What is Microsoft Power Apps?

Microsoft Power Apps is one of the components of the Microsoft Power Platform that enables you to build custom apps to accommodate your business needs or solve your problems when you cannot find a suitable off-the-shelf solution.

In a nutshell, Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform, that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.

Power Apps differs from classic software development regarding app lifecycles and how users or developers interact with them. Business users can use the platform to automate and build applications that improve business processes with no code or very little code.
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This solution allows you to quickly connect to your business data, which is either located in an underlying data platform, such as Microsoft Dataverse or within an on-premise/online data source, for example, Excel, SharePoint, Office 365, SQL Server and Dynamics 365 using a connector

What sets Power Apps apart?

The ‘low-code approach to app development’ sets Power Apps apart from other offerings, meaning anyone can build an app, even without technical experience. One of the key benefits of a low-code approach is that it is much faster to deploy an app than traditional development methods.

According to Microsoft: “Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business operations into digital, automated processes. What's more, apps built using Power Apps have a responsive design and can run seamlessly in browser and on mobile devices (phone or tablet). Power Apps "democratises" the business-app-building experience by enabling users to create feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.”

Power Apps are accessed across mobile/tablet devices or a web-based browser, meaning employees can use their apps from anywhere. One of the benefits of using Power Apps on a mobile or tablet device is that you can leverage the intelligent mobile functionality to capture photos, videos and signatures, as well as complete interactive forms.

The seven benefits of Power Apps

• Speed of app creation
• Low-code and no-code
• Microsoft and other third-party service integrations
• Business process automation
• Low cost of app ownership
• AI capabilities
• Cross-platform access and ease of deployment.

The Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem

We've also discussed how Microsoft Power Platform can enable citizen developers to problem solve. Essentially, citizen development allows for non-technical people or citizen developers to construct their solutions with less help from IT. These are to solve small IT issues, when it comes to the bigger items, it’s always best to consult with professional developers as when handing power to citizen developers with less security training, it is often a concern of increased risks.

Kiandra can enable your citizen developers to build simple point solutions to solve immediate problems while implementing a Microsoft Centre of Excellence (CoE) to ensure visibility, governance, and security. Establishing a Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) means investing in and nurturing organic growth while maintaining governance and control.  

Are you ready to drive innovation and improvement? Contact us today and we can help you start your own development.