Microsoft Power Platform has a core-four group of tools (Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents) that help solve problems, streamline processes, provide insight, and so much more. The sky is the limit! Yet, that potential can sometimes steer users in the wrong direction in figuring out what tool to use for what activity.
The Business Intelligence group is one of JourneyTEAM’s five practices that see these situations firsthand when working with our clients and prospective Power Platform users. Our Power Platform experts dig into the details of Power Platform and its features and functionality.
Here is one example from BI Developer, Nathan Giullian, of when you should choose Power BI over Power Apps and why…
The Need
A municipal government police department wants to attract new talent by making it easy for potential officers to understand their earning potential. Their plan? Create an easy-to-use wage calculator hosted on their website where prospective officers could come to this website and select different filtering options based on their experience, rank, work preferences, and other criteria to see an estimate of their yearly and bi-monthly pay.
The Solution
JourneyTEAM identified two options for leveraging Power BI to create a wage calculator…
The first option was to use the “publish to web” capabilities in the Power BI service to create an iframe which would then be embedded in the client’s public website. Typically, this feature is disabled for an organization because the data in Power BI is sensitive and not to be shared outside of the company. However, the wage calculator was intended to be public-facing in this case, and the data was safe to share.
Option two involved Power BI embedded, which comes at an extra cost that gets better refreshes, secured logins, and dedicated, scalable capacity. The team decided not to go this route because the data did not need to be secured behind a login and the data model was small enough that dedicated capacity was not worth the cost.
The Reason
The team considered Power Apps’ functionality for this situation, but because Power Apps does not support sharing with users outside of the host tenant, they could not continue that track. Power BI offered the next best solution in the Microsoft stack because it is easy to use and maintain.
Do you need guidance on leveraging Microsoft Power Platform in the right way? JourneyTEAM experts are here to help guide you and ensure your Microsoft Technology stack is improving your business processes. Contact our BI experts today!