A Brief introduction to Microsoft’s PowerApps Platform

After several months of being in Preview, Microsoft has moved its PowerApps service into General Release – though if PowerBI is anything to go by, we’ll see regular updates and enhancements in the coming months    .

If you’re not familiar with PowerApps, it’s a tool to create Data-Driven mobile phone applications in a Graphical Interface, and ‘without a need to learn any code’.

What gives this platform so much potential is that it’s built around your existing Office 365 Business Tenant, and so can tap into existing data repositories, such as Azure SQL Server, Sharepoint Lists and dozens of external data sources – in fact pretty much anything with API functionality. And, as with PowerBI, you can connect it to your on-premises SQL Server via an Enterprise Gateway.

Once you’ve created your ‘app’, you then share it with users & groups within your organisation in the same way you might share a document.

Whilst PowerApps isn’t strictly marketed as a BI platform, I think many BI professionals will quickly see the potential for this application to improve access to BI within their organisation – and importantly, capturing data back from the users

As I familiarise myself with this platform, I will share some of what I learn with you here. I will keep this ‘master’ post updated with links to any individual posts I create on the subject.

Connecting PowerApps to an Existing Enterprise Gateway

Populate a Dropdown Based on the Value of Another Dropdown

Transferring Data & Parameters Between Screens in PowerApps

Let me know how you get on!