PowerApps Q1 update: Customers are digitally transforming business processes using PowerApps

In the five months since its general availability, Microsoft PowerApps continues to gain traction as the platform of choice for customers developing employee-facing applications and modernizing business processes.

Customers are digitally transforming their business processes by digitizing paper-based processes, developing powerful, custom-built applications quickly and efficiently, and deploying them instantly to their users. PowerApps is helping NASCAR equip their field workers with race day information. IPS is using PowerApps to digitally transform their equipment servicing business. National Trust has been able to increase visibility and efficiency in driving conservation goals. PowerApps is helping Transalta save money and increase their uptime at wind farms across North America.

PowerApps continues to build out key integrations and extensibility scenarios that are enabling customers and partners to extend Microsoft applications and beyond.

Work seamlessly with large SharePoint lists. PowerApps can now connect to large SharePoint lists and filter through more data where it originates, making it possible to deliver high-performance apps that are backed by large enterprise systems. PowerApps is also constantly adding new connectors and operations that can be delegated to large data sources.

Embed PowerApps in Power BI dashboards or websites. Apps built using PowerApps can now be embedded in Power BI dashboards, which lets business users visualize insights and take actions from a single place.

Connect to even more data sources. PowerApps can now connect to over 115 data sources, including Oracle and Wunderlist. Users can also play videos hosted in Azure Media Services in PowerApps. It is also possible now for anyone to submit their own connector for the rest of the world to use with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. Any company with their own API is encouraged to submit their connector, as covered in this blog post.

Amplify the impact of professional developers. Developers can now more easily register existing Azure Functions and other APIs regardless of where they are hosted, increasing discovery by power users. Azure functions also recently announced support for editing and hosting Swagger metadata, which makes it easier to register and use them from PowerApps and Flow.

PowerApps also continues enhancing the end user experience through significant plan and feature additions.

Deliver apps to retail and deskless workers. Users with an Office Kiosk plan can run apps and forms built with PowerApps – including those embedded in SharePoint – without a separate license. We announced this capability earlier this month and it will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Organizations using Microsoft Staffhub to manage their staff workers can also embed PowerApps within the Staffhub app.

Increase user engagement using in-app push notifications. App makers and admins can now set up contextual in-app push notifications to their users to provide contextual information and bring them back to the app.

Build apps quicker with the Common Data Service. We’ve made major investments to improve the ease with which power users can create PowerApps from data in the Common Data Service with our new Entity Forms feature. You can now point and click to easily create more advanced applications based on entities in the Common Data Service.

Host of other improvements and updates. In addition to these key features, we delivered many performance improvements that make it faster to run apps, made typing advanced expressions easier with syntax highlighting, added support to create apps from templates in the web browser, ability to use native camera to take pictures with PowerApps, and are constantly adding new features to the admin center.

Partner network and community. Our partner network is growing and we now have 272 certified partners working with customers to implement a solution using PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Common Data Service. We’re also seeing increasing engagement and contribution from our community of users in the PowerApps forum as well as PowerApps Community Blog.

Our pace of product advancement is driven by the incredible response we’re seeing from users. Stay tuned for more regular product updates as we continue to empower businesses to turn expertise into solutions…