Power Apps

If you have a need to quickly develop apps, PowerApps can be good. If you have a simple project and don't have an experienced developer available, PowerApps can be good. If you have a complex project that needs a lot of customization, PowerApps is probably not the way to go. Another way to say it: PowerApps has simultaneously impressed and depressed. It's impossible to recommend for every development scenario, but probably worth exploring when needs are conservative and skills and budget are at a premium.

PowerApps is well suited for "quick-wins" and fast prototypes of business solutions. It also is beneficial for situations where business partners and developers work together - it allows the business folks to provide a "quick-and-dirty" prototype which is then fleshed-out by developers that are trained experts on the platform. The interactive and easy to understand representation of the solution allows business partners to "see" the solution and add, remove, or correct aspects of it themselves. It provides a common view and understanding of the actual solution across business units and tech teams.

PowerApps, being a low-code\no-code platform is not well suited for business processes that require many complex computations or large amounts of custom code - such as solutions that are better architected as Web Site or "full-blown" desktop solutions. There are solutions that are just not easy or quick to accomplish in a low-code\no-code platform. Enterprise Architects should know the difference, however business partners often try to create a solution and only when stuck because it becomes too complex do they engage a tech team for assistance - at which point there are sunk-costs involved and hinderences to re-platforming the solution.

PowerApps does a great job of bridging the gap for mobile form entry where needed. We don't have a ton of mobile use cases, but that's because we haven't had a very active online tool kit until the deployment of O365. With most tools behind a firewall, any opportunity to work in business applications has been through VPN and that usually requires a PC/Mac. Now that we're able to access the system through a credentialed entry point in O365, we have the opportunity to think about what our mobile environment could look like. That's where PowerApps comes into our portfolio.

PowerApps can find a home in any situation. If a company already uses SharePoint then that company can find a place for it that makes sense. The real strength of PowerApps is realized by empowering those workers that aren't a part of IT, typically analyst, schedulers, or someone who works in managing, collecting or reporting data, by allowing them to develop their own solutions for any issues they may have. PowerApps well lessen the dependency that organizations have for Developers/IT and put them in a position to do things for themselves.

It's so good as powerful line-of-business applications, I can't recommend it enough. The ability to tap into the Common Data Service and use this information along with custom entities, forms, and views, makes model-driven PowerApps incredibly useful and powerful. It's also very friendly for those who have implement business processes and logic but don't have experience with an actual coding language. There is so much flexibility with PowerApps.

But again, you may have to invest some time figuring out the functionality. Even though there isn't a specific code involved doesn't mean that the work will be simple and quick. You can do a lot with PowerApps, but it might take some time and effort to get a broad understanding of all that it is capable of.