Power Apps – What is it?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you would have heard of Microsoft Power Apps and all its associated terminology. That said, our experience is that between Microsoft’s continuous renaming and changing of how the look and feel of the platform, many organisations still don’t know how to best utilise the platform and harness it’s power – pun intended.

So, what is Power Apps?

I find it easiest to use Microsoft’s definition:

“Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform, that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.”

 <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/powerapps-overview>

Now our definition – Power Apps is a collection of services and applications that allow organisations to develop low-code applications with the ability to integrate with most Microsoft native services such as M365, SharePoint, SQL, Azure and also many other third party services.

So what problem is Power Apps solving?

Essentially, Power Apps allows people with little to no coding experience to experiment with integrations by removing the need for creators to create GUI from scratch and understanding backend code. This means that users such as administrators are able to develop applications to assist with their day-to-day operations or to solve problems for their user-base.

An Example

Let’s say your organisation was looking for a way to automate user administration. Your IT teams, HR teams, and management are all sick of the constant back and forth during the new user process, and sick of the constant typos in names, lack of permissions and general human errors that occur when creating new users without an automated set of validations and workflows.

The above example problem sounds like a prime candidate for a Microsoft Power Apps app that will exist within your organisations tenant, use your organisations authentication (Azure AD), and integrate with all your organisations services including on-premises.

In this screenshots below, you’ll see how Power Apps has solved this example problem by allowing us to create an portal for an organisation to request new users, and follow the whole request till completion. This includes the initial input of the data, then the approval by a specified manager, then the creation of the user (in this case, on-premises), synchronisation to Azure AD, and the follow up email to the requestor.

User Administration Application

Dashboard to see pending, approved and completed user creation requests.

The new user request capturing data with validation based on organisations’ requirements

Are you interested in how we can help you solve problems with Power Apps?

Get in touch!