Announcing Public Preview for PowerApps

PowerApps is a service for creating, managing and using custom business apps across platforms. PowerApps connects to your existing systems and data sources securely, allows you to build apps, forms, and workflows without writing code, and lets you publish apps instantly for web and mobile.

Over the last few months, we’ve invited thousands of users to try out PowerApps as part of our private preview. We received invaluable feedback about what they liked and what’s missing, and have addressed key feedback. We’d like to thank all our early adopters who have helped us make PowerApps better.

Today, we are very happy to announce the public preview of PowerApps. You can now sign up at https://powerapps.microsoft.com with a work or school account. Here are some of the things you can start doing with PowerApps right away. Please look at our documentation for more details.

 

Get started with sample apps

Once you sign in, you’ll see sample apps on your home page. You can immediately start playing with these with sample data from the web browser and get a feel for the types of apps you can create using PowerApps. Learn more about getting started.

Create new apps using PowerApps Studio

You can start creating new apps using the PowerApps Studio, available on the Windows Store. Choose from one of the following starting points.

• ‘Create app from data’ automatically creates an app by connecting to your existing data source, using one of our many connectors, including SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox, and many more. Learn more
• ‘Create app from template’ lets you use one of our pre-built templates as a starting point before you customize your app. Learn more
• ‘Create blank app’ lets you start from an empty canvas, which you can customize and connect to your data using our connectors or custom APIs. Learn more

Share your apps with other users or the entire organization

Once you create, customize and save your apps to the cloud, you can share the app with other users or security groups within your organization. When you share apps, you can choose whether the recipient(s) can re-share the app and whether they can edit the app. You can also share apps with your entire organization. Apps respect data source permissions at all times, so be assured that only authorized users can access data from any app you share. Learn more

 

Run apps using the web browser or PowerApps mobile apps

Once you share the app with other users, they can choose to run the app from a web browser on any device (PC, tablet, or phone) or using PowerApps for iOS or Android . This way, you build the apps once and they run on any platform and any device, and are truly cross-platform. Learn more

Add flows to automate powerful workflows from your app

Microsoft Flow is a new service, available today in preview, for automating workflow across the growing number of apps and SaaS services that business users rely on. Microsoft Flow is fully integrated with PowerApps, which allows you to automate business workflows as part of the app. For example, send an approval email when a button is clicked or create a record in your CRM system. Learn more about Microsoft Flow and about using flows as part of PowerApps.

 

Manage apps and connections

You can manage all your apps from the ‘My Apps’ section of powerapps.com. You can manage who the app is shared with as well as view and manage different versions of the app. Learn more

You can view and manage all your connections from the ‘Manage -> Connections’ section of powerapps.com. This lets you add new connections, update credentials, view which apps are using the connection, as well as delete connections. Learn more

 

Register and use custom APIs

Do you want to connect your app to your existing web apps and APIs? Don’t see a connector to your data source? PowerApps lets you register and connect to any RESTful API as a custom API All you need to do is to generate a Swagger definition for your API and create a connection to your API by uploading this definition. Learn more

 

Summing up how it works

As you start to play with apps, it will help to keep in mind a mental model about how PowerApps works. Most apps connect to data sources and services you’re already using. Things like SharePoint Online lists, Excel files stored on OneDrive or Dropbox or Google Drive, Salesforce or Dynamics CRM Online records, SQL Azure databases and more. When you use apps, you can interact directly with the data in those systems – updating rows in a spreadsheet, for example, or adding records to a CRM system

All in all, PowerApps fundamentally changes and accelerates how organizations build custom business applications. This is available for you to use starting today, so get started by signing up at https://powerapps.microsoft.com

This is a preview and we know our journey isn’t complete yet. We are working feverishly on enhancing functionality. We plan to soon enable features such as support for more SharePoint data types, look-ups, more connectors and templates, and performance improvements.

Once you start using PowerApps, you can always get answers to your questions, report issues, and submit ideas using the PowerApps community site. We’re waiting to hear your feedback.
 

-    The PowerApps team