Managing business flow through Power Apps

If you are an organization and looking for apps to solve business problems, you could either go for off-the-shelf apps or build custom apps from scratch. Off the shelf apps might not solve all your business problems since they are rarely customizable, and you are expected to modify your processes to fit into the way the app functions. The Custom Apps can fix this issue, but they are expensive and time consuming making it difficult to justify time and cost of customer app development. Hence come the Power Apps.

Power Apps is set of apps, services, connectors and data platform that provide a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. It is a low code platform that empowers business users to achieve more. Data is increasingly flowing and organizations that harness their data and use this to drive intelligent business processes will outperform those that do not. Using Power apps, you can quickly build custom apps that connect to your business data stored either in underlying data platform or in various online and on-premises data sources (SharePoint, Excel, Dynamics 365, SQL Server and so on). Power Apps enable the creation of web and mobile applications that run on all devices.

The platform comprises of four applications, Power BI for analyzing data, Power Apps for App development, Power Automate for process automation and Power Virtual agents for creating BOT to interact with data.

This all sits on common data service which has out of the box data connectors and AI builder capabilities that allows citizen developers which use artificial intelligence to build apps and processes. Power apps provide a low code platform to develop apps for web and mobile which empowers everyone to do more to solve their data problems. Power apps have 300 data connectors and build-in common data service. Developing a custom connector is also possible if a built-in connector does not suffice.

Creating an app through power app is made very easy, you start with selecting your data through SharePoint or excel or any other source, and then a connection and a site you want to connect to and the list you want to choose. Data connector then checks for permissions and then first thing it will do will create a browse screen where you can view all records. It will allow you to select an item from the records and upon clicking that item it will display a detailed view of the item selected. Lastly it will provide an edit button which will allow you to edit the information of the item. So, the app build in this scenario will have three screens, browse screen, detailed screen and edit screen. The browse screen will have options which will allow you to change the layout of the display. Detailed screen will allow you to add, edit or delete a field. Now the app allows you to create a record, navigate to a record, edit a record and delete a record. Further this data can be modelled in a model driven app. Common data services will be the source for multiple relationships between data. And various filters can be created for understanding different data scenarios. And a dashboard can be created to provide an insight into the data retrieved. So quite a lot of functionality can be built in model driven apps.

Hence, Power Apps can help you create an app as basic as a Microsoft Excel Workbook. The power of Power Apps comes from the ability to connect related technologies in your business, like Common Data services, Power Automate, Microsoft SharePoint, and other data sources. Power Apps can make an organization efficient by empowering every user to act and update data from their respective interface and this all happening in the quickest way possible.

If you have any comments, please reach out to us at info@proso.ai