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Should we take powerapps to production or it is nor realible enough yet?

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Posted on by MRCL

I have had serious reliability problems with powerapps particularly with data not loading. From the comments in the forum other people are also having the same issue.

Now I ask, does microsoft expect us to take powerapps apps to production now? Or we are not supposed to do that yet? If anybody could clarify that I would appreciate it.

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Building Power Apps

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hpkeong 2,944 on at

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Hi

I have been with Project Siena and now PowerApps since the first day. Let me share with you and hope it helps for you to think twic before you go further into writing apps:
1. I am using Excel (with DropBox, so far the fastest in Saving / Reading).
2. All my apps are saving fast and normal, without any disturbance.
3. Speed of saving depends on internet. Herein Malaysia, for 2-4mps speed (Home Wi-Fi) and 3G-LTE for phone, it still works pretty acceptavle (DropBox..average saving duration: 4-8 sec).
4. When saving data in Tablet Apps, Phone Apps can load data for the first time but failed to REFRESH (PG is notified of this issue and hope it will be resolved soon).
5. Sharing only ot the same domain. This is expected to be more open in future. Hopefully.
6. Printing from within Apps is still not possible forcing user has to print from Excel (which is very risky as original datasource will be corrupted).

Others: I would say that most of the functions, formula, layout, etc. are depending on apps writer. Apart from Printing & Sharing of Apps, (and also loading of phone apps speed), PowerApps has rendered a pretty perfect platform for creating all kind of apps.

Anyway, it is just my experience in using Project Siena (which I had published about 10 apps in Windows Store, under PK Hong, which may view / download) and PowerApps (for commercial, MRP, etc.).

Best wishes.

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MRCL 81 on at

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Hpkeong,
Thanks for sharing your experience. I also believe in the platform and have devoted significant time to learn it.
Let me share my experience: I have two apps, one using excel in onedrive for business and another using sql azure. I have no problem with the time it takes to save the data. The problem is the time to load the data and, most important, how often it fails to load the data without warning. It seems the problem got worse after the single sign in announcement, but I am just speculating. The problem happens in all platforms (ios, windows, web). My company uses office 365 and, of course, we want people to use onedrive for business instead of Dropbox.
Last thursday I brought a meeting with 5 people to show the potential of the platform and the data would not load. The day before it had loaded. The next day it loaded again. If you close the app and try to load it again it often does not load. And it happens with sql azure too.
Now there is another problem: in Edge when I click a button to navigate to another screen the app refreshes to the same screen (often not loading the data). In Chrome it works.

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Steelman70 873 on at

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Hello both, I have been experimenting over the last few weeks and I also think this platform has real potential.

In regards to printing/reporting I use Excel itself, and in particular the combination of PowerQuery (to get direct access to the data source) and PowerPivot (to define the measures to be reported). This does not have the same issues of data corruption that Hpkeong mentions, because you can have a reporting Excel file using the data from another file in read-only mode. But this is all part of Power BI with a thriving community.

Back to PowerApps and I am also experiencing data download reliability problems, also with SQL Azure. This happens mostly when I try to do analysis on datasets with >500 rows (e.g. summing of thousands of cash movements to calculate the current outstanding balance). I suspect this is an issue because delegation is still being refined and more importantly because we can only access the data of tables in SQL Azure and not the queries. This must surely be just a question of time, and then a lot of the processing can be delegated to the server.

Please vote for this idea: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/PowerApps-Ideas/PowerApps-must-also-see-SQL-Azure-Queries-not-only-Tables/idi-p/863

Regarding Edge, unfortunately it is unusable but Chrome is a good alternative.

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Brian Dang 3,976 on at

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Bump. I'd really like an official response on this question. What expectations should we all have at this point? It's a good question since we're more than six months into the first release.

From my experience, PowerApps is indeed powerful, but the thing holding me back from considering my apps to be end products is the record limitation. The app buttons, filters, and galleries work the way they need to. Once delegation is extended to Excel/OneDrive/Dropbox, there's no stopping what's possible with PowerApps.

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hpkeong 2,944 on at

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Dear Comrade

I am very sure PowerApps Group will definitely see our enthusiastic in making apps with their powerful PowerApps.
Things maynot be perfect initially but expectations on the stability of PowerApps is crucial to all of us.

Win 10 Mobile is a nightmare though Win 10 Tablet is Excellent.

Sincerely wishing that PowerApps will eventually be a real Cross-Platform Apps Creator for Productivity, etc.
Just a few more steps, and surely market will accept.

6 months (+ 2 years in Project Siena) shall be a sufficient period for Microsoft, such a Giant group with thousand of engineers to give us the best.

Awaiting for Stable PowerApps Studio, though not the final (and definitely keep going on for innovative).

Sincerely yours.

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Darshan Desai on at

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Thank you folks for the great feedback in this thread. Yes, we are painfully aware that there are some rough edges today and I want to assure you that we are working hard to fix them and make PowerApps more reliable and performant. We are making improvements every week and rolling out client updates with these fixes every two weeks. I will say take a bet on PowerApps and go to production if it addresses your business scenarios today. From our side, we will support you if you run into any issues.

I want to summarize the key feedback from this thread and provide a quick update on these issues:

1. Improve connector reliability (data loading): We take reliability issues seriously and are putting a number of fixes in place to address this. You will notice continuous improvements in this area. We are also investing in building a good error handling experience when your data fails to load, so you know what went wrong. Sometimes these errors are external to PowerApps and we want to make sure we communicate these clearly.

2. Improve data load performance (for SQL Azure), esp for larger data sets: Performance is a top priority for PowerApps and we are also investing in improving the overall app start time, including time to establish connection and load data. Again, this is an area where you'll see continuous improvements.

3. Extend delegation support (>500 records) for Excel on OneDrive/Dropbox: We just introduced delegation support for SQL Azure and Salesforce and are working on extending them to other connectors. We understand this is a big limitation to build any enterprise apps and this support is coming soon for multiple connectors and multiple operators.

4. Support for Edge: Web player (running apps on a browser) is a relatively new feature (we started supporting it end of April) and we are fixing bugs and rolling out updates every week. There is known set of issues we're fixing with supporting different browser types and new issues/bugs that we and our customers find. Please report issues you find to our support team and it will help us prioritize and fix these.

5. Share apps with users outside your tenant/domain and
6. Support for printing: These two features are on our backlog and we understand they are important, but not on our immediate list. We'll address them going forward, in the months to come.

Again, I want to thank you for being awesome early adopters and providing great feedback. We are glad that you are on this journey with us and we'll make every effort to support you and make you successful!

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Brian Dang 3,976 on at

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Thank you for the response, Darshan.

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hpkeong 2,944 on at

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Hi Darshan:

My respect to you and your team for making PowerApps such a powerful software.

[PC Magazine gave PowerApps the lowest score, and we wish to prove them wrong.
http://in.pcmag.com/zoho-projects/104878/feature/building-an-app-with-no-coding-myth-or-reality
(Appian, Zoho Creator, Salesforce Lightning, and Microsoft PowerApps)]

With continous effort (hopefully in parallel with Annual Update of Win 10 by the end of 29/Jul/2016), PowerApps will remove "Preview" and becomes one of the official member of Productivity Software, together with MS Office, PowerBI (awaiting for next integration) and MS Flow (awaiting for next improvement).

MRP, MRP II, ERP and then SAP.... I had been going thru these era since 1989 ~ now(MRP, MRP II, ERP) & 1992 (SAP).
Just sharing: a non-customized edition of SAP for SMI in Malaysia costs MYR 200,000 (min) or USD 50,000, and it takes about 3-6 months to complete.

With PowerApps, (and as a Quality, Productivity Consutlant, and I am a Non-IT guy), one can manage to use your powerful PowerApps to finish Productivity Apps, at least sufficient to be used for Sales, Planning (with BOM), Production and Quality Inspection till Warehouse control within 2 weeks ~ 1 month. I wish this encourage more to indulge into writing Productivity Apps for SMI with lowest cost as possible.

Your comments on Points 1 & 4 are important. Points & 6 will finally be the solution for Industries to love it (My existing 3 customers are using/testing/debugging and awaiting your printing features).

Many thanks and cheers!

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siddisma 2 on at

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The download button for the windows store for powerapp studio isnt working. Im on windows 10. Any help?

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