How to Create Your Own Apps with Microsoft Power Apps
Another highly valuable tool in the Microsoft Power Platform suite is Power Apps. Whether the task is simple or complex, every business has unique processes that benefit from automation and streamlining. Rather than hiring a team of developers to create custom functionality, with Microsoft Power Apps it’s possible to develop your own no-code or low-code apps in a fraction of the time and cost.
What is Power Apps?
Power Apps offers an incredible array of functionality to businesses looking to optimize processes and modernize capabilities. Your business can develop internal business applications to automate manual processes, collect helpful information, integrate custom functionality into your technology stack, and lots more. Power Apps can help you connect data from a wide variety of sources, including Microsoft’s Common Data Service and different on-premises or online solutions. You might be thinking no way can you build your own apps but you absolutely can!
Quickly build apps with pre-built templates
When it comes to the process of creating a new app for your business, there are three different app types in Power Apps: canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portal apps. Canvas apps are created on a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to add and order different app components. Model-driven apps, by contrast, begin with inputting your relevant business data, then working out from there to develop the interface. Lastly, portal apps make it easy to create customer-facing portals where customers can log on, access or submit information, and perform other activities.
Rapidly deploy your apps
Not only is it quick to develop apps for your business, Power Apps makes it quick to deploy them. Your apps can work natively on a wide variety of operating systems and devices. Traditionally, publishing an app that can work in multiple operating systems, such as iOS and Windows, requires a team of developers to dedicate many hours to the effort. Yes, that is as complicated and expensive as it sounds. A huge value of Power Apps is that the solutions you build will work natively within different operating systems so you don’t have to publish a different version for each OS. And, yes, that is as awesome as it sounds.
Extensibility
Power Apps makes it possible to create completely custom, powerful apps with no coding or very little coding. However, if your business wants certain complex capabilities that can’t be achieved without additional coding, Power Apps is extensible for professional developers. Developers can use the Power Apps platform to apply server-side and client-side logic, create data and metadata, and much more.
How Power Apps works with other Power Platform applications
As just one component of Microsoft Power Platform, Power Apps integrates with Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents to give your business the flexibility to build unified, end-to-end solutions.
For example, your organization could develop an app that helps with quality control in different business locations. The app could record different types of information such as customer feedback, employee feedback and suggestions, or audit results, and use Power Automate to organize and send this information to the appropriate person in your organization, who can ensure the feedback is acted upon rather than lost or ignored. Take it a step further and capture data from the entire process to put into a Power BI dashboard so you can identify gaps, track metrics and make smart decisions.
Want to learn more about Power Platform’s capabilities?
Power Apps offers only a slice of what’s possible when all the Power Platform apps are used together. By using Power Platform as a complete set of tools, your business can fully tap into the creativity, problem-solving skills, and determination of everyone involved in your business. If you’d like to talk to an expert about your business’s goals and how you can use Power Platform to meet them, contact Western Computer today.