A Basic Intro to PowerApps

Despite how much I've been blogging about Apple stuff lately, I still put in time on Microsoft technologies. Specifically, I've been working a lot with Sharepoint lately. If you've worked with Sharepoint, whether on-prem or O365, you've either used or heard of using InfoPath forms for getting data into Lists. InfoPath is due to be EOL'd in the coming years (2023, last time I checked), so I don't see it being a good idea to build complex forms in it any longer. MS' replacement for InfoPath, is called PowerApps. It's meant to be a low-code method for building forms and "apps" you can deploy to users of your organization. I'll be giving a general overview of what PowerApps are and when you, as a Sharepoint admin, would want to build a PowerApp vs an InfoPath form.

Background

The program I support makes Sharepoint Online teamsites available for the student project teams. Since the teams are already using Sharepoint for collaboration, some business processes are done through Sharepoint Online (SPO), such as reserving meeting spaces, submitting travel or purchasing requests. Those travel and purchasing request forms pre-date my employment and are InfoPath forms. The application to the program is handled currently by a PHP/SQL app. For a variety of reasons, I'm looking at rebuilding it in Sharepoint. This is what brought me to finding PowerApps. 

PowerApps vs InfoPath

As mentioned above, PowerApps are replacing InfoPath forms, and I think it's a welcome change. If you build a list in SPO, adding a record is pretty straightforward but quite basic. (Also, for certain situations, you may not want to expose an entire list for someone to add a record to. Instead, InfoPath or PowerApps will allow you to expose a form to the end-user so all they can do is add a record.) For example, if you need features like conditional visibility for certain elements or cascading dropdowns, the default new-record form of an SPO list won't cut it. In the past, you'd have needed an InfoPath form. InfoPath Designer, much like many of Microsoft's IT tools (think System Center products, etc) is very unintuitive and intimidating for a new user. 

PowerApps can be Designed

I'm not an InfoPath expert, but one of the things that I dislike about it is that, while it can be easy to make a very basic form for an SP list (once you know what you're doing a little bit), they're not attractive. Even the nicest InfoPath forms I've seen always look like a High-School HTML project from the early 2000's. There's not really a lot of design-ability built in. 

This is where PowerApps comes in. PowerApps allows one to not only build a form, but they have much more control over the design of the form. For example, my application form that I'm building has multiple pages. In InfoPath,  everything would generally be one single form. 

PowerApps Editors

When you build an InfoPath form, you build it in InfoPath Designer. The latest version is 2013 and can be downloaded for free from Microsoft. You can use it to build forms for Sharepoint 2013, Sharepoint 2016, or Sharepoint Online. InfoPath Designer can only be run from a device running Windows. 

PowerApps can be built using a desktop application called PowerApps Studio (available in the Windows Store), or via the web at powerapps.microsoft.com. In my complex application form I've built, 100% of it  has been done through the web-client on my Mac. 

PowerApps can be run "anywhere"

With an InfoPath form, you publish it to your Sharepoint site and that's how people add records to a list. You can provide just a URL to your InfoPath form where your users click on it and authenticate into your SP environment to fill out the form (Which can be an easy way to grab info from them without asking them to type it in, like name, email address, etc.). If you want to get a little fancier, you can embed your form into an itable of your traditional website. You can do these same things with a PowerApp if these processes work for your business. Otherwise, you can deploy it out to cell-phones and tablets. For example, let's say you have a team of sales professionals out in the field that need to be able to add and track orders. You can build a PowerApp that shows current orders in real-time and allows your sales team to add their orders. Maybe pulling out their company issued laptop to see new orders all the time isn't feasible. With the PowerApps app for their iOS or Android smartphone or tablet, they can run the PowerApp from their mobile device. PowerApps can generally scale between smartphone, tablet, and webapp running on a desktop or laptop.

Over the last few months leading up to this post, I've spent a LOT of time building some stuff in PowerApps, so keep an eye out for more information about it, if you're interested.