This video explains what organizations can already accomplish with Power Platform using existing Microsoft 365 licensing and when to consider upgrading to additional licenses. It walks through the capabilities and limitations of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, and AI Builder, highlighting standard vs. premium connectors, environment needs, and usage-based considerations. The guidance helps teams understand where they can begin automating today and how to plan for scaling more advanced solutions.
Hey y’all, this is Venice, and here at Rockhop we’ve been hearing from our customers that you are wondering what you can do with the 365 licensing that you already have within Power Platform and what kind of use cases you would need to consider when looking at additional licensing. In this video, we’re going to go through each of the apps within Power Platform, talk about what you can do today to get started in automation efforts in your company, and what to know and consider with additional licensing. That being said, we’re not going to go into the nuances of what license to buy for each of these, so let us know if you have additional questions about that.
We’ll start off with Power Apps. Power Apps comes with a seated version in most 365 licensing where you can build as many apps as you want using standard connectors. A lot of people make really impactful apps and automations in their company by building around the SharePoint data that you already have and are using and automating some of the processes around approvals that are happening through Outlook and Teams. Those are just some examples. We’ll share a link of where to look for what is a standard connector to give you some ideas, but there will also be templates involved within the Power Apps maker portal. So check those out and be aware of the little diamond that shows what is a standard connector versus a premium connector.
Premium connectors are things like SQL databases and Dataverse. Once you start buying Power Apps licensing, you will get Dataverse capacity allocated to your tenant. It’ll be pooled at the tenant level unless you assign it to environments. Everything using a seated Power Apps license will be stored in one environment for your organization, the default environment. This is okay to get started, but as you start building more business-critical processes on Power Platform, you’ll want to mature your development and testing process, and you’ll want multiple environments for that. The ability to have different environments and different settings for those environments—permissions, what data is allowed, etc.—will warrant looking at Power Apps licensing for anybody building apps or accessing apps with premium connectors behind them.
Lastly, if you have a Power App scenario that you want to share with external folks, you would look at building a Power Pages site. Internal to your organization, people can utilize their Power Apps licensing to access the Power Pages site, but once you’re ready to start sharing it with folks outside of your organization, you’ll look at buying Power Pages users, authenticated or unauthenticated.
Power Automate is really similar in that distinguishing factors are standard versus premium connectors and environment creation. In addition to workflows and approvals that are happening already in Outlook and Teams, some things that you may want to consider are email alerts when triggered in any of the systems that I’ve said already or summaries of things that have happened over the past week or month. Something that may drive you to need a Power Automate license is if you want to create automation around a program that doesn’t have API access and you rely on a desktop or a machine for that. You may want to build robotic process automation, and you would look at getting a Power Apps license for that scenario.
Power BI Desktop is a program that’s available to you today through the Microsoft Store, and you can connect to data and build reports in that program. You can also get a Power BI free license within your tenant, and that would give you the ability to publish what you’ve built on Power BI Desktop into your My Workspace. This is really a personal productivity use case that’s available today, but when you’re ready to start sharing, that’s when you need to look at Power BI licenses for you and the person that you’re sharing with. Other reasons why somebody may consider getting Power BI licensing are if they want to mature how they’re connecting to data—bringing in data into Power BI through a dataflow or a datamart, which are just more intelligent and easier ways for business users to bring in and transform data.
Power Virtual Agents allows you to build a chatbot to help answer some of the questions that are asked over and over again in your organization. Most 365 licenses have that capability already today, so you can build a chatbot and share it through the Teams client as the channel that you’re sharing it through. Folks in your organization could act upon that—chatting with and finding answers based on that Power Virtual Agents chatbot. You would need to get a license for PVA if you want to share it in a channel outside of Teams, such as your public website or Facebook. Then you would need to buy the amount of sessions for people engaging your chatbot outside of Teams.
AI Builder is exciting because if you purchase Power Apps or Power Automate, you get a certain amount of AI Builder credits. You can automatically read data from a receipt and write it to a data source or automatically read a business card and write it to a data source—starting to take effort away from manual processing of paper or processes like that. The thing to be aware of is that it doesn’t come with as many credits as you may think. Two hundred fifty credits is what you get for a Power Apps per-app license, and that will get you about 15 receipts. As you start to build a critical business process using AI Builder, you’ll want to make sure that you have enough credits. Every license that you buy pools credits at the tenant level unless you assign them to an environment. If you need more credits, you can buy one unit of AI Builder, which is a million credits. They have published an AI Builder calculator that can help you understand, based on the number of receipts you need to process per month, how many units you’ll need. It is done in million-unit increments, and if you’re converting to credits, be aware of the different language happening there.
Alrighty, that is the lowdown on how you can get started with Power Platform today with what you already have and why you may want to consider getting additional licensing. I hope you found this helpful. I hope you have an idea of how you can start the automation effort in your organization today. If you want to discuss any of these ideas or have questions, reach out to us. We’d love to talk to you. Thanks so much.
