The next product in the Power Platform suite is Power Apps.
Power Apps is a “no-code” interface that works well for the non-technical people out there – yes, it works great for the technical people as well.
To create a Power App yourself, you have to start at the Power Apps Home Page.
Working in the Power Apps Studio is quite like working in PowerPoint. For the most part, you will spend your time moving graphics around, making them bigger or smaller, lining them up just exactly where you want them, or getting the forms (what you would think of as slides in PowerPoint) to show what they should be showing at the right time.
From my experience, Power Apps works great in small tightly-controlled instances:
- Short Surveys
- Extremely simple repeatable operations – for example, booking company resources or scanning business cards then importing that into an in-house CRM.
- The entire application has less than 5 screens
- As an add-on to Power BI dashboards
Now for the elephant in the room – when should Power Apps not be used:
- If you need to support multiple concurrent users
- If you have lots of items to display (meaning more than 500 items)
- If you’re using complex logic to determine what happens next or shows on the screen
- Security (outside of your Office 365 domain) of information is important to you
The last point is very important since Power Apps does do a good job of security if the user is within your Office 365 domain – since that is a necessary functionality of Office 365 itself. It’s when someone outside of your Office 365 domain attempts to use your Power App that it completely fails. This is because Office 365 does not allow anyone to actively secure anything outside of your specific domain. If you all of your users are within your Office 365 domain, this does not apply to you and you should be secure – at least from the Power Apps viewpoint.
Because of how tightly integrated Power Apps is with other Power Platform or Office 365 tools, it works well within the Office 365 environment. It also allows for quick creation of simple apps that can get data from almost anywhere, even SQL Server and Sharepoint.
So, next time we’ll discuss the next product in the Power Platform – Power Automate. Until then…