Microsoft has come at the right time. To come out with a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool where you can develop your apps on the cloud much faster, and deploy them for multiple devices, whether it is mobile, cloud, laptops, or desktops. It is similar to Oracle APEX or Oracle developer tools where you just drag and drop into your application within minutes.
The primary use case of this solution is case management reporting. If, for example, you have a set of engineers who have been assigned a particular case or project they will need to record all of their activities and their visits. Using the application created in PowerApps, they report everything, then it goes through a workflow.
The workflow goes from recording the daily activities of the team for the specific project. The project then goes through a series of approvals and gets logged, completed, and the report is generated.
Expenses are also being logged.
We have Power BI as well, and it moves the data from the source to the data warehouse then generates a report.
This is quite a short term, six-week engagement. We wanted to create an application and have it up and running within four to six weeks, rather than spending three to six months on bigger projects on the platform. We wanted it to be quick and fast.
PowerApps is best suited for those cases where you have a small scenario and an application to support that project or scenario. You can call these departmental applications, which are needed on the fly. We create a much shorter development lifecycle and then deploy, and then people start using it.
Take an example of the COVID-19 situation. We wanted all of our branches to log their COVID cases or what exactly are they doing daily to manage the COVID cases and to know what the process is. All of those details are logged into the COVID folder and then the reports are generated daily or weekly.
Microsoft PowerApps is a no-code solution.
I would say that the most valuable features are the user interface, navigation, and business routes.
It quickly drags and drops. It doesn't take much coding, there is no coding in fact. You drag and drop, select a few things to configure, and then read those applications in the user screens.
With business rules, you can just select and you don't need to elaborate coding or backend code. This way, it's much easier to write or create those applications using their features.
When you capture a lot of data, the data becomes enormous. It's one of Microsoft's challenges that there is a threshold limit of 5000 items. It has to improve the threshold limit where it can handle data beyond 5000 items.
I would like to see integration with on-premise business applications, complex business routes, and complex business workflows.
We started using Microsoft PowerApps in 2014.
Currently, there is a challenge in scaling up. We can't scale beyond large data.
We have approximately 10,000 users in our organization.
There is a challenge in getting support. The support staff is not trained properly in PowerApps.
The initial setup was not easy, but not exactly complex. There was a lot of research.
There are two licensing costs, one is pay-as-you-go, or you can develop it for one year.
I would advise others to make an informed decision before you implement it. There are a lot of challenges, and the product is going through a lot of changes.
It's promising, so I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.