Understanding the Power Platform clients

Power Platform is an ecosystem consisting of several application types, and those application types offer several possible technical client types for desktop as well as for mobile workers. In this section, we will provide an overview of the various client types and the typical usage scenarios. This will allow you to design the best possible client configuration for various user groups of your Power Platform solution.

There are basically two types of clients; namely, desktop and mobile clients. We'll learn about them in the following sections.

Learning about desktop clients

The Power Platform desktop clients are used on PCs, primarily running the Microsoft Windows operating system (OS), but some of the clients are also available for PCs with non-Microsoft OSes. In the following sections, you will learn about the possible desktop clients.

Browser client

The browser client is the most generic and easy to use client, within which all Power Platform applications can run. Currently, the following browser clients and OS combinations are supported:

• Internet Explorer 11
• Microsoft Edge
• Google Chrome (latest publicly released version on Windows and macOS)
• Apple Safari (latest publicly released version on macOS or iPad)
• Mozilla Firefox (latest publicly released version on Windows)

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is the modern successor of the legacy Dynamics 365 Client for Outlook. It provides the following features:

• Dynamics 365 App for Outlook runs within Outlook desktop and the Outlook web client on PCs, as well as in Outlook apps for Android and iOS on mobile devices. This is a significant improvement compared to the legacy client application.
• Dynamics 365 App for Outlook offers a simplified deployment with no local installation. Instead, once deployed as an Office Add-In, it integrates automatically with all the Outlook clients of the respective user.
• Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a specific model-driven application and, as such, can be customized to reflect different customer requirements.

  Important note

  The legacy desktop Microsoft Dynamics 365 client for Outlook is still available for historical reasons. This client application is deprecated and should not be used for new Dynamics 365 implementations. This client has, however, certain unique features that aren't available in the modern client app yet – specifically, full offline capabilities, the ability to integrate with multiple Dynamics 365 instances, and client-side synchronization.

Dynamics 365 App for Outlook offers the following capabilities:

• View Dynamics 365 information about related contacts or leads within emails, appointments, and so on.
• Link email, appointments, and so on with Dynamics 365 records.
• Add activities and create new Dynamics 365 records.
• Track contacts and more.

  Important note

  All of the previously described Power Platform clients require desktop versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, if you wish to use the template-based document generation or data export and import capabilities using Excel files.

Unified Service Desk

Unified Service Desk (USD) is a framework for building contact center and call center solutions supported by CDS platform. USD consists of two main components: the CDS solution and the Agent Desktop application.

These main components will be described in the next two sections.

Common Data Service solution

The CDS is used to host the USD entities and offers full configuration capabilities for creating the agent desktop's composition, design, integrations, automations, and so on. For simple requirements, there is no need to use custom development; however, there are possibilities for deeper modification and extensibility using code.

Agent Desktop application

The Agent Desktop application is a local desktop installable application that is used by the contact center/call center agents for their daily business. The agent logs into the agent desktop, and then Agent Desktop connects to the CDS environment from which the configuration for the business processes is then retrieved. If the business functionality changes, this change can be done centrally within the configuration of the underlying CDS solution.

USD is based on the User Interface Integration (UII) framework, which, in turn, is a custom development framework for the following aspects:

• Integration and automation of applications
• Session management
• Hosting various application types (hosted controls, web application, Silverlight applications, Java applets, Microsoft Win32 applications, .NET applications, Citrix remote hosted applications, and so on)
• Automating communication across various channels
• CTI integration using the CTI framework

Part of Power Platform are two technologies; namely, Robotic Process Automation with UI Flows and Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These partially cover the capabilities of USD with less overhead and no need for local deployments.

When analyzing requirements and architecting solutions for client-side automations or multichannel support, these technologies should be considered and could be potentially beneficial over USD. Therefore, we will look at them in detail in the following two sections.

Robotic Process Automation with UI Flows

UI Flows are the latest members of the Power Automate technology. UI Flows make it possible to record manual interactive UI step-by-step activities, which need to be performed on legacy enterprise applications that don't have APIs. Those recordings are then used within Power Automate flows to automate the manual processes. This is done by playing the recordings back with real data that's been collected within the flow's automation from other sources.

The benefit of this capability is that there is no need to modify the existing legacy applications just for the purpose of integrating them into modern automation processes.

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a separately licensed add-on for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It allows us to configure various additional communication channels for customer service agents. Currently, the following channels are available:

• SMS channel via TeleSign or Twilio
• Chat channel
• Facebook channel via Facebook Messenger
• Teams channel
• WhatsApp channel via Twilio
• LINE channel
• Twitter Direct Message channel
• WeChat channel
• APIs for building co-browse and remote assistance using third-party providers
• Integration of the telephony channel using the Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework

The benefit of this app is that you can extend Dynamics 365 Customer Service with many important communication channels, without the need for custom development or deploying any local software such as USD.

Understanding mobile clients

In today's world, mobile clients for business applications have increased importance since the number of mobile workers is growing very fast. Power Platform provides mobile applications for all platform components for both Android and iOS free of charge. The following are the mobile clients that are available for these applications:

• Dynamics 365 for Phones and Dynamics 365 for Tablets: These are mobile clients for model-driven applications. Despite their names, they can run Dynamics 365 as well as non-Dynamics 365 model-driven applications. The apps provide a selection of all model-driven apps a user has access to and allow us to start any of those apps. The user interface's design and look and feel is identical to the design for the browser client, just optimized for the small form factor.

  Important note

  The aforementioned mobile apps provide limited offline capability. This capability requires certain mobile offline configuration.

• Power Apps mobile player: This is a mobile client for canvas apps. The app provides a selection of all canvas apps a user has access to and allows us to start any of those apps.
• A unified mobile client app to run both model-driven apps, as well as canvas apps in one environment, is currently in preview and will replace the Dynamics 365 app and the Power Apps app.
• The Field Service mobile app is a Microsoft-branded third-party mobile application, used for Dynamics 365 Field Service. This is due to historical reasons, since Dynamics 365 Field Service was acquired by Microsoft from a partner company called FieldOne, and their module was integrated with this third-party mobile application. Field Service Mobile provides certain features not yet available in the native Dynamics 365 app for phones and tablets.

  Important note

  Microsoft provides a new CDS based Field Service (Dynamics 365) app as a preview offering. This new app will replace the third-party mobile app until summer 2021.

• Power Automate mobile app: Mobile client for Power Automate flows. Compared to the other mobile player apps, the Power Automate mobile app has extended capabilities, since the user can not only run the flows, but also participate in approval processes, create their own flows, and monitor the whole environment with their own or shared flows.
• Power BI app: Mobile client for consuming Power BI dashboards and reports the same way as they are consumed in the browser client.

In this section, we learned about the types of Power Platform clients; namely, desktop and mobile clients, along with their sub-types.

In the next section, we will focus on Power Platform administration and monitoring.