Bring on your creativity!

With the current Microsoft "Platform thinking" the license puzzle is not always easy to make.

But you know what, let's look at it from the positive side and be creative.

Ok imagine now you have a certain business scenario or use case. First of all evaluate if the scenario is belonging to the 'Personal productivity' setting or rather being a 'Business critical' one.

Personal productivity and Teams collaboration

Imagine that we have a scenario that is purely focused on a user scenario. Receiving an email with some attachments and having automation to process it to OneDrive. Sounds rather personal right? Or building some PowerApps for personal tasks registration and saving data on a SharePoint list? Your Office365 licenses with seeded PowerApps licensing makes it possible to create your own PowerAutomate flows and PowerApps apps.

So why not using this licensing potential to the maximum and use a set of "Standard connectors" made available? Therefore have a look at the list of standard connectors.

Or extending your collaboration within MS Teams and building some structured table set? Have a closer look at the "PowerApps for Teams" possibilities. Consuming data within MS Teams and staying in your safe Teams environment. So building in Teams for extending collaboration scenarios

So be creative as a Citizen Developer and use the non-premium connectors that are available.

And no worries from the data security perspective, IT can enable and or restrict the combination set of cloud connectors with the provided "Data Loss Prevention" or DLP mechanism.

Business scenario's - the real stuff?

Personal productivity scenario's are great but what if scenario's or use cases get bigger, more on team or enterprise level and have more critical data set in it?

That's when another approach is needed. From my experiences in the Microsoft Ecosystem and talking to customers a more End-2-End process approach is needed. First of all perform some brainstorm sessions about the 'Futureproof" process.

Indicate the different profiles and persona's and identify their current problems and inspire them on possible opportunities.

Below an example of the "Journey Map" of Brent the buyer. So don't automatically jump on the technology side of things but focus on the persona and their daily tasks. Also keep in mind that certain tasks are performed in a certain context. Brent could be in his car and in the need for a more mobile solution (Canvas App). As if when sitting at home, due to corona, having more a need for a backoffice application (ModelDriven type).

So having a clear image on the whole team and their future tasks will also help you in finding a solution for your "Licensing puzzle". And also make sure that you have a clear view on the frequency of tasks being performed. This is where a "Consumption based" licensing model can have it's advantages.

Based on this "Journey mapping" you will have a clear image on who needs which application at each moment of the day. Have a good view on the licensing model by perhaps using following "License matrix". For the latest price models please take a look at the licensing guide by following this link: Licensing overview for Microsoft Power Platform - Power Platform | Microsoft Docs

By applying the persona's mapping to your licensing model you will differentiate your pricing on an individual level and also take into account the consumption levels. So why not having chat bots in place in order to consume when conversations are done, instead of paying a fixed monthly fee per month.

So be creative in this!

Having some "Citizen Development" in place with personal productivity scenario's, why not using the maximum out of your Office and or M365 licenses. This by using the seeded PowerApps standard connectors.

For the more Business scenario's why not starting with the "Per App" license in order to give access to certain persona's for their first app. Or when trying out some new apps and not knowing what the activity result will be, try out the newly "Pay-as-you-go" plan. In this last case you have the own agility to pay only when a user runs an app during a monthly period.

Once building up maturity on the PowerApps and having multiple apps in place, have a look at the "Per user plan". Running unlimited apps and portals per user for a flat monthly rate.

By Frank Vanhamel

Microsoft PowerApps Evangelist

#PowerApps #CanvasApps #PowerAutomate #Data #Licensing #PayAsYouGo