When it comes to Application Lifecycle Management, many product leaders find it demanding. Though leaders use low-code platforms like Power Apps, they encounter a lack of collaboration and interoperability. Besides, transporting applications and components from the Power Apps environment to another build or user environment remains highly challenging. This leads to deferrals in application delivery, increased cost, and resource consumption.
As a best practice, product managers can effectively automate Power Apps builds by integrating the platform with the Microsoft 365 suite. This integration is all about strengthening collaboration across an enterprise by bringing development and operations teams closer together and accelerating innovation by creating applications in a combined way. The integration also helps in extending the gains of DevOps and Agile methodologies. Power Apps Integration with MS 365 allows managers to connect their low-code applications with reliable project management tools. This modernizes the development lifecycle from ideation to deployment.
Prerequisites for Integrating Power Apps and Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365’s ALM Accelerator can be installed in an ecosystem that supports the Dataverse database. Fortunately, Power Apps has intuitive support for this database. The accelerator can be used to deploy low-code apps built on Power Apps to other environments that also have a Dataverse database. By collaborating with a Microsoft Power Apps development company, tech enthusiasts can understand the steps for effective integration.
Along with the above, the following prerequisites are required for integration:
- A licensed Microsoft 365 account with permission to build and view AD groups, generate product registrations, and provide admin consent to Power Apps
- A valid Power Apps portfolio with authorizations to build and organize pipelines, repositories, service connections, and extensions
- An active Microsoft Power Platform account with permission to form application users and grant permissions to the application user
The Convergence of Power Apps and Microsoft 365 – Key Features
Microsoft 365 ecosystem offers several tools and solutions that offer DevOps capabilities. Another key aspect of Power Apps is that it’s adaptable enough to allow leaders to integrate with those different tools through APIs, SOAP/REST web services, Forge components, and accelerators. This way, leaders can reduce the complexity of integrating low-code apps with CI/CD engines like Azure DevOps. This combination streamlines the deployment of a complex app in real time without the need for manual scripting activities.
The integration also provides technical managers with features that support the comprehensive lifecycle of an application:
- Single-stage Deployment – With simple interface actions, app creators can deploy multiple user interfaces, databases, and workflows. By using the dependency analysis engine in Microsoft 365, creators can monitor and ensure a functional state for all active applications.
- Easy Transition – By using Microsoft 365’s wireframe tools, app managers can set up a deployment plan and migrate the required applications to another environment. As per a recent survey, Power Apps’ built-in accelerators look for the dependencies before migration, overcome 90% of migration issues, and seamlessly deploy the application in the required environment.
- Operations and Analytics – With easy-to-use analytical dashboards, both technical and non-technical stakeholders can assess the performance of low-code applications. Similarly, troubleshooting most critical issues in apps can be done within seconds.
- Identity Management – Power Apps and Microsoft 365 combination handles identity and configuration management of active applications
- Automated Versioning – Need to launch an earlier version of an application or virtually consolidate development? No problem! Power Apps version management delivers strategic ways to organize application history.
4 Technical Strengths of Power Apps and Microsoft 365 Integration
1. Empowering Business Users With UX Controls
With Power Apps and MS 365 combination, digital leaders can quickly start constructing apps through a wide range of intuitive UI elements using low-code methods. These apps can continue to grow in sophistication, and business users can use technical tools like Visual Studio Code to augment low-code applications with tailored client-side components.
Similarly, non-IT stakeholders can build UX elements using the Power Apps Component Framework (PCF)and deliver a completely customized app experience. These components are reusable and platform-agnostic, thus easily compatible and can fix right into any number of low-code applications. These custom elements can be created from scratch in Typescript or by leveraging standard development frameworks like React.
2. Leverage Existing Business Logic and Data Sources
The merging of the Microsoft Power Apps development platform and 365 suite unlocks access to more than 300+ data sources and leveraging systems like SAP, Workday, ServiceNow, and Salesforce becomes easier. However, tech leaders need to develop a custom connector when they need access to a data source where no built-in support for Power Apps is available.
Whether leaders need to provide application access to new or existing data that resides in the Cloud or on-premises, leveraging Azure Functions and API Management is the right choice. In short, by creating custom connectors, unlocking access to any third-party data source is possible. Azure API Management’s native integration with Power Apps allows leaders to seamlessly push these tailored connectors for better discovery and consumption.
3. Extend and Restructure Legacy Systems With Automation
The interconnection of Power Apps and Microsoft 365 enables tech leaders to bring legacy systems to life by implementing API-based automations and linking them with applications.
The availability of AI-driven Automation modules in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem allows Power Apps users to produce “Automation-as-an-API” on top of any low-code app. This allows to capture of the keyboard inputs and mouse ticks, including parameterization, which runs in response to data actions or API calls. This makes it possible to incorporate low-code applications with legacy systems, even when the systems do not have an intuitive API or database support.
Let’s look at the case study of FortisAlberta, a US-based energy services provider. The leading firm was working with a legacy energy calculation portal. This portal was not able to deliver reports online and meet the enterprise's needs. Understand this, they hired offshore Power Apps developers and integrated a custom application with the legacy platform. On average, the updated energy calculation system is now processing 120 housing entities in an hour and improved business ROI by 75%.
4. Streamlined Application Lifecycle Management
The integration offers access to ALM Tools that automate common build and installation tasks of applications. This includes deploying Power Apps-based assets into source control, creating build artifacts, getting to mainstream environments, provisioning, and running tests against the application. Power Apps Build, which is an assortment of build and release tools integrated with Azure DevOps, is presently in the pilot phase.
This product release will provide further support for App Principal authentication, allowing leaders to organize a range of build tasks starting from quality checks to environment management. The collaborative approach enables both technical and non-technical stakeholders to participate in the creation of an enterprise solution. Similar Power Apps development platform integration with GitHub will be made available sooner, enabling product managers to create, test, and deploy custom code straight from the repository.
Also read – Unlock the Potential of Power Apps
Closing Thoughts
Development and deployment of Power Apps-based solutions can be managed effortlessly using Microsoft 365’s automated CI/CD pipelines. It speeds up time-to-production and enhances application quality by minimizing the barriers between development and operations. On the whole, the integration of Power Apps into Microsoft 365 is quite progressive and well-executed.
