Power Apps: The Microsoft Power Platform Solution for Creating Applications

Post co-written by Madeleine de Place & Coralie Martinez

According to estimates, only 0.3% of the world’s population can code. Nonetheless, the need for mobile, tablet, and desktop applications continues to grow. Companies, regardless of size or field of activity, are increasingly in need of innovative tools to save time and streamline processes in order to remain competitive.

Microsoft has launched Power Platform, a suite of tools making it easy to create websites and applications with no particular development knowledge.

Power Platform brings together five low-code/no-code tools:

• Power Apps for creating business applications
• Power Pages for creating websites
• Power Automate for process automation
• Power Virtual Agents for creating chatbots
• Power BI for data-driven decision-making

Companies have quickly realized that Power Platform has become a true accelerator for transforming and modernizing their information systems.

In the first post in this Power Platform series, we’ll introduce you to Power Apps and its many possibilities.

What is Power Apps?

Power Apps is a Power Platform tool that makes it easy to build mobile and web-based business apps, sometimes in just a few minutes.

Note that applications created with Power Apps are not accessible in stores such as the App Store or Google Play. Therefore, they are only for use within the company, except in certain cases.

Power Apps provides two types of applications:

• Canvas apps: internal company apps for mobiles, tablets or PCs. They can be fully customized and created from a template, a data source (Excel file, SharePoint, etc.), or from scratch.
• Model-driven apps: these apps are slightly more complex but still for internal company use. They are based on predefined formatting, and Dataverse allows you to create your own data architecture.

What Power Apps Can Do for You

Power Apps has many benefits for companies:

• Easy to learn: you don’t need specific development skills to use Power Apps. The tool is simple and highly intuitive. You don’t need to know how to code to create an app! It’s easy to learn, and Microsoft provides a wealth of free documentation online to help you get to grips with the solution quickly.
• Greater independence for business users: business users in marketing, finance, human resources, etc., can now create applications to meet their daily needs without having to rely on developers. These “citizen devs,” as they are called, can create, manage, and upgrade the applications they use on their own to make their internal processes easier.
• Numerous connectors: Microsoft has made more than 400 connectors available for applications created with Power Apps. This makes it possible for the company to connect these applications to the tools it already uses: SAP, Salesforce, MailChimp, Microsoft 365, OpenAI, Adobe, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
• Time-saving: applications are not only ultra-quick to make with Power Apps, they also help employees save time every day. For instance, with a mobile app, salespeople in the field can enter their data directly so they don’t have to re-enter it when they return to head office. This time-saving feature frees them up to focus on tasks that add more value.
• Cost-saving: using Power Apps is estimated to cut development costs by 24% because it increases efficiency and eliminates the need for third-party solutions, which can be extremely expensive.

We are already seeing the return on investment (ROI) for our clients of using Power Apps as a technological base for modernizing and creating applications.

Coralie Martinez, Power Platform Domain Director at Cellenza

What Can Power Apps Be Used For?

Power Apps can be used for many different things, and each company or department can decide for itself what it needs. There are countless examples of corporate applications for internal use:

• Annual leave scheduling application
• Expense forms management application
• Material orders management application
• Application for reporting incidents in the field
• Application to help integrate new employees
• Sales management application
• Stock management application
• Application for tracking product life cycles (orders, inventory, etc.)
• Application for signing up for internal events
• Etc.

How Much Does Power Apps Cost?

Microsoft’s pricing plan is extremely flexible, and you can choose from several options to meet the needs of your business:

• Subscription-based pricing is recommended for companies with several users or many applications. You can choose between a subscription per user (with unlimited applications) or a subscription per app (with one user for one app).
• Pay-per-use, where the company only pays when a user runs an app during a given month.

Depending on the chosen solution, the license per user will be between €5 and €19 per month.

See the Power Apps pricing plan to find out more.

Power Apps: Key Takeaways

Power Apps is the ideal Power Platform tool for creating internal company applications. It lets anyone make web, mobile, and desktop applications, even if they don’t know how to code. It’s an easy and cost-effective way to improve efficiency!

Would you like to talk to an expert? Would you like to learn more about Power Platform or get help with your Power Platform governance projects? Contact us!