From the course: Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals (PL-900) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

Introduction

From the course: Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals (PL-900) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

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Introduction

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Hello, my name is Craig Zakhar, and this is the video course for Exam PL-900: Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals. As I said, my name is Craig Zakhar. I've been writing about Microsoft products for a lot of years now. The first book about Microsoft I wrote about was Windows 95. That shows you how long ago that was. So I've done a lot of different operating systems and applications, both Microsoft and outside on various networking subjects. I wrote the Exam Ref book for Microsoft Press on PL-900, and now this is a video version of it. And as you can see here, we've divided the course into six modules relating to the objectives of the exam, and we're going to take a look at each one in turn. Module one is describing generally the Power Platform toolset. Power Platform is a collection of various tools, applications, services, whatever you want to call them, that enable people to create their own apps and informational displays and chatbots and automated processes. The idea here is to support what Microsoft calls citizen developers. People who are actually using the tools are creating them. That's what Power Platform is all about. So this first module talks about the business value of the various Power Platform services, discusses each of them in turn introducing their basic functions. And we talk about the security and administration of Power Platform overall. Then in module two, we start talking about the Microsoft Dataverse, which is the database environment that Microsoft includes as an underlayment of the various Power Platform tools. We'll talk about how that is stored in the cloud using Microsoft Azure. And then we're going to talk about the connectors that enable users to create products, apps, flows, dashboards, and so forth that connect to outside sources and obtain data from them, and those use components called connectors. So we'll talk about that in detail. In module three, you see that this is the first of four modules devoted to each of the four main tools in the Power Platform suite toolbox, whatever you want to call it. This one is Power BI, where we look at its various components, talk about the process of connecting to a data source, obtaining the data and working with it afterwards. And then we'll look at building a basic dashboard using Power BI. In the next module, we're talking about Power Apps. While Power BI is about displaying information, Power Apps is more about manipulating it, and actually creating functional apps for users. So we're going to look at the Power Apps components, and there are two different kinds of apps in Power Apps, canvas apps and model-driven apps. And we're going to look at the process of creating each one. Next, we have Power Automate. Power Automate used to be called Microsoft Flow and it creates content that they call flows, which are essentially macros recording activities that can be repeated as necessary. So we're going to look at the Power Automate components and we're going to build a basic cloud flow. And then, finally we're going to look at Power Virtual Agents, which is a tool for creating chatbots that you can integrate into Microsoft Teams environments or websites or pretty much anywhere. Basically, a chatbot is an automated application that conducts conversation with a user. So we're going to talk about how those chatbots can be used, especially in Microsoft Teams. And then we're going to look at the process of actually building and publishing a basic chatbot. And that's it. That's the PL-900 course. I hope you'll stick with me through the however many dozen videos to come, and we'll hopefully learn something about these tools and how you can make use of them for yourself, and how your constituents, how your users can make use of them.

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