When should we use Power Apps and the Power Platform?
The nitty gritty of decision maker confusions
I recently did a poll in Nepalese in IT group (a group of IT professionals in Australia) on how and when we should use the Power Platform.
On what factors should we make the decision to use power platform?
So let's dive in, shall we?
Disclaimer: I will try my best to ensure I stay non-biased even though I know I'll be biased due to the number of technologies I've learnt about enough to overcome their issues
Ease of learning: I built my first powerapps in 3 days, as a proof of concept. It was an using SharePoint list, and had a canvas app front end. It was so easy to build and deploy, it felt almost unreal . There's MS learn, there's plenty of developers that do YouTube vids, there's the free Microsoft developer account that gives you unlimited tools for all of power platform and office 365 and much more. Another one, if you get stuck, a quick google helps alot as there are enough people in the platform now who have run into similar issues as yourself. These ensure there is relatively less tech debt and replacing yourself as a dev is quite easy as the new person in the role can pick your code up quite easily.
Integrations: PowerApps and the Power Platform draws from your office 365 licence directly and there's no hassle. You can easily build apps, flows and reports and not worry about access issues as all is managed seamlessly if you use Azure AD within your organisation. (I think there's close to 409 million users of Azure AD). They integrate with SQL server, splunk and salesforce with ease if you want. It does so using many ways
A. Connectors (native and others) which there are 1000 or more of. You can talk to systems directly from powerapps and power automate using connectors and receive data and perform operations instantly.
B. Http requests and webhooks which allow you to talk to any modern system. I recently built a powerapps that used azure cognitive search via API and azure openai to enable you to talk to your documents and it took me a week to do so. List of all connectors here
Time to market: On average, powerapps save 3 to 4 times the effort compared to building a traditional application. Templates are available both in official powerapps channel and others via GitHub or community sources. Also, you can simply point powerapps to a data source and it will generate a responsive sample app for you.
It took me less than a minute to create this app on my phone for this article I'm writing. Amazing, isn't it?
Licensing: This can be both a pro or con, as powerapps normal app can cost from free to 40 aud per user per month. If you use SharePoint lists, it should cost you nothing, which in my opinion is a great price. But if you're looking to build an app for 100000 users within your organisation and you need something like SQL server, you might be better off with other platform like .NET as they might cost significantly less. But the thing is as the licence is all you can eat, you might be ahead with the power platform with multiple apps.
Future proofing: I know this sounds weird, esp considering it is a closed system and MS might one day decide they won't be supporting the platform. But hear me out here. Last earnings, CEO Satya Nadella mentioned for the first time how much dynamics 365 made (Dynamics 365 is the platform that power platform is based on) and it is only 5.5 billion. What a shame. Jokes aside that is not much compared to Salesforce’s 32 billion considering Microsoft have an advantage of being the de-facto enterprise platform for most of the organisations in the world. Microsoft will definitely want to compete and eat Salesforce's pie. Also, Airtable (the platform which Microsoft seems inspired from to create SharePoint list) is valued at 10 billion + and Microsoft will no way leave the market when there's already so much money invested and to be made in this platform.
When not to use Power Platform?
When you're already invested in other low code platforms like salesforce or servicenow
When you have an amazing army of developers and don't have to worry about tech debt
When the licensing cost is too high for your organisation.
You like keeping your job (I heard a team build something in F# so now they have perpetual jobs as not much F# Devs in Perth)
Hope this was helpful. Reach out to me and subscribe if you want to learn more of the platform.