Celebrating a year of innovation: Announcing the Microsoft Power Platform templates Cookbook Challenge

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, enterprise organizations are grappling with an ever-expanding application backlog, with over 1 billion apps expected to be built by 2028.¹ However, there are only four million developers in the United States.²

This disparity underscores the urgent need for scalable solutions that empower organizations to bridge the gap between demand and developer capacity. Enter Microsoft Power Platform, a suite of low-code tools designed to empower both professional developers and citizen developers. By enhancing these tools with generative AI, we’ve revolutionized how applications are built, reducing the time and expertise needed to develop robust solutions.

However, mastering Microsoft Power Platform isn’t instantaneous, which is why, a year ago, we introduced public preview versions of our enterprise application templates to accelerate organizations’ time to value and streamline the upskilling process.

Unlocking innovation with Microsoft Power Platform templates

The enterprise templates were designed with three key characteristics to ensure rapid deployment and maximum impact:

Time to value

• Eliminate upfront investments: Traditional enterprise software development often requires significant initial investments in time and resources. Our templates mitigate this by providing ready-made solutions that can be customized and deployed quickly.
• Reduce resource requirements: The templates reduce the sets of skills and resources needed, enabling even those with limited coding experience to deploy powerful applications.
• Digitize and connect processes: By using these templates, organizations can gain new business insights through the digitization and connection of previously manual and siloed processes.

Maximize existing IT investments

• Leverage existing systems: Our templates are designed to integrate seamlessly with major IT investments like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), IT, and HR systems, ensuring continuity and extending the value of your current technology stack.
• Maintain data integrity: The templates help to protect and maintain your systems of record and data sources of truth while enhancing their functionality with Microsoft Power Platform.

Boost productivity

• Reduce inefficiencies: Valuable time for your teams is freed up through use of the templates, streamlining and automating manual processes.
• Connect data across systems: The templates enhance workflows by connecting data across multiple systems of record.
• Meet users where they are: Whether in Microsoft Teams or other collaborative platforms, our templates are designed to work where your users already are.

Over the past year, we’ve expanded our template offerings to cater to various departments, including finance, HR, and IT, with new applications continually being added. Here are some key examples:

• Finance: The SAP Procurement template facilitates seamless procurement processes within SAP environments, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.

• HR: The Onboarding Buddy template streamlines the onboarding process, ensuring new hires have a smooth transition and access to all necessary resources from day one.

• IT: The Hardware Request and Management template simplifies the management of hardware requests and inventory, ensuring IT resources are allocated efficiently and tracked accurately.

The image below lists our existing templates as well our in-production templates that are coming soon.

In-production Microsoft Power Platform templates

• Expense Reimbursement: Simplifies the expense reporting process, ensuring timely reimbursements and reducing administrative burden.
• Attendance and Time Tracker: Tracks employee attendance and work hours, providing accurate records for payroll and compliance.
• Meeting Room Request: Streamlines the process of booking and managing meeting rooms, ensuring optimal use of shared spaces.
• Inspection Report: Facilitates the creation, submission, and management of inspection reports, improving compliance and oversight.
• Trainings and Registrations: Manages employee training sessions and registrations, ensuring seamless coordination and record-keeping.
• Parking Reservations: Automates the process of reserving parking spots, enhancing convenience for employees.
• Visitor Registration: Simplifies visitor registration and tracking, improving security and visitor management.
• Goal Tracking: Enables employees to set, track, and achieve their professional goals, fostering growth and productivity.

We invite you to explore our current template offerings and stay tuned for exciting new releases. Use the existing templates to jumpstart your projects and unlock the full potential of Microsoft Power Platform. For more information, visit the Overview of Enterprise templates for Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Platform Cookbook Challenge

The existing Microsoft Power Platform templates have been so well-received, that community members have even proactively provided valuable feedback and suggestions for future templates. Inspired by this engagement, we at Microsoft decided to create a community-driven repository of additional Microsoft Power Platform templates.

We’re kicking off this initiative with the Microsoft Power Platform Cookbook Challenge—a fantastic opportunity for community members to contribute their own templates and win free tickets to the 2024 Power Platform Community Conference.

Microsoft Power Platform Cookbook Challenge details

Qualification periods:

• Week 1: June 3 – June 9
• Week 2: June 10 – June 16
• Week 3: June 17 – June 23
• Week 4: June 24 – June 30

Entry criteria: Post a qualifying Copilot Studio template, sample, or demo in the Copilot Studio Cookbook, or a qualifying Microsoft Power Apps template sample or demo in the Power Apps Copilot Cookbook. To qualify for the drawing, templates, samples or demos must be related to Copilot Studio or a Copilot feature of Power Apps, Power Automate, or Power Pages, and must demonstrate or solve a complete unique and useful business or technical problem. Power Automate and Power Pagers posts should be added to the Power Apps Cookbook. Final determination of qualifying entries is at the sole discretion of Microsoft.

Weekly drawings: Each week, five random names will be drawn from the pool of entrants. Users not drawn in a given week will roll over to be included in the drawing for the following week, with a maximum of six new entries per week. After the five names are drawn from the pool of entrants, those names are entered for the grand prize raffle in early July.

Grand prize: Four winners will be selected to receive a pass to the Power Platform Conference in Las Vegas (September 18 through September 20, 2024), valued at USD1,800. Winners will have the opportunity to present their demo or solution at the event.

To qualify, entries must demonstrate a complete, unique, and useful business or technical solution related to Copilot Studio or a Copilot feature of Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, or Microsoft Power Pages.

By participating in the Microsoft Power Platform Copilot Cookbook Template Challenge, you not only stand a chance to win a pass to the 2024 Power Platform Community Conference, but you also contribute to a growing library of innovative solutions. We look forward to seeing your creative and impactful submissions.

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Sources:

¹1 Billion New Logical Applications: More Background (idc.com)

²How Many Software Developers are There in World? | LinkedIn