During one of the webinars I was following about Business Intelligence, the name “Power Apps” appeared. It was only mentioned very briefly but it piqued my interest because I never heard about Power Apps before. I decided to do some research myself to get a grasp of the basics. Personally, my first “hunch” was that Power Apps was closely tied to the creation of automatic solutions in the administrative/financial environment of an enterprise. So let’s see if my assumption was correct.
What is Power Apps?
First, let’s avoid a discussion about grammar. Power Apps may sound like its plural but it is singular. Power Apps is one of the parts of Microsoft’s Power Platform, a low-code platform that spans Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and standalone applications. The full power platform has four disciplines:
- Power BI (Business Analytics)
- Power Apps (Application development)
- Power Automate (Process automation)
- Power Virtual Agents (Intelligent chatbots)
These tools allow “Citizen Developers” (people who can’t write code and aren’t traditional developers) to solve their own everyday challenges in their business by building applications in order to serve the business.
Applications can be used in the broadest sense of the word because, if utilized properly, these four standalone applications can be complimentary and very beneficial for an organization.
One of the biggest advantages of Power Apps is that it is…well: an app! This means that it is very easy to access on your phone, tablet, or on the web from any location. For tasks that you previously performed on paper, Power Apps let you create and use an app. Deploying a suitable app has a positive influence on the productivity of your organization if used properly. For example, you can create a form in your app with fixed options that are used by everybody in the department. They can only use that specific app with its standard templates instead of working on papers and with their own files. This can provide grip, clarity, and fast, clear work. Of course, this only works if it is the right tool for the right job.
You can quickly create a Power App thanks to its intuitive approach. You can get even quicker results by working with standard templates, or you can simply design your own custom app to get the exact “look and feel” of your organization.
You can then share the app with your entire organization and collaborate within the app. If there are changes in the market or within your company, you can respond to this and easily edit or scale the app if necessary.
In the past, creating an app by developers could be very time-consuming and expensive. Nowadays, because of low coding, this can be done by people in the organization without a specialization in programming.
Power Apps license
Before continuing, it is important to know that Power Apps is a business applications platform. This means that you can’t use it to create a consumer app that you can develop and sell on an AppStore. You can only use it to create applications/tools for your own organization. To be able to use it, you need to have a license. This means anyone in your organization that wants to use it, needs to have a license. The basic functionalities of Power Apps are included in most O365 licenses so if your company has an Enterprise E1 – E3 license you are probably covered to start out. However, if you want to get all the features, you need to add a premium subscription to your O365 license. If you are interested in that, you should check the pricing list on https://powerapps.microsoft.com.
What can you do with Power Apps?
Like the other applications on the Microsoft Power Platform, Power Apps will support a Citizen Developer in creating business applications. There are three types of applications that you can create with power apps:
- Canvas apps
- Model-driven apps
- A portal to reach out to your stakeholders
Canvas apps
This app allows you to start with a blank canvas (also the reason why it is called a canvas app). It looks and feels like a hybrid of Excel and Powerpoint. You can drag and drop pieces onto the blank canvas and you can design this down to the last pixel. The app is very flexible in which you can move all the pieces around, change the colors, letter types, etc. You can build out your app with different screens and different design elements (called components). To me, this sounds very familiar to Powerpoint. The Excel feeling comes into play when you are starting with formulas that determine the behavior of your app.
With a canvas app, you choose your own data source. You can choose from over 400 different connectors. This means that you are building a canvas app, referencing data on anything from an enterprise database system like Sharepoint. If you have Dynamics365 as an ERP system you can also use Dynamics365 as a database system for your canvas apps.
Model-driven apps
This app is called a model-driven app because it allows you to build a data model. With a canvas app, you start completely blank (literally) but with a model-driven app, you start with a data model. This is a relational data model that is driven by relational databases. Because of this, you really need to make a blueprint/mindmap of what you exactly want to create. You need to ask yourself questions like:
- What kind of data do I need to collect?
- How does this data relate to each other?
- What different tables do I need to use in my data?
- What different columns do I want in my table?
- How do all these tables relate to each other?
It is a bit comparable with a CRM database system that an organization can buy. However, the big difference is that a model-driven app is not an off-the-shelf pre-built application that somebody else designed and that has limited flexibility. With model-driven apps, people who are working at the company (and have a far better understanding of it) can develop models that are fully suitable for a specific organization. On top of that, it is very easy to adjust the model in case of changes in the organization.
Like the canvas app, the model-driven app has a very easy drag and drop interface that allows you to construct your own tables, construct the columns on those tables, and the relationships between them. The front-end user interface is already “ready to go” in terms of a responsive, accessible performance interface. This makes it easy for you to build out forms and views that allow you to see and interact with your data in certain ways that are immediately visible on the screen. This makes it very easy to define where specific items need to go on the screen.
Unlike canvas apps which is a “pixel-perfect” type of design where you start with a white screen, in model-driven apps you are designing a front-end user interface in a component-driven way. This gives you the option to decide for yourself how many columns you want and what parts of data you want to see where on the screen by dragging and dropping the building blocks you want to use.
Portals
You can use a portal when you want to be able to have stakeholders (customers, suppliers, etc.) interacting with your data. With portals you allow, for instance, customers to log in and raise a ticket or get a status request on an order.
A portal must be built on the Microsoft database. This means that the data model you are using for this must be built in the Microsoft Dataverse. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. For instance, you can’t use the portal functionality on Sharepoint or any other external database system.
To make the portal you built out the data model in the model-driven app and then you are surfacing specific parts of that app with the appropriate security and permissions to, for instance, your customers. This way customers can log in, get updates, submit information, etc., based on the data model you have build.
How do I become a Citizen Developer?
Maybe you already are without realizing it! For instance, a lot of people work with Excel. They mostly use it to solve business problems with formulas and logic, based on this program. When you do this you don’t use code. Instead, you write formulas, you use logic to set up analyses, and you drag and drop with a point and click interface to create your own business application in Excel.
Final thoughts
My hunch was not really far off but also not close. I had no idea that Power Apps have been around since 2017 and that it is a competitor of other low-code platforms like Mendix and Outsystems. In my opinion, tools like Power Apps are the next steps in utilizing modern technology in companies.
Personally, I sometimes have the feeling that programs like Excel are extremely limited and not really suitable for the job. For me, it sometimes feels that you try to fix everything with a hammer. And if a hammer is the only tool you have, then every problem you see looks like a nail.
That is the reason why I think that more sophisticated tools like Power Apps and Power BI can provide far more sophisticated problem solutions, more suitable for an organization.
People are sometimes afraid that their jobs will be in danger when jobs are fully automated but personally, I think that this only creates more opportunities for these people. Power Apps can turn a person into a Citizen Developer in which employees can put their creativity into building Power Apps instead of executing standard processes that can be fully automated.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or if you have any additional advice/tips about this subject. if you want to keep in the loop if I upload a new post, don’t forget to subscribe to receive a notification by e-mail.
