Powering Your Business With Power Apps – Tech Tip for March 9, 2021
We are continuing to take a closer look at Microsoft’s Power Platform which includes Power BI, PowerApps and Power Automate. These three technologies can be used on their own or together to create solutions that help your business work better.
This week we are focusing on Microsoft Power Apps. The objective of Power Apps is to enable nontechnical users to build business applications (apps), without requiring that they have coding expertise. Power Apps has a visual user interface with drag-and-drop functionality, as well as application templates to make app development easier.
What Can Power Apps Do for Your Business?
- Provides a rapid low code development environment for building custom apps to address business needs​.
- Provides rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business processes to digital, automated processes.
- Enables creation of Web and Mobile apps that can run on all devices.
- Connects business data from many sources including Microsoft SQL, SharePoint, Excel, OneDrive for Business, Dropbox, Google Docs, SAP, Oracle and Dynamics 365.
To learn more about what Power Apps can do for your business, watch this demo video.
Examples of Problems that Can be Solved with Power Apps
- An employee onboarding app can be built which brings together resources like policy guides, team member contacts and forms on to a single platform so that employees have a hassle-free onboarding experience.
- An expense or PTO approval app that allows the employee to submit a request along with supporting documentation with workflow and have a manager approve the request.
- An estimating tool for costing projects that integrates with existing pricing sheets in Excel or SQL.
How to Get Power Apps?
Microsoft Power Apps is available as a cloud-based subscription. It can be added as an additional subscription to your existing Microsoft 365/Office 365 tenant. It may be purchased via a Per App Plan or a Per User Plan. Watch this video to learn more about Power Apps: