Power Apps: Why Create and Share Applications Easily and Quickly

The name Power Apps hints at what this powerful Microsoft Power Platform tool offers: the development of robust applications for the day-to-day life of the people who need to use them. In this post, we tell you the reasons to use Power Apps, so you can bet on a desirable technology for your processes and employees.

What is Power Apps and What Is It For?

Power Apps is a tool for creating applications with little code (low-code) in a collaborative environment, faster and at lower costs. These applications are aimed at the specific needs of the company and are connected to corporate data platforms in repositories such as Microsoft Dataverse and data sources such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365…

Power Apps is integrated within Microsoft Power Platform, a low-code platform to bring tools developed with little code to corporations, in addition to increasing their productivity and, ultimately, the value of their business.

How do Power Apps work?

How Many Types of Applications Can I Create with Power Apps?

Power Apps allows you to develop four types of applications:

• Canva apps: Like the canvas on which we paint a picture, this ‘white space’ allows us to connect to more than 200 data sources and ‘paint’ with them.
• Model-driven apps: With responsive or adaptive design (adapts according to orientation and size), they are very attractive for use with forms and process flows.
• Cards: These are micro-applications that are created very quickly to show business data through connectors.
• Microsoft Dataverse: This data warehouse comes with Power Apps to store and manage standard and custom tables. If you are already a Dynamics 365 customer, your data is included in Dataverse.

To create an application, there are two tools:

• Power Apps Studio: for compiling canva apps. Microsoft itself says that creating apps with this designer is “more like creating a slide deck in Microsoft PowerPoint”.
• Model-driven application designer: for designing the sitemap and aggregating components into a model-driven application.

Users access their own applications, or those shared by other users, from the desktop of a personal computer or from a mobile device (tablet or phone).

Integration of Power Apps with Other Tools

Power Apps has more than 500 connectors that allow linking to other software or data sources. For example, with SharePoint Online, Microsoft’s corporate collaboration platform.

Why use Power Apps: Uses of Power Apps in the Enterprise

Integrates Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been surprising for many years with its advances, and Power Apps is integrated to take advantage of it. AI Builder allows you to add custom AI models without programming knowledge so that any employee can work with it.

Among the tasks that this artificial intelligence can perform are analyzing customer opinions and predicting company figures. Also, understand and process text, detect objects in images, or manage forms.

The AI ​​models are simplified and explained step by step, and the technology is integrated into the data sources thanks to those 500 different connectors that we talked about before. In addition, there are online guides and self-help and self-learning information to perform better.

Automate Tasks

Data collection, document management, approval processes… The most classic functions of an office job can be digitized, which increases productivity and employee satisfaction.

Improved Analysis and Visualisation of Information

If data intake and processing are automated, these are also analyzed more quickly and easily. Once compiled and managed, the application itself analyzes and represents them in a very visual way so that human teams can make decisions based on them.

Power Apps Success Stories

The Microsoft website includes examples of companies from very diverse sectors that show the versatility of Power Apps.

For example, Toyota Motor North America employees have developed more than 400 apps with Power Apps. Some of them have served to improve the quality control of their products and others are in the form of a questionnaire for workers to assess their health status if they have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus.

For its part, the Coca-Cola UNITED bottling company created and launched a sales and inventory data repository in a week. The company was looking for a way to expedite on-demand shipping. Prior to this tool, teams would manually review inventory, which could lead to delays. By delivering orders earlier, you improve the company’s customer satisfaction.

Some have even launched hackathons to boost the use of the tool among workers. Thus, some H&M workers created a mobile application to follow the development of the flexible working day, its duration, and from where it was carried out.

Plain Concepts and Power Apps

From Plain Concepts, we have also developed tools with Power Apps that can be very useful for you. Smart Occupancy App is an application for companies to manage their workspaces following the security measures that were implemented after the lack of confinement due to COVID-19 or with massive teleworking, which means that many companies have fewer face-to-face jobs and that therefore you have to reserve a place if you go to the offices.

With Smart Occupancy it is possible to reserve workspaces on a specific day and time, as well as check how many spaces are free. In addition, it has an alert notification system that notifies crowds and generates occupancy reports. With this, the use of space is optimized and the safety of employees is guaranteed.

Our experience helps you bet on us to develop the potential of Power Apps and its low-code philosophy. Ask us your questions and we will work with you to revolutionize the use of technology in your company.