Microsoft PowerApps helps non-developers build mobile apps

For employees, PowerApps allows users to create apps in a Microsoft Office-like experience, and contains templates for getting started.

Called PowerApps, Microsoft said the product “helps businesses create employee-facing apps of all kinds, from the simplest app – like an employee survey – to long-lived, mission-critical apps that connect to line-of-business systems and cloud services and run on any device”.

Instead of pushing an app to an online marketplace, a program created with Microsoft PowerApps can be sent to everyone in company via an email attachment. The new tool will dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to develop new mobile enterprise apps, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of app platform Bill Staples said in a statement today that the aim of PowerApps is to bridge the innovation gap in the business apps sector. It’s a version of tools like Salesforce’s Lightning App Builder, but it’s also a logical extension of Microsoft’s earlier plans to make all its business tools accessible to non-developers. Any employee who knows how to work with Office will be able to create their own apps with PowerApps, according to Microsoft. The built-in connectors support popular cloud services such as Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox, OneDrive and on-premises systems including SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases, SAP and more.

In addition to non-IT professionals, Microsoft is also pitching PowerApps to professional developers.

Enterprise: adds all the features of Standard with dedicated infrastructure (Azure App Service Environment), App governance, secure access control and usage reporting, API management. The reason behind this is that there are still a small percentage of mobile apps that have the ability to tap into all of the data that many businesses collect every single day. However, the company has said it believes the field has the potential to become a billion dollar market.