Power Platform | The future is context (IQ)

So you´ve tried to keep up with all the latest announcements happening during Microsoft Ignite early November around the Power Platform, Business Applications, Azure and Developer Tools? You might have seen the intro to Context IQ – a new way to collaborate in a hyperconnected business but you´re still asking yourself of how you could build yourself apps following this concept? What would be, if no matter of being a code-first or citizen developer or even citizen data analyst, you would be enabled to build yourself such modern collaborative applications?

The vision Microsoft sets around this is to scale through Fusion teams development, a concept which is designed to empower three key audiences coming together. Above visual outlines how this audience can work in their tooling of choice, those they are familiar with to build and deliver applications, deploy and maintain them at scale. While in fact this toolchain equips everyone to achieve more, it also empowers collaboration itself.

Let me explain this in more detail. Above visual outlines the power house that everyone is offered with to build and design collaborative (Context IQ) applications, no matter being on a multi-cloud vendor strategy or counting on Microsoft Cloud technology. With the recent available Azure Synapse Analtytics connector for Dataverse, the bring-your-own-model through AI Builder your options to design and build your collaborative application received a booster.

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or dedicated resources—at scale. With Azure Synapse, customers can build their end-to-end analytics solution with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for their business intelligence and machine learning needs.

With the additional low-code and open sourced language Power Fx you´re empowered to add logic to your applications and AI-infused developer toolchain using PROSE and GPT3 allowing for easier application creation without e.g. knowing complex data filter mechanism. This „intelligence data engine“ can be used in context of purely new generated applications that have their own company CI/CD and are deployed as mobile or desktop applications, they could be „hosted“ natively inside Microsoft Teams channels or being accessible through intelligent chatbots acting behind the scenes and brought into context simply by @mention the bots name during a conversation.

Last, but not least, there´s the Dynamics family. A configurative-first approach to reach your business goals, recently extended by the latest family member Supply Chain Insights. Being a part of a Fusion Team, your toolchain to quickly create business outcomes, operate in a faster time to market and reduce the software solutions backlog simply quadrupled by using those latest capabilities. I´ve seen companies starting early adoption initiatives in terms of kicking-off design-thinking workshops to collect ideas around modern collaborative applications in a hyperconnected business and map them later on with best-of-breed fitting technology. Being part of those is always inspiring in terms of seeing fast adoption being possible, rapid prototyping and generating quick MVPs or PoCs to further proof the business value behind this platform approach. Until then, …