An awesome session presented today by Chris O’brien, during which he took us through the new capabilities and features of Power Apps, which are in my opinion just AWESOME 🙂

Before listing the features, I needed to highlight the fact that there are 6 times more Power Apps compared to the same period last year, such growth can only confirm that Power Apps will be around for a while and that it might be the first GO-TO tool to build simple Enterprise solutions, fairly quickly without any coding knowledge.

Power Apps by its design is not a programming platform or coding tool, it uses syntax similar to the ones in Excel for formulas, and the code runs as a set of instructions one after the other.

We need to keep in mind the limitation of SharePoint forms customisations and the proper Power Apps. So if you use a SharePoint list form customisation, these might not be available to users (by default), it they use the mobile client, again, I would add YET.

Power Apps offre three templates to start you project:

•  Canvas App (the most popular).
• Model-driven App (more expensive).
• Customised SharePoint Forms
  

Here is a list of the most interesting I took from the sessions

•  Power Apps can work offline using the commands such as PATCH, Collect

• Power Apps offers local storage capabilities (around 20Mb), which I think, is more than enough to store lookups data, temporary forms data (for synchronizing later), and other types of data.
• Combining Power Apps with Flow we can have Actionable forms embedded in the emails for smoother business process design and better user adoptions *hopefully 😉
• Power Apps integrates easily with SharePoint, so Apps can be embedded in the modern pages using the Power Apps Embed web part.
• Connecting to on-premise data sources is now avaiable and easy to configure. Before you ask, YES it is secure as only outbound connection to Azure endpoints are needed. In other terms, you won’t drill a whole in your firewall * you can sit Mr Sys Admin 😉