Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents book review

Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents: A practical guide to building intelligent chatbots with Microsoft Power Platform by Nicolae Tarla

I have created bots for customers and internal users for several years, mainly with the Azure Bot Framework which required deep coding skills. Power Virtual Agents allows you to create and deploy automated chatbots without requiring a developer, just a browser and Microsoft Power Platform. This book provides a great introduction to Power Virtual Agents written in a friendly and non-technical way.

I like that licensing is addressed in this book up front; there is a tendency to hide the license and cost implications and focus on the technology when talking about new and exciting software products.

This book explains the concepts used in chatbots such as topics, trigger phrases, entities, and conversations and how these are uses to build your chatbot. You are taken through creating a trial of Power Virtual Agents into building your first chatbot.

The book shows how to deploy a Power Virtual Agent to your organization’s website or to a Power Apps Portal. The book explains step-by-step how to configure your chatbot to authenticate both internal and external users, possibly one of the more technical aspects of building a chatbot.

Microsoft Teams has become so important within organizations as a central way to manage and access data. I see the future of Power Virtual Agents more in being deployed internally to support the organization internally rather than in the more tradition use of bots assisting external customers. I was therefore glad to see this book focus on the creation and deployment of bots within Microsoft Teams and also demonstrating how Power Virtual Agents can be used to access and leverage information held across internal systems.

Finally, I was especially pleased with chapters on best practices. There are some really good thoughts and suggestions in this book that you should consider when planning your chatbots.

You can purchase direct from Packt https://www.packtpub.com/product/empowering-organizations-with-power-virtual-agents/9781801074742 or from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Empowering-Organizations-Power-Virtual-Agents/dp/1801074747