Redeveloping an app for your organization? Consider Power Apps

Strategy
Written By Jas Shukla

How can Power Apps be used to replace internal or home-grown apps?

Power Apps is a platform for building organizational applications. Power Apps are built with Microsoft tools and run on Azure, making them easy to scale, secure, and upgrade.

In most cases, they can be built by both IT and non-IT users.

Over the years, we’ve helped organizations build Power Apps that:

  • Connect systems together

  • Run automated workflows

  • Surface information to staff in an efficient and accessible way for mobile/tablet devices

  • …and more!

If you’re considering Power Apps as a replacement for an internal or home-grown app, read on to learn more about the benefits and scenarios.

Benefits

For organizations, the benefits of Power Apps include productivity and the ability to streamline businesses process.

Probably the best way to understand the “power” of a Power App is with an example. We built a Power App for the City of White Rock that displays a training catalogue from a SharePoint list and manages registration. This improves access and saves time for both front line and desk workers as they can review their registration info within the app (instead of digging through email or SharePoint):

See what else we delivered for the City of White Rock including SharePoint and Power Apps solutions.

A Power App is a good option in another scenarios as well. For example, where you want to reduce manual processes to automate or improve repetitive tasks like:

  • Trigger approvals and entries based on expense reports

  • Run processes for employee onboarding and offboarding

  • Approve time off requests

  • Process an order

For developers and owners of apps in an organization, there are benefits as well:

  • Less code maintenance: Power Apps is a low-code platform that enables users to build feature-rich, custom business apps with minimal code (and with the rise of the Copilots, this will get better!)

  • WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) development experience: Developers experience the actual working app very early in the development process

  • Drives greater collaboration: Create and share custom solutions with team members to be more productive

Connect systems across departments

Power Apps uses APIs and connectors to integrate with existing systems, facilitating communication and collaboration across departments. This helps reduce confusion and information silos as data can be easily shared among users.

A connector in Power Apps lets you connect to various systems such as SharePoint, SQL Server, or other Microsoft 365 data such as people profiles. The connector directly retrieves the data and can save data back into the system.

For more complex apps, there are premium connectors that require additional licensing.

Power Apps also allows roles and permissions to be assigned to different members of a team, so only the necessary people can access specific areas of data. This helps keep information secure and ensures that everyone involved has the most up-to-date information available.

For example, a common task that involves multiple systems in most organizations is setting up a new user when someone is hired.

A Power App can facilitate this by using the app to take care of the workflows behind the scenes. This might mean adding the user in Active Directory, adding the user to various Teams and groups, or setting permissions in other systems.

The app can then be extended to manage the repetitive tasks such as name changes, address changes or position changes. Typically organizations need to update information in multiple systems and an employee file to complete these tasks.

Here’s an example of an app like this:

See an example of a full employee file solution in action including the SharePoint design, tips for a Purview file plan and the metadata structure.

Streamline processes and automate tasks

Power Apps lets you streamline processes and automate tasks, saving time and money. With the ability to quickly create custom applications and workflows, teams can collaborate in real-time on multiple projects. This enables faster decision-making and more efficient resolution of issues. Automation also eliminates mundane manual tasks, allowing teams to focus their efforts on higher-value activities.

For example, board meetings are a common activity in most organizations. Board members need access to agendas, reports, and next steps that might be stored in one or more SharePoint areas. A Power App can bring together a calendar of meetings and the content associated with board activities into one area. This is an example of a Power App we built for this scenario in a municipality:

Learn more about the council solution and how we worked with the Township of Langley in the full case study.

Create apps in minutes or (more likely) days

With Power Apps, you can quickly build custom apps. This way, you don't have to wait weeks or months for someone to develop your app to meet the company's needs.

There is nothing to install, unless you want to use the designer on your PC, so you can get started right away by going to make.powerapps.com in your tenant environment. You can start with an app template to explore how apps are built and of course there are tons of resources to learn more.

Power Apps templates

The language is relatively easy to learn compared to picking up a programming language, and with AI tooling, Power Apps is getting better at suggesting options. You can configure data sources, design screens with forms and user interface (UI) elements like lists, galleries and charts, and set up automation rules.

Through drag-and-drop features and visual designers, creating applications is relatively straight-forward. If you have designers, you can even start creating a Power App from Figma!

Behind the scenes, the infrastructure is part of Microsoft 365, so you’re not going to have to setup servers, or install services. Keep in mind that this also means that you can’t run a Power App outside of Microsoft 365.

Resources to learn more

Reach out for support planning and building a Power App! We help with both design and development of the solution, as well as providing support during the roll-out.

Jas Shukla

Jas has over 15 years of experience in consulting, user experience design, and product management. Jas partners with clients on the strategic vision, user experience, requirements and the information architecture to ensure solutions meet both business and end-user needs.

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