Power Apps

Power Apps is Microsoft's low-code application platform, part of the Power Platform. It supports three app types: canvas apps, which give you a drag-and-drop design surface and an Excel-style formula language; model-driven apps, generated from a Dataverse data model and used for record-management scenarios; and Power Pages, externally facing websites with authentication and Dataverse-backed data. Power Apps integrates closely with Power Automate, embeds into Microsoft Teams as tabs, and shares identity with Microsoft 365. A limited use of in-suite connectors is included with Microsoft 365; Dataverse and premium connectors require Power Apps licensing.

Worked example

A warehouse team needs a way for staff to log damaged stock on a tablet as they walk the floor, rather than filling in a paper form that gets typed up later. A canvas app built in an afternoon lets staff photograph the item, select a damage category from a dropdown, and submit — writing straight to a SharePoint list the warehouse manager already has a dashboard built on. No developer, no formal IT project, no separate database to stand up: the app connects to data the organisation already has, using connectors already included with the Microsoft 365 licences staff already hold.

Common pitfalls

Building an app around premium connectors or Dataverse without checking licensing first is the most common budget surprise — the seeded, included-with-Microsoft-365 usage covers standard connectors like SharePoint and Outlook, but Dataverse and many enterprise connectors need separate Power Apps per-user or per-app licences that weren't part of the original assumption. Choosing canvas apps for what's really a large, many-entity record-management system, rather than a model-driven app, leads to significant rework later — canvas apps excel at focused, task-oriented scenarios, not sprawling CRM-like data models. And treating a citizen-developer-built app as a permanent, unmaintained fixture once it's working is a genuine governance risk — apps built quickly outside IT's usual review process still touch real business data and need the same ownership and support plan any other line-of-business tool would get.