The route to creating a business application was a long, winding, and expensive journey.
Now, Microsoft has developed a new way of working, where business apps can be created quickly and effectively by the department itself, without the need to write any code with their Microsoft Power Apps.
What are Microsoft Power Apps?
Microsoft Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors, and an integral data platform that form a fast development environment for a business to create custom apps.
The data is either stored in the data platform or as part of other Microsoft offerings such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, etc.
What do Microsoft Power Apps do?
Microsoft Power Apps allows a business to automate, digitise, and transform their manual operations, creating applications that run across both browser and mobile platforms.
Creators can add business intelligence and process automation functionality into apps, making the platform attractive to businesses looking for a faster ROI.
The key selling point is the drag-and-drop nature of the app creation process, meaning no coding experience is required. 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: What is it?
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. Take a look at the different applications it houses below:
Power BI
This app 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
This application focuses on the automation of repetitive tasks, allowing the creation of a digital workflow in a matter of minutes, rather than weeks or months!
Power Apps
MS 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 should you use Microsoft 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.
Need help with 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 MS 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.
