Benefit
When an off-the-shelf solution isn’t available Microsoft Power Apps can provide a bespoke solution to solve your business challenges; a few examples include:
- Staff holiday allowance: Create a holiday app for employees to input their holiday. Introduce an approval procedure from Power Automate to approve or reject requests
- Lead capture for field sales: Empower your salespeople in the field to capture leads via an app, as opposed to waiting till they’re back in the office. Features like business card scanner also enables information to be gathered instantly
- Event registration: Create an event registration app which enables attendees to register and check-in, then automatically collect their details in your database
- Employee expenses: An employee expenses app, allowing your employees to enter details of any expenses and attach photographs of receipts for easy tracking
The apps are designed to be accessed across mobile/tablet devices or a web-based browser, meaning employees can use their app from anywhere.
One of the benefits of using Power Apps on a mobile or tablet device, is that you can leverage the smart mobile functionality to capture photos, videos and signatures, as well as completing interactive forms.
What sets Power Apps apart from other offerings is the ‘low-code approach to app development’. This means essentially anyone can build an app, even without technical experience. Although it’s worth noting that there’s actually quite a learning curve for those who want to build their own apps, so unless you’re a developer you should ideally work with your Microsoft Partner to design and build anything but the simplest applications.
One of the key benefits of a low-code approach, is that it is much faster to deploy an app compared to traditional development methods.
Conventional app development can be costly and time-consuming in comparison to Power Apps; Power Apps Licensing starts as low as £7.50 per app/per month and due to the low-code approach, development time can be kept to a minimum.
One of the main advantages of the Power App Platform is that being a Microsoft solution, it is full capability to integrate with other Microsoft tools. This means that developers can leverage data from Microsoft applications (e.g., Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Excel etc) and other third-party services. There are a range of connectors available for Power Apps, meaning that there is scope to connect seamlessly with other platforms.
Power Apps leverages the Common Data Service (CDS) which uses a role-based security model. For users, this means that security roles can be established using a certain set of access permissions, ensuring that employees only see the data appropriate for their job role.
When businesses first start using Power Apps, there can be concerns about user access and restricting certain information within an app. However, Microsoft have implemented functionality to ensure that the apps are secure, and privileges can be granted where necessary.
