In the modern business world, no two enterprise businesses are the same. While they may serve the same market, manufacture the same product, or operate in the same region, each business has its own nuances, workflows, and considerations.
When it comes to getting ahead, enterprises would be wise to look beyond the one-size-fits-all approach offered by most software packages. Customizing apps and tailoring tools to the unique needs of your business can offer an advantage that can pace you ahead of your competitors, boost efficiency, or provide a better customer experience.
But custom development can be time–consuming and prohibitively expensive. In a competitive job market, developer hours are at a premium, and by the time you’ve gone through the entire process of designing, developing, prototyping, Q&A testing, and releasing an app, you’ve likely been leapfrogged by your competitors—and now you’re left with nothing to show for it but yesterday’s ideas.
But there is a way to develop apps to address your glaring business needs without burning valuable developer hours or falling behind schedule. Meet the world of PowerApps.
You’ve Got the Power
PowerApps is Microsoft’s platform for low-code or no-code business application development, enabling staff with little to no coding experience to bring business app concepts to fruition with minimal effort. Built on the Azure framework, PowerApps allows users to build custom applications or automation via templates or an intuitive user interface—no software engineering degree required.
Because of the functionality in PowerApps, rapid deployment of transformative business apps is now within reach for individual employees, business units, departments, and entire organizations, ensuring no business problem remains unsolved.
Building a custom app in PowerApps begins via a drag-and-drop interface with templates and common UI elements. ‘Developers’ don’t need to worry about functions, objects, APIs, or dependencies—thanks to the PowerApps framework, most of these considerations are handled behind the scenes.
To populate the app with data, PowerApps can be connected with Microsoft data sources such as SharePoint, Outlook 365, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Forms, Excel, Azure Data Lake or Data Factory, and more, as well as popular third-party data sources such as Mailchimp, Salesforce, Basecamp, Facebook, and Adobe. Many of these sources already have pre-scripted ‘recipes’ to incorporate into the app via Microsoft Flow.
Likewise, to export data from the app, such as usage data, PowerApps seamlessly connects with PowerBI to provide advanced analytics and reporting via customizable dashboards.
Business Benefits of PowerApps
The benefits of deploying PowerApps in your enterprise business aren’t just limited to increasing the speed to the solution:
Responsiveness
Apps developed within PowerApps are immediately mobile-friendly and able to be utilized on any device with an internet connection via the power of the cloud: mobile, desktop, laptop, and tablet are all able to run PowerApps with no additional coding required.
Higher ROI
With reduced development hours and the democratization of development, enterprise businesses will be able to realize ROI with PowerApps exponentially faster than if they developed custom apps from scratch via a traditional development and design team. Whether using PowerApps in a traditional developer environment or empowering employees to develop solutions on their own, the plug and play elements of PowerApps will save countless hours and eliminate redundancies in development and deployment.
Security
Because PowerApps is built on Microsoft’s Common Data Security framework, apps developed via PowerApps are guaranteed to protect your business and customer data—and remain compliant with policies like GDPR. App security can also be configured at the role level, ensuring that only designated administrators have access to app data.
Is your Government Data Secure in the Public Cloud?
Whether developing consumer-facing apps for product purchasing or information capture, or internal apps to solve business problems or automate processes, PowerApps has the flexibility and ease of use to enable any member of an organization to design a solution and deploy it within days rather than months. By democratizing development within your organization, you’ll enable staff to work smarter and more efficiently than before, and allow them to develop and deploy solutions that can save your organization thousands of hours that can be invested in bringing new products to market, or better serving the customers you already have.
See what PowerApps can do for your business today.
At OnActuate, we’ve been building custom apps for as long as we’ve been in business. We apply the same level of planning and consideration into our PowerApps services, helping our customers truly leverage the power of behind this new and exciting app development option. Learn more about how PowerApps and OnActute can help you improve your operations by contacting us today!
