New Best Practices Community Galleries!
We are pleased to announce the refresh of our Best Practices section in the community. This area of the community will focus on the three primary areas for successful app building: Administering PowerApps, Creating Apps, and Expressions and Formulas. We encourage everyone to jump into these forums not only to ask, but also to answer, questions in these topic areas! We are sure this will help app-makers to optimize the success of their apps as well as give all community experts an opportunity to showcase best practices and lessons learned.
In addition to the above mentioned forums, we've also refreshed our Best Practices App and Video Galleries found here. These video galleries are full of helpful community tips, business scenario ideas, and event recordings that will help you, no matter what level, to do more with PowerApps and Flow.
The Community Apps Gallery:
The App Gallery visually showcases apps from Microsoft and other Community Members all around the world! In addition to being an awesome resource for app ideas, it's goal is to dissect featured apps so that we can glean reusuable formulas, configurations, and patterns found in common business scenarios. We've kicked off the App Gallery with several popular sample apps created by Microsoft, and hope you'll add your own apps with practical tips to speed up app building for everyone.
Apps submitted to the new PowerApps App Gallery will be reviewed for quality and business value. The most popular submissions will be further amplified on social media, and across other Office 365, Azure, or Dynamics 365 communities. The App Gallery will focus on many elements of ‘building’ apps such as control selection and formatting, navigation, formulas, functions, conditional formatting, advanced gallery formatting, binding data tables, sub forms, and more!
Category tags available as of today:
The Community Video Gallery:
Over 400 videos posted by PowerApps gurus and evangelists! There have been so many videos posted over the past six months that Anton Robbins (one of our PowerApps Champions in DC) has decided to catalog them in an Excel spreadsheet (aka.ms/powerappsvideoindex). You may also like the filter at the top of the gallery to find what you need. If you have any videos you'd like to share in the community, please reference them there too.
The Live Events and Webinars Gallery
This gallery is content produced by Microsoft either at an online webinar, or at a live event such as our conferences. We wanted to make it easy to find all the key presentations right in the community. Don't hesitate to filter in this gallery as well. It covers quite a few beginner, intermediate, and advanced topics.
Remember that you can use the Options menu above each gallery to subscribe to RSS feeds. This way you can make your own custom guru video app using our RSS Connector if you prefer.
What's next?
Coming soon is the remodeled Design Matters Gallery:
The Design Matters gallery is focused on User Experience and User Interface principals (UX/UI). You most definitely don’t have to have a degree in software design in order to make your apps attractive to your users. However, in today’s modern workforce, consumers are more concerned than ever with ‘enjoying’ their app experiences, especially for mobile apps. They want them to be easy to use, self-evident, and ‘finger-friendly’ too. Therefore, thinking about elements such as app icons, or how we navigate users from one screen to the next, is important to the success of each app we make, and will help to improve discovery and adoption. This also has a secondary advantage of enhancing our reputation as low code app builders.
We will be encouraging community members to post questions regarding UX/UI on this forum in order to get help from community members who are more experienced in design components. We will also be sharing the ABCs of UX design from our own design teams here at Microsoft. The ABCs focus on core principles that you can leverage no matter what level of Power User you are!
Are you a Design Professional?
In addition to the above, this forum will also be open to UX/UI Designers to submit suggestions and best practices. Professional designers contribute to the success of Power Users building apps every day, as organizations normally rely on them to drive branding, look & feel, and coherence across business applications. Therefore, we appreciate comments, suggestions and feedback from experts like these, whether or not they currently know how to use PowerApps to create business solutions.
Please go check out these features, and note that it's all available via your mobile devices too!
Happy PowerApping!
Audrie (@ArtsyPowerApper on Twitter)