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Power Apps Solutions

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Posted on by JayHangan Microsoft Employee

Good morning Makers,

Have you been working on a Power Apps Solution that you would like to share with your peers...Please do! Tell us about the scenario and business need, then talk about the great solution you and your team developed to increase productivity. We would be interested in learning about the roadblocks you faced, what learning resources you used, and what tips and tricks you would like to share.

Let's help make each other better and start the conversation.

Categories:

GCC, GCCH, DoD - Federal App Makers (FAM)

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Jay- Our CIO office posted below on their site. When you reach out they have two people that have little knowledge on Power Apps. We have created a Power Platform group to give useful resources to people interested in learning more. We need help with Adoption at the CIO level.
Best Practice
Why should Power Apps be avoided?

1. More difficult to support, additional training and documentation will be required to support the application
2. Easier to break with minor changes to the underlying data source
3. Permissions are managed outside of SharePoint making it more difficult for site owners and technical support representatives
4. Longer turnaround for development than SharePoint form
5. Application dependency on multiple technologies which requires more technical knowledge to maintain and troubleshoot
When to use Power Apps?

Power Apps should only be used when SharePoint OOB options will not meet the requirements and technical support is available for the build and maintenance of the solution. Since using Power Apps will increase the cost and build time of the application consider the business benefit of the requirement and whether the additional cost will outweigh the benefit of the feature or functionality to the process owners.
Reach out to the XXXX to review the requirements for advice on how to move forward. Even if power apps is determined the best option this review could save time and money to avoid pitfalls that have already cost many lost hours of development.

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ivan_apps 2,189 Moderator on at

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I created a PowerApp solution to digitize the approval routing and creation of the DoD Form DD2875 + supporting docs for new accounts/onboarding.
Business need was to centrally track, monitor and route form creation and approval so the process didn't revert back to PDFs being sent back and forth through email.
Our organization can now track and monitor time to completion, time in stage, and improve processes based on metrics recorded in the app. I plan to build PowerBI dashboards now to easily display high level metrics for the overall process.
It is a canvas app so that Premium licensing is avoided! The app is currently in production but I hope to package a generic version soon with the supporting SharePoint list backend definitions so it can be easily shared & customized. The design is similar to Model-Driven apps, even including clickable Business Process Flow stages. Attaching screenshots for reference and I hope to get it out on GitHub sometime soon.

Learning resources: Reza Dorani's YouTube Channel & Shane Young's YouTube Channel . These were instrumental in creating this app.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Great work Ivan. I love using April Dunham YouTube Channel and Reza Dorani's YouTube Channel. They have great solutions and ideas.

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rdfarley 5 on at

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Would you share the msapp file?

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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@ivan_apps This looks great! It's very exciting to see others building solutions in the platform for gov customers! Great job and keep going!

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Nestle_Snipes 3 on at

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Outstanding! I'd love to get a copy of your template!

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timt0m 4 on at

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How did you get the E-sig to populate on the PDF. I'd love to see this app template as well.

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ivan_apps 2,189 Moderator on at

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I finally was able to put some time aside to do this - below is the link to the App to create DD2875s!
I'm sure there are things I missed in the install steps so please give me some feedback and I'll fix the install doc.

ivan-apps/PowerApps: sample power apps (github.com)

In the interest to help everyone out with the same questions you may have, please use the comments or post an issue on the GitHub page. Thanks!

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NChan 2 on at

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Hi, Can you please share a unmanaged version of this solution. I want to look at your canvas app to see what it does.

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FocusRach 63 on at

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On the contractor side, we've created a couple of enterprise-wide apps that have been working well. We are a smaller company and don't have to worry about data size.

Resume App
Collect details of an employee resume, skills, certs, and more. Using a Power BI report to review and analyze data. Generates a Resume from a word template and sends a copy to the manager/employee once the resume is completed.
Performance App
Most Recent - A custom in house solution to help managers and employees navigate performance related topics.
Employee Directory App
As you would expect. Simple and for searching Employees for contact information.
IT Asset Management App
SPO Forms and Mobile App for Scanning Equipment using the barcode feature.

Some of the challenges we deal with Specific to Power Apps:
Co-Authoring in GCC high Power Apps would be helpful!
More Templates available for quicker launch. In Commercial there are so many power app templates available that give stakeholders/end users a quick glance of the art of the possible. Can we have the Onboarding one moved over?
Cost Related / Available Resources: For larger data requirements, we'll need to expand to a data base. Because of the lack of familiarity with Dataverse and knowledge, I do think we would choose the tried and true SQL (in Azure). Which... I guess Microsoft gets money either way. My point is.... cost vs features is still a factor (in my current situation) that I cannot justify when it comes to continued development in Power Apps when expanding to a datasource that isn't free. Power Apps is still new to our industry and mid to small size company investment is less likely, because of the various facts:
It's new and the number of people who understand it in our industry is still small (slowly growing).
It requires development - other OOTB solutions from other companies, don't requirement development, so it's quicker to receive the functionality you need. Why go through the ordeal to spend in house development time + Costs to license and maintain a database + in house maintenance and support when it costs the same or only slightly more to buy someone else's product.
It requires support after development - OOTB Solutions can package support costs in with licensing. A custom in house app.... well... you'll need to find someone who can support it. With there not being enough power platform developers for GCC high... this is a challenge.

While I understand the decentralized model that Microsoft started this platform with, I just see that model struggling in our industry. Most people are not spending time, excitedly creating their own solutions (like I did) AND manage them internally. There are companies that are IT centric in services and thus have more than enough resources and but not everyone in our industry has that. Growing the talent pool / interest in GCC high's Power Platform would be so helpful overall. I've seen how Microsoft does this in the commercial space, I think the GCC high space just needs more attention, more community!

Other Solution Challenges for GCC High:
Power Automate - Copy feature is not working correctly.
SharePoint search - not that great yet! Some companies are avoiding SharePoint for this reason.
Simple end user/stakeholder lack of knowledge. I still met a lot of IT professionals who have not/do not spend time learning the 'new' way that Microsoft has architected solutions like SharePoint or even Teams. They are still managing in the old ways. I think adding help guides or 'walk through pop ups' for IT professionals on the Teams screen would be helpful.

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