MS Power Apps?
Discussion
Any good or a waste of time?
I work in a school, running the catering. But my background is 20 odd years in SW development and MS stuff etc etc albeit have been out of it for nearly 20 years!
I have the summer hols off and with CV i wont be going far or doing much. Thinking I could automate quite a lot of the paper based systems we have in schools for ordering meals via web or app from home, producing production schedules for kitchens, billing etc etc
In the old days I would have knocked up something in MS Access but that seems bit too old skool and considering we have Power Apps at no cost it seems something not to waste if its any good?
Advice welcomed?
I work in a school, running the catering. But my background is 20 odd years in SW development and MS stuff etc etc albeit have been out of it for nearly 20 years!
I have the summer hols off and with CV i wont be going far or doing much. Thinking I could automate quite a lot of the paper based systems we have in schools for ordering meals via web or app from home, producing production schedules for kitchens, billing etc etc
In the old days I would have knocked up something in MS Access but that seems bit too old skool and considering we have Power Apps at no cost it seems something not to waste if its any good?
Advice welcomed?
shouldbworking said:
Good tool, but licensing costs need to be carefully considered, particularly if you are using premium features - which includes some fairly fundamental stuff like having a real database behind it
Yeah, spotted that. We may already have SQL server licensing, but to be honest (at the moment) everything is Excel based so the volume of data is pretty low. Only really starting to get remotely near to needing anything more but if the opportunity is there its tempting to play.I did get the impression its a bit of a hook to tie you in to extra services.
Is it a case of paying licensing what you dev?
It's not the simplest of licensing models.
Everyone needs a basic licence to be able to use shared powerapps, minimum (unless you use portals, which are another kettle of fish)
You can build apps, including premium features for free using community plan licensing - but you can't share them
If you build an app needing premium features, you either licence it per user, or if you have lots of apps shared it's more cost effective to buy full unlimited app creation / consumption for everyone.
The most likely scenario is the first - basic licences for everyone.
There are things within it that can cost more e.g. If you're calling a third party service, you need to have a subscription to that service, but that's just common sense really.
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
Everyone needs a basic licence to be able to use shared powerapps, minimum (unless you use portals, which are another kettle of fish)
You can build apps, including premium features for free using community plan licensing - but you can't share them
If you build an app needing premium features, you either licence it per user, or if you have lots of apps shared it's more cost effective to buy full unlimited app creation / consumption for everyone.
The most likely scenario is the first - basic licences for everyone.
There are things within it that can cost more e.g. If you're calling a third party service, you need to have a subscription to that service, but that's just common sense really.
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
If you're low volume and working in Excel then unless you need to be able to host the data in the cloud so others can access it in ways you can't achieve with Excel, then I'd look at what the newer versions of Excel can do.
You can easily build a complex relational database model and report off that and PowerQuery will automate data ingestion and manipulation for you too.
You can easily build a complex relational database model and report off that and PowerQuery will automate data ingestion and manipulation for you too.
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