PowerApps

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.

Power-Apps can be used for virtually any type of situation. I've seen it used for an office reservation tool, especially during COVID, where that has been extremely useful. I currently use it a lot for various quality assurance forms for various teams who need different things to review for each team that calculates scores, as well as sends the information I need from various sources to SharePoint for analysis later. People can use it for mobile apps or canvas apps - I prefer canvas apps, but you can really create pretty much whatever you want and there are so many different tools and items to use for each app (scanner, signature insert, etc.). So really the sky is the limit.

When building a data pulling app from one of our current programs we ran into trouble with the current program having the ability to communicate to an app without losing restrictions on the program. It did require communicating that out with the program provider. There are times where you will have to figure out solutions to make the app work that our outside of the Microsoft program.

Based on my experience, PowerApps is highly suited for organizing, scheduling, and planning. Highly useful to keep records and create events. We really benefited from using the PowerApps when we were undergoing a phased opening of our labs during the pandemic. We were to operate on limited capacity, and scheduling our workday through PowerApps helped ensure smooth functioning in the interest of everyone's safety and health and avoid chaos.

Powerapps is the lesser of 2 evils. It lets to restrict what people can see and how they can interact with it, but it has the potential to be a bit of a dragon when trying to implement it in more-complex workflows.

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.

PowerApps is well suited in organizations with less complex structures. It is easy to use when the organization has a centralized decision-making system and decisions are readily taken. It may create issues among multiple decision-makers as they may have disagreements on certain issues which may cause a backlash among themselves on issues pertaining to just-in-time inventory management or throughput time of the process to be completed. Organizations can overcome these issues with the centralization of decision-making power to making power.

PowerApps is best suited to automate any workflow or standard operating procedure that requires paperwork and data intake. Specifically, this app can build an automated process to do anything you do manually with data. It allows you to connect other platforms together for seamless transfer of data, as well as making mundane processes easy with GUI.

PowerApps is well suited for for projects that need to be explained or justified and the need for calculations to be made and shared with a group. A scenario where it would be less appropriate would be projects that are in a rough draft state or not ready to be shared with others.

PowerApps is extremely well suited for R&D settings for multiple reasons. The ease of use, very intuitive, one of the best features being customization.

PowerApps is well suited for scenarios that are internal to your organization. PowerApps is something that works great if the intended users are all internal employees. For an additional fee you CAN create "Portals PowerApp" that enables it to be client facing for items where you might need forms filled out by a client and have that data be securely sent to a database, SharePoint list or even a live excel document. So if your intention is to create an app that you want to maybe put on Apple Store or Android Play Store, PowerApps is not for you.

PowerApps is well suited to environments where an organization wants to allow their employees the flexibility to create solutions to make their lives easier while still maintaining good dlp policies. PowerApps is very secure and you can give access to all organization or limit it just the users that you wish to use that application.

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.

It is suitable to use to develop internal applications, integrating your current environment and platforms. It is highly recommend to use as a low-code platform if you already have an Office 365 subscription (E3 or greater is much better in terms of value). Easily deploy mobile applications [without] investing in a specific platform. It is less appropriate to be used as a platform to sell applications to customers and for high-performance applications.

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.

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.

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.