Within recent years there have been many shifts within the Office 365 world. For a long time SharePoint development could only be done by the hard core SharePoint developers.
Where initiatives like SPFx have created the option to develop client side web parts using all sorts of JavaScript based frameworks, there is now a shift towards no-coding solutions again. This doesn’t mean that SPFx doesn’t have a future. I do believe that there will still be a need for this. There are just alternatives available that can work for the users of SharePoint Online.
For quite a long time development has been limited to C# developers and this resulted in many organisations telling me that they wanted no development in their solutions. Quite often this only lasted until the first workshop, as the limitations that this gives are quite often not acceptable.
Although I’ve always been happy to deliver coded solutions, however I do prefer in many cases the non/low-coding solutions.
| Development Area | Coding | Non/Low-Coding |
| Integration | Web services | Connections |
| Data Layer | SharePoint wsp files | SharePoint UI (or any other application that can hold data) |
| Workflow | SharePoint wsp files | Microsoft Flow (or SharePoint Designer if you are into torturing yourself) |
| Presentation | Apps, SPFx web parts or wsp based web parts | PowerApps |
| Deployment | wsp files | PnP PowerShell (Although this could be considered coding) |
In my recent posts I’ve looked at the Microsoft Flow options and today it is time to look at the PowerApps as PowerApps can replace many of the coded web parts and apps.
So where can you put all your PowerApps?
As Wonder Laura has shown in her post it is easy to embed your PowerApps on SharePoint page using the embed web part.
But what if you have a classic page? Yes, you can simply use a script editor web part and add your PowerApps app there.
But you can also add a PowerApps app to Microsoft Teams tabs. is there any need for a SharePoint intranet? Could you do all your work within Teams?
Or you could run The PowerApps app from within the PowerApps app that you can download form the Windows Store.
Then there are still more options. In the SharePoint lists you can give users access to the PowerApps that you develop.
The Create and App gives you the App in PowerApps which you can then use within all the above locations.
This isn’t particularly useful for the end user as it gives this away form SharePoint feeling, but the Customize forms option is great! How often have you used SharePoint Designer to adjust list forms? Or how often did you use JSLink?
No need for all of that anymore. You can now simply modify your form that is used by the list and place your PowerApps app right there!
Now it is time to take this all a step further. Have you ever tried updating multiple lists? For example you are trying to create a car record in a cars list and one of the fields is accessories. The accessories available come from a lookup list. Then when a user is trying to add his/her car details one of the accessories doesn’t exist. You could now very easily let the user connect into that other list and add the details that they need. So you can add data to multiple lists without having to leave the first list and still all without any coding.
Ok, developing PowerApps is an art too. In this post I’ve only shown you very basic apps, based on data in lists, but there is a lot more that you could do.
But imagine if you could create something like this
It’s not difficult to create once you know how to and still without any major development work.