Power Virtual Agents enables you to create and manage chatbots on a no-code basis via a graphical interface. With easy-to-use drag and drop components and branching logic, you can create a chatbot from scratch very easily while testing it too before deployment.

Part of Microsoft’s Power Platform, it is aimed at the so-called ‘citizen developer’, which is a business analyst who understands the coding process but lacks the ability to write code or developers who want to have the luxury of a fully functional no-code experience.

Once created, you can deploy your chatbots to such interfaces as Teams. You can also integrate your chatbots into other 365 apps which you work with by using many prebuilt ‘connectors’ while further extending their usefulness by attaching custom Power Automate workflows.

Whether you want to inform your employees or customers, with Power Virtual Agents you can rapidly, and easily deploy intelligent chatbots tailored to your needs.

Power BI (FREE)

A free version of Power BI comes with all Microsoft 365 subscriptions by default. All you have to do is assign a license to users from the Admin Portal.

With a free license, users can explore Power BI for personal data analysis and visualization using My Workspace, but you can’t share with other users.

A Power BI Pro or Power BI Premium Per User license is required to share content.

Power BI Pro enables organizations to mine their existing data throughout their systems and return the data in a rich, visual style. Data can be pulled from files such as Excel or from databases like SQL server and Access. Power BI Pro also connects to a myriad of non-Microsoft data sources which can be imported into the platform.

Once you have connected your data, you can present it in a report or on dashboards. Reports are visually interesting and interactive. Often, when users hover over a visualization, more information pops up. Whereas dashboards are typically populated with KPIs about an organization or a project.

The dashboards which are generated can be shared inside or outside of your organization based on permissions making it easy to explore data using plain, conversational English.

You can get instant analytics from much-used applications while ensuring that your data is secure, centrally managed and meets your compliance standards and certifications.

What’s great about Power BI Pro is that you don’t need data analytic skills; very quickly you can be presenting your data in numerous ways to audiences both large and small. For example, visualizations can be exported and embedded in SharePoint and Teams or sent as PDFs.

Microsoft MyAnalytics helps you to understand how you spend your time at work by using information from your 365 mailbox, calendar, and other sources. Consider it your very own ‘wellness centre’, as it aims to make your work-life more productive and less stressful.

It’s very interesting to see the stats that it keeps on you: for example, you might be shocked by the number of emails you have sent or read over the last month (or maybe not)!

You can also book ‘deep work’ sessions whereby it will stop Teams’ notifications in an attempt to let you focus more clearly.

Also, it looks and reports to you about different recipients and meeting durations. The dashboard helps you to prioritize your work and spend time more effectively by adjusting your idealized workday and choosing when you’d like to work more efficiently and with less distraction.

Tired of taking calls from clients or replying to endless emails when scheduling appointments? If so, Bookings is the app for you.

Bookings allow your customers to schedule appointments with you online or via a mobile app. It’s designed for small businesses that take a lot of appointments over the phone or via email. It is connected within Microsoft 365 with your calendar and allows customers to pick and choose a date and time in a handy, visual way. Furthermore, its web-based business-facing pages allow the setup and management of customer preferences, schedules, staff lists and product pricing – and there is no coding or heavy lifting involved!

If your bookings are for an online event, Bookings connects with Teams by automatically creating a Teams’ link for each booking.

A business-facing mobile app allows a user to check bookings and access customer lists with contact information. 

Microsoft Yammer is a cloud-based service that offers a private social network for your organization. You can keep your colleagues and members of Microsoft Teams up to date by sharing information, ideas, files, updates, images, and videos etc.

You can set up notifications in your inbox to view, prioritize, manage important messages and announcements across your groups.

When joining Yammer, you need to have an email ID of your organization; however, you can also create an external social network to allow external people, like business partners, customers, and suppliers to connect and communicate with your organization.

Yammer is integrated with SharePoint Online, Skype, Facebook and other applications and has the same trusted security, compliance, and analytics from the Microsoft Office Admin center. It provides open APIs to integrate any other third-party applications with Yammer.

Microsoft Teams is a digital location that brings together people, content, conversations, and apps in one place. Microsoft Teams is integrated with other 365 services to utilize the power of SharePoint, Word, Excel, and apps on Microsoft’s Power Platform.

People who join a Team can upload and download files, interact with apps, and communicate with other people on their team and within their organization. Video calling and conferencing is easy to schedule and is sync’d with a user’s Outlook calendar, and once a meeting is underway, you can create breakout rooms and record the session, if needs be.

Also, you can add other services like Yammer, Facebook, GitHub, and RSS feeds, which can give powerful use cases for your day-to-day work. Lastly, you can do video calling and organize meetings within teams and works across Windows, iOS, Mac, web, and Android platforms.

OneDrive for Business is the enterprise version of the free OneDrive and is a cloud-based storage solution that offers you the ability to store any types of files and data.

It is deeply embedded with Microsoft 365 and a close cousin of SharePoint’s document library. OneDrive is like a private version of SharePoint where individual users can share files if they like; and these files can also be assessed from any device or browser from any location.

Files uploaded to OneDrive, once shared via a variety of links (permissions), can be worked on or ‘co-authored’ by many people, while hundreds of versions of each document are being saved by default to the cloud.

Lastly, you can ‘sync’ your files to your PC and mobile device using the OneDrive app or web browser, thus backing up your files automatically.

Microsoft Outlook is another quintessential app that powers businesses around the world. Though primarily for email, with its calendar, tasks, and ability to connect to other Microsoft 365 services such as OneDrive and SharePoint, it’s truly embedded within the 365 ecosystem.

The Outlook app is also second to none when it comes to smartphone email apps as it allows you to stay connected and productive regardless of your location.

You can also save your chat history into Outlook while organizing meetings in Teams; when you create a Teams meeting in Outlook is syncs with your Teams’ calendar, and vice versa. Also, your security is protected without compromising your productivity, while your emails are backup to Microsoft 365 with a generous allocation per Microsoft 365 user.

A relatively new kid on the block, Sway sits somewhere between PowerPoint and a webpage – but don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to code. If you’re familiar with Content Management Systems (CMS), you’ll quickly understand how to build your ‘sways’ by adding ‘components’ to a page.

Starting with templates or a blank ‘web-based page’, you can add colour, text, images, and multimedia components and then create numerous transitions that add a finishing touch to your production.

While it is used to create and share interactive materials such as presentations, reports, and personal stories, what you use Sway for is up to you. Also, when you finish your Sway, you can share it via a link which is great for company/product profiles, CVs, reports, newsletters, and proposals.

It is highly customizable and integrates with other 365 apps and services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Microsoft OneNote allows you to take notes in a digital notebook and share them within your team and with others. Based on the concept of the 1980s’ Filofax, your notes are taken on pages and saved within categories.

What’s great about OneNote is its freedom. Unlike Microsoft Word, which has set page sizes usually bound for the printer, OneNote’s pages are seemingly endless, which allows you to cut and paste images, create tables, and embed content. If you are using it on a device that allows you to mark it up with a handheld pen, you can make your own notes on the screen.

OneNote is a truly multifunctional tool for note taking, brain storming, filing what’s important in your life, and sharing content with friends and colleagues as you can access saved notes from anywhere using your mobile, tablets and PCs.

It’s often joked that Excel runs the world. Since its launch many decades ago, Excel has morphed from a simple spreadsheet to a ‘data dump’ that is used in a myriad of ways by a multitude of users.

Out-of-the-box, it’s a spreadsheet that offers you the ability to create, edit, view, delete and share spreadsheets from anywhere. You can feed text or numeric data into the spreadsheet and run formulas. It also has the capability to recognize patterns and auto-complete the remaining data in a spreadsheet.

It’s also used extensively for data analysis and reporting purposes as it has the ability to create charts and graphs that will display your data in a functional, yet elegant fashion.

And when files are saved to OneDrive or SharePoint, you can co-author content from any device or any location.

Microsoft To-Do is a task management application that enables users to manage tasks from any device. You can also share To-Do lists to people inside and outside of your organization while breaking tasks down into steps, add due dates and set reminders.

In many ways, To-Do is like Planner, but for yourself. It’s designed for both business and personal use, and as it has a great smartphone app, it is perfect for day-to-day out-of-the-office use.

Furthermore, it is integrated with Outlook Tasks so your tasks will appear in Outlook too. Also, it suggests tasks for you by AI scanning of your emails and, if you flag an email, it can create a related task about it.