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[Nirav P]

Hello All,

I have a question – is Power Apps popular or used by Enterprises for any app development requirements?

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Nirav P
Dallas
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[Alaa Bitar]

Hello Nirav,

I have been creating business application for enterprise customer for almost two years now using the PowerPlatform (Power App + Power Automate + Power BI). My customers are banks, insurance companies, fund managers and governmental organisations for the most of them. The applications goes from simple leave request of document approval to expense management or collaborator evaluations.
The platform can definitively answer a wide variety of business needs but it is not intended to replace any custom application development using any development languages like .Net or Java etc…
It really depends on the needs that you or your organisation or your customers have.

Best regards,

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Alaa Bitar
Consultant
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[Rob Elliott]

In my company in the UK, Capita, with 65,000 staff my job title is SharePoint and Power Platform Manager and I am regularly building apps for teams across the business using Power Apps, Power Automate and SharePoint as the data source or repository. This is usually apps that might be short-term or for a specific project or use and which don’t justify external development.

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Rob Elliott
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Flow Community Super User
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[Fabian Heil]

How are you dealing with the topic Self Service vs. IT Service? Do you prevent the end users to build their own apps and workflows or is it completely free for everyone and you are providing it as a service in case the users need help?

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Fabian Heil
IT Consultant SharePoint Applications
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[Rachel Davis]

We leave both PowerApps and PowerAutomate open to the business. Anyone can use them. We tried limiting workflows to IT only and resulted in a bottleneck that it took MONTHS to create a basic workflow. No business can wait months for a notification workflow. So now we leave it open.

That being said, if you’re building something that’s business critical for the enterprise, we do recommend working with IT to get that flow attached to a service account so that if the creator loses access or leaves the company, the workflow will continue to function properly. There are also security concerns if your Power App is accessing systems outside O365 that require you to have access to a dedicated environment. But the building and maintenance of the apps and flows are up to the owner/creator.

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Rachel Davis
Program Manager, Business Operations
Rockwell Automation
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[CBryan Chapman]

100% it is intended for all companies big or small.

Check out all the case studies here https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/category/case-studies/

There is even a great case study on a mutli-national energy company that hits close to home for me that had tremendous savings as a result of leveraging PowerApps.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/multi-national-energy-company-uses-powerapps-to-create-a-decision-validation-tool

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CBryan Chapman
Office Manager
Calgary
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[Kurt Charney]

The whole PowerPlatform is a pretty amazing thing – and while it doesn’t have the full horsepower of a custom .NET application it is not designed to replace that. 

We leverage Azure and the PowerPlatform – The PowerPlatform gives you a platform where you can allow users that are not developers, and even some that are to build an application and flow that can address the workflow that they already intimately know – and address the problem that they want to solve. 
No pulling in IT or other developers, they can do it themselves – that is the true power of the PowerPlatform. 

I manage the automation and security for the whole platform at my company, and one thing that we are starting to leverage more and more is the hybrid scenario. 

True workhorse functions built as an Azure API and then the PowerApp and flows are able to consume them and to be the front facing  user built and managed section of that. 

When you combine both of the two together there is almost no problem that your company will not be able to solve. 

You have developers building the background API’s that are doing the core lifting and providing reuse and standardization – while you have the users who are not developers being able to leverage a platform that can quickly and easily consume those API’s – it is an unstoppable mix. 

Our goal with the PowerPlatform is to build the appropriate guardrails around it so that users in the company can freely innovate without thinking of IT’isms. 

It is a powerful mix – but trying to segment when something should move from just being a PowerApp and switch to .NET can be a challenging question sometime. 

But one thing can make that decision easier – if it is something that can be built for direct reuse – you have the developers build the API’s and some of the core stuff – deep AI learning and standing up the DataLake or Azure SQL databases – honestly all these are done via automation at our company – but the devs built that automation and now it has enabled the regular users to leveage these. 

Once you have that – from an enterprise perspective – you have a common API to go to to access enterprise data XYZ – and not a 100 different copied datasources all over the place.  API First – and the PowerPlatform has incredible support for this – and we are driving Microsoft harder each day on this front. 

I hope this has helped. 

Kurt Charney

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Kurt Charney
PowerPlatform Automation Engineer/Cloud Specialist
Chevron
Houston TX
713-754-4489
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