See the power of PowerApps
October 28, 2019

See the power of PowerApps

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PowerApps

We have several departments that use specific line-of-business applications build on model-driven PowerApps, including Sales and Purchasing, our Create Lab, our Quality Control Lab, and our Regulatory department. Our business could not function without these applications as data and requests would get completely lost in email. Using PowerApps allows us more visibility into the process and offers more business process automation.
  • Quick development with no code for specific line-of-business applications.
  • Allows greater control over business process automation through workflows and better-formalized connection to crucial business data, such as Accounts, Salespeople, etc.
  • Building an elegant user experience is very user-friendly and doesn't take a ton of time to put together.
  • Forms and views into the data all come "pre-packaged" for the quick implementation of model-driven PowerApps.
  • Canvas-driven PowerApps may take a little time to understand. They are incredibly powerful, but as such, there is more to learn, test, and understand.
  • PowerApps offer a lot of flexibility, so they don't always get completed extremely quickly. That being said, they offer a lot of power without any code.
  • Building navigation and launching the app could use a little improvement as well.
  • Licensing, as with many Microsoft Products, is continually changing and requires assistance in most cases.
  • Incredible ROI, especially with the new licensing of just using one PowerApp. Update your navigation to include multiple apps and release this to several users who only need one or two of these. For model-driven PowerApps, this is a huge win.
  • If you break up your PowerApps or if users are using several, you will have to be more careful about your licensing. But overall, there is so much value and power, I would encourage spreading out the ability to create and build PowerApps to more and more users to get full value out of the tool.
  • Again, learning PowerApps isn't for the faint of heart. You will likely have to invest some time figuring out several things, but I promise, the effort is worth it.
I'm not sure if you can say D365 CRM is an alternative to PowerApps, because basically all the customization of using D365 CRM, or what used to be called XRM, is now called a model-driven PowerApp. Likewise, SharePoint has become intimately connected to canvas PowerApps. Both are just simple ways to start creating a PowerApp, and it doesn't take too much work to quickly get up to speed creating useful PowerApps for your company.
There are several incredible community members posting videos and blogs about getting started with PowerApps and getting into a deep dive technically. PowerApps has a great community and a lot of supporters for it. I'm not sure what the "official" Microsoft support is like, but the community is really great.

Do you think Power Apps delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Power Apps's feature set?

Yes

Did Power Apps live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Power Apps go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Power Apps again?

Yes

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM), Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Flow, TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe), OneDrive, MS SharePoint, OneNote, Trello, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Teams
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.

Power Apps Feature Ratings

Visual Modeling
6
Drag-and-drop Interfaces
8
Platform Security
10
Platform User Management
9
Reusability
7
Platform Scalability
8

Evaluating PowerApps and Competitors

Yes - In a way, with the changes Microsoft has been making to licensing, model-driven PowerApps has replaced D365 CRM and canvas PowerApps can replace custom development or highly customized SharePoint applications. The reason to replace these is development time. Instead of developers working on this via code full-time, we can spread the work out to others who are less technical but still understand a lot about the business and can put that business knowledge to technical use.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
It's really a combination of Price, Features, and Usability. Without it being cost-effective, we wouldn't have been able to proceed. Without it have several features, it wouldn't have been as useful. And without it have exquisite usability, we wouldn't have gotten very far creating new applications and getting users to use them.
I suppose we may have expanded our selection options beyond just Microsoft products. But truthfully, we are a Microsoft shop. There is so much value with using all the cloud capabilities that Microsoft offers, it's hard to expand and look elsewhere. The integration, the single sign-on, and the flexibility within the O365 and D365 tools and capabilities makes it hard to look at competitors.

Using PowerApps

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Connecting to pre-existing, business-critical data, like accounts, contacts, products, orders, invoices, etc.
  • Designing an elegant, line-of-business application is relatively straightforward.
  • Very powerful, no-code option, even if there is a bit of a time investment required.
  • As mentioned previously, there is a time investment required to get a deep understanding.
  • While it is no-code, it is beneficial to have someone who can think logically and has a good sense of the business process and user experience.
Yes - It's solid. You have a PowerApps app on your phone and from there, you can open any PowerApp you have access to in your organization. It's pretty straightforward, even if there is a sense of redundancy having to open first the PowerApp phone app and then the actual, developed application itself.
There is still complexity in creating PowerApps, but you can't underestimate the power of the PowerApp, so naturally creating one could get complex. But the usage of the app should be straightforward, even if it relies heavily on the UX from the application designer. Overall, very user-friendly, does not require code, and relatively painlessly taps into business-critical information without requiring any data copying.