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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Power Virtual Agents is a set of technologies released under the Power Platform umbrella by Microsoft. It allows non-developers to create solutions to automate customer interactions and provide services using a conversational interface, thus relieving the pressure on front-line staff providing this kind of support.
Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents is a guide to building chatbots that can be deployed to handle front desk services without having to write code. The book takes a scenario-based approach to implementing bot services and automation to serve employees in the organization and external customers. You will uncover the features available in Power Virtual Agents for creating bots that can be integrated into an organization’s public site as well as specific web pages. Next, you will understand how to build bots and integrate them within the Teams environment for internal users. As you progress, you will explore complete examples for implementing automated agents (bots) that can be deployed on sites for interacting with external customers.
By the end of this Power Virtual Agents chatbot book, you will have implemented several scenarios to serve external client requests for information, created scenarios to help internal users retrieve relevant information, and processed these in an automated conversational manner.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents
A practical guide to building intelligent chatbots with Microsoft Power Platform
Nicolae Tarla
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents
Copyright © 2021 Packt Publishing
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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
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First published: July 2021
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Contributors
About the author
Nicolae Tarla is an independent consultant focused on business transformation through automation, enterprise architecture, and digital transformation. He has architected and implemented business solutions for over 15 years for the private and public sectors, at both enterprise and SMB levels. With a passion for CRM, he has worked with multiple platforms throughout his career and continues to recommend the best business solutions for clients.
He was awarded the Microsoft MVP award for 4 consecutive years. He is actively involved in the leadership team for his local Dynamics 365 user group and participates in organizing local Dynamics 365 Saturday events. He continues to share his knowledge through his personal blog and other channels. His Twitter handle is @niktuk.
About the reviewer
Renato Romão de Souza is a Microsoft MVP who has been recognized as a valuable professional by Microsoft in the business applications category. He was recognized as Power Virtual Agents Community Founder and Power Virtual Agents Super User, for the contributions he makes in Microsoft forums on the Power Virtual Agents product. He is a senior Microsoft 365 developer focused on digital transformation with Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and other technologies.
He has trained over 2,700 students in Power Virtual Agents through his courses. He is also the community manager of the CaquiCoders, organizing technical events with speakers from the technical community. Also, he is an associate at MTAC (Multi-Platform Technical Audience Contributor) Brasil, bringing technical content to non-profit organizations, communities, and students in Brazil and around the world.
Table of Contents
Preface
Section 1: An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents
Chapter 1: Introducing Power Virtual Agents
What is a chatbot?
A condensed history of bots
Malicious use of chatbots
Fast forward to today
Impact on organizations
What is Power Virtual Agents?
The developer role in the chatbot space
How does Power Virtual Agents add value?
How does licensing work for chatbots?
Summary
Chapter 2: Licensing for Power Virtual Agents
Introducing the licensing and pricing structure
Understanding Power Virtual Agents and the Power Platform
Getting access to Power Platform
Power Platform licensing expanded
Imposed limits on Power Platform
Managing Power Platform licensing
Understanding Power Virtual Agents in Microsoft 365
Dataverse database capacity
Dataverse file capacity
Dataverse log capacity
Licensing considerations
The scenario
Estimating usage
Summary
Chapter 3: Building Your First Power Virtual Agent Chatbot
Completing the initial setup
Creating a trial tenant for an organization account
Creating a PVA trial
Knowing your environment
Creating a Power Virtual Agent
Publishing a Power Virtual Agent
Summary
Section 2: Leveraging Power Virtual Agents on Your Website
Chapter 4: Creating a Power Virtual Agent for Your Website
Introducing a PVA for your website
The Greeting Topic
The Thank you Topic
The Start over Topic
The Goodbye Topic
The Escalate Topic
The End of Conversation Topic
The Confirmed Success Topic
The Confirmed Failure Topic
Description of the business scenario
Extending our basic PVA
A look at decision logic
Guiding the conversation
Summary
Chapter 5: Integrating a Power Virtual Agent into Your Website
Testing the agent in the default demo website
Where can we introduce a Power Virtual Agent?
How to present our Power Virtual Agent
One Power Virtual Agent versus many
Summary
Chapter 6: Handling Authentication and Personalization
Providing generalized information to users
Providing a personalized experience to users
Authentication considerations
Leveraging various data sources
Summary
Section 3: Leveraging Power Virtual Agents in Teams
Chapter 7: Building a Power Virtual Agents Application for Teams
Description of the business scenario
Creating a Power Virtual Agents application for Teams
Summary
Chapter 8: Integrating the Power Virtual Agent into Teams
Where can we introduce a Power Virtual Agent for Teams?
How to present our Power Virtual Agent for Teams
Sharing a bot with your organization by submitting it for admin approval
One Power Virtual Agent versus many
Summary
Chapter 9: Serving Information from Various Sources
The role of connectors in a Power Virtual Agents conversation
Working with static data
Working with dynamic data
Retrieving data using available connectors
Retrieving data from other sources
Summary
Section 4: Best Practices for Power Virtual Agents
Chapter 10: Power Virtual Agents Governance
General governance considerations
Governance in the context of the entire Power Platform
Security management
Monitoring approach
Application(s) management
Tenant, environment, and application hygiene
Governance of Power Virtual Agents for the web
Governance of Power Virtual Agents for Teams
Summary
Chapter 11: Power Virtual Agents Best Practices
Design and build best practices
Putting together the right team
Providing measurable value
Power Virtual Agents life cycle
Understanding your licensing constraints
Handing off to support agents
Defining the success factors to monitor for
Alignment with organization goals
Managing your starter template
Understanding the environments
Implementing best practices
Starting small and building up
Creation of the first bot versus additional bots
Topics structured around one unit of conversation
Writing topic trigger phrases
Setting the expectations
Asking questions
Handling long-running processes
Managing best practices
Reviewing analytics for continuous improvements
Deleting bots
Known issues and working around them
Summary
Chapter 12: Power Virtual Agents Administration
Managing Power Virtual Agents
Working with environments
Data locations for organizations
Assigning and managing licenses
Enabling and disabling Power Virtual Agents
Modifying Power Virtual Agents
Monitoring the success of Power Virtual Agents
Troubleshooting issues
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Preface
Power Virtual Agents is a set of technologies released under the Power Platform umbrella by Microsoft. It allows non-developers to create solutions to automate customer interactions and provide services using a conversational interface, thus relieving the pressure on front-line staff providing this kind of support.
Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents is a user guide to building chatbots without having to write code. The book takes a scenario-based approach to implementing bot services and automation to serve employees in the organization and external customers. You will learn about the features available in Power Virtual Agents to create automated bots that can be integrated into an organization's public site as well as specific web pages. Next, you will learn how to build bots to be integrated within the Teams environment for internal users. As you progress, you will explore complete examples for implementing automated agents (bots) that can be deployed on sites for interacting with external customers.
By the end of this Power Virtual Agents chatbot book, you will have implemented several scenarios to serve external client requests for information, created scenarios to help internal users retrieve relevant information, and processed them in an automated conversational manner.
Who this book is for
This book is for organization representatives looking to automate processes, relieve the first-contact workload of their front-line agents, and provide actionable results to employees and customers. Business professionals, citizen developers, and functional consultants will also find this book helpful. Some understanding of the Modern Workplace and the Dynamics 365 family of products will be useful. Beginner-level knowledge of what the Power Platform is and its main modules will also help you to grasp the concepts covered in the book more effectively.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introducing Power Virtual Agents, introduces you to Power Virtual Agents. It provides an overview of the technology's purpose, as well as comparing the specific Microsoft offering against other similar competitors' products.
Chapter 2, Licensing for Power Virtual Agents, discusses the various licensing options available for implementing this functionality.
Chapter 3, Building Your First Power Virtual Agent Chatbot, introduces you to the most basic Power Virtual Agent scenario. The most basic chatbot we will create will greet you and engage in a basic conversation, leveraging your responses.
Chapter 4, Creating a Power Virtual Agent for Your Website, leverages the basic knowledge we gathered in the previous chapter to extend the basic Power Virtual Agent we previously built to turn it into a fully functional agent. We will take a specific business scenario and create a more complex Power Virtual Agent. We will provide help to a user based on an existing knowledge library provided on a public site.
Chapter 5, Integrating a Power Virtual Agent into Your Website, discusses the various presentation formats and technical aspects of introducing a Power Virtual Agent into a public website. We will look at two different scenarios to present and trigger an automated agent on public pages.
Chapter 6, Handling Authentication and Personalization, delves deeper into the role of a Power Virtual Agent, with the ability to authenticate a user and provide personalized services. We will look at retrieving account details based on an already identified customer.
Chapter 7, Building a Power Virtual Agents Application for Teams, describes the process of building a Power Virtual Agent targeted at internal organizational stakeholders and team members. We will look at the differences between a public agent and an agent targeted at internal users.
Chapter 8, Integrating the Power Virtual Agent into Teams, presents details on integrating and leveraging a Power Virtual Agent from within Teams. We will build a Power Virtual Agent that will provide services through Microsoft Teams. We will show in this scenario how to integrate a Power Virtual Agent into Teams.
Chapter 9, Serving Information from Various Sources, discusses leveraging the available connectors to retrieve and present information in a conversation. We will look at a typical scenario for self-service when requesting information from your internal HR department.
Chapter 10, Power Virtual Agents Governance, looks at governance considerations when implementing the Power Virtual Agents functionality in an organization.
Chapter 11, Power Virtual Agents Best Practices, focuses on best practices when implementing Power Virtual Agents.
Chapter 12, Power Virtual Agents Administration, focuses on the administration of environments with Power Virtual Agents deployed.
To get the most out of this book
To take full advantage of the material covered in this book, you should have access to a Power Platform environment. You can achieve this by creating a 30-day trial or using an environment already created by your organization.
If creating a new trial environment, you should have some basic understanding of the Office 365 admin console, and the Power Platform admin console. Using these, you will manage users and environments as needed.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "Click on Continue and wait for the system to complete all background processes."
Tips or important notes
Appear like this.
Get in touch
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Section 1: An Introduction to Power Virtual Agents
In this section, you will start to get familiar with Power Virtual Agents, what the agents are, how they can provide value to an organization, and what the licensing requirements are, as well as building your first automated bot.
This section contains the following chapters:
Chapter 1, Introducing Power Virtual AgentsChapter 2, Licensing for Power Virtual AgentsChapter 3, Building Your First Power Virtual Agent ChatbotChapter 1: Introducing Power Virtual Agents
Welcome to a new adventure. You might have encountered various incarnations of chatbots over the years but not even realize what they are or how they work. This book is about to change all of that.
This is not a new topic or a fashionable episode in technology that will fade away. The time is now to start adopting these capabilities and putting your organization on the path to success.
In this chapter, we will focus on a historical overview of chatbots. We will be touching on the following:
What is a chatbot?What is Power Virtual Agents?How does Power Virtual Agents add value?How does licensing work for chatbots?Grab a coffee and let's get going.
What is a chatbot?
Chatbots, or simply bots for the context of this book, are not something new. They are almost as old as the internet. Of course, they evolved at different stages, taking various shapes and forms.
At a high level, the definition of a bot is a piece of software, or an application, that performs an automated task or set of tasks.
Way back in the beginning, chatbots were doing this by running a script or a set of scripts. This is nothing more than automating a set of commands.
If you think about it, it is pretty obvious how this would be valuable. It has been recognized that when dealing with repetitive tasks, leveraging a bot can not only take some of the workload from humans but also perform these tasks much faster and much more accurately.
This might sound familiar to those of us who have looked at how the personal computer was born. Not only have chatbots been around for almost as long as the personal computer, but they are now as important and prevalent as the personal computer, as we will see when we look at internet traffic consumption later in this chapter. As a matter of fact, the Encyclopedia Britannica defines a computer as a device for processing, storing, and displaying information (https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer).
But let's take a step back in time and look at some history. Bear with me here; this will set the necessary context for where we are going.
A condensed history of bots
The internet took shape in the 1970s. But it only caught the attention of the general public in the early 1990s. So, when I mentioned in the introduction that bots are almost as old as the internet, I was not lying.
Some of the first appearances of bots can be traced back to 1988. Yes, you read that right. Their preferred cradle at the time was a network called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). For those of us with gray hair, or no hair left at all, this will be familiar. We used to spend entire nights exchanging information and finding things out, reading documentation and other materials shared, among other things. Various servers were powering different networks with multiple channels, some more friendly or interesting than others. Funnily enough, IRC is still around; you can always poke around and find out more about it.
Those early bots provided all sorts of automation in a channel. From keeping a channel active, recognizing users, and providing them with moderator or administrator status, to responding to specific commands and even returning automated messages or documents, they were ubiquitous in that space.
As a matter of fact, they were extremely important. Due to the nature of IRC, a bot was always used by an established channel in order to keep the channel open and to prevent malicious users from taking over that channel. At the time, these kinds of bots were run from machines with long uptimes, typically running some version of BSD or Linux.
As they started to show true value, they started to become more refined and to escape the confines of IRC. They also started to separate functionality. Some bots are designed for the repetitive execution of tasks, while others are more inclined toward conversation. And that's how chatbots were born.
Some of the first incarnations of bots outside of IRC though were in fact web crawlers. To be more specific, the first such bot was called WebCrawler, and it was created in 1994. It went from AOL to Excite. But the most famous web crawler was created in 1996. It was named BackRub and was later renamed Googlebot.
Important note
To find out more about BackRub, take a look at the following link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#BackRub.
But bots have not always been used for a good cause, as we will see in the next section.
Malicious use of chatbots
As bots became recognized for their power and usefulness, they started to catch the attention of various malicious groups. Just like everything on the internet, they started to take on a life of their own, varying based on the group that adopted them.
Besides the obvious valid and good use cases, bots started to be adopted and used for malicious use cases. Having the ability to perform a large set of actions in an automated way was appealing to all.
Between the years 1999 and 2000, several incarnations of malicious bots and botnets (groups of bots working in conjunction) started to appear, for which people were unprepared. Some of these activities started through IRC but then expanded into the wild.
The year 2007 brought us one of the largest botnets at the time, called Storm. It was estimated that the botnet infected 50 million computers. There were various programmed use cases and scenarios leveraged in the attack. While negative in its intended use, it did show that bots can really scale.
Some of these use cases include actions such as sending large numbers of spam emails, identity theft, unauthorized distribution of malware, DDoS attacks, bots for artificially increasing traffic and revenue on advertising, game cheating bots, and many more.
But it is not all bad, so let's shift gears and fast forward a little.
Fast forward to today
What we know and use today on the internet was shaped in great part by bots. Starting with the assistance provided on various IRC channels, or the web crawlers that put information at the fingertips of users, bots evolved into indispensable tools for many business use cases. The ability to automate processes, as well as the power to interact with bots through normal conversation, became an indispensable tool. As technology evolved, so did the capacity of bots. We can now create smarter, faster, and better bots. Bots assist us in doing our day-to-day activities, assist our customers, and provide a differentiator for businesses that adopt and use them wisely. The current business landscape has evolved to leverage bots at scale.
In fact, bots are currently adopted so much that some statistics show that out of today's web traffic, roughly half is bot-generated traffic. As technology evolves, exponential bot traffic growth is expected. This will be driven by technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) and the ability to implement conversational scenarios through natural language processing.
Let's just look at the Turing test, developed in the 1950s. It was meant to test the ability of a machine to have a conversation with a human in an indistinguishable manner from a normal conversation between two humans.
As AI-infused conversational chatbots have taken shape, their uses have extended into various scenarios, including the following:
Messaging applications, either as part of websites or baked into various applications.Marketing platforms with a focus on external customers and potential customers.Company internal platforms focused on serving internal users and employees.Customer service scenarios targeted at helping existing customers.Healthcare scenarios for scheduling appointments, locating services, or providing basic medical information.Toys are getting smarter, with educational scenarios for various ages.Chatbots are used in many other scenarios too.
In today's business world, chatbots will have an essential role to play. Let's look at the expected impact next.
Impact on organizations
As organizations of all sizes strive to evolve and compete with one another, part of their digital transformation strategy is to look at the use of bots.
