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6 Reasons to Choose Microsoft for your Low Code Application Platform

 

by James Townsend

Low code software development has been in the news in 2020.  The COVID crisis has disrupted many businesses, and they have been forced to transform themselves rapidly.  We have never seen so much digital transformation since that term was coined in 2012.  Low code development platforms have been chosen for many of these efforts because they can bring software solutions to fruition more quickly than traditional development methods.

Businesses and other organizations are choosing which low code platform they need, and these products are maturing quickly.  This post highlights six reasons why organizations choose Microsoft for low code application development.

  1. Microsoft has the most complete platform. No software vendor comes close to offering as a wide a set of capabilities as Microsoft.  These include database (Dataverse), business intelligence (Power BI), reporting tools, integrated document management (SharePoint), email (Outlook), spreadsheet (Excel) and even artificial intelligence tools. The breadth of products makes Power Platform a fit for a wide variety of business scenarios.  
  2. Product maturity.  The Dynamics precursors of Power Platform such as Dynamics CRM have been well well established for many years and are familiar to many IT departments. Microsoft invests extensive resources to continuously improve its products, so you can expect new features to continuously appear. 
  3. The Microsoft cloud. Today's strongest low code platforms are hosted in the cloud, and Microsoft has the second most popular cloud offering after Amazon Web Services.  For business and government, Office 365 is the leading cloud productivity suite, so users already have Microsoft cloud accounts.  Microsoft hosts government clouds in the United States and other countries which achieve the highest security accreditations.  Microsoft bears the expense of upgrading the cloud and provides a financially-backed guarantee of uptime. 
  4. The Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft has tens of thousands of resellers and implementation partners worldwide.  Some of them specialize in Microsoft low code development. Microsoft AppSource is a marketplace for Dynamics solutions which can be installed in Power Apps either as complete solutions in themselves or as components of a low code solution.  
  5. Security integration. The Power Platform exists in the context of Office 365, making security management much more efficient than when multiple platforms are used.  The permissions model is quite granular and powerful. 
  6. Mobile apps. Microsoft creates and maintains mobile apps which you can download from the leading app stores.  Mobile computing has continued to grow in importance, and these prebuilt apps represent significant savings of time and money from building custom mobile apps. 
While companies can choose more than one low code platform, this undermines the benefits of going low code in the first place.  Standardizing can ensure compatibility and interoperability as well as save on subscription costs and support personnel. 

For more information, see my related posts:




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