9 Ways Microsoft PowerApps Can Improve Your Business

Ever feel like something is holding your business projects back from true greatness?

Eventually, every manager discovers there are limits to how efficiently and effectively they can manage major projects. At that point, the only way to improve anything is to find a better set of tools for the given task.

Microsoft PowerApps is the ultimate toolset for anyone who wants to manage their business projects and accelerate growth. Unfortunately, many managers don’t fully understand what PowerApps is and what it can do for the bottom line.

Keep reading to discover how Microsoft PowerApps can completely change how you do business!

 

What Is Microsoft PowerApps?

We’ve got a full breakdown below of the different benefits that PowerApps can offer your business. Before we dive into that, though, it’s important to define what Microsoft PowerApps actually is.

In a nutshell, PowerApps is Microsoft’s attempt to provide an “all in one” solution to various business problems. To this end, PowerApps is a collection of apps and services as well as its own data platform, complete with easy connectors (more on this later).

The company’s goal is to avoid the “if you give a mouse a cookie” problem. That’s when you buy one product and then realize you need to purchase other products to get maximum use out of the first one.

With PowerApps, you are typically good to go with a single subscription. And if you ever worry that you aren’t making the most out of this service, you can always link up with expert PowerApps consultants online.

Now that you know more about what PowerApps is, let’s look at some of the benefits it has to offer in terms of project management and growth acceleration.

 

Hyper-Efficiency

On paper, the equation for great management is pretty simple. You want to accomplish all your goals while minimizing your cost and time spent. While that sounds great on paper, the truth is that many businesses struggle with running things very efficiently.

Fortunately, improved efficiency is one of the greatest benefits of PowerApps. That’s because it reduces many of the more complex aspects of the development process into an easy and intuitive “drag and drop” operation.

Just imagine all of the time that your development team spends on tasks like creating user interfaces and linking form fields. By streamlining all of this, PowerApps helps make development hyper-efficient and helps you build empowering apps.

With this tool, your team can create brand new applications in a fraction of the time. By saving time and money in this way, you can boost your bottom line while never falling behind again on your development timeline.

 

Fulfill The Need for Speed

Speaking of never falling behind, efficiency is only one aspect of remaining on schedule. Another aspect is, of course, your overall speed. And PowerApps can help improve that speed even as it improves your efficiency.

That’s mostly because speed and efficiency are linked together. For example, imagine all of the various daily tasks that go into development. Now imagine PowerApps shaving time off–a few minutes here, a few minutes there.

It may not seem like that’s a lot of time when you’re in the moment. But multiplying all of that saved time by all of your development days and for each team member and the time really adds up.

From a management perspective, this improved speed is a dream come true. Every minute that the development team shaves off is another minute they can spend polishing the final product.

Thanks to PowerApps, you’ll never have to make the choice between doing it fast and doing it well. Instead, you get to have it both ways!

 

Optimize Development

The end result of that improved efficiency and speed is an optimized development process. Why? Because with PowerApps, you no longer have to deal with the “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem.

The typical development process includes a number of different people with different responsibilities. One team may be developing the product while a completely different manager must approve it. Along the way, other teams handle things like quality assurance and product rollout.

Each step of the process adds a little more time to develop. By the time things are complete, your new app may already feel out of date!

With PowerApps, the same business unit can handle the entire development process from beginning to end. This optimizes the entirety of development while freeing up key personnel to complete other responsibilities.

And when the smoke clears, your cutting-edge app will be timely and relevant instead of feeling like yesterday’s news!

 

Low-Code Apps

We’ve talked a lot about app development. As you know, app development has a well-earned reputation for being highly complex.

That’s because other development tools require mastering countless APIs, objects, and functions and understanding entire libraries of coding and design theory. But would you believe that PowerApps makes it where you don’t need mad programming skills to create an app?

This all goes back to that “drag and drop” interface that we mentioned before. Most of the actual app coding can be done by just dragging and dropping. And that fundamental change means big things for your business.

First, it means less experienced programmers can get more done with PowerApps. Second, it means veteran programmers can do far more in less time. Finally, PowerApps handling the overhead means it’s easier than ever to manage the development process.

Whether you are designing desktop apps, mobile apps, or browser apps, Microsoft PowerApps makes it all much easier.

 

Connect Data Sources & Services

Sometimes, one person’s app development causes another person extra work. For example, someone else may have to create their own backend SQL Server queries to get the most out of an app with an otherwise intuitive frontend.

All of that is a thing of the past with PowerApps. That’s because Microsoft has standardized data connectors, making it easy to directly connect most storage devices to PowerApps.

Depending on what you need to do, this alone can save plenty of development time. And in addition to device connection, PowerApps makes it easy to connect to the cloud as well, making it a perfect solution for remote app development.

 

Automate (Almost) Everything

It shouldn’t be a surprise that PowerApps integrates so well with existing Microsoft products. For managers, one of the biggest deals is how well PowerApps works with Power Automate and the entire Microsoft Power Platform.

Power Automate is designed to keep your entire team up to date about major changes and keep everyone on task. But when something is not optimized for Automate, then it’s easy for you to lose many of the efficiency benefits that Automate brings to the table.

Thanks to the PowerApps and Power Automate integration, the custom apps that you develop can respond to data, updates, or changes, even when they come from other platforms. That means your app can embody the values of your own company in staying both relevant and versatile.

 

Full Microsoft 365 Integration

If you liked the integration with Microsoft Automate, you’ll love this. PowerApps fully integrates with Microsoft 365, and this opens up a world of possibilities for your project management.

In fact, Microsoft 365, Automate, and Power BI all integrate effortlessly with PowerApps. That means that your team can very easily transfer data across different apps and share them with the relevant team.

Compared to some of the other bells and whistles, that may sound pretty straightforward. Buy by optimizing how your team shares data, you can optimize your project at every level of development.

 

Mobile Ready

In some ways, modern apps face the same challenges that websites began facing a few years ago. This can best be described as the “desktop vs mobile” dilemma.

Sometimes, business apps may look and function just fine on a desktop. But when you try to make the transition to mobile, it looks cluttered and confusing via smartphone.

The good news is that PowerApps does for apps what responsive design did for website design. PowerApps lets you easily develop for both desktop and mobile and optimize how the app will look on screens of various sizes.

Thanks to the standard connectors we mentioned before, both desktop and mobile apps can use the same set of data. And you walk away with an app that is intuitive for workers whether they are at the office or on the go.

 

Affordable Subscriptions

While all of these benefits sound nice for project management goals, you may have a simple question: “am I going to have to pay an arm and a leg for this?”

Believe it or not, the answer is “no.” PowerApps subscriptions are very competitively priced, and it’s easy for you to find the right plan for your particular management and development needs.

And if you already have a Microsoft 365 subscription, be sure to check the fine print. There is a chance that you already have access to PowerApps via your subscription and can start enjoying the benefits today!

 

What’s Next?

Now you know how Microsoft PowerApps can transform your project management and accelerate growth. But do you know who can help you get the most out of PowerApps?

We specialize in helping companies maximize the use of PowerApps, Office 365, Sharepoint, and more. To see what we can do for you and your development team, contact us today!

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