Microsoft Power Apps: Prompt and Cost-Effective Development of Business Apps

Power Apps is a suite of low-code development software to help citizen and pro developers create custom apps with rich business logic and workflow automation capabilities. The suite is best for building web and mobile apps (e.g., for employee onboarding, work scheduling) and web portals (e.g., a customer portal, a community portal).

86% of the Fortune 500 companies leverage Microsoft Power Apps with its drag-and-drop app designer, pre-built app templates, AI Builder, and 200+ data connectors for easy integration with other Microsoft products (e.g., SharePoint, Office 365, OneDrive, Excel Online, Dynamics 365) and third-party platforms (e.g., SAP, Oracle) and tools (e.g., Dropbox, Google Docs).

Types of Apps to Build with Microsoft Power Apps

Canvas apps
  • App elements are dragged and dropped onto a canvas, data sources are connected to the app via Excel-style formulas.
  • Highly customizable.
  • Suitable for apps with simple business logic, e.g., for holiday approval, event registration.
Model-driven apps
  • Apps are created based on data models built on Dataverse, an underlying data platform for Power Apps.
  • Layout and functionality customization is limited.
  • Suitable for complex apps, e.g., customer service management and event management apps.
Web portals
  • Designed using preconfigured and custom templates, forms, and views.
  • Suitable for employees or users outside organizations like customers and partners.

Useful Integrations for Power Apps

  • Power BI – to build applications in Power Apps that offer diverse reports and dashboards.
  • Power Automate – to create logic in Power Automate for workflow automation in Power Apps.
  • SharePoint – to extract and store data from SharePoint lists, libraries or OneDrive in Power Apps and create apps directly from a SharePoint list.

Power Apps Use Cases

Workflow management
  • Drag-and-drop workflow editor for creating custom workflows.
  • Pre-built templates for typical workflows.
  • Workflow-related emails and notifications.
  • Workflow scheduling.
  • Real-time dashboards with workflow status, progress, due dates, etc.
  • Workflow analytics (e.g., workflows by type, complexity, average completion time).
  • Managing workflows from mobile devices.
Financial management
  • Expense reporting.
  • Review and processing of accounts payable and accounts receivable.
  • Invoice creation and review.
  • Financial reporting (e.g., end of year reporting, expense reporting).
  • Business card management (scanning and capturing contact information).
Human resources management
  • Employee information management.
  • Recruitment, hiring and onboarding management.
  • Time and attendance management.
  • Employee performance tracking.
  • Payroll management.
  • Employee request management.
Cost control
  • Cost estimation.
  • Budgeting.
  • Cost allocation.
  • Cost tracking.
  • Reporting (actual and committed costs, cost variances, cost trends, etc.).
Inventory management
  • Automated inventory data uploading and editing.
  • Storage of multiple data types (e.g., image, RFID data).
  • Inventory search by keywords and serial number.
  • Purchase order creating and approval.
  • Sales order placing.
Configure price quote
  • Guided ordering and purchasing for customers.
  • AI-based calculation of price of configurable products.
  • Sales validation and approval.
  • One-click quoting.
  • Document designer for automated document creation (e.g., proposals, custom quotes, engineering documents, contracts).
Asset management
  • Asset tracking.
  • Asset booking.
  • Asset check-in and check-out.
  • Work order creation and routing.
  • Asset warranty tracking.
HR management
  • Workforce planning.
  • Recruiting and onboarding.
  • Employee database management.
  • Time and attendance tracking.
  • Performance reviews.
Portals
  • Employee portals.
  • Customer portals.
  • Ecommerce portals (B2C and B2B).
  • Vendor portals.
  • eLearning portals.
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