Power Apps

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 is good, but not perfect. There is a lot of room to improve. Nevertheless, you can get a lot of functionality out of the box and you have the possibility to program with JavaScript additional functionality. I wish the usability would be improved. Nintex is much more user-friendly and easier to understand but may be more limited. In my opinion, PowerApps is a mighty platform and well-integrated in the Office365 suite.

It is fantastic for distribution to mobile devices, updates are simple and the UI looks awesome. Simple applications out of the box are fast and easy but it is not suited to customization. It is best as a window for prepared data.

For context, this is a low code platform, I am a developer, not a citizen developer, and I have found the PowerApp platform is not suited to customizations. I have only developed one application but I've spent a substantial amount of time perfecting it. There is a limited event model to tap into. The programming model for variables is backwards to standard programming, which requires a constant mental rewrite. Datacards are both useful and restrictive.

Data access for SQL Server is limited. Stored Procedures can only be accessed with Flow and in fact Flow is the best way to interact with it, which somewhat moves it out of the citizen developer zone. Joins can be done with Lookups but that will fire a separate query for each record in a list. Customizing the Item property resulted in quite unexpected queries being sent to SQL Server. Sharepoint is fast but searching with criteria is poor. For instance, you can't query using a date or a yes/no field.

SQL per-user pricing is expensive, which requires the use of per-Flow pricing to mitigate the cost but that increases complexity.

PowerApps is best to display data in a very nice, presentation form. It's well suited for application within Microsoft account domains and can be accessible by domain users only. Best fit to integrate PowerApps with MS flow to represent data to users. Also can be used to display in all devices and OS.

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.

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.

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.

We had a layoff where the employee who was responsible for data integrity was let go. Their job was to make sure all new products, projects etc. had a naming scheme that fell in with our business rules. When they were let go we were able to create a PowerApp(s) that helped take some of their tasks and pass it on to the user with feature-rich data entry screen that interfaced with our ERP's data source. I'm not saying this will replace people in the workforce but it helps alleviate some of the burdens a scenario like this might create.

I don't know of an area PowerApps would not be suited for. It is extremely powerful and when connected to the common data service becomes more powerful. I have seen it used in libraries to track books and attendants down. I have seen it used to track bus routes and or broken down buses. I have used it as a calculator, with a large number of formulas that drive it, that becomes simple and easy to use on desktop and on mobile. If you have a need to present or gather information of any kind, PowerApps can likely solve your issue.

More basic applications for creating and editing records are very easy to create and can be very powerful. For more complex applications people need to make a relatively large time investment in order to adapt excel workbooks or other static databased work-flows to PowerApps and I have discovered that it can take some creative thinking in order to get certain scenarios to work the way you want. That being said I would still recommend PowerApps but with caution depending on the type of Application.