What Is Microsoft PowerApps?

Power Apps is an application creator that allows users to build mobile- and web-based apps with low or no code. These apps can interact with data sources and services within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. App creators can integrate business intelligence dashboards and automation into apps, making the platform more attractive to businesses.

Initially, the developers see the Power Apps as a basic tool for users with varying levels of technical expertise. It was primarily an app design platform focused on enabling users to create interactive apps for various business requirements. However, the platform took off, and the proof of its success is its ability to address major challenges that organizations are facing.

In recent upgrades, Microsoft even introduced model-driven apps, as well as the Power Apps Portal. Its advanced canvas apps, allows users to develop apps without coding in conventional programming languages, and remain flexible in designing and customizing different layouts. These capabilities help to introduce a wide range of apps that offer more functionality for businesses with Power Apps.

Why Microsoft PowerApps?

PowerApps provides a nice drag-and-drop user interface which makes it easy for you to add different controls (i.e. text field, choice field), media (images, video, camera controls for your phone), forms, and screens to construct a mobile app. Also, it allows you to connect to external data sources or store the required data directly inside the app. Once you have created an app, you can easily publish it and share it with your organization.

The best feature of PowerApps is that you can tailor your applications to your business requirements. This helps you digitize business processes and react more quickly to changing markets without being entirely dependent on developing a software solution to do so. Another leading feature is the tool’s level of accessibility.

PowerApps offers a compelling business case to leaders. One of its leading features is the tool’s level of accessibility. This helps your employees across your organization to help drive business outcomes and increase automation and optimization with ease.

How Does PowerApps Work? 

Microsoft PowerApps can be accessed from both desktop devices or its mobile app on handheld devices. Creating a mobile or desktop application is so simple with its drag-and-drop user interface. Here is a four-step process you can use:

 

• Choose a pre-built template and ensure it runs with your desired tablet/phone layout.

• Connect the data source such as OneDrive, Dropbox or Salesforce and import your selected data into the app.

• Then you can quickly drag-and-drop various forms, screens and controls including camera controls, images, text fields, videos, choice fields and much more to create your desired app.

• At last, click the publish and share buttons for sharing the app across the business.

Benefits of Power Apps Integration:

Companies may face difficulties to find a solution that specifically adapts to its needs and if it is found the time factor can be the reason that a profit maximization is not achieved immediately. Microsoft PowerApps integration will solve this problem by creating personalized applications within your company for your company. By combining PowerApps with Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can obtain the best performance.  When you consider how long it can take to develop an app using traditional methods and how much it costs, the sheer speed and ease of developing PowerApps at very low cost cannot be understated. Here are few benefits that you enjoy by PowerApps Integration:

Wide Availability

Power Apps, is available with the subscription of Microsoft 365 which has wide availability. So you can create different types of apps to integrate them in different platforms. By this, you can transform many manual business processes into digital and automated processes.

Better Data Integration

By utilizing Microsoft’s common data service (CDS), PowerApps enables your employees to access business data from over 200 various data sources such as Outlook, SharePoint, Dropbox, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, OneDrive, Salesforce, Twitter and so on. This allows staff to easily access and share business data on the go no matter their location.

Easy App Development

Coding an app with APIs, libraries, functions, and objects can be daunting for the non-programmer. The benefit of Power Apps is it can be handled by dragging and dropping. While building a mobile app, whether it is an app that runs in a browser, or an in-house desktop app, Power Apps handles all of the usual overhead that goes into making the app fit the environment. Power Apps handles most of the daunting tasks like the pros and cons of frameworks, dependencies, or libraries backend, so there is nothing to worry much.

Security and compliance

Users will have total control of applications through the administration center by PowerApps Integration. Also, each app developed with PowerApps is automatically linked to Microsoft's Active Directory Domain Service (ADDS), which authenticates, authorizes and enforces security policies for all devices and users.

Higher Productivity

By being able to create applications for business requirements and automate processes, the productivity can be improved very much.  Employees save time by not having to perform tedious manual tasks and better utilize their time to devote to tasks of greater relevance for the company. 

Which Microsoft Office subscription is best for PowerApps? 

You need a subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E1 or higher for Microsoft PowerApps. PowerApps operates on two subscription plans: 

Plan 1:

Subscriptions suit the users needing to access data stored in custom apps, cloud services, on-premises data and run canvas apps using premium connectors.

Plan 2:

Subscriptions is a good choice for both administrators and users that require more advanced capabilities such as real-time workflows, custom code plug-ins and running model-driven apps.

Conclusion

With a Microsoft PowerApps implementation and support partner, you can ensure that your application is everything you need and more, capable of deployment across your company. Veelead Solutions offers expertise in data integration and analytics, a solid understanding of data architecture and building enterprise-grade applications. Create PowerApps tailored for your business with Veelead Solutions.