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Reality of building enterprise-level PowerApp for critical business process

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Posted on by scriptkat

Hey all,

I have been asked to evaluate and possibly implement a series of critical Human Resources data-entry/workflows/reporting that would be leveraged by ~15,000 employees in PowerApps, and potentially accessed by thousands of employees at a time.

I am learning the technology, and am frankly concerned about the scalability and reliability of building and supporting critical business workflows that may be accessed by up to thousands of employees at a time in PowerApps. I've tried researching the feasibility of this myself, but can't find much in the Microsoft documentation that points towards limitations.

It does concern me that every third-party reference/consultant I come across flatly recommends not to put critical business workflows into PowerApps. It also isn't sufficient enough of an explanation for me to explain to my managers why this might not work. I also don't want to do a trial-by-fire in implementing something and releasing it to my organization only to discover that the scalability/performance is not requisite.

Does anyone have experience of implementing something similar in their organization, and if so what was your experience?

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Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

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cchannon 4,702 Moderator on at

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I have no idea who is telling you that the platform cannot handle critical business workflows, but they are flatly wrong.

This platform is used to house mission-critical beating-heart kind of data and processes for MASSIVE implementations that utterly dwarf the scale you're talking about. There is zero concern with having thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users in the application. It can be--and is--used at that scale for many customers.

There are countless examples of massive deployment success stories, but the PowerCAT team has actually collected a bunch of them in one place to make it easy for you. Take a look at some of these names and the stories behind them. H&M, Coca Cola, The Red Cross, Chevron, EY... Companies of massive scale have used this platform to deliver key capabilities for years.

When you say "every third-party reference/consultant I come across flatly recommends not to put critical business workflows into PowerApps" it sounds like someone you're talking to is trying to sell you away from the platform. There is no reason whatsoever to think that the platform cannot scale to your usage requirements. 15K concurrent users is a normal use case; it is by no means a stretch for the platform.

If you'd like an impartial assessment, private message me. I only work with massive scale public sector implementations so I am not looking for your business, but I don't mind helping you get more references and maybe connecting with a partner who can speak more directly to your industry's needs.

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scriptkat 25 on at

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Thank you for your detailed response. I found the included reference very helpful, and have since been talking to Microsoft separately regarding this. I will private message you, appreciate the offer.

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peakmargins 2 on at

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Hi @scriptkat, did you try implementing the solution in Power Apps? Would you mind sharing your learnings with the community? What worked well? What was challenging? Did it perform at scale?

Thank you!

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RobinCarlsson365 5 on at

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I usually do not recommend PowerApps for critical business processes. The criticality and non-funcitonal requirements for a solution is not only related to the amount of end-users or the possibility to scale. In my point of view, non-funcitonal requirements fo also include other level of availability, the possibility to plan maintenance windows, the possibility to restore and host the service on different hosting platforms, etc., which are requirements that PowerApps may not fullfill for critical business applications (unless it is a Dynamics 365 application).

Microsoft have work to do with PowerApps, to mature the platform, to make management more transparent, more agnostic, and specifically provide the option self-manage and plan maintenance of the platform based on customer requirements.

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