Tech Ideas & Best Practices

Power Pages is a remarkable low-code/no-code platform built on Microsoft Dataverse, designed for creating and managing websites with utmost ease. Even without prior coding experience, you can develop a website that's accessible to anonymous users, making it perfect for sharing public information. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through the steps to create a stunning Power Pages site and offer valuable tips to ensure its professional appearance.

1.Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Power Pages Site

• Access Power Pages: Start by visiting the Power Pages website
  

• Initiate a Free Trial: Click on the Try it for free button.
• Sign In: Use your Microsoft 365 account to sign in.
• Create a Developer Environment (if needed): If you encounter a message indicating that you can't create a site in the default environment, create a developer environment.

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• Begin Site Creation: For initiating site creation, we have two options to choose from. Let's continue by opting to Start with a template.

• Select a Template: Choose a template that aligns with your site's purpose, whether it's for business, e-commerce, or personal use.

• Customize Site Details: Provide a name and web address for your site.

• Confirm and Proceed: Click Done to complete the initial setup.

2. Editing Your Power Pages Site

Once your site is ready, it's time to start editing. The Power Pages editor is user-friendly, featuring a drag-and-drop functionality to effortlessly add web parts from the Web Parts pane to your desired locations on the page.

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To configure a web part, click on it, allowing you to adjust properties like alignment, links, and images.

3. Enabling Anonymous User Access

For sites that need to be accessible to anonymous users, follow these steps:

• Click Set up in the left navigation.
• Select Site visibility.
• Under Site visibility, opt for the Public setting.
• Click Set to public.

4. Preview and Go Live

Before going live, it's crucial to preview and ensure your site looks its best. You can do this by clicking the "Preview" button and choosing between the "Desktop" or "Mobile" options to test on various devices.

Sync your website. Once you are happy with your website, you can Sync it so that it is live and accessible to your users.

Tips for Crafting a Professional Power Pages Site

• Choose the Right Template: Select a template that complements your site's purpose and appearance.
• Quality Visuals: Incorporate high-quality images and videos to enhance visual appeal.
• Clear and Concise Content: Craft content that is both clear and easily comprehensible.
• Proofreading: Always proofread your content meticulously before publishing.
• Cross-Device Testing: Ensure your site functions seamlessly across different devices and browsers.

Examples of What You Can Create with Power Pages

• Create a company website to showcase your products or services.
• Establish a blog to share your expertise with your audience.
• Develop a knowledge base to offer support to your customers.
• Design an event website for promoting and registering attendees.
• Build a community website to facilitate user interaction. 

While Power Pages works well for public-facing websites, many organizations also use SharePoint for internal portals and employee-facing experiences. Exploring modern intranet and portal structures can help you decide how these platforms complement each other.

Conclusion

Power Pages is an incredibly versatile platform for crafting professional websites, accessible even to non-coders. Its unique feature of allowing anonymous user access is a significant advantage for businesses seeking broader information sharing. To create a cohesive and successful site, remember to maintain consistent branding, implement responsive design, prioritize accessibility, keep content updated, and actively promote your site on various online channels, including social media. With these guidelines, you're well on your way to building a remarkable online presence with Power Pages.

Building a Power Pages site isn’t just about launch it’s about long-term usability. Teams that already manage SharePoint sites often find it easier to extend governance and structure across platforms when they understand how sites are planned and maintained in Microsoft environments.

In today's digital age, where connectivity and collaboration are paramount, an organization's intranet serves as the central hub for its employees. This in-house website brings together resources, documents, applications, and communication tools, fostering seamless interaction within the organization.

Crafting an intranet site that reflects the brand and engages employees is vital for a thriving workplace environment. The starting point of this engagement journey lies in homepage design. Here are five essential tips to create a best looking intranet homepage that ignites employee interest and participation.

1.Less is More: Embracing Simplicity

Simplicity is the cornerstone of effective design. An engaging intranet doesn't overwhelm users with cluttered layouts or excessive elements. Instead, it focuses on delivering the necessary information succinctly. A clean and organized design captures users' attention just as a well-presented meal appeals to the senses.

The "less is more" philosophy ensures that concepts are conveyed clearly without confusion. Drawing inspiration from successful brands like Apple and Google, we explore the power of minimalism in design, enhancing accessibility and user satisfaction.

In the ever-evolving world of software development, efficiency and accuracy are key. Microsoft has taken a giant leap in this direction this week with the introduction of Microsoft Copilot, a groundbreaking AI-powered assistant. Generative AI is proving to be a game changer in the technological landscape. As users become more familiar with it, they can expect a substantial increase in performance. This article examines the features, benefits, and potential impact of Microsoft Copilot, a game changer in the software development industry. 

What is Microsoft Copilot?

The Microsoft 365 Copilot system is a triad of components: Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and Teams, where users can access and engage with the AI assistant; Microsoft Graph, encompassing files, documents, and data within the Microsoft 365 framework; and OpenAI models and apps such as ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4, DALL-E, Codex, and Embeddings. These models and apps are hosted within Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft's Copilot is a segment of a broader initiative towards generative AI. Future includes specialized Copilots for Microsoft's Dynamics 365 business apps, Power Platform, the company's security suite, and the Windows operating system. With the integration of Copilot into the Power Platform, the ability to automate mundane task, manage more, develop chatbots, and transform a concept into a functioning app in mere minutes becomes accessible to everyone.

At the heart of Copilot, and other generative AI tools, lies the Large Language Model LLMS. These LLMs are akin to machine-learning networks trained via data input/output pairs, utilizing self-supervised or semi-supervised learning techniques. Essentially, the LLM consumes data and generates a response based on the algorithm's prediction of subsequent words. The content within an example LLM can be confined to exclusive corporate data or, as with ChatGPT, can encompass data sourced or scraped from the web.

The Transformative Impact of Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot's Objective: Automation and Efficiency

Copilot's objective is to create and to enhance workforce efficiency by automating routine task, for example, such as composing an email to client or assembling a slideshow. These subtitles help developers to organize the content into distinct sections, making it easier for readers and users to navigate and understand the various aspects of Copilot.

A Partner in Creativity

Microsoft 365 Copilot team is designed to be a creative partner, assisting customers in the generation of content, presentations, research and data analysis.

Co-pilot in Word

Imagine drafting a report or an article in Word, and Co-pilot suggests sentence structures, corrects grammar, and even proposes content based on feedback from your initial inputs. It could significantly speed up the writing process and improve the quality of the output.

Co-pilot in Excel

In Excel, Co-pilot could assist in data analysis by suggesting the most suitable formulas or charts based on the data you're working with. It could also automate repetitive tasks like data entry and sorting, allowing you to concentrate on more complex analyses.

Co-pilot in PowerPoint

When creating presentations, Co-pilot could offer design suggestions, recommend layouts, and even generate text for slides based on the topic you're presenting. This would make the process of creating professional-looking presentations much quicker and easier.

Co-pilot in Teams

In Microsoft Teams, Co-pilot could help by automatically summarizing meeting notes, pulling in relevant data from other Microsoft applications, and even suggesting follow-up task based on the meeting discussion.

Co-pilot in Outlook

For Outlook, imagine a Co-pilot app that drafts email responses for you based on the context of the incoming email. It could also prioritize your emails, for example, reminding you to respond to the most urgent ones first.

Co-pilot in Power Platform

In Power Platform, Co-pilot could assist in app development by suggesting the most efficient ways to build apps, automate processes, or analyze data. It could also provide real-time debugging support, making the development process smoother.

How to get Copilot for free?

Subscribers to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium plans can avail themselves of Microsoft 365 Copilot at a monthly fee of $30 per user. This pricing represents a significant increase over the current costs of existing Microsoft 365 subscriptions. You can access Microsoft Copilot for free during its preview phase by downloading the Copilot extension from the Visual Studio Code marketplace.

Unlocking the Potential of Data

One of the most significant technology challenges businesses face today is harnessing the vast reservoir of data. Copilot creates a new enterprise knowledge model:

Business Chat: This feature works across all business data and apps to surface information and insights from a sea of data, allowing knowledge to flow freely across the organization. It is designed to function across Large Language Models LLMS, Microsoft 365 apps, and your personal data and apps, encompassing calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts. This integration opens doors to capabilities that were previously out of reach.

For instance, you might want to inform your team about the progress on a specific project. With a simple natural language command to Business Chat, it can compile and generate a comprehensive update from your recent meetings, emails, and chat threads. Copilot ensures that you have the final say, giving you the flexibility to keep, modify, or discard any part of the generated content. This innovative approach not only enhances your creativity in Word but also boosts your analytical prowess in Excel.

Empowering Through Learning

Copilot is not a static feedback tool; it's designed to make users learn and grow:

Natural Language Prompts

Unlocking functionalities across Microsoft 365 becomes as simple as writing and speaking naturally.

Continuous Learning

Copilot can learn to create, integrate and manage new domains and processes, performing even more sophisticated tasks and queries over time.

 A Commitment to Responsibility

Microsoft's approach to Copilot is grounded in responsibility:

Security and Compliance

Through the integration of two-factor authentication, adherence to compliance standards, and robust user privacy safeguards and user first, Copilot establishes itself as a trustworthy solution for customers.

Responsible AI

Microsoft's multidisciplinary team of engineers ensures that potential user harms are mitigated, and tools and technologies are applied to detect and correct data bias.

Benefits of using Microsoft Copilot:

• Increased productivity: Copilot can help you to be more productive by automating repetitive task and providing suggestions for how to improve your work.
• Improved accuracy: Copilot can help you to improve the accuracy of your work by providing suggestions for grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
• Enhanced creativity: Copilot can help you to be more creative by providing suggestions for new ideas and approaches.
• Simplified collaboration: Copilot can help you to collaborate with others more easily by providing a shared workspace where you can work together on documents and code.

Conclusion

Microsoft 365 Co-pilot is not just a feature but a comprehensive AI assistant that aims to revolutionize the way we work across multiple applications. By automating repetitive task and offering intelligent suggestions, it allows users to focus on more meaningful and productive work, thereby increasing overall productivity.

Microsoft Dynamic 365 co-pilot

In the fast-paced world of business technology, Microsoft has once again raised the bar with the introduction of Dynamics 365 Copilot. This AI-powered assistant is designed to streamline various business functions, from sales and customer service to supply chain management. Let's delve into what Dynamics 365 Copilot offers and how it's revolutionizing the way we work.

The Dynamics 365 Copilot: What Is It?

Dynamics 365 Copilot is an AI-driven assistant that aims to automate repetitive tasks across different business roles. It integrates seamlessly with CRM and ERP systems, automating manual data entry, content generation, and note-taking. This allows employees to focus on more creative and impactful aspects of their work.

In a recent exploration of business trends, our survey revealed that almost 90% of employees are eager to utilize AI to minimize repetitive aspects of their work. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot offers organizations the opportunity to equip their workforce with AI-driven tools specifically designed for roles in sales, service, marketing, operations, and supply chain management. By leveraging these AI functionalities, professionals can focus more on the engaging and rewarding parts of their jobs, leaving mundane tasks behind.

Dynamics 365 Copilot, capitalizing on the latest breakthroughs in generative AI, automates these monotonous tasks, thereby unleashing the workforce's full creative potential. By putting CRM and ERP systems to more efficient use, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot not only enhances the rate of innovation but also contributes to better results across all sectors.

Copilot in Sales and Customer Relations

The Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales helps sales representatives cut down on clerical work. For instance, it can draft email responses to customers and their requests and even summarize Teams meetings in Outlook, pulling in relevant CRM data like product and pricing information.

Copilot in Customer Service

In the realm of customer service, Dynamics 365 Copilot offers contextual answers to customer queries via chat and email. It also provides an interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history, ensuring that AI-powered expertise is always at hand.

Copilot in Marketing and Customer Insights

Marketers can benefit from Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing. The AI assistant can help in data exploration, audience segmentation, and content creation. It can even suggest additional customer segments that may have been overlooked.

Copilot in Business Central and Online Commerce

For those involved in online commerce, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central can streamline the creation of product listings. It can generate compelling product descriptions based on attributes like color, material, and size, which can then be published to Shopify stores with just a few clicks.

Copilot in Supply Chain Management

In the supply chain sector, Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center proactively identifies external issues like weather or financial fluctuations that could impact supply chain processes. It can review and then edit draft emails to alert partners and mitigate potential disruptions.

Power Platform Copilot

The Power Platform Copilot harnesses the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Copilot to offer additional functionalities. It makes it easier for customer service departments to build virtual agents in minutes, leveraging Azure OpenAI Service and Bing to provide answers from selected company websites and internal knowledge bases.

Conclusion

Dynamics 365 Copilot is not just another AI tool; it's a comprehensive solution designed to improve customer experience, employee satisfaction, and operational efficiency. Its integration across various functions makes it a game-changer in the world of business applications.

By adopting Dynamics Copilot, you're not just leveraging AI; you're embracing a future where AI works alongside humans to achieve work excellence.

Bing Chat Enterprise: Enhanced Search and Retrieval

Bing Chat Enterprise, is an AI-powered chat platform designed to facilitate work within organizations. It comes with robust commercial data protection features, ensuring that user and business data remain secure within the company. Bing Chat is available via bing.com/chat and the Microsoft Edge for Business sidebar. It is offered at no additional cost for customers who are licensed for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, Business Premium, or A3 or A5 for faculty.

Microsoft 365 Copilot leverages the intelligent ChatGPT engine, the same technology that powers Bing Chat, to enable users to search and retrieve both internal and external information effortlessly. But it goes a step further by integrating Bing Chat Enterprise with Microsoft 365 Graph and various Microsoft 365 apps. This integration empowers users to utilize AI assistance for projects within Office, enhancing efficiency and creativity. Both the individual user and the company's administrators retain full control, leading to substantial gains in productivity without compromising security or customization.

Benefits of Bing Enterprise

Data Security: One of the standout features is its commitment to commercial data protection. The platform ensures that chat data is not saved, and Microsoft does not have access to it. This ensures that your business data remains confidential.

Efficiency and Creativity: Bing Chat Enterprise is AI-powered, providing your workforce with better answers and greater efficiency. It also opens new avenues for creativity within the organization.

Managed Access: The platform allows for seamless, managed access control using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory), making it easier for employees to log in and use the service.

How to Enable Bing Enterprise in Your Microsoft 365 Tenant?

Enabling Bing Chat Enterprise for your organization involves using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) for managed access control. While the blog did not provide step-by-step instructions, it is likely that further technical documentation is available for setting up Bing Chat Enterprise within your Microsoft 365 Tenant.

Key Takeaways

• Bing Enterprise is an AI-powered chat platform with robust data protection features.
• It aims to empower your workforce by providing better answers and fostering creativity.
• Managed access is provided through Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory).
•   By integrating Bing Enterprise into your workflow, you can take your organization's communication and data protection to the next level.

GitHub Copilot: Unlocking Productivity

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered pair programming tool that works directly within your code editor. It is designed to assist developers by providing code suggestions based on natural language prompts. Trained on billions of lines of code, GitHub Copilot is capable of offering coding suggestions across a multitude of programming languages.

Data from GitHub reveals that Copilot is poised to boost efficiency across the board. Among the developers utilizing GitHub Copilot, 88% report an increase in productivity, 74% find they can concentrate on more fulfilling tasks, and 77% acknowledge that it aids in spending less time on searching for information or examples. However, Copilot's impact goes beyond enhancing individual efficiency. It establishes create a novel knowledge framework for every company, transforming the way they operate.

Benefits of GitHub Copilot

1. Speed and Efficiency: GitHub Copilot speeds up the coding process by offering multi-line function suggestions, thereby allowing developers to concentrate more on business logic rather than boilerplate code.

2. Enhanced Security: The tool filters out common vulnerable coding patterns, adding an extra layer of security to your code.

3. Customization: GitHub Copilot offers recommendations based on the project's context and style conventions, allowing for a more personalized coding experience.

4. Learning and Adaptability: Whether you're working with a new language or framework, GitHub Copilot can assist you in navigating through the code, reducing the valuable time spent on documentation and web searches.

How to Get GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot offers two main plans:

Copilot for Individuals: Priced at $10 per month or $100 per year.

Copilot for Business: Priced at $19 per user per month, with additional features like organization-wide policy management and corporate proxy support.

You can start a free trial or purchase a plan directly from GitHub's website.

Key Take aways

• GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered tool that enhances coding efficiency and security.
• It offers personalized suggestions based on the project's context.
• It is available in different plans to suit individual and business needs.

By integrating GitHub Copilot into your development workflow, you can significantly enhance your project' coding efficiency, security, and adaptability.

Conclusion: The Future of Work is Here

Microsoft 365 Copilot is more than a technological advancement; it's a philosophical shift in how we approach work. The Copilot System Next generation AI in Power Platform is changing how you write and develop low-code solutions, Microsoft Business Chat, Copilot in Excel, Copilot in Outlook. Copilot in Word, Copilot in Teams Meetings, Copilot in Meeting Recap, Copilot in PowerPoint. More visuals Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes, and creates. It recognizes the human need for creativity, purpose, and connection and leverages AI to enhance, not replace, those aspects.

By lightening the load of busy work, using less time, enhancing the user and ability to focus and connect through creativity, unlocking the potential of data, empowering through learning, and committing to responsibility, Copilot represents a holistic approach to the future of work.

It's not just about doing things faster or more efficiently; it's about reconnecting with the essence of our work, the life and soul of our team and company, our creativity and energy, and the heart of our purpose.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is not just a tool: it's a companion, a partner, and a catalyst for a new era of work. It's an invitation to explore, innovate, and transform. It's time to embrace it with Microsoft 365 Copilot. You can read more about

Microsoft products and updates right here.

Companies in various sectors depend on SharePoint Document Libraries as a robust solution for file storage, organization, and management. While these libraries already offer high levels of flexibility and power, their capabilities are dramatically expanded when combined with Microsoft Syntex. Together, these technologies form an intelligent ecosystem that redefines document management and accessibility. In today's world, where data is an invaluable asset, optimizing its management is crucial for any business. As a component of the Microsoft 365 suite, Microsoft Syntex is designed to transform the way organizations engage with their content. In this article, we'll explore the groundbreaking potential of integrating a SharePoint library and Syntex, and how it can be a game-changer for your enterprise.

What is Microsoft Syntex?

Microsoft Syntex is a cloud-based AI-powered content services platform that is part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It leverages machine learning to automatically classify, extract, and process content, thereby transforming the way organizations deal with data. It's not just about storing documents; it's about making them smarter.

The Need for Content AI in Modern Business

The volume of data that businesses generate and consume is staggering. Manual data management is not just time-consuming but also prone to errors. This is where Content AI, a form processing model like the one provided by SharePoint Syntex, comes into play, automating repetitive tasks and offering insights that were previously impossible or very time-consuming to obtain.

The Power of No-Code AI

How Syntex's No-Code AI Enhances Content

Syntex uses no-code AI models that can be trained by any user, regardless of their technical expertise, to classify documents and process content. This democratizes the power of Artificial intelligence AI within the organization.

Real-world Examples of Workflow Simplification

For instance, a human resources department can train Syntex to automatically sort incoming resumes into different categories, thereby saving hours of manual work.

What is SharePoint Syntex?

SharePoint Syntex is designed to enhance SharePoint's capabilities by integrating AI-powered content management features. It automates the categorization of documents, extracts valuable insights, and even applies your organization's security and compliance policies automatically.

How much does SharePoint Syntex cost?

Initially, Microsoft set the price for the Syntex license at an extra $5 monthly per user. Therefore, it's prudent to first test the system's capabilities with a limited number of licenses before making a broader investment.

The system's automated sorting and labeling of content and file types within documents gain substantial value when integrated with other Microsoft 365 offerings like Power Automate or Power BI. However, fully realizing this potential requires discussions across various departments to pinpoint the most beneficial use cases.

How it Integrates with Microsoft 365?

Being a part of the Microsoft 365 suite, Syntex offers seamless integration with other Microsoft products like Microsoft Teams, Power BI, and Power Automate, thereby providing a unified experience across various business functions.

How to use SharePoint Syntex: Document understanding models

Unlike traditional form processing techniques, these models are adept at extracting information from the unstructured content of text documents, such as legal agreements or correspondence. Users need to upload text-rich files so that the model can understand which elements need classification and extraction. Built on Azure Cognitive Services language learning capabilities, these models are housed in SharePoint sites within a Content Center, which serves as the foundational template for your site's document libraries. To initiate the process, begin by adding five sample files and a single counter-example to the Content Center. The model then gets applied to your SharePoint site and document libraries to start classifying and extracting relevant information.

What are the benefits of Microsoft SharePoint Syntex?

Efficiency

One of the most significant advantages of Microsoft SharePoint Syntex is the automation of repetitive tasks. By leveraging AI, Syntex can automatically tag and categorize documents, saving countless hours of manual labor.

Accuracy

Traditional document management systems often rely on human input for content processing, image tagging, and categorizing, which can lead to errors. Syntex minimizes these errors by using machine learning algorithms trained on your specific content.

Security

With Syntex, you can set up advanced security protocols based on the content of the document itself. For example, if a document contains sensitive information, Syntex can automatically restrict access to sample documents to authorized personnel only.

Integration

Being part of the Microsoft 365 suite, Syntex offers seamless integration with other Microsoft products like Power BI, Power Automate, and Teams, providing a unified and streamlined user experience.

9 Key Features of Microsoft SharePoint Syntex

The cornerstone of SharePoint Syntex is its Content Center. To fully leverage Syntex capabilities, setting up a dedicated Content Center site template is indispensable. These specialized site types serve as the control hub for managing Syntex models, facilitating the incorporation of metadata and automated workflows to ensure compliance. Through machine learning tools, a Syntex model can be trained to interpret document content similarly to a human reader. The system then automatically identifies key content elements, extracts valuable information, and attaches metadata tags for easier search and organization.

1. Document Processing with Syntex

Tagging and Securing Information

In various sectors, SharePoint Document Libraries stand as a cornerstone for intelligent document processing, enabling organizations to store, organize, and manage a vast array of files. These libraries are inherently robust and flexible, but when augmented with Microsoft Syntex's document and content understanding models, they evolve into an advanced system for managing and retrieving documents. In a landscape where data has become a critical asset, leveraging advanced metadata search is essential for any business. As an integral part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Microsoft Syntex aims to revolutionize the way companies interact with their digital content.

Syntex can automatically tag documents based on their content and apply security measures such as restricted access or encryption. One of the standout features of Microsoft Syntex is its automatic content tagging. Instead of manually sifting through documents and assigning tags, Syntex utilizes machine learning algorithms to analyze your document's content. It understands handwritten text in the context of existing documents, identifies key phrases, and relevant data, and then tags them appropriately. This leads to more accurate and faster search results, streamlining the way your team accesses information.

For instance, if you upload a legal document type of contract, Syntex can identify clauses, dates, parties involved, and other key elements. These are then tagged automatically, making it simpler to locate specific contracts based on any of these elements later on.

Advanced Security Measures

While it's crucial to make information accessible, it's equally important to protect sensitive data. Microsoft Syntex integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Information Protection to apply advanced security measures automatically. This includes:

Restricted Access

If a document contains sensitive data like customer details or proprietary algorithms, Syntex can automatically restrict its access to a predefined group of users.

Encryption

For highly confidential documents, Syntex can enforce encryption policies, ensuring that even if the document gets into the wrong hands, the content remains secure.

Compliance and Audit Trails

Automatically tagging and securing documents has another significant advantage: compliance. Syntex allows you to define specific compliance policies for different types of documents. It can even generate audit trails for user interactions with sensitive or regulated information, helping your organization meet legal and policy requirements.

2. Integration with Microsoft Azure and AI Builder

SharePoint Syntex also integrates with Azure's cognitive services and AI Builder, allowing for more advanced data processing capabilities like sentiment analysis or image recognition.

3. Translation and Summarization

Language Translation Features

Syntex supports multiple languages and can automatically translate documents, making it easier for global teams to collaborate.

4. AI-powered Content Summarization

It can also summarize long documents into shorter, more manageable versions without losing the essence of the content.

5. Content Assembly and Digital Media Processing

Auto-generating Documents with Templates

Syntex can auto-generate documents using predefined templates, which is particularly useful for creating contracts or reports.

6. Processing Images, Audio, and Video

It can also process and tag digital media like images, audio, and video, making them searchable and easier to manage.

7. Syntex and Business Workflows

eSignature and AI-powered Search

Syntex integrates with eSignature solutions and offers AI-powered search capabilities, making it easier to find, sign, and manage contracts and invoices.

8. Security and Content Management

Syntex Protector for Advanced Document Library Security

Syntex Protector ensures that sensitive documents are automatically identified and secured according to predefined policies.

9. Backup and Restore Functionalities

It also offers robust backup and restore functionalities, ensuring that your data is safe and easily recoverable.

Conclusion

Summary of Key Benefits

SharePoint Syntex is not just another document management system; it's a powerful tool that can transform how your organization manages and interacts with content.

How Syntex Can Transform Your Business Operations

By automating mundane tasks, a compliance service enhancing security, and offering unprecedented insights into your data, Syntex can significantly improve efficiency and decision-making processes.

How to Get Started with Microsoft Syntex

Ready to revolutionize your content management? Contact us today to get started with Microsoft Syntex. 

In the digital age, the way businesses operate is constantly evolving. Two key players in this evolution are Power Apps and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Together, they're reshaping the future of business applications.

Power Apps: A Game-Changer in App Development

Power Apps, part of Microsoft's Power Platform, is a low-code development platform. It empowers everyone, from professional developers to tech-savvy business users, to create custom business applications. For instance, a retail company can use Power Apps to create a custom inventory management app, streamlining their stock control process. With Power Apps, the tedious, time-consuming coding process is replaced by a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface. This democratization of app development accelerates digital transformation, making it accessible to all.

The Rise of AI in Business Applications

AI has been a buzzword for some time now. But it's more than just a trend; it's a revolution. AI's ability to learn, reason, and understand makes it a powerful tool in various business applications. For example, a healthcare provider can use AI to analyze patient data and predict health risks. From predictive analytics to customer service, AI is making its mark.

Power Apps and AI: A Powerful Combination

When Power Apps and AI come together, the possibilities are endless. But what exactly is Power Apps AI and how does it work? PowerApps AI refers to the integration of AI capabilities within the Power Apps platform. This integration allows users to leverage AI's capabilities without needing extensive coding knowledge.

Understanding Power Apps AI Builder

So, what is PowerApps AI Builder? AI Builder is a feature integrated with Power Apps that allows users to leverage AI's capabilities without needing extensive coding knowledge. It provides pre-built AI models in Power Apps that can be used directly in your apps, or you can build and train your custom models based on your data.

The Use of AI in Power Apps

What is the use of AI in Power Apps? AI in Power Apps is used to enhance the functionality and efficiency of business applications. For instance, a logistics company can use AI Builder in Power Apps to create a Power App that predicts delivery times based on traffic data. This not only improves the efficiency of delivery processes but also enhances customer satisfaction by providing accurate delivery estimates. This integration brings AI's power to the masses, making it a key player in the future of business applications.

Transforming Business Processes with Power Apps and AI

Power Apps and AI can streamline and automate business processes. For instance, a manufacturing company can use AI to predict equipment failures based on historical data. Power Apps can then use these insights to automate maintenance scheduling. This combination not only boosts efficiency but also enables data-driven decision-making.

Enhancing Customer Experience with Power Apps and AI

In today's customer-centric world, providing a personalized experience is crucial. Power Apps and AI can help businesses achieve this. A telecom company, for instance, can use AI to analyze customer data to gain insights into behavior and preferences. Power Apps can then use these insights to tailor the customer experience, such as recommending personalized data plans, boosting satisfaction and loyalty.

The Future of Power Apps and AI

The future of business applications lies in the convergence of Power Apps and AI. As AI technology advances and Power Apps continues to democratize app development, businesses can expect more sophisticated, personalized, and efficient applications. This fusion of Power Apps and AI is not just the future of business applications; it's the future of business itself.

Conclusion

The integration of Power Apps and AI is revolutionizing the way businesses operate. By democratizing app development and leveraging AI's capabilities, businesses can transform their processes, enhance customer experience, and make data-driven decisions. As we look to the future, the synergy of Power Apps and AI will continue to redefine the landscape of business applications. The future is here, and it's powered by Power Apps and AI.

Elon Musk once said, "Prototyping is easy but Production is hard." What if there is a magic wand that magically transforms your design from a prototype to a production user interface? Well, the app genies have heard your wish and created a magical Figma plugin  - "Create Apps from Figma UI Kit (Preview)". Note: This is still a preview feature.

We at SharePoint Designs, will save you a significant amount of time and effort by creating flawless, trendy, modern & aesthetically pleasing power app solutions. We have been experimenting the Figma plugin and re-designed some of the sample apps from PowerApps and have also created some of our own apps.

In this blog, we showcase the before and after versions of these apps using the Figma UI kit. By taking a look at the transformation for yourself, you'll be able to see the significant difference we can make in improving the design and user experience of your power apps.

1. Leave Request App

A leave request app can be used by employees across various industries and organizations, including small businesses, non-profits, and large corporations. By using a leave request app, employees can easily request time off and receive timely updates on the status of their request, while managers and HR personnel can more efficiently manage leave requests and ensure compliance with company policies and regulations. This can lead to improved employee satisfaction, better scheduling and resource allocation, and reduced administrative burden for HR personnel.

Some common features of a leave request app include the ability to submit and approve leave requests, the ability to view and manage leave balances, view holidays to plan the leaves, the ability to view and setup rules and policies around leave requests, and the ability to generate reports and analytics related to employee leave.

2. Claims Manager App

A Claims Manager App can be used by claims adjusters, insurance agents, healthcare providers, and other professionals involved in the claims process. By using a Claims Manager App, these professionals can streamline their workflows, reduce errors, and improve the overall efficiency and accuracy of claims processing. This can lead to improved customer satisfaction, reduced costs, and better compliance with regulatory requirements.

Common features of a Claims Manager App include the ability to submit and track claims, the ability to manage documents and other supporting evidence, the ability to communicate with customers and other stakeholders, and the ability to generate reports and analytics related to claims processing.

This version of the app is designed to be used in Mobile but it can be extended to Desktop / Tab as well.

3. Service Desk App

A Service Desk App is a software application designed to help organizations manage and track customer service requests and support inquiries. It provides a centralized platform for employees to handle customer queries, monitor service levels, and manage the resolution of customer issues.

Common features of a Service Desk App include the ability to submit and track service requests, the ability to assign and escalate tickets, reopen a closed ticket, the ability to communicate with customers  and the ability to generate reports and analytics to monitor the service desk performance.

4. Quality Check App

This App was designed and developed by our Design Ninjas team of SharePoint Designs which includes  Agalya, Jamal & Johnsi.

A quality check app can be used by individuals or teams responsible for ensuring quality control, such as quality assurance or quality control professionals, production managers, or field inspectors. By using a quality check app, these professionals can streamline their workflows, reduce errors, and improve the overall quality of their products or services.

This app can be used in various industries, such as manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and hospitality. It provides users with tools and features that allow them to track and monitor defects, identify potential issues, and implement corrective actions.

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We at SharePoint Designs would be happy to help bring your ideas to reality in as early as 12 days. Please go through this infographic below to understand the detailed design and development process we follow to help you achieve your goals.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and submit the Contact us form to the right or shoot an email to sales@sharepointdesigns.com

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Related Links

‍Ways build power apps

What are PowerApps?

Power apps is a low code development platform created to be used by citizen developers. It has an array of apps, connectors, services and data platform that provides an immediate application development environment to build custom apps for your following business requirements. Well, by using power apps, you can immediately create custom apps that connect to your business data that has been stored in the underlying data platforms, which is the standard data service for the apps on-premises or in various data sources. 

Creating apps using Microsoft power apps enriches the business with logic and workflow capabilities to transform your business from manual to digital automated procedures. Furthermore, apps developed and power apps users using PowerApps have flexible and seamless designs, which enables you to use them on your mobile devices, tablets or browser. PowerApps helps you work according to your desire; it also makes your user experience feature-rich without writing the code and with proper content management.

Well, when the power apps hit the market, creators assumed it was a basic tool for users with varying tiers of technical expertise. It was mainly an app power platform concentrated on facilitating users to build interactive apps for assorted businesses and their process management or personal strategies. Nevertheless, the platform took off, and the assurance of its success is its proficiency to deal with common challenges that organizations face.

Furthermore, Microsoft PowerApps presented an apps portal as well as model-driven apps. It’s the new canvas app, which in fact enables users to build apps without code being written in standard programming languages, and stay flexible in designing and customizing different designs. These capabilities enable a broad range of apps that contribute more functionality for businesses with Power apps.

Top 10 Use Cases for PowerApps for your Different Development Needs

There are 3 different types of PowerApps solutions that can be used. To access them, go to make.powerapps.com and click on the Apps icon on the left navigation bar. Click on the new app button to select canvas apps, model-driven apps, or websites.

1.Web Portals

Click New app -> Select Website to start creating web portals.

This feature is applicable for creating websites that can be accessed internally and externally, facilitating end users to connect securely with all the data stored in the CDS.    

2.Canvas Apps

Click New app -> Select Canvas to start creating canvas apps from blank.

Developers can start building apps by adding workflows to your existing data source and then designing a custom app that delivers more flexibility than model-driven apps. This feature is ideal for business users that want to work from a blank canvas. 

3.Model-Driven Apps

Click New app -> Select Model-driven to start creating model driven apps.

This feature is excellent for business processes that require complex logic. With power apps, the designs are effectively governed by the connected data sources and rely on the information you feed in the app. Well, now that you know what Microsoft power apps are and how it enriches your business, let's dive into their top 10 power apps use cases that you can implement in your business/organization.

Top 10 use cases for Microsoft PowerApps

1.Enables you to build Customized Business Apps

If your business comes across a specific challenge or has a notion for an innovative solution that could give you a great edge, you can build a custom app through power apps to tick all these boxes for you.  

The most significant advantage of using power apps is that anyone can create a custom app without requiring coding knowledge or technical expertise. Customized power apps enable you to run and operate your business according to your desire. It caters to practical business tools which enhance your company's service or product, broaden the customer base and boost efficiency. 

2.Precise Business Planning

 Planning holds an important place in any successful business. It's one of the key features which enable you to work on time with all discipline. Power apps are a spectacular choice for you to make your planning more aesthetically pleasing and convenient. Power apps promote rapid development, designing, and customization; thus, you can precisely plan accordingly to your wish! 

3.On-Site Inspection

The on-site inspection application enables you to refer to all instances with pictures, site details, and location pins. Whether you are in real estate, insurance, property management, or any other business, this tool is helpful for your work. It will make your work more accessible and inspection superior. The recorded information is reserved in the back end and can be utilized when detailed reporting or analysis is required.

4.Helps With Expenditure Approval

 There is no argument that expense approval is a tiresome job involving many processes and submissions. But, by using Microsoft power apps, users can build a mobile application for seamless and effortless expense approval. An employee can assert an expense by submitting a proposal with proper proof. Then, a manager can also reject or approve the request through notifications and the app can be well-integrated with the existing human resources system.

5.Fonts

Building a custom theme for your Power apps is essential. The fonts, colors, icons and styles you use for all types of controls like date-downs, text inputs, etc., define and embed an app's unique look and feel. 

6.Seamless Integration With Office 365 Tools

 The numerous benefits of Power apps for Office 365 make your overall process very comfortable. From no coding or programming required to complete security, and seamless app development to easy-to-use data connectors and low cost, it caters for everything! 

Furthermore, like numerous other Office 365 products, Power apps obtain regular updates with many unique features. Notably, the latest update features an AI Builder that facilitates Power apps to operate Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence technology and Machine Learning to assist you in building and developing advanced and more imaginative apps. 

7.Quick Quote Generator

Sharing customized quotes with the consumers has constantly been a hassle as it consumes a lot of time to develop custom-create manual sections and templates and send them to consumers, then follow them until they are in! 

But, with Power apps, business users can entirely automate the customized proposals generation process, wherein pre-defined templates immediately generate quotes based on the values documented in the application and automatically sends personalized mail to the customer. 

8.Image Processing Tools

Power apps can incorporate camera-enabled devices, so companies can create apps that offer picture-processing functionalities. For example, construction companies, healthcare providers and retail providers can capture photos of their products and other commodities during inspections with a mobile devices camera and the data accumulated from its GPS. A customized examination app stocks some data within SharePoint or the standard data service layer, pretending to be a hosted database. 

9.Offline Working Capability

In Power apps, you can search, manipulate consistently, filter, aggregate, and sort, even though the data source doesn't exist. Sources range from in-memory arrays in the app to list and create, using Microsoft lists, data-verse, and SQL databases. 

10.Approval

 Power apps designer use the approval pattern to allow stakeholders or multiple stakeholders to examine data, decisions, and records all at once or in series. Even though the approval pattern can be beneficial, it's often integrated with other patterns, particularly the audit and inspection pattern. Authorizations can be smoothly carried out with Power Automate authorization workflows, but they can also be executed with the ability you develop into your app.

Benefits of using power apps

1. Hassle-Free Delivery

Undoubtedly, it takes an extended amount of time and multiple cycles to design and build new software. Wherein, power apps accelerate the speed of the same and are way simple to learn for new employees as well!

2. Cost Efficient

Software management and development lifecycle can be one of the intricate and budget-breaking business processes. In addition, Power apps seamlessly integrate and allow real-time collaboration among team members. It also provides you with apps that are more mobile-friendly or even agree with tablet and desktop versions at the same time. 

3. Versatile

Power apps are appropriate in remote storage connections, data servers on-site, and cloud-based environments. The connection and the flow of information is effectively constant. Furthermore, security protocols are driven faultlessly to assure data flow is safe between all areas. 

4. Total Security

The custom apps users built through Power Apps are exceptionally secure. These applications and workflows bind into the Azure Active Directory and other Microsoft security keys like the Common Data Services (CDS) which caters to a role-based safety model.

You can regulate permissions at the data and application levels, which tells end-users only to see what’s appropriate for them without portraying internal profiles and follows all the company policies. Furthermore, apps created on the Common Data Services (CDS) are also automatically GDPR-compliant.

5. Solve Unique Business Challenges

If your business encounters a specific challenge, has to fulfil a unique need, or has a notion for an imaginative solution that could give you a competitive advantage, you can indeed assemble a custom app through Power apps to tick all the requirements for you.

From, running data analytics, tracking employee expenses, automating communications and integrating AI functionality into your processes, changes can be done easily through Power apps. In addition, as it’s customized, you can contemplate any inefficiencies or extraordinary processes present and make your app totally fit your business.

6. Saves You Money

Well, no doubt that the time you save by using Power apps will depict productivity gain and money saved. Nevertheless, one of the other key advantages of Power apps is the expenditure entry to start with.

Indeed, off-the-shelf software goes on high price range and often has functionality that may not fit an organisation’s desires. Wherein, the custom Power apps are low-code, more cost-effective and significantly they’re quicker to create. In turn, organisations can accomplish their return on investment (ROI) as well, and that too faster.

 7. Boosts Business Transformation

Building custom apps can perhaps take months or even years. However, when your organisation is evolving, you ought to take actions quickly and intensify your digital transformation. A Power app, personalized to precisely the way your company works, can be assembled in few days or even less.

While a few organisations won’t be certain where, to begin with, that notion, you don’t have to worry at all. Pick one province of your procedures that isn’t functioning as well as it could be. Break down the duties involved and you’ll usually find one assignment that takes much lengthier time than it should.

Lastly, to know how SharePoint designs enable effortless invoice tracking with the power apps, visit the link for a clear idea. In the coming years, the necessity for apps will persist as businesses look for methods to simplify processes, determine new and unique ways to cut costs and improve employee productivity and efficiency. Furthermore, contact us, and you will indeed love the next new app we create for you! 

Frequently Asked Questions

1.What are the 6 major components of power apps?

Answer-

• Gallery
• Screen
• Control
• Card
• Property
• Function

2.Can Power apps work offline?

Answer- Yes, you can definitely run it offline on your PC on a mobile device.

3.How many companies are using Microsoft power apps?

Answer- Approximately 771 companies are using it.

4.What are the 4 components of a power platform?

Answer- Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents.

5.Do you need Office 365 to use Microsoft power apps?

Answer- Yes. You cannot use powerapps without office 365.

Reference Links

Ways build power apps

Designing Power Apps app

Top 10 best use cases for power automate

Microsoft Power Automate offers a variety of powerful flows that streamline workflows and enhance productivity. With Power Automate, you can automate repetitive tasks, connect different applications, and create custom flows. Its versatility and ease of use make it the best choice for automating processes. Power Automate Desktop provides numerous examples, showcasing its capabilities, such as data integration, email automation, and document processing.

Power Automate is one of the most powerful automation tools available in the market today. It allows you to automate tasks and make them repeatable, while also giving you control over when they get done. This makes it an ideal solution for businesses that want to improve their efficiency while reducing costs through automation. The best part? You don’t need any coding experience or expertise just need some data!

Monitor files and folders in your cloud storage that need attention.

Power Automate can monitor files and folders in your cloud storage that need attention. You can monitor specific files or folders in your cloud storage, for example, you can monitor for a specific file type like an image file or even a specific size like 10mb. You can also specify whether you want to be alerted when there are changes made to this folder by any user other than yourself.

You have the option of setting up Power Automate so that it will only notify you when something happens on these monitored locations but not alert others unless they access them as well - meaning they won't get any unnecessary notifications about what happened if they aren't interested in finding out themselves!

Automate expense approval processes.

Expense approval is a manual process that involves many people and can be difficult to manage. A company's employees are spread across multiple departments, each of which handles their own expenses separately. With an automated expense approval process, you can streamline the process so that it’s easier for all employees to approve expenses without having to contact each other individually or wait until after hours when someone else might be available at the right time.

Benefits of automation include:

• Reduced costs by eliminating manual tasks like filing receipts.
• Increased efficiency through fewer errors
• Improved communication between departments

for example, if there's an incident with supplies or equipment then everyone will know immediately instead of waiting months later when someone discovers it themselves.

Route HR forms to the right people for approval and processing.

If you’re a human resources manager, it’s likely that your team is overwhelmed with forms. You may have hundreds of them to process, and they can be lost or misplaced. Or worse still, some of the people who need to fill out certain forms may not have access to the information necessary for completing them (for example, if someone has left the company). And even if you do everything right and send the form off on time and then again later when someone else needs something from it. there's still no guarantee that all relevant data will be collected before being sent off again!

Coordinate tasks and keep notes at every step when you onboard new hires.

As you know, onboarding is a critical part of any new hire's journey. And it's important to make sure the process goes smoothly and efficiently so that everyone can start working together effectively as soon as possible.

With Power Automate, you can automate the onboarding process by creating tasks for each step in your employee's career path: filling out a form, uploading their resume or portfolio etc., scheduling interviews with managers or HR representatives etc., reviewing answers from previous rounds of interviews after they've already been conducted (and making changes if necessary). You'll also be able to collect feedback from your employees on how they feel about these steps by using surveys or polls, which will help you identify problems with your current system!

Track compliance requirements and make sure they come before any project goes live automatically!

Compliance is a big deal. It’s the foundation of any well-run business, and it can be easily forgotten when you have other things to do. We all know what happens when something goes wrong: you get blamed, or worse yet, you lose clients because of your poor judgment or lack of foresight. So how do we ensure that our compliance requirements are met before our projects go live? With Power Automate!

Streamline human-led processes that involve repetitive tasks that are not standardized.

One of the best use cases for Power Automate is when you have a process that is not standardized. A good example of this is when your company has multiple subsidiaries, each with its own business processes and procedures. The goal here is to ensure that everyone follows the same standards in order to create a consistent brand image across all departments.

The first step in streamlining this type of human-led process involves creating an environment where everyone understands their role within the organization and what they need from others in order to perform their jobs effectively. This can be achieved through creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) or creating business processes based on customer needs so that every employee knows how he or she should work with other departments within your organization.

Build automated workflows to connect your files, data and processes across your entire organization.

• Build automated workflows to connect your files, data and processes across your entire organization.
• The Power Automate Platform empowers you to build workflows that connect your files, data and processes across your entire organization.

Automate and streamline document processing using computer vision technologies, including optical character recognition (OCR)

• Automate and streamline document processing using computer vision technologies, including optical character recognition (OCR)
• Extract text from images in a variety of formats

OCR is the process of extracting text from an image. With OCR, you can extract any type of information from images such as barcodes, QR codes and more. The technology has been widely used in industries such as retail management where it helps identify product prices in store shelves for better inventory control; however, it can also be used for other purposes like automatically detecting handwritten numbers on documents to prevent frauds.

Document automation is particularly useful in the United States, where Power Automate simplifies the creation and management of documents. When combined with Power BI, Microsoft's powerful business intelligence tool, Power Automate flows become even more impactful, enabling data-driven decision-making and enhancing organizational efficiency.

Access data and workflows right from where you work with Power Automate in your favorite apps like Microsoft Teams.

Power Automate is available as a web app, so you can access it from any device. You can also use the Power Automate Connector for Microsoft Teams to access your data and workflows right from where you work with Microsoft Teams.

Keep your team in sync by providing notifications and alerts when something changes.

• Send notifications and alerts to your team in Microsoft Teams, Slack or any other channel.
• Power Automate can send notifications and alerts via email or text message.
• You can use Power Automate to create a single place where you can manage all of these notifications and alerts.

Automate approval and approval-like processes

One of the best Power Automate examples is automating email notifications. With a simple flow, you can receive real-time alerts for critical emails.

With Power Automate's robotic process automation capabilities, businesses can automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for employees to focus on value-added activities. Embracing Power Automate ensures efficient business process automation and boosts productivity.

Automation is a great way to reduce the amount of human effort required for approval processes. With Power Automate, you can automate approval and approval-like processes with ease.

One example of an automated process would be the ability to approve a purchase order on behalf of your customer without having any involvement from them at all! Another example would be if you wanted to create a new product or service offering, this would require multiple approvals from various departments within your company before it could go live.

With Power Automate’s extensive feature set, there are many ways that you can automate existing business processes by using its Predictive Intelligence capabilities as well as its built-in Workflows feature which enables users to build complex workflows simply by dragging and dropping fields onto their form elements (or adding more advanced rules).

Getting started with Power Automate is easy, so what are you waiting for?

If you're new to Power Automate, there's a good chance you've heard about it. But if not,

here's what it is:

Power Automate is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses run more efficiently and effectively by streamlining their business processes with AI technology. It uses predictive analytics to identify problems in your organization's processes before they happen and then automatically solves them. For example, if your sales team misses their targets or sends too many emails per day (which would be bad), Power Automate can tell them this so they can improve next time around!

You can also integrate Power Automate with SharePoint, streamlining document approval processes and improving collaboration. When it comes to the best Power Automate Services, Microsoft offers an extensive range, including connectors for popular apps like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and more.

Conclusion

I hope this article has given you some ideas about how Power Automate can help your organization. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to learn more!

Read More

Ways build power apps

SharePoint is a collaboration and document management platform. It is designed to help organizations manage and share information more efficiently. SharePoint helps companies by providing a centralized platform for document management, team collaboration, and communication. With SharePoint Online, businesses can access company data from anywhere, facilitating remote work and improving productivity.

To effectively organize SharePoint sites, start by defining a clear structure and hierarchy. Categorize sites based on teams, projects, or departments, ensuring a logical arrangement. Leverage SharePoint's features like lists, libraries, and metadata to classify and tag content for easy searching and retrieval. Assign site owners who can manage permissions, content, and collaborate with users.

Here are some of the best use cases for SharePoint

• Intranet Portal
• Document Management System 
• Content Management System
• Custom ERP on SharePoint
• Project Management tool
• Knowledge Base - Viva Topics
• Department and Team sites
• Forms and workflows 
• Purchase Request 
• Internal Newsletter

SharePoint as an Intranet

SharePoint is the ultimate collaboration platform for your organization's intranet, offering a host of customizable features and functions. Think of it as a private network that's accessible only to your team, complete with SharePoint Design Examples to guide you in customizing your own intranet.

SharePoint can be used to share important company information, collaborate on projects, and communicate with one another. With a company directory, training calendar, and tools for task management, SharePoint makes it easy for your team to stay connected and informed.

Using SharePoint, you can customize your intranet to suit your organization's needs. With SharePoint, you can add custom web parts and apps to provide additional functionality, such as event calendars, news feeds, and document libraries.

And with the concept of hub sites, SharePoint makes it easy to connect and organize multiple SharePoint sites in a central location. It is easy to share resources and information between departments or teams when using SharePoint.

With SharePoint, your organization can stay connected and collaborate like never before.

SharePoint as a Document Management System

With a central document library and built-in document workflows, SharePoint makes it easy to store, find, and share content. Organizing SharePoint sites is crucial for efficient collaboration. Start by creating a clear site structure, organizing documents into libraries, and setting up appropriate permissions for different teams.

When using SharePoint, encourage proper document management by utilizing version control, check-in/check-out, and document approval workflows.

Track and collaborate on processes directly from your Office desktop programs - SharePoint allows you to protect sensitive documents and ensure that only authorized users have access to them by controlling access at any level.

And with Document IDs, every document can be made unique and easily retrievable. All documents can be tagged with metadata, making it easy to find what you need.

With SharePoint, you can streamline your organization's document management process and improve efficiency.

Content Management System

SharePoint is the best platform for creating a robust intranet that enhances employee engagement and supports a digital workplace. With SharePoint Online, you can easily build and manage an intranet site tailored to your organization's needs. Utilizing SharePoint team sites is a perfect example of how to collaborate effectively within a team, share documents, and coordinate tasks.

If you're looking to boost collaboration and streamline content management within your organization, then SharePoint is the perfect solution. This powerful platform makes it easy for your team to work together on documents, media assets, and web content in real time, with the bonus of version control to ensure that everyone is always working with the most up-to-date information.

But that's not all - SharePoint also integrates seamlessly with OneDrive and Microsoft 365, so you can share and access information across different platforms.

As an administrator, you'll have complete control over who has access to which content, ensuring that the right people have the right information at the right time. With SharePoint, you'll be able to take your team’s collaboration and content management to the next level.

Custom ERP on SharePoint

If you’re looking to streamline your business operations and improve efficiency, look no further than SharePoint. As a flexible platform, SharePoint can be used to build custom Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that help manage day-to-day business activities such as procurement, project management, risk management, compliance, and operations.

With SharePoint, you can easily integrate your ERP system with other business processes and third-party applications, thanks to its seamless integration with Office 365 and OneDrive.

Additionally, SharePoint has robust security and permission controls, ensuring that sensitive information is kept safe and secure.

With SharePoint as your ERP solution, you'll be able to take control of your business processes and drive your organization to new levels of success.

Project Management Tool

With SharePoint, you can create dedicated project sites that bring together all the relevant documents, tasks, and discussions in one place. SharePoint's task lists allow you to assign tasks to team members and set deadlines, ensuring that everyone stays on track and on schedule. And with Microsoft Teams integration, you can also use Teams as a task management tool, giving your team even more flexibility and visibility into project progress.

By using SharePoint for project management, you'll be able to increase collaboration and efficiency, helping your team deliver better results.

SharePoint as a Knowledge Base

SharePoint is a powerful knowledge management platform that makes it easy for your organization to access and share critical information. With a document repository, everyone in your company has access to the knowledge base. They can use keyword searches to find the information they need quickly and easily.

In addition to providing convenient access to information, SharePoint also offers advanced features like version control and permissions management, which allow you to efficiently manage your knowledge base and ensure that your team has access to the most up-to-date resources.

To work with SharePoint effectively, provide comprehensive user training and promote best practices for site navigation and content creation. Consider utilizing SharePoint hub sites to aggregate and connect existing team sites, fostering better collaboration and information sharing across departments.

Whether you're looking to design useful resources for your employees or simply want to streamline the way your team accesses and shares knowledge, SharePoint is the perfect solution to work efficiently on SharePoint, familiarize yourself with its features like document libraries, lists, and workflows. Project SharePoint site examples demonstrate its effectiveness in managing projects, facilitating communication, and tracking progress. SharePoint also excels in case management, providing a centralized hub for organizing and resolving cases. Modern SharePoint intranet examples showcase visually appealing and user-friendly interfaces that improve information dissemination and collaboration on the intranet homepage.

Department Sites and Team Sites

SharePoint offers two types of sites that can help your organization stay connected and organized: department sites and team sites.

Department sites are specifically designed and managed by a department within your organization, and can be customized to meet the specific needs of that department. With features like search, news feeds, calendars, and lists, department sites are a great way for multiple departments to share and manage information.

Team sites, on the other hand, are more focused on collaboration within a specific team. These sites allow members of a team to share and manage documents, resources, and other information in a single, central location. With SharePoint team sites, your team can stay connected and organized, no matter where you are.

Overall, the main difference between department sites and team sites is their scope. Department sites are accessible to multiple departments within an organization, while team sites are only accessible to the members of a specific team. Whether you need a broad-based solution for multiple departments or a more focused solution for a specific team, SharePoint has it all.

Forms and Workflows

Are you tired of manually managing your business processes and wasting valuable time on tedious tasks? With SharePoint, you can streamline your workflows and increase productivity with the help of powerful tools like PowerApps and Microsoft InfoPath.

Creating forms and initiating workflow processes has never been easier, and SharePoint's built-in workflows can help manage common business processes with ease. Plus, you can create custom workflows to meet your specific needs and improve collaboration between team members.

Imagine being able to collect and track data seamlessly, streamlining your processes and freeing up more time to focus on what matters. With SharePoint's workflow capabilities, all these possibilities can be a reality.

Purchase Request

If you want to streamline and manage your organization's purchase request process, SharePoint has got you covered. With SharePoint, you can design customizable purchase request forms and store them in a central location that is easily accessible by multiple users. This makes it easy for teams to work together on purchase requests, improving collaboration and efficiency.

What’s more, you can customize your purchase request forms to include any additional information that you need, ensuring that you have all the relevant details on hand. With SharePoint's powerful purchase request management capabilities, you'll be able to streamline your process and make informed purchasing decisions, helping your organization succeed.

Internal Newsletter

SharePoint's internal newsletter web part is the perfect solution for keeping your employees informed and up to date. With just a few clicks, you can add this web part to your SharePoint site and start sharing relevant news, updates, and other important information with your team.

Also, you can customize the newsletter web part to display the articles or links that you want, making it easy to highlight the most important information. And with the ability to match the branding of your SharePoint site, you can ensure that your newsletters are consistent with your organization's visual identity. Keep your team in the loop with SharePoint's internal newsletter web part.

Conclusion

To work with SharePoint effectively, familiarize yourself with its features like document versioning, metadata, and search capabilities. It's essential to handle sensitive corporate data securely by implementing data loss prevention policies, encryption, and access controls. SharePoint is a versatile solution for managing and safeguarding valuable company information.

Contact us today, if you would like a free demo to know more about the various ways SharePoint can help your company.

If creating power apps app has always been on your mind but you didn't know where to start, then you have come to the right place. Power Apps is a versatile platform that empowers users to create mobile and web apps with ease. One of the great starting point is Free SharePoint templates. Whether you need a mobile app for on-the-go productivity or a web app for broader accessibility, Power Apps and SharePoint have got you covered.

In this blog you can learn how to create an app from free PowerApps templates, a blank canvas, and a data source. We will focus on canvas apps, which give you the flexibility to arrange the user experience and interface the way that you want it.

What is Power Apps?

Power Apps, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, allows you to build three types of apps:

• Canvas Apps: Highly flexible, drag-and-drop design for both mobile and desktop.
• Model-Driven Apps: Component-based apps with dashboards, forms, views, and charts.
• Portal Apps: External-facing apps for customers, partners, or vendors.

Creating power apps mobile app becomes a seamless process. Its intuitive interface allows users to design custom mobile apps tailored to their specific needs. You can get started in many different ways; however, for all of the options, you will use the Power Apps Studio features and functionality to build your app.

1. Create an App from a Template

A quick way to learn Power Apps is to start with templates. Templates come with sample data, letting you explore functionality and design before building your own.

Popular Power Apps Templates: (H4)

1. Budget Tracker Template

For example, you can use PowerApps budget tracker template to create an app that helps you track the budget for projects and events with custom categories, simple data entry, and visuals that highlight expenditures for an effortless inspection.

2. Issue Tracker Template

PowerApps issue tracker template to keep track of different issues, assign owners, and update statuses.

3. Knowledge Base Template

Centralize policies, troubleshooting guides, and training content. Optimized for mobile, so your team can access knowledge anytime, anywhere. Equip your team with the tools to find the information they need quickly and effectively. Embrace the future of workplace learning with our Power Apps Knowledge Base Template.  

2. Create an App from a Data Source

Another great option is to build directly from your own data. Power Apps connect seamlessly to multiple data sources, including:

• Microsoft SharePoint lists
• Dataverse (formerly CDS)
• SQL, Excel, and many others

When you point Power Apps at a data source, it automatically generates a three-screen app that lets you:

• Browse records
• View item details
• Create, edit, or delete records

Power Apps + SharePoint Lists

SharePoint lists and Power Apps integrate tightly. You can:

• Build an app directly from a SharePoint site
• Customize modern list forms inside Power Apps

Read our guide: How to Build a Power Apps App from a SharePoint List

3. Build from a Blank Canvas

If you want complete creative control, you can start from scratch with a blank canvas. This option lets you:

• Add screens, forms, and layouts as you go
• Design custom user experiences
• Use connectors to link to multiple data sources

Think of this as freeform app creation perfect if you have a unique use case or want to experiment.

4. Explore Model-Driven Apps

For more structured, data-first applications, Power Apps offers Model-Driven Apps. These are ideal when you need:

• Dashboards with real-time insights
• Predefined business rules
• Components like charts, forms, and workflows

Examples of sample project templates in Power Platform include:

• Asset Checkout
• Innovation Challenge
• Fundraise

Why Power Apps is a Game-Changer

Power Apps isn’t just about making apps. it’s about transforming business productivity.

• No-code/low-code design - Empower non-developers to build solutions.
• Integration-ready - Works seamlessly with SharePoint, Teams, Office 365, and 400+ connectors.
• Mobile-friendly - Apps run smoothly across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re:

• Starting with a template,
• Connecting to a data source, or
• Designing from a blank canvas

Power Apps make custom app development simple and accessible.

For organizations using SharePoint, it’s an especially powerful way to turn lists and processes into mobile-first, automated solutions.

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Microsoft VIVA As An Intranet is a Microsoft Teams based application that allows users to view company wide news, join conversations and be connected with everyone with any device.

Create a culture of connections

‍With VIVA as Intra-net, you can easily allow everyone to collaborate with colleagues across your organization without having to send files back and forth via email. You can also encourage meaningful connections that allows to join a discussion, mentorship within the group.

Collaborate Easily with Team Members from Anywhere

‍In addition to being able to share documents and other files, you can also quickly connect with team members using chat, voice calls, and instant messaging. This makes it easier to work together and stay connected throughout the day.

Stay Connected with Mobile Devices

‍‍With mobile devices becoming more popular, it’s no surprise that people are increasingly relying on them for communication. According to a recent study by Cisco Systems, nearly half (47 percent) of employees surveyed said they used smartphones at least once per week for business purposes. And while some companies still rely on traditional methods of communication, such as email, others are embracing newer technologies, such as social media and mobile apps, to keep up with the times.

4 Easy-to-Implement SharePoint Design Examples

SharePoint Designs, as the name suggests we are all about creating aesthetically pleasing, innovative, clean and modern designs. We are committed to providing our clients with a world-class experience using our unique designs.

Not all designs have to be complicated and time consuming, some of the designs are very easy to do using the out of the box webparts provided by SharePoint.

Here we are presenting you 4 Best SharePoint design Examples for free which can be achieved easily with no or very minimal coding knowledge.

SharePoint Design Example 1

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SharePoint Design Example 2

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SharePoint Design Example 3

SharePoint Design Example 4

Power Automate is a cloud-based service that allows users to create automated processes in Microsoft

Create a new flow

You can use Power Automate to automate any process that requires input from a user. This includes creating emails, sending messages, scheduling meetings, and more.

Add a task‍

Once you add a task, you can choose what type of task you want to create. There are three options available: Create a new email, send an existing email, or schedule a meeting.

Add a webhook

‍You can also use a webhook to trigger actions when something happens on your website. This allows you to automate things like sending emails, updating a database, or even creating a new document.

Add a trigger

‍A trigger is a piece of code that tells Power Automate what to do when certain events occur. Triggers are triggered by different events, such as when a user visits a webpage, clicks a button, or submits a form.

Add a workflow

‍Once you’ve added triggers to your flow, you can add actions to them. Actions are pieces of code that tell Power Automate how to perform a task. You can use actions to automate any process, whether it’s sending out emails, creating reports, or performing other tasks.

SharePoint is Microsoft's web content management system (CMS). It allows users to easily manage information across an organization's intranet or extranet sites. When it comes to examples of good SharePoint intranet sites, there are plenty of impressive ones to draw inspiration from. In this blog we provide you some samples of our SharePoint Intranet templates that  can be leveraged to create engaging and interactive intranet portals that improve communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing within organizations. These free designs provide a great starting point for building your intranet site and offer basic functionalities to get you up and running quickly.

If you're looking to buy SharePoint intranet examples, there are numerous options available that can enhance your SharePoint intranet site. These design examples can be easily downloaded and customized to fit your organization's needs. They provide a solid foundation for building a visually appealing and functional intranet site, saving you time and effort in development. These intranet design examples include a variety of features that allow you to customize the look and feel of your site.

A SharePoint Site is a collection of pages, lists, libraries, apps, web parts, configurations, features, content types, and sub-sites. Examples of Site templates in SharePoint include collaboration (team) sites, communication sites, organization sites, wiki sites, blank sites, and publishing sites.

The two main type of SharePoint intranet sites are:

Team Site

A SharePoint team site connects you and your team to shared content and resources. Use team sites to store and collaborate on files or to create and manage lists of information as well as:

• Track and stay updated on project status
• Organize and co-author shared content
• Connect to a Microsoft 365 group to access team resources

Communication Site

A SharePoint communication site is a great place to broadcast information to others. Share news, reports, status updates, and more in a visually appealing format. Use communication sites to engage and inform broad audiences.

• Create portals, department, or project-specific sites.
• Share company news, announcements, and events.
• Engage dozens, or thousands, of viewers.

Here are some of the SharePoint site design examples for free so you can kickstart your SharePoint intranet journey!

Intranet Home Page Design

Here is a SharePoint design example for a basic intranet site:

SharePoint Intranet Business Portal Design

‍A business portal is a website that provides employees with access to company news and services. It can help companies improve productivity by providing employees with easy access to information and tools.

SharePoint Intranet Collaboration Portal Design

This SharePoint intranet template includes a  collaboration team site that allows users to share files, collaborate on documents, and communicate online.

Knowledge Base Portal Design

This template includes a knowledge base portal with an easy navigation menu, search box, and categories. It's perfect for any organization that wants to provide its employees with access to company information.

In conclusion, whether you choose to buy SharePoint templates, download free solutions, or explore Office 365 intranet templates, SharePoint offers a wide range of options to create impressive intranet sites. With its web parts, site templates, and integration capabilities, SharePoint online is a versatile tool that can be tailored to meet your organization's specific requirements. Contact us today so we can explore the best template that can get you started right away. We promise we can deliver a custom intranet site in as early as 2 days!!! So, what are you waiting for?

About the Client

Magick Woods Export Pvt. Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Magick Woods Ltd., Canada - one of the top manufacturers and pioneers of quality bath vanities and kitchen cabinets. Some of their customers include Home Depot, Lowes, Menards, Rona, and Home Hardware.

Project challenges

• Lack of a quality check process at the end of the production line to ensure delivery of products that meet world-class standards
• An ineffective manual tracking system involving QC inspectors - due to the unavailability of a defect identification system
• No one-stop report repository in place for the management to review the number of open defects and statuses of defects

Our Solution

SharePoint Designs developed a QC form to update the defects in the system instantly. Equipped with a camera feature, the QC Inspector could upload or capture the images of defective items. The data stored in the back-end could be used for further analysis. Furthermore, the form could be easily accessed through handheld devices like mobiles or tabs. Using Power BI, a summarised report of the defects and their status was made available for quick reviews.

Our experience in working with different MS applications like Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI played a major role in the quick roll-out.

Business Benefits

• Power to instantly reject defective products and eliminating any of their chances of reaching the end customer
• Vast reduction of worker hours involved in updating, correcting, and verifying the documents
• Ability of the QC form to captures the total defects recorded in a day
• Easy-to-interpret Power BI-based reports that facilitates a smooth management review process

About the client

‍Daikin, a global air conditioning manufacturing company, has its employee base spread across countries and was looking for solution to reach the employees in their native language.

Challenges

‍The Intranet is a connecting tool for employees located across the world. The user-friendly intranet might fail to serve its purpose if it does not have a personal touch with the users.  Giving the option to the users to read the content in the language they prefer, is an added advantage.

Our Solution

We used Azure translation services and configured 7 languages (Japanese, Mandarin, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese). The translator tool was added as an extension, so the user can translate from anywhere on the site. Entire site contents except attachments are translated. The user is able comprehend the business in their own native language which brings real collaboration among the employees. The discussion board has a separate language option. The users can choose to comment using their preferred language and others can read it using translation tool similar to social networking tools.  

Technologies used

‍Azure Translation services

Intranet, a powerful tool in the modern age helps to stay connected virtually with colleagues across the world. With the right design and content, an organization can use the intranet as an effective tool for communication. It isn’t just sharing news, business information, or management messages. Intranet can do more for business than we all imagine. 

Here, we are elaborating on how Daikin, a global air conditioner manufacturing company uses the intranet as a tool to reach out to its employees. Daikin approached SharePoint Designs to redesign its intranet into an informational and engaging one. 

The Home Page Contents  

As we always say, we love to design SharePoint sites. Our very creative design team came up with multiple design ideas to keep the Intranet home page informative and lively. Here are the contents on the Home Page 

• Unique top navigation bar: A custom extension was developed to display the top navigation bar across the site. The option consists of the Home Page, Discussion Board, Upload form, and other folder names. This allows the user to navigate across the site from any location. The top navigation displays the count of new uploads for the day.
• Welcome banner: A Personalized Welcome banner greets the logged-in user and displays the current date and time. It also provides quick links for manuals and contact details.   
• Upload Form:  A custom-developed upload form, using which users can create site pages. All files related to the site pages are stored in a unique folder in the document library that can be located easily. 
• Discussion Board: The latest three discussion topics along with a brief description appear on the home page. Clicking on the     title navigates to the discussion topic.
• Latest Uploads & Press Release: The recent four press release items and recent five uploads in all other folders are displayed on the Home Page – Press release & latest upload sections.
• Advanced search: The custom search bar is available throughout the site. The search results are refined to display results only from the site pages library. The users can easily find the information they are looking for with either a keyword search or use filters on the search bar. The results page is neatly designed with more filter options.
• Recommended Read corner: Select and featured articles are displayed in this section. This space can be utilized to display the Most viewed or liked site page for the month, announce contest winners, etc. 
• Translator: To support the employee base across various countries, the intranet was designed with a translator tool. Reading the content in a language the user is comfortable has its advantages. Azure translation services are utilized and the employees can choose from the  eight language options. The entire site contents, except the files, use  azure translation services.  
• Subscribe to periodic emails: Though the Home page is full of information, users might miss reading any important updates on the intranet. The new “Subscribe” feature allows users to stay in touch with what is happening around them. On each folder page, a subscribe option is available that the user can activate to receive an instant, daily or weekly summary of the uploads done. Using Power Automate flow, automated emails are sent to users based on their subscription frequency.

A well-built intranet plays a vital role in connecting remote teams, share knowledge and business updates. SharePoint Designs, understands the business values and envisions the complete solution. From design to deployment, we carefully plan and deliver outstanding intranets that help businesses engage with each other.  

About the client

Daikin, a global air conditioning manufacturing company was looking for an innovative approach to collaborating and conducting interactive discussion topics among employees across the globe. 

Challenges

An interactive and engaging platform for employees to discuss various topics that include industry-related, People related Hobbies, or other interests. Employees should be able to comment, view others' posts, and post likes. The discussion board should be as simple as using a social networking forum.

Our Solution

Though SharePoint has a default discussion board, we at SharePoint Designs built a custom webpart including Power Automate flows provides all the below features and gives the best user experience.

Discussion post owner and admin privileges

• Using a custom form, any user who has access to SharePoint can initiate a discussion topic and attach files to the discussion post and notify others through an automated email when the discussion is created. 
• The discussion post owner can edit or delete his post.
• The Post owner will get notified when other users post like or comment on the discussion topic.
• Ability to close or reopen each discussion.
• Admin can Pin topics so that users can view them on the top on the discussion board page.‍

Discussion post users

• All users can like, comment and tag other SharePoint users or user groups on the discussion board post. Users will be able to edit or delete their comments.
• Tagged users get notified through an automated email. 
• Users can view and download the attachments on the discussion post.
• Ability to Pin topics of their choice, search with keywords, share the discussion post link, and translate the contents.

Benefits

A very innovative and interactive tool that engages employees to actively participate in discussions, and contests. The organization that values their employees' feedback are always ahead in the competition. Discussion Board acts as an open forum to discuss with many people at a time. 

Technologies

SPFx, Power Automate

About the client: Daikin, a global air conditioning manufacturing company, was looking for an innovative approach to collaborate and share knowledge with its employees across the globe.  

Challenges

• A Proper document management system that classifies information based on pre-defined categories and allows users to access documents across the site
• A user-friendly site page so users can preview the documents attached, download, comment & tag other users.
• Enable users to click and search pre-defined categories on the site pages
• Restrict other users from viewing sensitive or confidential documents
• There should be an option to delete pages automatically based on the expiry date.

Our Solution

• SharePoint Designs understood the requirements and captured them as detailed user stories. As a first step, an upload form captured all the information required to create the site page in the SharePoint library. Each field in the upload form was metadata on the site page for search. 
• The user who creates the page updates the mandatory information and need-to-know information on the upload form. Using the upload form, the user can upload any files and folder up to 5GB. The user has an option to notify users regarding the page upload through the upload form. Using Power Automate Flow, an automatic email with the brief content of the upload is sent to the users immediately.
• The user is also allowed to restrict access to all employees by using the “Who can access” field. The site page will be visible only to those user groups mentioned in the form.
• The created site page is detailed and allows users to like, comment, and tag other users. Tagged users will receive an automated email containing the link to the site page. 
• The site page contains metadata, which allows the user to click and search the site pages library. 
• Automatic page deletion is enabled through Power Automate flow based on the expiry date updated on the upload form.
• All users are enabled to download the files without opening them.
• The person who created the site page can delete his page without navigating to the site page library
• Using Power Automate, a flow is executed to identify any expired site pages and gets deleted on the mentioned date.

Admin Features

The site admins are provided with additional features to perform the below functions

• Option to edit or delete the site page of other users. 
• Manage permissions by restricting or providing access even after the page is published
• Edit and delete other user comments‍

Benefits

The site page is power packed with so many details in a well-planned design and layout that the reader finds it very smooth to navigate to each segment of the page, click and search metadata and move on to the following pages in the chosen folder. Anyone who wants to share knowledge with other colleagues can use the upload form & share information.

Technologies Used:

SPFx custom webpart, Power Automate

When bringing two companies together through acquisitions, you are often bringing in a different culture with different technology. This can often make it difficult to efficiently collaborate. Sharing files and streamlining communication is a common problem. Two of the leading agency networks, McCann and MullenLowe, needed help to create a single platform which enabled their employees to work together through close collaboration. Microsoft Teams provided the solution they were looking for.\

Welcome to the fourth industrial revolution where we're now experiencing the digital age. This revolution is transforming all industries, including shipping and logistics. Maersk, the integrated transport and logistics giant, has transformed their business using digital strategies. In the past, shipment delays were caused by hiccups in a supply chain, since those chains must move large amounts of data. Since Maersk's switch to harnessing data digitally, they've reinvented how global supply chain management is done.

"PowerApps gives me the ability dream up a business system, draw it, then make it at much quicker speeds that I could have done by learning to program."– Lars Peterson, General Manager (and app maker), Reliable Electric

Lars Peterson is a General Manager at Reliable Electric, Canada, who had no prior app development experience before using the Power platform. He taught himself PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and SQL, and used the Power platform to transform core business processes, such as creating daily work order estimates. This replaced a legacy system for which the company was paying $2,000 for a single seat, and was not user friendly or customizable to meet their exact needs.

Business scenario

Reliable Electric specializes in the design and installation of integrated electrical projects in high-end homes. To generate a work order proposal for a customer, they need to go through the process of analyzing drawings and determining the materials required to accomplish the design. The term used to define this process in construction and engineering projects is a takeoff. To put together a proposal, the estimator at Reliable Electric needs to generate accurate price estimates for all the takeoffs in a project. This requires a complex set of inputs followed by a lookup of product information and a series of calculations to generate a final customer-ready proposal with accurate estimates.

Before Power platform – business process, challenges and opportunities

Reliable Electric had purchased a legacy desktop-based software called Accubid. The process was as follows:
- A contractor would provide the plans
- Estimators would do the takeoffs and enter all the information into Accubid
- All information from Accubid was then copy-pasted into an estimation spreadsheet to get a final proposal

This solution had several challenges:

- According to Lars, “the interface was terrible, was hard to view and change certain data elements.”
- The output from Accubid had to be copy-pasted into a spreadsheet to get a proposal that met their needs.
- Only one person could use the tool at a time. Each additional seat was $2000, which was cost prohibitive.
- They needed a solution that provided them control over their data, with a user interface that was easy to use.

Power Platform solution – Work order estimation app

In a prior role, Lars Peterson was a small business consultant who researched multiple tools to help his customers but found himself almost always recommending Excel. He tried Access but felt it was complex and not something he could leave with the customer to maintain on their own. After joining Reliable Electric, he spent six months researching several estimation software solutions. He did not find any off-the-shelf tools that met his exact needs and decided to build a solution on his own using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, with SQL as the backend. He found out about PowerApps through his Office 365 subscription. He chose it over other competitive offerings due to the rich visual appeal and depth of customization that was possible. He calls the solution “Estimating the Database” or ED for short. The application has been live in production since December 2017 and used daily by Estimators, Project Managers and Sales Representatives in the organization. It actively manages over 70 projects at any given point in time.

‍PowerApps: Estimators use a PowerApp on their desktop to manage the entire estimation process. They use predefined assemblies that have been customized for the business. These assemblies are basically takeoff templates that have a collection of products. The assembly is attached to a project and becomes a takeoff – an assembly with a quantity. The cost and labor associated with each takeoff is rolled up based on the products in the takeoff. Each takeoff is then priced based on this roll up with labor costs and other adjustments factored in. All of this happens automatically based on the defaults set in the estimate and can be customized as needed. The final output is stored in a SQL database. An Excel spreadsheet that is directly connected to the database is used to generate the final product list or bill of materials along with the proposal summary.

Microsoft Flow: Flows are used to trigger stored procedures in SQL and notify the Director of Projects & Design whenever a new product is added, or a new assembly created.

SQL Azure: All data for assemblies, product lists, prices and estimates are stored in a SQL Azure database.

Benefits from using the Power platform

• Reduced the time for data entry by half which allowed plans to get priced quickly
• Electricians found the app easy to learn and use, as compared to the old Accubid solution
• No more need for copy-pasting data, the spreadsheet is directly connected to the database which ensures that everyone always has accurate information
• They are in full control of the data – it is instantly available and can iterate through quickly

Solution architecture

The app uses SQL Azure for storing information about Assemblies, Products, Estimates and Proposals involved. The PowerApps application provides easy to use templates to key in the receptacle, view the assemblies and products involved, modify if needed per the customer’s request and generate an estimate for the client

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Looking beyond a single app

Encouraged by the success of the estimator app, Lars has built several additional solutions. His goal is to modernize all instances where they use siloed spreadsheets for critical business processes and replace them with a PowerApps solution. He has brought on an additional resource to work on the backend SQL database layer, while he continues to develop the PowerApps Canvas apps.

• Employee Engagement: A phone app used to submit feedback, report vacation, 1-on-1 forms, and manage employee information.
• Product Updater: A tablet app built to edit product lists and vendor product information.
• Sales Tracker: A desktop app to enter and track opportunities and projects. Setting this up to link to QuickBooks through an Azure SQL synced database.
• Asset Tracker: A phone app that tracks all tools in the company. Plan to use the barcode feature in this app and populate it full of tools.

Additional screenshots

Work order estimator

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Mobile apps – employee requests, asset tracking
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Product updater

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Sales tracker

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A very common question our customers ask is, how do I implement role based access control in my app. In other words, how do I make certain features or screens of my app available only to the authorized people in my organization. For example, make Admin screen available only to the users who belong to an Active Directory Group “Administrators” or make management views available only to the users belonging to the Active Directory Group “Managers” (as shown in the picture below).

In this blog post, I’ll show you how you can find out the Active Directory group membership of the signed in user and accordingly make decision to show/ hide certain features.

High Level Steps

We’ll use custom connector feature of PowerApps to connect to Microsoft Graph API for listing the Active Directory Groups that the user belongs to*. After getting the list of groups through this custom connector in PowerApps, we can easily check if the user belongs to a particular group and accordingly set the visibility of certain controls or screens.

Following are the broad steps:

Step 1: Register an app in the Azure Active Directory and request permission to use the right Graph API(s)

Step 2: Grant Permission requested above (An Active Directory Admin needs to do this)

Step 3: Add this app as a custom connector in PowerApps environment

Step 4: Use the custom connector in your PowerApps app

* Note:

• If you never used Microsoft Graph before, I strongly recommend that you checkout their documentation and graph explorer. I find Graph Explorer very handy to explore what’s out there and even test out the output of the specific APIs before using this in my own code.
• Graph API we are using here, lists the groups that the user is direct member of. So, it’ll miss out the group membership through nested group membership. For this blog, we are keeping it simple by just checking for direct membership. There are other Graph APIs for finding nested group membership too. However you’ll need to know group id (you can’t use group name for using that API). You can use the concept outlined in this blog to make use of this other API (after finding group id from the graph explorer). If there is enough interest, I’ll do another blog post showing how to use the other graph api.

Step 1: Register An App In The Azure Active Directory and Request Permission To Use The Right Graph API(s)

These steps are similar to the steps documented in this example of custom api.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal. If you have more than one Azure Active Directory tenant, make sure you’re logged into the correct directory by looking at your username in the upper-right corner.

2. Select Azure Active Directory -> App Registration

3. Select New application registration.

4. For Registering a New App, use following values:

Name: Any Name that you want to use ( I used “GraphAPIDemo”)

Application type: Web app/ API

Sign-on URL: https://login.windows.net

5. Once it is created, select this newly created app. Note down the application id (it’ll be used as Client Id in the later step of adding this API as custom connector in PowerApps environment). After noting down the application id, click “Settings” menu at the top.

6. From Settings, click on Reply URLs, add following url and hit save:

https://msmanaged-na.consent.azure-apim.net/redirect

Note- This url may not work for non US locations. If you get error, you’ll have to come back and add your location specific url. I’ll go in greater details about that error at a later step (where you register this as custom connector in PowerApps environment).

7. From Settings, click on Keys

8. Enter a description for the key, choose the expiry period, and hit Save. A new key value will be generated. Note down that value. You’ll need this key secret in later step while registering this API as custom API in PowerApps. (Note- very important to note down this secret in this step because you won’t be able to see this key if you come back to this screen later. )

9. Go back to Settings, click on Required Permissions

10. In the Required Permissions, click on Add and then Select an API:

11. On the next screen, select Microsoft Graph:

12. Click on Select Permissions:

13. Under “Delegated Permissions”, check following ones:

• View User’s Basic Profile
• View User’s Email Address
• Sign Users In
• Access Directory As Signed In User
• Read Directory Data
• Read All Groups
• Read All User’s Basic Profile
• Sign in and read User Profile and, hit “Select”

Step 2: Grant The Permissions Requested In The Previous Step (An Active Directory Admin Needs To Do This)

This step can be done only by the admin of the active directory. There are 2 ways to do this:

Option 1:

Ask the admin to the Azure portal, go to Azure Active Directory -> App Registrations -> and select the app you registered in the previous step. Go to settings -> Required Permissions, and click on Grant Permissions button at the top:

Option 2:

Send the following URL to the Active Directory Admin (it is typically someone from your IT Department). In the url below, put the client id (or application id) you noted while registering the app in the active directory. On clicking this url, your Active Directory Tenant Admin will get the prompt to grant permission.

https://login.microsoftonline.com/powerappsdemo1.onmicrosoft.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=<Client-Id you noted earlier>&response_type=code&redirect_uri=https://msmanaged-na.consent.azure-apim.net/redirect&nonce=1234&resource=https://graph.windows.net&prompt=admin_consent

Step 3: Add This Registered App As A Custom Connector In Your PowerApps Environment

1. Go to powerapps and click on gear icon on the top right, and select “Custom Connectors”.

Note- if you are part of multiple Active Directory Tenants, make sure you sign in to the active directory tenant where you registered this app in the first step.

2. Once you get to Customer Connectors screen, click on “Create custom connector” and Choose the option to “Import an Open API File”:

3. You’ll get following dialogue box. By importing an OpenAPI file, you are essentially importing a Swagger file. Use the Swagger file I created for this scenario (Save it to your local drive, and use it for uploading OpenAPI file). For Custom Connector title, use any title you want. I used DirectGroupMembership.

4. “General Information” step is automatically filled using the information in the swagger file. Feel free to change the icon, description but don’t change Host and Base Url.

5. Click Continue. In the Security Step, Swagger file will help automatically select Authentication Type as OAuth2.0 and choose the Identity Provider as “Azure Active Directory”. Leave all the information as automatically filled. You just need to fill the following information:

Client id: <Application Id you noted down in the earlier step of registering your app in Azure Active Directory.” >

Client secret: <Secret Key you noted while creating Keys in the App registration in Azure Active Directory step earlier>

Resource Url: https://graph.microsoft.com/

Click Continue.

6. Next Step of Definition will have everything automatically filled out from the Swagger file. Don’t make any changes (except summary and description- if you want to)

7. Click on Creator Connector:

8. If you followed all the steps properly, clicking on “Create connector” should create the connector successfully.
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If you see warning like following, scroll down and see if you see 200 Success message. If you see 200 Success message, please ignore the warnings. These warnings show up because my swagger file has extra parameters that are used by other Graph APIs. You don’t them for this example, that’s why it’s just warning.

Next step is to test it. Click on “Test” link and then “New Connection” on the Test Screen:

9. Click on “Create” from the Pop up dialogue box:

10. Sign in using your account:

If you are getting sign in error in creating connection, scroll down and see your error message. If the error message points to a different reply url than the one you specified while registering the app in active directory (Step-1) earlier, please add this reply address as a reply url in your app (reply url from your error message)

11. On successful sign in, you successfully registered Graph API with the right permission as a custom connector in your PowerApps environment. You should be all set to use it in your app. You can go ahead testing this in the portal by going to “Custom Connector”, selecting this connector and clicking on “Test”. For user id input, provide your full email (e.g. sudhesh@powerappsdemo1.onmicrosoft.com) and see the output. If all goes well, you should get 200 OK status.

If you are getting 404 error, please check the following in the graph explorer

Go to graph explorer, sign in, and try running following API (make sure you provide full email of the user id e.g. meganb@bappartners.onmicrosoft.com ).

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/{userid}/memberOf

See if you can successfully get the list of groups here.

If you get permission error, please click on modify permission link and add following permissions (your Active Directory Admin will have to do this):

User.Read

User.ReadBasic.All

People.Read

Directory.Read.All

Group.Read.All

User.Read.All

People.Read.All

After ensuring that you get the groups list using Graph API as stated above, come back and test your custom connector in PowerApps. You should be good now.

If you are facing any other error, please double check that you followed following steps properly:

• The Registered App was Granted Permission by an Admin of the Active Directory (Ensure that the permission was granted before you registered this as custom connector in PowerApps environment)
• While registering the app, you provided proper reply url  (if you got error during custom connection creation, you added additional reply url)
• While creating custom connector, you provided proper resource url
• You noted down the correct Client Id, and Client Secret. (Client Id is same as Application Id. Key is same as Client Secret)
• You are signed in to the Active Directory Tenant where you registered your app
• You could successfully run the api from Graph Explorer

Step 4: Use the custom connector in your PowerApps app

1. In the PowerApps environment where you created this custom connector, create a new app.

2. Create a blank app. Click on View -> Data Sources. You should see this Custom Connector you just created in the list of data sources (If not, click on “New Connection” and you’ll see that connector). Click on the Custom Connector you just created.

On click on this, your custom connector should be a Data Source in your App now. I see “Graph” as a data source now (this name came from the title given in the swagger file. Feel free to change that).

3. For quick testing to see if you are getting the groups, insert a button control and OnSelect action of the button, put following formula:

ClearCollect(MyGroups, Graph.ListUserGroups(User().Email).value)
Graph is the name of the data source (custom connector)

4. Preview the app and click on the button. Go back to design mode and check if the collection “MyGroups” has the list of the groups you are member of.

5. Getting some value in collection like above means you are able to successfully get the list of Groups, the signed in user is member of. You can now use this for setting visibility on or off of certain screens or controls. For example, if you have an Admin button on this screen, you can set the visible property of that Button to:

If(“Administrator” in MyGroups.displayName, true, false)

Note- in your application, you’ll most likely not have any button to get the list of groups. You’ll most like do this in the OnVisible event of your screen.

Hopefully this tutorial gives you a good overview of how to implement active directory group membership based permissions in your app. There are many steps involved here (incl. admin consent), so it’s a long post. However following all these steps successfully will also give you good idea of how to implement any custom connector in your PowerApps environment and how to make use of different Graph APIs.

Let us know your feedback and questions. Will be great if some of you can share your scenario or any additional tutorials you created on similar lines.

Related Links:

Ways to Build Power Apps: A Beginner’s Guide

Bookmark PowerApps Champs to continue learning about how Champions have used Power Apps in ways that are redefining their organizations, their careers, and their lives. Read about their impact–find out what makes them Champions.

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Samit

Samit Saini was a security guard at London Heathrow Airport who enjoyed tinkering with technology like Excel and VBA. When he got access to Power Apps, he used it to digitize some of the paper-based processes at Heathrow such as providing translations for common questions asked by international passengers, performing customer experience audits, and supporting passengers with reduced mobility.

Heathrow has benefitted greatly from this level of substitution, having already saved more than 11,000 sheets of paper, 850 hours of time, and $460,000 in potential app costs. They cite that every 25,000 sheets of paper saved equals about 3 trees. But as Samit puts it, “In Heathrow, we’re not trying to save trees, we’re trying to save the forest.” With this type of implementation, Power Apps is reducing the consumption of resources of paper, time, and money.

Watch a video on Samit’s journey: MeetSamit

Martin

Martin Lee has built 50+ apps over the past year for a variety of use cases such as field technicians, call center agents, and executive conferences for Autoglass® (part of Belron® group). Belron® is a vehicle glass repair and replacement group operating worldwide across 34 countries and employing over 25,000 people. With the data collected from apps, they are generating insights and reports getting much more than they had originally planned to do.

Nick

Apps could be made by anyone, for anyone, to solve anything. But they could also be done any time. At the American Red Cross, a volunteer had created an app while deployed during Hurricane Harvey. The app allowed volunteers to check-in and report on their status. It was a simple use case, but had significant value, and it was made ad hoc. Nick Gill, a trainer at the American Red Cross, described this app in his Microsoft Business Applications Summit presentation, along with the app he built for First Aid & CPR instructors to order training supplies such as gloves and masks.

Learn more about the American Red Cross.

Camilla

Camilla Friedrichsen is a Quality Management Specialist at the LEGO Group headquarters in Billund, Denmark. She created a solution to track and communicate product quality issues with the development and operations teams at LEGO. All the information on a quality issue became available in one spot, her team did not need to search elsewhere for additional information, such as pictures. Managing access was easy as SharePoint gave the flexibility of maintaining granular level permissions. Her team was able to implement the solution for themselves, without needing IT to build it for them.

Learn more about Camilla and the LEGO Group - MeetCamilla

Vanessa

At Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank in terms of assets, Vanessa Welgemoed is on Ian Doyle’s team which has modified the company’s app-building process. As part of their approach, they elicit ideas from those in their organization on what apps they want. Those who share ideas are also invited to learn how to build the apps themselves, so that they are not reliant on central IT. With this implementation in place, Standard Bank collectively has over 100 apps in production and is continuing to grow at a rapid pace as the energy and interest in the Power platform continues to grow.

See how Standard Bank is using Power Apps

Remi

SNCF is France’s national state-owned railway company that operates the country’s national rail services. Rémi Delarboulas, a digital adviser in the digital transformation team took the initiative to build a Power Apps application called Digi Bogies. The aim was to reduce the error rate and streamline the work required to perform this operation. The result was a very intuitive user experience that culminated in the app providing a list of recommendations and guidance around optimal spring placements.

Learn more about SNCF at: Power Platform Customer Success Story

Jonathan

Jonathan Oberhaus is an example of someone whose job is to make apps: not any ordinary apps–but specifically Power Apps. At DriveTime, he has shipped four solutions in production and continues to grow the app portfolio for scenarios such as insurance claims management and contract employee management.

DriveTime started its Power Apps journey as an early adopter in 2016 with Travis Bliele, a business analyst with Power BI and SQL background but no app development experience. He had created a mobile solution for DriveTime car buyers to inspect vehicles at auctions. As the impact of the Power platform grew, the company created a full time Power Apps developer position filled by Jonathan Oberhaus.

Keith

Arriva is one of Europe’s largest transport providers. They operate ~18% of London’s bus service and service ~2.4 billion passenger journeys each year. Keith Whatling had used Power Apps and the Common Data Service to digitize management of the quality process in Arriva London’s operations center. Management and staff could stay more connected in order to continually improve the quality of their operations.

Keith speaks passionately about ‘digital inclusion.’ To quote Keith, Power Apps is a tool that “democratizes technology, one where the cost of quality apps, processes, and data are in the hands of those that need it, not just those who can afford it. It’s the pebble in the pond. A game changer.” He sees how Power Apps makes it possible to build ‘never apps’ apps that would never be built for small teams. Everyone can have an app.

Eric

At G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned bottler for Pepsi-Cola products, Eric McKinney was managing the company’s migration to the cloud and rolling out services such as Office 365 and Skype. He substituted a paper-based store audit process with Power Apps. With real-time reporting, the company was able to respond much more quickly to issues and reduce errors. On top of that, G&J Pepsi was able to use rich PowerBI reports to derive insights over the aggregated data such as their top in-store competitors on a per-region basis. Since 2016, Eric has built several cross-platform solutions using Power Apps for auditing stores, managing merchandise and tracking resources.

Watch a video on Power Apps at G&J Pepsi

Ludovic

SNCF Railway has a growing community of app makers. They have thousands of app makers on their Yammer channel for Power Apps. While to some this is a large active community, to Ludovic Malondra, a digital transformation leader at SNCF, he sees this as a relatively small number. His goal is to expand Power Apps adoption to all 165,000 employees at the company, redefining the expectations of growing community.

Learn more about SNCF at: Power Platform Customer Success Story/

Ashlee

Never doubt that a twitter contest could change your life. Ashlee’s Power Apps story begins with a fidget spinner–not an ordinary one, but a digital one. Having learned about a challenge to see who could build a fidget spinner in Power Apps, Ashlee used her knowledge of trigonometry to animate a spinner that wowed the Power Apps team and won the contest.

Today she builds complex apps with her dad and leads hackathons where participants of all ages learn Power Apps and crucial life skills.

More Resources

Would you like to learn about more customer stories? Visit

‍Customer Stories

Designing a Power Apps app‍

Ways to Build Power Apps: A Beginner’s Guide

United Kingdom based nonprofit Leonard Cheshire doesn’t just provide care and support for people with disabilities around the world, it changes lives for the better permanently. The organization works to make the support that enables independent, rewarding living more accessible to all, and it is in the middle of a major digital transformation. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform, Leonard Cheshire is streamlining its processes and has created smarter apps for staff to make great care services easier to access and deliver.

With Power Apps, Leonard Cheshire can change the game in the way we support people with disabilities to achieve their goals and aspirations.

-Deepash Shah: Business System Manager

Leonard Cheshire

Transforming lives through digital innovation

Millions of people around the world live with disabilities and have full, rewarding, and personally fulfilling lives. Leonard Cheshire supports thousands of them by providing more than just social care. The nonprofit supports individuals to live, learn, and work independently, giving them freedom, choice, and greater structure in their lives.

Leonard Cheshire focuses on a single, simple goal to deliver real and sustained positive changes in the lives of people with disabilities by improving the accessibility of education, employment, and independent living support. To help it make support services more accessible, Leonard Cheshire uses technology in creative and intuitive ways.

“We knew we could create better outcomes for the people we support by changing our technology,” says Jon Petty, Executive Director of Technology at Leonard Cheshire. “So we launched an organization-wide transformation initiative we call Project Connect.”

Project Connect is designed to shift mindsets and processes throughout Leonard Cheshire by using digital technology to connect people and streamline operations. But before Project Connect, the nonprofit relied on numerous disparate systems and manual processes.

“The limitations of the tools we were working with were well known,” says Petty. “The need for change was clear costs kept going up, and we had to make decisions based on little to no data, because it was all stored in different places. There was no single version of the truth.”

Establishing a foundation for greater transformation

Leonard Cheshire worked with QuantiQ a Gold-competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network to consolidate its systems and build new apps and workflows using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform. The nonprofit will use the Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Finance apps to consolidate information across services, provide simple, streamlined support, and manage social care billing and project accounting. With the Dynamics 365 Healthcare and Nonprofit Accelerators, Leonard Cheshire saved time and effort by reusing existing blueprints with Common Data Model standards. On the platform, it built customized apps for end-to-end fundraising and billing management.

At the center of its transformation, Leonard Cheshire is using the Microsoft Power Platform to build new, intuitive apps for handling care plans, assessments, and notifications; uploading images to Microsoft Azure Blob storage; and creating data visualization and business insights for reporting. Before, support workers at Leonard Cheshire used Microsoft Word and Excel files to build care plans and assessments, and they used third-party or house-built finance and compliance apps.

“Our old systems hadn’t seen any investment in years,” says Laura Crandley, Executive Director of Partnerships at Leonard Cheshire. “People did what you would expect they came up with their own solutions. We had thousands of Word documents in use. Our people will be able to manage and record care easily from anywhere using a streamlined mobile app.”

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Better experiences, better lives

Using this blend of Dynamics 365 apps and Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power Apps, and Microsoft Power BI on the Microsoft Power Platform, Leonard Cheshire is building a complete, cohesive platform for modern, streamlined operations. That new foundation is bringing the organization’s entire digital world together, creating an ecosystem that’s far more valuable than the sum of its previously disparate parts.

Leonard Cheshire is improving management, service delivery, and reporting while reducing administration and overall costs. An independent ROI study predicted full payback in less than 36 months. The investment pays off in productivity and collaboration, too. Leonard Cheshire staff now work on a common platform with a single view of the information they need.

For example, the nonprofit had a paper-based staff rostering system that it is now fully digitizing. This will give decision makers full visibility into how many external agency staff the nonprofit is using and an opportunity to reduce this expense by better scheduling according to staffing gaps.

“We’ve identified a lot more ways that we can make a difference using Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform,” says Crandley. “We’re now using them to improve our financial operations, with customer relationship management and compliance monitoring capabilities to follow in the next few months.”

As Project Connect continues, Leonard Cheshire is finding more ways to empower its employees and the people they help. For those who rely on Leonard Cheshire’s support, the transformation initiative will make services more accessible and understandable, ultimately enabling them to live more fulfilling, independent lives from the moment they first engage with the organization.

Find out more about Leonard Cheshire on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Our old systems hadn’t seen any investment in years. People did what you would expect—they came up with their own solutions. Our people will be able to manage and record care easily from anywhere using a streamlined mobile app.

-Laura Crandley: Executive Director, Partnerships

Leonard Cheshire

Introduction: Why Power Apps

Have you ever wished you could build your own app without being a professional developer?

With Microsoft Power Apps, that dream becomes a reality. Power Apps is part of the Microsoft Power Platform and allows anyone from beginners to IT pros to create apps with drag-and-drop simplicity.

Whether you want a mobile app for your team, a SharePoint-integrated solution, or a knowledge base your company can carry in their pocket, Power Apps has you covered.

But here’s the big question: How do you start?

There are three main ways to build apps in Power Apps:

1. Start from a blank canvas
2. Start from data
3. Start from a template

This guide will break them down, show Power Apps examples, and help you decide which method is best for your business.

1. Build a Power Apps Canvas App from Blank

Starting from scratch gives you the most flexibility. With a Power Apps Canvas App, you can design the app exactly how you want it, think of it like drawing on a whiteboard.

• Canvas App from Blank: Design the UI freely with drag-and-drop tools.
• Model-Driven App from Blank: Powered by your data model, with prebuilt forms, dashboards, and charts.
• Portal App from Blank: Create external-facing websites and apps for customers or vendors.

When to use Canvas Apps:

• You need a custom business solution.
• You want to integrate with SharePoint app development or external data sources.
• You’re solving a problem that templates don’t fit.

Customer-first priority

One of the highest priorities for North State Grocery is keeping customers happy at both of its chains. When a popular customer service program became a bottleneck for responding to customer requests for new products, the customer service team worked with SkyLite Systems to replace it.

The new solution unlocks customer data from Microsoft SharePoint Online a familiar tool for the staff making it possible for all stakeholder departments to access and update the database from any connected device.

It also helps keep data and alerts moving smoothly, preventing requests from falling through the cracks  all while increasing the value of Office 365 and the company’s Microsoft investment.

“This tool makes managing the customer relationship much easier.
Now we know that nothing is going to fall through the cracks.”
- Lynn Martinusen, Customer Service Manager, North State Grocery

Competitive industry needs

Holiday Market and SAV•MOR Foods, the two formats that comprise the North State Grocery regional grocery retail organization, operate in an extremely margin-sensitive, competitive industry.

With limited square footage and big competitors in the northern California market, it’s critical for these operations to be highly customer focused. That’s why the stores rely heavily on strong customer service to attract and retain loyal customers  in-store, at the point of purchase, via email, and on social media.

One way the stores cater to their customers is by using shelf signage to solicit suggestions for new products.

“You can call us, and we’ll do our best to bring in any item that’s available and feasible for us to carry.
We’ve always received great reviews from customers for working with them to stock products that are important to them.”
- Lynn Martinusen

Growing complexity of customer needs

• Natural and organic products expanding exponentially made it harder to keep up.
• Many new and niche products were emerging, making buyer/vendor selection challenging.
• Small store footprints meant limited shelf space.

“We rely on our customers to tell us what they want to see in our stores.”
-Martinusen

• Customer request program existed for 28 years.
• Managed by a small team of four.
• Used Microsoft Access database.
• Became difficult to:
  1. Respond to requests
  2. Manage follow-ups
  3. Keep buyers, customers, and managers in sync
  4. Prevent requests from being lost

Martinusen:
“It was a huge responsibility… the old system just wasn’t conducive to having everyone work with the program.
Instead, it was a bottleneck.”

Building the new solution

North State worked with SkyLite Systems (Microsoft Partner Network) to design a modern platform.

How it started:

• Began with a simple sketch on paper of requirements.
• Built a custom Microsoft SharePoint Online list form using Power Apps.
• Integrated with an existing customer database in SharePoint.
• Leveraged Microsoft Flow (11 automated flows) for alerts and lifecycle tracking.

Benefits:

• No training needed familiar SharePoint UI.
• Nontechnical staff could build reports and metrics with 20+ list views.
• More than 50 users now collaborate across departments (vs. 4 in old system).

How it works

• All requests stored in SharePoint lists.
• Stakeholders use Power Apps forms to view request details.
• Automated email alerts go to buyers, managers, and customer service.
• SharePoint Quick Edit list view feels like a spreadsheet for updates.
• Deep integration with Outlook and Flow ensures tasks are completed.

Chennault:
“This spreads the workflow and decision making to staff who are directly responsible… eliminating the bottleneck.”

Rollout and adoption

• Built in 10 days → tested by customer service → rolled out to buyers.
• Added quick edit functionality for ease of use.
• Training delivered via manual + video uploaded to SharePoint.
• Now managing nearly 300,000 customer records and 1,200 items, with 50+ new requests weekly.

Results and impact

• Time savings: 15 minutes saved per customer contact.
• No middleman: Store managers can instantly check status or trigger actions.
• Positive customer reviews: Yelp, Facebook, and hotline praise follow-up.
• Better employee adoption: Buyers and managers find it manageable.
• Maximized Office 365 investment: No new software required.

“Power Apps has created a way for us to easily share important information about customer requests
for new products with our stores and senior management staff.”
- Lynn Martinusen

Final takeaway

North State Grocery successfully modernized a 28-year-old customer request program by combining SharePoint, Power Apps, and Microsoft Flow.

The result: Greater efficiency, Stronger customer loyalty, and Higher value from Microsoft 365.

As an App Maker, before you begin building your Power Apps solution, it's recommended to go through a design process. When designing your Power Apps solution, there are several different factors to consider, such as:

• Business requirements
• Data Model
• User Experience (UX)
• User Interface (UI)
• Business Logic
• Output

By going through a simple design process, you can flush out any minor issues before they become a larger problem once the app has been put into production. It is also important to understand that this design process is for Canvas apps.

So how do you go from a simple blank Canvas app, as seen below?

To a fully customized Canvas app solution?

Understand the needs of the user

One of the most powerful and, at the same time, challenging parts of building a canvas app is that you start with a blank screen. This gives you the ability to build what you want, but to do that you have to know what you want.

In many cases, when purchasing software to solve and or streamline business solutions, there are many business processes that don't quite fall within the software's supported guidelines. When you run into this issue, typically, there are several internal discussions and meetings held to determine how those unsupported processes can be updated/altered to meet the software requirements. For most organizations, this isn't ideal because of the cost or time takes to update those business processes. The great news is, by using Power Apps to build your solution, you won't have to worry about unsupported business solutions. Why? With Power Apps, you can build a custom solution tailored to the exact needs of your business requirements.

Often when building an app, you are tempted to recreate the piece of paper or legacy software-driven process exactly. This is possible but might not be the ideal solution. By challenging the existing process and asking what it is the business needs to do, not what does the piece of paper or old software allows you to do, it opens the possibility of better, more efficient processes. For example, maybe on the paper process, the user had to type notes about what they see. Would it be better instead to just take a picture? This type of thinking will lead to better apps and better outcomes.

Business Requirements

Every app you develop will have a different set of business requirements based on the solution. Taking the time to think about all the requirements is key to rolling out a successful production app.

Depending on the solution or company policies, you may have certain security, privacy, or compliance requirements you must follow. For example, let's say you are collecting secure personal information in the app. You will want to ensure this information is securely stored and not visible to everyone.

During this process, you will also want to identify any government regulations or authentication/authorization requirements (if applicable). You don't necessarily have to have all the answers to your questions here; you just want to know all the requirements.

Offline Mode

One of the first questions to consider when developing your application is, will the app need to function offline? If so, will the entire app or only part of the app needs to function offline? When will the data be synchronized to my data source? Are there any limitations?

This is important to consider during the planning phase because if you were to build your app without this functionality, then decide to add it later, it will be more difficult than just doing it in the first place. Why is this? You will need to make sure you are using collections and additional functions like SaveData and LoadData as you go along to allow your app to function offline. Also, if you are using Forms and trying to implement Offline mode, you will run into issues.

There is a thorough discussion that needs to take place around Offline mode, and it's best to have this early in the design process as it will affect the rest of the process.

Data Model

In the "Power Apps related technologies" module, you learned about some of the common data sources for building apps, but with all these choices how do you actually decide which data source to use for your solution? Maybe you already have a data source implemented that users work with on a day to day basis, like SharePoint. Could you just use this as your data source to build your app? Do I need to connect to multiple data sources? These are all common questions you should ask yourself and there are number of additional factors to consider, such as:

• Business Requirements – Every data source and it's supported functionality is slightly different. So, depending on your app requirements you need to select the data source that supports your needs or modify your business requirements to comply with the supported functionality for the selected data source.
• Licensing/Cost – Certain data sources like the Common Data Service or SQL are considered a "premium data source". A premium data source will require each user who uses the app to have a Power Apps Per App Plan or a Power Apps Per User Plan. For more information about licensing, see Power Apps pricing

User Experience (UX)

By designing your Power Apps solution in a Canvas app, you have complete control of the end-user experience. This allows you to fully customize nearly every aspect of your app. However, just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should. When designing your Power Apps solution your goal should be to keep it simple. When your end users open the application and begin using it, they should have no confusion about what to click on or where to go. If your app requires an extensive training program for users to understand how to use it, you may want to rethink your app.

Some of the basic designs elements you will want to consider are things like:

• Custom Branding (your logo and colors)
• Pop-ups
• Hide/show buttons based on users' access/permissions

One of the most common User Experience enhancements you can implement in your applications are Pop-ups. By implementing pop-ups, you can provide the users with a simple, but useful visual to confirm what the user clicked on went through or maybe your pop-up acts as a loading screen as the logic on the backend is processed. For example, in the screenshot below when a user clicks on "Submit", we might have a simple pop-up display to let them know their submission was successful.

User Interface (UI)

To fully visualize the User Interface or UI, you may want to consider creating a mockup of your application. Two common ways to create a mockup of your application are below:

Use Visio to create a wireframe diagram. A wireframe is a visual representation of an application's user interface. To begin, there are various website and mobile wireframe templates available, or you could start from blank template. The diagrams are a quick way to show app functionality and gain team consensus on the design.

The example below shows a simple Visio wireframe of a Purchase Items screen in an inventory app.

Use Power Apps to create a mockup of your application. You can add most of the controls, graphics, forms, and other items to your app screens and play with the layout and size for each element as if you were building the app for real. When designing the UI you don't need to add the logic behind the various elements you placed on the screen.

The goal here is to focus on what the app could look like and how it could function. This similar to what you can do with a Visio wireframe but one of the biggest pros of going this route is that you will gain more experience working with Power Apps and also learn more about the various UI elements available in the process.

All of the experience and knowledge you will gain by creating your app mockup in Power Apps will only payoff later when it's time to start on the production app. Another big upside to using Power Apps for your mockup is that if you show this to your team and they like what you did, you can continue building off this app or create a new app and copy the elements you would like to keep to your other application. By not having to redo the UI or only having to redo parts of it, you could potentially save yourself hours of work.

The example below shows a simple mockup of a New Purchase Order Screen.

It really comes down to your preference and comfort with the software you are using to create the mockup. You should also consider licensing and costs when making this decision. Visio requires additional licensing to get the full functionality required for creating a wireframe diagram. Whereas with Power Apps, it doesn't matter which license you have. As long as you have Power Apps (and sufficient permissions in your environment), you can create apps and mockup apps.

As you design the User Interface, a few additional things to think about are Accessibility and Localization. It's important to ensure the app interface follows accessibility guidelines so all your users can interact with your application without any issues. To review these guidelines and additional accessibility properties, see Create accessible canvas apps in Power Apps.

Localization can be something you must consider when developing your application as well. Depending on where your app will be used, you may need to use different punctuation. For example, some regions of the world use a . (dot or period) as the decimal separator while others use a , (comma). For more information on building a globally supported application, see Build global support into canvas apps .

Business Logic

When using the common data service, you can create business rules and recommendations to apply logic and validations without writing code or creating plug-ins. The great thing about the common data service and business rules is that they are applied at the data level. This means that you can apply rules that are enforced regardless of how the data is accessed.

Often when building apps all of the business logic is built into the app. This works great if the data is only accessed via the app. The challenge is often business data is used in many ways and from different tools. This is where Business Rules shine. You can apply logic on the data in the Common Data Service, allowing your rules to be enforced no matter which tool interacts with the data.

For example, you have built a capital project expense tracking application using Common Data Service as the data source. In your business process, the duration field is an optional field if your request is less than 10,000 but the duration field is required if the request is more than 10,000.

After you set up your entity in Common Data Service, you would then apply a business rule that says if Project Amount is greater than 10,000 then make Project Duration a required field. Now, regardless of how the user interacts with the data, the Business Rule will be enforced, keeping your data integrity.

Output

Finally, you will want to discuss your app's data output. This simply means what type of data will your app generate, and once the data is generated what will be done with it? A few questions to ask your app stakeholders:

• How does the data need to be visualized?
• What actions will be taken on the data once it is collected?
• Are there specific format or file types the data are needed?

The answers to these questions will help determine if additional functionality needs to be added to the app such as a Power BI report, email output, PDF, or CSV.

Let’s look at an example. Perhaps your organization has a legacy ERP solution and the orders submitted in your Power App need to be reflected in the ERP application. While one option might be to build a custom connector to that solution, another option may be to export the data to a CSV file using Power Automate and Power Apps together, see screenshot below:

The great thing about generating this CSV file export is that it's not linked to your data, so the changes you make to the file will not alter the app data.

If you need our team to build this types of PowerApps for your business. Please submit the form!

Related Blogs

Checkout our other blogs related to building Power Apps:

https://www.sharepointdesigns.com/blog/ways-build-power-apps

Welcome to Microsoft Power Apps. This self-paced, online module helps you build apps from the ground up.

In this module, you will:

• Explore how Power Apps can make your business more efficient.
• Learn which technologies to use to perform tasks in Power Apps.
• Learn about the different ways to build an app in Power Apps.
• Create your first app from data in a Microsoft Excel workbook.

In this introductory module, you'll learn how to create an app from data in an Excel workbook. As a prerequisite, you'll download a workbook that contains sample data. Next, you'll upload the workbook to Microsoft OneDrive for Business, where you can share the data with others. Then, you'll build the app without using code.

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors, and a data platform that provides you with an opportunity to build custom apps for your business needs. By using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your business data that is stored either in the underlying data platform (Common Data Service) or in various online and on-premises data sources (SharePoint, Excel, Office 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Apps that are built by using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business processes to digital, automated processes. Power Apps simplifies the custom business app building experience by enabling users to build feature-rich apps without writing code.

Power Apps also provides an extensible platform that lets pro developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.

With Power Apps, you can:

• Build an app quickly by using the skills that you already have.
• Connect to the cloud services and data sources that you're already using.
• Share your apps instantly so that coworkers can use them on their phones and tablets.

When it comes to using Power Apps to get things done and keep people informed, your options are nearly limitless. The following examples can help you think about how to use an app, instead of traditional paper notes, to run your business:

• Equipment in the field -Often, company representatives who visit customers in the field carry clipboards to help guarantee a paper trail of parts with scheduled replacement dates. By running an app on a tablet, reps can look up the customer's equipment, see a picture of a part, test and analyze the part, and then order new parts. Reps can perform these tasks on-site instead of leaving the customer's warehouse.
• Restaurant employee management - Employees of a large restaurant might fill out work schedules and vacation requests on a piece of paper that's affixed to a wall. With Power Apps running on everyone's smartphone, employees can open the app to record the same information, anywhere, anytime. The app can even send reminders for the start of the next day's shift.

If you're a beginner with Power Apps, this module gets you going quickly; if you're familiar with Power Apps, it ties concepts together and fills in the gaps.

Power Apps building blocks

Power Apps is a collection of services, apps, and connectors that work together to let you do much more than just view your data. You can act on your data and update it anywhere and from any device.

To create, share, and administer apps, you'll use the following sites:

• Make a Power App - On this site, you can open apps, specify the type of app that you want to create, share your app, and create data connections and flows. To use this site, you'll need to log in by using your organizational account.
• Power Apps Studio - On this site, you build apps by configuring user interface (UI) elements and Excel-like formulas.
• Power Apps admin center - On this site, you'll define environments and data policies.

Note:

To use these sites, you'll need to sign in by using your organizational account.

When you've completed your tasks, you can run your apps in a browser or in Power Apps Mobile (available for Windows tablets, iOS devices, and Android devices).

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This unit explores each part of the following Power Apps components:

• Power Apps Home Page - Apps start here, whether you build them from data, a sample app, or a blank screen.
• Power Apps Studio - Develop your apps further by connecting to data, adding and arranging user interface (UI) elements (known as controls), and building formulas.
• Power Apps Mobile - Run your apps on Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS, and Google Android devices.
• Power Apps Admin Center - Manage Power Apps environments and other components.

Power Apps Home Page

If you are building an app, you'll start with the Power Apps Home Page. You can build apps from sample apps, templates, or a blank screen. All the apps that you've built appear here, along with any apps that others have created and shared with you.

Power Apps Studio

Power Apps Studio is where you can fully develop your apps to make them more effective as a business tool and to make them more attractive. Power Apps Studio has three panes that make creating apps seem more like building a slide deck in Microsoft PowerPoint:

• Left pane - Shows a hierarchical view of all the controls on each screen or a thumbnail for each screen in your app.
• Middle pane - Shows the canvas app that you're working on.
• Right pane - Where you set options such as the layout, properties, and data sources for certain controls.

Power Apps Mobile

Power Apps Mobile for Windows, iOS, and Android devices allows you to use all the apps that you've created, and those others have shared with you, on your mobile device. You or your users can download the Microsoft Power Apps app from the appropriate app store. When users log in with their credentials, they will see all apps that have been shared with them. The Power Apps Mobile app only needs to be downloaded once.

When you use apps in Power Apps Mobile, you get the most out of your device's capabilities: camera controls, GPS location, and more.

Power Platform admin center

The Power Platform admin center is the centralized place for managing Power Apps for an organization. On this site, you can define and manage different environments to house the apps. For example, you might have separate environments for development and production apps. Additionally, you can define data connections and manage environment roles and data policies.

Licensing

Most users get their initial start with Power Apps by utilizing one of the licenses that come with their Microsoft 365 Plan or Microsoft Dynamics 365 license. These licenses allow you to extend the functionality of the app that is licensed. This means if you purchased a Microsoft 365 plan that included a Power Apps license then you can build apps that extend and use SharePoint as a data source. But Power Apps doesn’t have to stop at just extending that platform.

Power Apps has over 300 available data source connectors available including Common Data Service. To incorporate Common Data Service or any of those additional connectors all users of the app will need a premium license. There are two different ways to acquire a Premium license:

• Per App model
• Per User model.

The Per App license plan allows individual users to run two applications and one portal for a specific business scenario in a specific environment based on the full capabilities of Power Apps with access to premium connectors. The Per User license plan allows users to run unlimited premium licensed apps. This gives you the ability to grow with Power Apps and control costs by purchasing the license that best matches your business goals.

In addition, Power Apps also has the capability to use Power Apps portals to build externally or internally facing websites using Common Data Service and Power Apps controls. Power Apps portals have their own licensing model and are not included in any of the licenses discussed previously above. With Power Portals you will purchase a capacity based license to meet your business needs.

Review the following links about licensing.

Microsoft Power Apps pricing

Microsoft Power Automate pricing

Microsoft Power Apps portals pricing.

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Checkout our other blogs related to building Power Apps:

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