Provide your organisation with the best and most powerful solutions using PowerPlatform.
Know as ‘low code’, Microsoft PowerPlatform allows you to quickly build solutions on top of your existing data (SharePoint, Teams, Azure …etc.) and deliver modern and robust solutions to your end users.
We can help you with :
- Information architecture
- Design and development of business applications and processes using Power Platform.
- Microsoft Teams custom applications development.
- SharePoint Modern customisations and development.
- DataVerse data architecture, security and optimizations.
- PowerBi and Virtual agents.
What is Power Platform?
A low code platform, part of Microsoft365, is meant to be used by citizen developers and power users for rapid development and deployment of business applications.
We refer to the Power Platform as the suite of:
- Power Apps
- Power Automates
- Power Bi
- Power Virtual Agent
- Power Pages
- Data connectors
- AI and ML Builder
- & Dataverse
PowerApps
Power Apps is the engine which allows companies to design and develop business applications. When building a new PowerApps App, the first thing to consider is “Who your audience is ?” or more precisely, “How your users will be consuming the apps” ?
This is important to determine which type of Apps you will opt for.
PowerApps offers mainly three types of Apps:
Canvas App:
The canvas App are the most common choice to start quickly building your apps.
More exactly, you design your app while defining the data model.
Usually, the approach is to start designing the different screens and components of your apps, while you define which data sources you want to create/use.
In summary, the process of building Canvas App can be viewed as defining the UI first, and plugging the data when needed.
Microsoft define Canvas App as “Design and build a business app from a canvas in Microsoft Power Apps without writing code in a traditional programming language such as C#. Design the app by dragging and dropping elements onto a canvas, just as you would design a slide in PowerPoint. Create Excel-like expressions for specifying logic and working with data. Build apps that integrate business data from a wide variety of Microsoft and third-party sources. Share your app so that users can run it in a browser or on a mobile device and embed your app so they can run it in SharePoint, Power BI, or Teams.” Ref.
Model Driven App
A model driven app is viewed as data first, you connect PowerApps to your data model which will generate the different views required to interact with your data (CRUD operations).
A typical scenario where model driven apps is more suitable, is when you have existing data models (entities), and you want to wrap an App around your data quickly.
“Compared to canvas apps, model-driven apps in PowerApps are based on underlying data — specifically, the data stored in Common Data Service (CDS). CDS is a secure, cloud-based storage space that organizations can use to store business application data.” Ref.
Portal Apps [Deprecated]
Both Canvas and Model Driven apps are meant to be used internally by your users.
If you ever need to build apps which can be exposed publicly (external users), PowerApps Portal Apps is the answer.
There are certain limitation when it comes to designing the user interface, Portal apps are driven by Bootstrap and are more like web application rather than the typical PowerApps (Canvas or Model Driven app).
In addition to the user interface, Portal Apps cannot connect to any data source. You can only use Dataverse for Portal Apps.
Power Automates
Power Automates is the engine which allows the automation of business processes.
From the simple data validation to the more complex approval processes. Power Automate offers different data connectors and actions.
The first step in developing your Power Automate is to define the trigger of the Power Automate.
Power Automates offers different ways to trigger your processes.
- Data Trigger: This can be a data event such as Item creation or modified.
- Schedule: You can define a frequency for the process to run (e.g. Every data, every hour, or a more customized recurrence).
- Manual trigger: If you want your flow to be triggered manually either from your Power App or from the
When you have decided which trigger is the most suitable for your Power Automate, the next step is to develop the process.
Power Automate offers a variety of actions to implement most of the business processes without too much hassle or custom development.
It is impossible to describe all the actions in one document, but most of them are very simple and intuitive to use.
The second consideration when developing the process is to use the correct connectors.
Power Bi
PowerBi is the platform which allows you to build interactive reports using your existing data.
As Microsoft Describes PowerBi:
“Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.”
