Websites Get a Whole Lot Easier—with Microsoft Power Pages

Besides how easy it is to create, host and manage your website, another key consideration is how well-connected your website is with your enterprise applications. With so many customers interacting with your business through your website, you want to make sure data flows automatically to and from your back-office applications and databases.

With the recent announcement of the newest addition to the Power Platform, Microsoft has you covered in all these critical areas. Generally available later this year, is a secure, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Using this tool will feel just like working with other tools in the Power Platform.

The low-code/no-code development tool lets your technical and non-technical users expand the value of your investment in Microsoft applications—like Dynamics 365 and Office 365. Both groups can quickly design and publish websites that work with all browsers and devices.

It’s a great addition to the toolset, which lets you customize and build applications to automate workflows and build business intelligence reporting models by integrating technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. With Power Platform, you can also personalize dashboards that provide real-time visibility into KPIs and predictive analytics to forecast what’s coming in the next month, quarter and year.

Customizable Templates Enable Fluid Visual Experiences

Let’s take a closer look at the components of Power Pages, which follows in the footsteps of its forerunning—Power Apps portals. Design Studio makes it easy to style, configure, and publish websites. You can build your own or use templates to design your site pages with text, video, images, data forms, and lists.

The Templates Hub provides you with full-featured websites and demo data to can quickly publish sites that deliver services such as scheduling, registration, and application submissions. And with Learn Hub, you can explore guides, tutorials, and videos to learn how to build websites, model and visualize data, work with code components, and configure sites.

Along with the customizable templates and the ability to enhance website visitor experiences, Power Pages provides several key capabilities:

• Supports JavaScript, Liquid templates and CSS
• Integrates with code components and APIs.
• Allows developers to interact with underlying business data and implement custom business logic—without leaving their favorite tools.
• Provides developers with a command-line interface to easily download and upload customization projects from Visual Studio Code and GitHub.
• Enables advanced users to automate development workflows by leveraging CI/CD practices.
• Includes styling, configuring, and publishing layout tools for pages with text, videos, images, forms and lists.
• Enables design and testing of database queries before running on live sites.
• Streamlines testing of website mobile versions—with QR code private previews.
• Supports code round-tripping.
• Accesses Microsoft Edge debugging tools.

Another approach to website development to consider is how Power Pages websites can be quickly built by your non-technical users—and then modified by your development team to add features like alternative authentication without breaking the design view in the Power Pages service. The solution also runs on Microsoft Azure and connects with Dataverse to give you critical security capabilities: advanced encryption, role-based access controls, and support for Microsoft Azure Front Door and other web application firewalls. You also get Microsoft Azure DDoS protection. These capabilities allow you to securely collect and share information with website visitors—which your customers will appreciate.

Ready Now for Testing

General availability for Power Pages is expected later this year. Currently, you can test the new tool and the new features in preview mode and provide feedback to Microsoft. It’s a good idea to start testing now, but it’s best to wait until general availability before moving websites into production scenarios.

To learn more about Power Pages and other Microsoft Power apps, reach out to Velosio today. We welcome the opportunity to help you modernize the way your company analyzes data, automates processes, and delivers content with the Microsoft Power Platform.