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Saima Naz
Feb 18, 2025
The Role of Cloud-Managed Services in Saudi Arabia – Empowering Vision 2030
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A Comprehensive Overview of Power Apps and Best Practic...
In today’s technology-driven world, modern businesses rely on data than on anything else. From entering their time for payroll, seeking guidance on current processes, and evaluating data to make decisions, users interact with data virtually on a daily basis.
No wonder, users can be empowered to gain insights from and interact with data while automating those tedious tasks that appear to be onerous. Power Platform allows your company to create solutions while enabling you to unite tailored technology to help everyone, from top executives to the ordinary employees, drive the business with data. Power Platform consists of four key products: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents.
Power Apps provides a rapid low code development environment for building custom apps for business needs. It has services, connectors, and a scalable data service and app platform (Common Data Service) to allow simple integration and interaction with existing data. Power Apps enables the creation of web and mobile applications that run on all devices.
Like a database, Common Data Service, or CDS, is a data storage service, which can be used to store data in the form of tables known as Entities. CDS is a service that is used largely in the Power Apps portal, but it is also accessible through other Power Platform services and Microsoft Dynamics. It would be easy to think of the CDS as just a relational database, but it truly is comprised of three components: entities, logic, and security.
Whenever a new environment is created, a new example of CDS is made along with a pre-defined set of entities. This standard data plan is called the Common Data Model (CDM) and the entities created inside the initial instance of CDS are called the core entities. The Common Data Model can be understood to be the base language of the platform and lets applications communicate seamlessly and easily.
Not only is the CDS an interactive database with a pre-defined data set, but it also accompanies some integral logic that users are familiar with, allowing data to be authenticated in real time in line with certain requirements. They also can help an end user understand by showing messages advising them on what should be done before saving a record. Logic almost always means another crucial element of the Power Platform: Power Automate. This allows us to automate several different types of processes across the entire Power Platform and beyond.
Users will be acquainted with the notion of security roles and business units. The CDS follows this security model, which implies that security is easily configured out of the box, letting us us lock down fields and record sharing, just as it occurs in Dynamics.
A no-code platform is a development platform that exploits a visual development setting to lay layperson users craft apps, through systems such as drag-and-drop, adding application elements to create a whole application. Developers as well as non-technical people can use these tools to practice quick application development with modified workflows and functionality. A number of these products are geared toward large businesses that need to swiftly design business processes and workflow applications at a massive scale. The tools provide templates for workflow, element libraries, and interface customization to produce full-fledged applications sans any coding.
1. Canvas Apps
Canvas-based apps have existed since Power Apps first emerged nearly 2 years ago. Canvas apps can immensely help you connect to a majority of the data sources that are included in your O365 license. What’s more, these apps are amazing for putting scores of data sources together into one app; for crafting a completely custom UI; for delivering a user-friendly, and mobile-first application for your users.
2. Model-driven Apps
In Power Apps, model-driven apps are grounded on fundamental data, i.e., the data stored in Common Data Service (CDS). With model-driven apps, you need not worry about selecting the app size. And the best part is that it is responsive, which implies that it works on mobile or tablet quite easily. These apps are built on a data-first approach; therefore, they are far stiffer in design than canvas apps, with a majority of other user interface mechanisms being premade and pre-selected; however, there is still room to edit discrete components.
3. Portals
Portals help build externally facing website through smart no-code solutions. Power Apps interface enables you to create an unidentified or genuine website that lets users interact with data held in CDS. Portals let companies create websites which can be shared with external users external either incognito or through the login provider of their choice, including LinkedIn. Enterprise login providers can also be integrated using various industry standard protocols like SAML2, OpenId Connect and WS-Fed.
4. Power Apps Features and Benefits
Some of the features of Power Apps include:
Power Apps is the go-to thing for its user-friendly functionalities and its capacity to integrate data. Here are some key benefits that Power Apps offers your business.
In a fast-paced tech environment where each minute counts, getting the apps at the right time is very important. One of the major advantages of Power Apps is how swiftly you can develop a valuable, working app. Power Apps takes out numerous time-consuming elements from the normal development process and swaps them with an innate drag-and-drop interface. This results in Power Apps developing a new app faster than ever.
Coding can be a challenging undertaking for a non-programmer with such elements as APIs, libraries, functions, and objects. Power Apps makes this task easier by dealing with a majority of coding by dragging and dropping. Power Apps handles all of the normal overhead that goes into creating a mobile app that either runs in a browser or a local desktop app. Power Apps obviates the need to learn about the pros and cons of frameworks or libraries.
One of the key benefits of the Power Apps is that being a Microsoft solution, it is fully capable of integrating with other Microsoft tools. This suggests that developers can leverage data from Microsoft apps such as Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Excel as well as other third-party services. There is a slew of connectors available for Power Apps, which means that there is scope to connect impeccably with other platforms.
Although Power Apps is available within many Microsoft 365 subscriptions, it’s also highly affordable as a standalone app. From a price range between $10 per app per month and $40 per user per month, it delivers a cheaper solution to outsourcing app development.
Here’s a real-world case of how a large infrastructure, Heathrow Airport, or London Airport, has used the Power Apps to drastically enhance their business operations.
Being a key international airport situated in London, United Kingdom, Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports. Given the traffic congestion and other complexities involving flight operations at the airport, there was an urgent need to streamline systems there. And the first step towards that objective was to digitize the airport’s processes. To this end, Heathrow Airport adopted Microsoft Office 365 for all its employees, which was later built upon with the introduction of Power Apps.
With the help of Power Apps, Heathrow Airport created an official process for creating and executing apps for employees to use. These apps could help employees build their own apps as well as utilize features from other internal apps to avoid a duplication of effort.
The implementation of Power Apps paid dividends to the airport in terms of:
Saima Naz
Mar 1, 2021
An Overview of Current Agile Trends & Practices
Of late, Agile has proved to be more than just a catchword in the IT industry.
At the start of another year of thrilling events, the arena of Agile Development continues to grow as organizations continue to discover more exciting ways of planning and implementing work. Technology and virtual communications approaches have grown phenomenally and are here to stay, while our capacity to maintain human connection continues to prove difficult even in the best of circumstances. Agile believes in communication and putting the whole team in once place to get the task done in order to avoid information silos.
The Covid-19 pandemic saw a major shift in the work ethic across all industries, including software. The concept of working from home, which was earlier not encouraged, was adopted, but it also suffered from serious communication issues.
At its heart, Agile suggests that the teams must be self-sufficient and be able to communicate to avoid information and communication gaps. Therefore, based on the pandemic and the need to increase output while maintaining the needed distance, the concept of Cross Functional Teams was introduced.
The cross functional teams include people from different functional domains of a project or a product life and put them together to conduct all phases of program from start to finish. In this structure each member of the team uses their expertise of respective domains to achieve a common goal.
The year 2020 gave us a chance to evaluate how many of these predictions of Agile trends were accurate. Here is our list of top 4 trends for PMOs in 2021:
Inevitably, that stress has been laid on digital transformation and alternate ways of working across traditional, remote, and hybrid models, just like much of 2020 was the year of digitization for PMOs. In an environment that is volatile and constantly changing, PMOs continue to encounter many challenges, one of which is adjusting to changes as it strives to support agile changes in their own exclusive ways. So, let us explore a little deeper into each of these trends and learn what they might offer in 2021.
Agile has swiftly sneaked out from the world of software development into virtually all product and service industries. And PMOs are trying to find ways in which they can retain monitoring and control of how projects are managed. Agile (uppercase A) works as a delivery framework while agile (lowercase a) refers to the executive culture framework and mindset. Regardless of whether (A)agile is a criterion for PMOs, upright behavior in process and attitude will enable positive continual change.
Many Agile transitioning organizations would contend that this is already the case for PMOs, whereby perceptibility, transparency, authority, and supervision are often left behind. To ensure good governance, several features of the business must be taken into account, such as adaptability and embracing frequent change.
“Agile makes you quick but to be agile you have to be fit. It’s just two letters away from “fragile”, so it’s best to get fit before you get nimble,” said Ms Mamoona, Agile & PMO expert at a global IT company.
Artificial intelligence has seen an enormous in the last few years; in fact, calling this technology our time’s industrial revolution won’t be off the mark. AI has revolutionized the way we think, design, work and produce. AI is already widespread and getting a tougher position by the day as we see the speedy rise and influence it has on many industries worldwide. Just look at your phone – it identifies your face to unlock your screen, search. More astonishingly, it is able to detect algorithms that help you to navigate online, with as simple as autocorrect allowing you to type emails quicker than ever.
When it comes to project management, the surge of AI reporting can simplify the delivery of performance indicators to empower decision-making processes. We have also observed that AI provides more targeted insights on how project managers are feeling through feedback provided in their status reports as an example. Artificial intelligence has turned to be a valuable tool to not only support PM but also in so many other exciting ways. For instance, using AI has already played such a vital part in the Financial Risk Management space for the Financial Services industry, which is mostly focused around payment services. Nevertheless, talking about the advantages of AI and its valuable place within the PMO is at a promising stage and yet to be wholly realized.
There are risks to executing or building systems that are keener than we are. Will AI replace the human component in PMO and project delivery? Although we do not believe it will, we do think that AI can help accelerate the automation within PMOs and allow for focus to be placed in fields of more significance.
Digital transformation is an old field. The standard hypothesis is that people tend to assume digital transformation is an IT transformation enterprise only. Whether that is a structural change from non-digital-driven to digital-driven or maybe the spur to change your digital experience with better and more resourceful solutions. One of the most significant things to comprehend is that it is fundamentally business transformation, reinforced by investments in new technology—not a new technology on the lookout for opportunities.
In this day and age, consumer needs are continually developing, and businesses are keeping up with variable degrees of success. Delivery systems are adapting and being modified to match accelerated development across many industries. Shareholders and board members uphold more traditional needs within these unsettling settings. ROI and practical decision-making around calculated synergy, risk exposure, and asset utilization still need to be established. The key focus should be how you support organizations on their digital transformation trip and leveraging technology to improve current business methods, elevate culture, and the general user experience — all with the objective to meet changing market and business requirements.
The Covid-19 pandemic has seen a large segment of the global workforce work from home. It hardly needs pointing out that the new work ethic has had a dramatic impact on team collaboration and output. There are no rules for how to do this effectively, and in true Agile fashion we are learning as we proceed. Remote working has rapidly begun to reshape the future of the workforce, combining changes and employee management that need transparent communication and engagement enterprises.
Being resilient to change is important to keep relevant and become resolute to thrive. 2020 has been the year of reconsidering internal processes to keep up with the quick pace expected for 2021. It is highly crucial that PMOs focus on how to drive value for their organizations and learn to adjust to procedures that will inspire internal progress from within the PMO itself.
Saima Naz
Feb 19, 2021
Different Industries that are Using Data Science and An...
Now, these are some general trends in Data Science and Analytics that will be observed in 2021 and the coming years. However, there are many ways in which Data Science is changing the shape of different industries like marketing, finance, etc. Given enough time, Data Science might be a part of all the industries in the world, not just tech!
So let’s understand the role of this technology in different industries.
Data Science already plays a huge role in marketing and retail. The most basic thing that almost every company uses is marketing and retail dashboards that visualize the data to see the hidden patterns and trends. Data Science and Machine Learning are also very useful for customer analysis wherein customer data is collected to understand the demographic of customers, the products that are popular with different types of customers, their likes and dislikes, and how to market a particular product to a section of customers.
The internet and social media are a treasure trove of data! Google alone processes around 20 petabytes of data every day (That’s approximately 1 followed by 15 zeros) Companies can use the web and social media analytics to obtain data about their customers and feedback on their performance which can be used to improve their bottom line. Sentiment analysis is a great example of this where companies can obtain their customer reviews from the internet or social media and to understanding the sentiment of the customers towards the company.
Supply Chain and Logistics may sound boring but it is a critical aspect for companies. Can you imagine Amazon working if their system for transporting products from point A to point B crashed? No! Therefore, Data Science and Analytics is an extremely important part of the Supply Chain and Logistics that companies can use for Inventory Management, Procurement Analysis, Inventory Classification, etc. For example, data analytics algorithms can be used to understand the correlation between demand and supply for companies and create methods to increase sales by always ensuring in-demand items are available.
FinTech is a technology trend that is becoming more and more popular with time. It involved finance companies using cutting edge technology like Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to improve in areas like risk analytics, fraud detection, algorithmic trading, etc. Many big banks and finance companies use Data Science to analyze their large store of data to optimize their risk scoring models and decrease their risks. This data can include financial transactions, lending schemes, interest rates, customer interactions, customer trustworthiness, etc.
As you have seen, there are various new Data Science and Analytics trends emerging in 2021. You can leverage them to learn more about Data Science and improve your career using the data science courses offered by Great Learning in collaboration with The University of Texas. These programs will teach you right from the basics of Data Science such as Python, Business Statistical, and Data Visualization to various techniques of Machine Learning such as Supervised and Unsupervised algorithms.
You will also get direct domain exposure by doing projects relating to Data Science in different industries like Marketing and Retail, Web and Social Media Analytics, Supply Chain and Logistics, and Finance and Risk Analytics. Some of these projects include Facebook Comments Prediction, Retail Sales Prediction, Insurance Data Visualization, etc.
Saima Naz
Jan 24, 2021