Microsoft has announced the preview of Power Pages, the fifth product in its Power Platform family, designed for low-code makers and professional developers.
Power Apps portals have provided users with end-to-end experiences to create external portals at speed and customise them with pages, layouts, and content.
Power Pages is a standalone offering that allows anyone to access a robust platform for creating data-powered, modern, secure websites, no matter their technical skill level.
The new offering also offers adaptable features to facilitate extensibility by providing businesses of any size with the means to securely build websites with dynamic aesthetic features.
Microsoft says its low-code family is the most comprehensive development platform globally, and this new product will streamline business processes and automate workflows, allowing for unification and convenience.
As part of the preview, a range of features and capabilities are now available.
The Design Studio makes designing, styling, configuring, and publishing modern business websites easier by offering users the ability to start from scratch or use a premade template to create their site pages with text, video, images, business data forms and lists.
The Templates Hub contains full-featured websites with demo data, making it simple to learn how to manage scheduling, registering, and submitting applications.
Further, the Learn Hub allows users to explore guides, tutorials, and quick videos to learn how to build websites, model and visualise business data, work with code components and configure sites.
Microsoft Dataverse is a low-code data platform that enables users to securely collect and share business information with site visitors.
Power Pages runs on Microsoft Azure and connects with Dataverse to provide vital security capabilities, including advanced encryption, rich role-based access controls (RBAC), and support for Microsoft Azure Front Door and other web application firewalls.
Visual Studio is another offering available through Power Pages and provides users with a way to code advanced capabilities using JavaScript, Liquid templates, code components, and web APIs.
These tools mean professional developers can securely interact with underlying business data and implement custom business logic without leaving the surface of their favourite developer tools.
The Microsoft Power Platform command line interface also helps developers download and upload their customisation projects easily.
Microsoft notes that many perceive low-code web development as ideal for basic projects like site showcasing, company profiles, or eCommerce platforms for other content.
Power Pages instead allows users to do more than this, supporting professional, large-scale and enterprise-wide undertakings.
Benefits of the Power Pages platform include:
- Community services
Reach and serve millions of people, offering community services such as self-service permitting, licensing, incident and outage reporting, and applying for grants.
- FAQ sites
Provide answers to common questions about products, services, special events, policies, and procedures.
- Customer self-service
Provide all-day customer self-services, such as warranty registration, returns, support inquiries, appointments, and bookings.
- Partner support
Streamline business processes with partners, such as supplier onboarding, sustainability tracking, inquiry management, and vendor support.
