a customer that has gone “all in” with the Power Platform. As with many customers, initial adoption was grassroots in nature – starting in some places with Power BI and others with PowerApps. They quickly realized the potential the platform represented for their business and has built a company-wide center of excellence to educate, train and support the thousands of employees now using the platform to help shape the future of SNCF.

Here is a short video that highlights the great work they’re doing at SNCF.

What’s Next?

It has been an exciting journey for all of us on the team. In so many ways we are just getting started.

As we look forward to the year ahead, we are planning to deliver some really special product developments. These will come together across all of our offerings – from Dynamics 365 to the Power Platform – as part of our April 2019 release. You can get ready for that now by checking out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, April 2019 release notes.

I would also welcome you to join us for our Virtual Launch Event in April, where we may have a few added surprises.

And lastly, to our community of makers and creators – thank you for being on this journey with us. Your dedication, energy, and ingenuity inspire me. Your passion literally has me running up the stairs every day when I come to work. Thank you. Hope to see you all soon!

James.