Traditionally, the route to creating a business application was long, winding, and expensive. One of the issues was how to translate the business needs of a department, into something that the IT team could deliver quickly. Now, Microsoft has developed a new way of working, where business apps can be created quickly and effectively, by the department themselves, without the need to write any code.
What is Microsoft Power Apps?
Microsoft Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors, and an integral data platform, that together form a fast development environment for a business to create custom apps. The data is either stored in the data platform, Dataverse, or as part of other Microsoft offerings such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, etc.
What do Power Apps do?
Power Apps allows a business to automate, digitise and transform their manual operations, creating apps that run across both browser and mobile platforms. The key selling point is the drag-and-drop nature of the app creation process, meaning no coding experience is required. Creators can add business intelligence and process automation functionality into apps, making the platform attractive to businesses looking for a faster ROI.
The drag and drop design process includes the ability to add images, bar code scanning, video, voice capture and similar technologies, from a mobile device. This makes it ideal for shop floor or warehouse-based apps.
Microsoft Power Platform
Power Apps are part of the overall Microsoft Power Platform, which includes Power BI (Business Intelligence) and Power Automate (data automation). All Microsoft Power Platform tools are built on Azure, ensuring the same enterprise-grade security, certifications, and administrative controls trusted by businesses around the world.
Power BI focuses on capturing and gaining insights from your company data. It focuses on turning data into powerful visual information, to aid decision making and reporting.
Power Automate focuses on the automation of repetitive tasks, allowing the creation of digital workflow in a matter of minutes, rather than weeks or months!
Power Apps brings this functionality, together with the integral data platform, to create easy to use and manage apps for a company to benefit from.
Why use Power Apps?
Power Apps help widen the reach of people, departments and teams that can use their business experience to develop value-added apps to help them succeed. Using the business application builder, you can build an app from existing templates, adapting it as your business grows. Power App connectors allow the app to access prebuilt actions and triggers, linking to services such as Salesforce, Office 365, Twitter, Dropbox, Google services, and more. Power Apps combines enterprise level security and functionality, with an easy-to-use business-app creating interface.
How to discover more about Microsoft Power Apps
The simplest way to start finding out more about Power Apps is either to look at an online demo, or one of the videos on the Microsoft YouTube channel. There is also a series of e-books available to download for free.
However, much of the value of Power Apps comes from the integration with other Microsoft services, such as Azure or 365. As a Microsoft partner, we would love to show you how Power Apps can integrate with these services, and help you get started. To find out more, please get in touch.
