Enterprises are exploring new technologies and business tools to work smarter, faster, and better.
Power Apps, one such application from Microsoft, is accelerating business transformation and helping enterprises globally to reduce their software development costs and increase overall efficiency.
Power Apps is part of Microsoft Power Platform which is a suite of low-code and no-code digital automation tools that allow you to transform and modernize your business processes, applications, and data intelligence to improve business performance.
Power Apps is a specific tool that helps to build custom business apps that can easily connect to your data across the web and mobile – without spending extra time and effort needed for custom software development. In fact, with Microsoft Power apps everyone can quickly build and share low-code apps within their team.
It is being used extensively to build self-service apps such as onboarding employees, expense claims, helpdesk, sales information capture, and processing approvals and requests. The employee can complete tasks quickly on the go. PowerApps enables employees to access business data from Outlook, Salesforce, SharePoint, Dropbox, Dynamics 365, OneDrive, PowerPoint, Excel, Twitter, and many more.
Microsoft Power Apps is a leading low code application development platform from Microsoft that is empowering non-technical people to build applications on the fly. Microsoft Power apps can create innovative applications that change and improve processes thereby bringing operational effectiveness.
PowerApps comes equipped with intuitive Microsoft tools, prebuilt templates, with drag and drop simplicity. PowerApps is easy to use and can seamlessly connect with many business systems and databases right out of the box- like SAP, Oracle, Workday, and Salesforce to name a few.
What is Power Apps?
Power Apps is one of the components of Microsoft power platform along with Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Virtual agents.
Microsoft Power Apps, is a leading low code application development platform from Microsoft and is empowering non-technical people to build applications on the fly. Microsoft Power apps can create innovative applications that change and improve business processes,
Power Apps comes equipped with intuitive Microsoft tools, prebuilt templates, with drag and drop simplicity. PowerApps is easy to use and can seamlessly connect with many business systems and databases right out of the box- like SAP, Oracle, Workday, and Salesforce to name a few.
Power Apps makes it easy even for non-code developers to build customized apps by accessing data either from its data platform known as Microsoft Dataverse or from other on-premise or online data sources like SQL Server, Sharepoint, Dynamics 365, etc.
Power Apps is revolutionizing the way applications are being built, by enabling a Low Code environment and empowering users to create custom business apps without even writing any code. The apps built using Power Apps are responsive by design and can run on all kinds of mobile devices and in a browser.
It provides a platform for developers to create data connectors to integrate with external data sources.
How to create Apps using Power Apps?
Power Apps offers a developmental platform to build different kinds of business apps. It has three different options, which can be used to build apps
- Canvas apps
- Model-driven apps
- Portals
To begin with, the user has to access the link. After login, one can start creating apps with Power Apps Studio, which is the app designer used for building apps.
Canvas apps
Canvas apps can be easily built for the web, mobile, and tablet applications and it gives a lot of flexibility to users to choose the kind of interface they want to have and gives the option to connect to 200 different data sources.
Canvas apps enable you to use your creativity and business acumen to tailor-make the look and feel of your apps. All this can be done without using programming languages like c#. You can drag and drop items within the canvas app just like Microsoft PowerPoint and create excel-like logic-based features while working with data.
Model-Driven apps
Power Apps studio has an app designer for model-driven apps which allow you to design a sitemap and has components like tables, dashboards, forms, views, charts, and business processes.
All these different components can be easily brought together using the app designer. The apps could be created based on functional roles and business needs without writing any line of code. It offers a tile-based structure with a very simple interface for users, making it easy and hassle-free to create apps
The key difference between canvas apps and Model-driven apps is the component-based approach. Canvas app lets you have full control over your app layout as against model-driven app, whose layout is determined by the components which have been added to the app.
The advantage of a Model-driven app is that it lets you create feature-rich responsive apps, giving a similar user experience across a variety of devices from desktop to mobile
Power Apps Portals
Power Apps Portal helps to create a powerful external-facing website for users outside of the organization like suppliers, customers, third-party vendors. The portal is secured with a sign-in facility with specific identities.
The app users can quickly create a customized website, with its own pages, specific layout, designs, which can be selected with ready-to-use templates. Forms and lists can be added too on the portal. Power Apps portals Studio is a WYSIWYG design tool helping to add and configure webpages, components, forms, and lists.
Power Apps portals Studio offers different options to add, delete or custom configure webpages, forms, lists to create tailor-made websites
Driving digital transformation with Microsoft Power Apps
Microsoft Power Apps is empowering organizations to increase agility, drive customer success by building professional-grade low code apps to digitize their processes and overcome business challenges.
At TeBS, we have partnered with numerous mid to large enterprises and have helped them to leverage Power Apps to reduce their overall application development costs and increase overall operational efficiency.
# Digitization of customer touchpoints through a portal built on Power Apps
Our customer, a commercial aircraft leasing provider in Asia, approached us to help them digitize their customer touchpoints to enhance service and significantly reduce the response time, to become more efficient.
We helped them build a self-service secure portal using Power Apps, which streamlined the communication between customers and their employees through the web portal. The portal helped to give centralized access to entire customer data, giving better visibility to customer service teams to track the pending issues and resolve them in time. The portal creation in enhancing operational efficiency by reducing the burden on the internal support team, which was handling customer issues manually.
# End-to end automation of HR processes with the help of Power Apps
We helped a leading global estate firm to streamline and digitize their HR processes with end-to-end automation of their entire employee lifecycle processes like employee onboarding, employee engagement, and offboarding.
TeBS conceptualized and built an HR Digital Workspace with automation features which facilitated the HR team to manage employee onboarding and offboarding activities. The Digital workspace was built on the Microsoft SharePoint platform with PowerApps, and UiPath Bot automation in the backend.
How a Power Apps partner can help
Power Apps is leading the way in no code /low code solutions and encouraging enterprises to embrace their solution. Power Apps gives the power to build business apps to users with advanced functionality like pre-built AI components which was previously only limited to professional developers.
If you would like to know more about the feature and functionality of Power Apps and how it can help you to innovate your business processes with a quick ROI, connect with our Microsoft experts and they can share industry use cases and scenarios which has helped our customers to reap great value.
