Microsoft's PowerApps: The easiest way ever to create a mobile app

Introduction and scope of PowerApps

Want to work on your phone? Microsoft has a new service to let you build your own apps, instead of waiting for the IT department to get around to it.

"The way we work is changing," says Omar Khan, who runs Microsoft's new PowerApps service. "We're more mobile than ever before; work now happens everywhere. Businesses have a more mobile workforce and most employees are doing their work from more than one location.

"But still, a lot of work happens at our desks. Many mission critical systems were build decades ago and many of those systems require VPN connectivity and a desktop web browser to access. In fact, half of information workers still don't have access to their business apps from mobile devices, even though our consumer apps have rapidly evolved, in fact so fast that it's hard to keep up with."

Redmond has produced a mobile app builder so simple any Office user can use it

Cloud drag factor

Why have business apps lagged behind? One reason is the popularity of cloud services. They're convenient and they often have mobile apps for their own tools, but that doesn't help if you need to use them alongside data from another system, especially one that's running on your own server.

"As businesses adopt more SaaS services, their data is more dispersed than ever before," Khan points out, "and being able to connect to that data across clouds is difficult."

IT departments can't help, says Khan. For one thing "they lack the skills to deliver the apps that employees need". And for another, they can't keep up with the number of apps business users need and he doubts they'll be able to catch up.

That's the same story that CCS Insight saw in a survey earlier this year – 20% of employees said they'd asked IT for mobile apps, and of the 80% who didn't ask, over half said it was because they didn't believe IT would be able to deliver (and given that 43% of those who did ask didn't get an app from their IT team, they might be right).

A third of the employees surveyed said they'd consider making their own apps without asking anyone at their company and 10% said they already had – looking at the survey numbers just from the UK, 14% said they'd make their own apps.

You don't have to write code to create options like a slider bar

Scope of PowerApps

They are exactly the users who Khan thinks will want Microsoft's new PowerApps service. The idea is to make it easier to build mobile apps that use business data, whether that's coming from a cloud service, a server or just an Excel file, says Khan. "With PowerApps, you can connect to your company data – whether that's coming from SaaS apps like Salesforce, Dropbox, Office 365 and many more, or from enterprise systems like Oracle, SAP, SQL Server or even from custom systems in house."

And the key is that this isn't another developer service; it's designed to be easy enough for the employee who needs the app to make it themselves. "Anybody with simple Office skills, Excel and PowerPoint skills [can] create apps using the data exposed through the service, and you can share them with other people in your team, on any device – iOS, Android or Windows."

You can make simple tools with PowerApps, or you can build something more powerful. Khan notes that "it's useful for anything from instant surveys all the way up to extending critical business systems, like time and expense tracking."

Excel on the go

Most businesses run on Excel spreadsheets and email (or SharePoint and workflows for larger, more sophisticated setups). The Office apps can open a spreadsheet on pretty much any smartphone or tablet, although more complex functions and macros won't work (even on an iPad Pro). But a complex spreadsheet isn't easy to use on a small screen the way an app designed for touch is.

PowerApps makes it easy to take a spreadsheet and turn it into something that looks like an app, with fields that you drag out on-screen (very much like putting objects onto a PowerPoint presentation), but still stores the data in Excel so you can go back and work on it at your desk when you want to. The file needs to be saved in the cloud, but you can choose from various cloud services; Box, Dropbox and Google Drive as well as OneDrive.

If you use SharePoint, you can use a SharePoint list as the data source for your app. For companies that use it, that's as important as getting Excel spreadsheets onto your phone says PowerApps program manager Wade Wegner. "We're taking data that used to only be available in SharePoint, in the browser, into an app, without having to write code."

Start with the built-in templates to get basic apps you can extend

Template apps

You can start with a template to make things simpler – initially there are only a few of those available (like tracking sales leads or people who are coming to an event, a product catalogue, a simple service desk app and a survey), but Microsoft will be adding more. "Templates give people ideas as to ways they can build PowerApps and ideas of how they can solve their problems, and they also show the best practices for how you build apps," explains Wegner.

So far, then, this is much like the handy FileMaker Go tool for turning FileMaker databases into mobile apps, but PowerApps gets really interesting when you use it to connect to other systems. If you use Salesforce or Dynamics, you can combine information from those systems with what's in your spreadsheet (as well as systems on your own servers, like Oracle and SAP). That means you can use your full list of customers to look up information rather than duplicating it in your app.

You can also add actions that happen outside the app – if you're collecting sales leads and you want to be able to offer a new customer a discount, you'll probably need to get approval. You can have an app send an email and process a yes or no answer to place the order with the discount or let the customer know they didn't qualify for a discount after all.

IT insight

To add more app features – like using the phone GPS to add your current location to customer leads that you create – you can use PowerApps' API features, which is where the IT team gets to have more control. They can choose extra APIs that will be available, including connections to company databases. "We heard from IT admins that they didn't want users to be building apps without having some insight into what's happening," Wagner explains.

Add workflow so your apps can do more than just editing and showing records

This is where the underpinnings of the PowerApps service become clearer – it's built on the Azure Apps service that Microsoft unveiled to developers last year, and it evolved from the Project Siena tool Microsoft created to let people make Windows 8 apps.

"With PowerApps, we not only let business users innovate with a simple tool but it also has a full infrastructure behind it in Azure that allows developers to build web apps for business use as well as native back-ends and that helps them deploy apps. It also has a full experience for IT to manage those data connections as well," Khan explains.

You can build apps in PowerApps on Windows, OS X and in a web browser. PowerApps starts as a free preview – when it launches you'll be able to make as many apps as you want without having to pay for the service, and it will be free for your IT team to manage those apps. However, if you want to connect to your own servers to get data, you'll need to pay for a business licence.