PowerApps allows you to build business application with no-code, and is included in most Office 365 plans. This Microsoft PowerApps hackathon was held in Birmingham, UK

1. Thank you to our sponsors
who paid for today!

2. Book the following two classes and receive a 20% discount
 Building Business Solutions with Office 365 – 3 days
 Midlands – 12th March or 14th May
 Authored and delivered by Penny Coventry, MVP
 Designing Modern Workflows & Forms with Microsoft PowerApps & Microsoft Flow – 2 days
 Midlands – 15th March or 17th May
Special Offer!
20% discount for Community Day attendees quote: 20community
Visit:
www.combined-knowledge.com
Special offer for PowerApps Community Day attendees

3. www.combined-knowledge.com
Contact us
T: +44 (0) 1455 200520
E: sales@combined-knowledge.com

4. PowerApps
Hackathon
Tuesday 6th February 2018
Conference Aston
Meeting Suites
http://ukcommunityday.com/

5. Agenda
• 09:00 Coffee and networking
• 09:30 Welcome and Introduction to Microsoft
PowerApps
• 10:45 Break
• 11:00 Plan ideas and start building
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30 Hackathon
• 14:00 Hands-on Hacking and Mentoring
• 16:30 Present your work and win prizes
• 17:00 Finish

6. Introducing PowerApps
• One of the Business Application Platform (BAP) apps
• A single, unified extensibility platform
• Easy Authoring – WYSIWYG – Excel like expressions
• Mash up data from multiple sources
• Cross Platform – iOS, Android, Windows, web
• Enterprise Ready – Centrally managed, DLP policy on data
& connectors
Power BI PowerApps Microsoft Flow
Common
Data Service
Connectors
+ gateways

7. Data sources
• External data - connections
• Local storage - collections
• Common Data Service – Azure base storage for
importing data from multiple data sources
• Offline
Calendar
Documents
Products
SharePoint lists
SharePoint site connector
Product Code List Price Color
Batman Action Figure
Captain America Action Figure
GI Joe Action Figure
Green Hulk Action Figure
Red Hulk Alter Action Figure
WP0001
WP0002
WP0003
WP0004
WP0005
$14.95
$12.95
$14.95
$9.99
$9.99
Black
Red
Green
Green
Red
Connection
Local storage
Connection takes care
of authentication of
user access the data
Loaded when app started or the
Refresh function runs

8. 213k+
People in organizations
are using
PowerApps and Flow
1M+
monthly active users
https://www.featuredcustomers.com/vendor/microsoft-powerapps/customers

9. https://www.pcmag.com/review/353386/microsoft-powerapps
12th June 2017

10. A PowerApps Audit Solution in 5 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSgYBGKNNGk

11. It’s not just for business

12. How to build a Fidget Spinner
Ashlee Culmsee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqKS_k4WCRM

13. What is PowerApps Studio?
• A Windows Store application and web
application that empowers:
• Business experts
• Business analysts
• Consultants
• Other app “imagineers”
• to create:
• new purpose-specific mobile apps
• that enable new business scenarios for employees and customers
• without requiring any programming skills

14. What PowerApps is not
• A developer tool (replacement for Visual Studio)
• A means for creating
• Mission-critical transactional applications
• Complex forms with dependencies
• Printable forms, unless a screenshot is enough
• Anonymous form entry
• A silver-bullet solution for all business scenarios
• A tool to build responsive web applications
Support for SharePoint in PowerApps and Flow
is developing but there are definitely things
you can’t do!

15. Create an app
• Three options to create a PowerApps:
❑ Start an app from scratch – blank surface
❑ A template
❑ Create an app from data,
if you know where you data resides, e.g.,
❖ A SharePoint custom list
▪ PowerApps created from a SharePoint Online list are treated as either
Private v Public views
▪ Can now create SharePoint custom forms
❖ Excel spreadsheet
• Save:
• Locally (.msapp)
Or
• The PowerApps cloud service

16. PowerApps Studio
Windows app or web
• 1. Ribbon
• 2. Thumbnails of all screens
• 3. App Screen
• 4. Property list
• 5. Formula bar
• 6. Options
1
2
3
4 5
6

17. Demos

18. Getting Started
• Sign up – work or school account
• Getting started for free: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/
• Community Plan: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/communityplan/
• Use PowerApps Studio:
• Web or
• Install from Microsoft Store
• Short videos
• https://www.youtube.com/
• Keywords: Audrie Gordon PowerApps getting started
• In the long term:
• Microsoft Flow and PowerApps sessions at Microsoft Ignite
• https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/sessions-ignite-2017/
• Follow the blog: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/
• Follow on Twitter: @powerapps
• Join the community: aka.ms/powerapps-community
• PowerApps in a day: aka.ms/appinaday
• One scenario – choose one of two datasources – SharePoint or CDS

19. Plan ideas and start building
• Work as individuals or in teams
• Conference / event
• Speakers, sessions – abstracts, agenda, location
• What’s new this week – Store
managers
• How to update it once a week?
• Take account of poor internet connectivity
• Simple expense approval app
• Using SharePoint and Flow
• Remember presentations are at the
end of the day!!!

20. Welcome back from lunch
• Hackathon

21. Strategic Considerations
• Updates to PowerApps/Flow/Teams/etc are
frequent
• The PowerApps team uses 3-week sprints
• Don’t even think about packaging up the PowerApps Studio App
• Train via hackathon approach
• Learn to tolerate rapid change – Industry asked for it!
• Turning these tools off will just push people to other platforms
• There will always be gaps
• Currently PowerApps cannot talk to stored procedures or views in
SQL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/sql/
• Most gaps can be worked around effectively
• PowerApps team are very up-front with their backlog

22. How to position PowerApps
• If your organisation is
super-conservative, risk
averse and still on
Windows 7
- “We are not building a
production app. We are
piloting ideas without the
risk and expense of
custom development.
Let’s face it, users don’t
know what they want…”
• If your organisation is a bit
hipster & uses terms from
the start-up world like
“minimum viable product
(MVP)” and “fail
forward…”
- “PowerApps allows us to
quickly test our most
critical assumptions at
low cost and low risk and
develop an MVP…”

23. Presentations & Prizes

24. PowerApps roadmap - highlights
H2 Calendar 2017 Calendar 2018
oCreate and use embedded PowerApps as custom list forms
in SharePoint Online
oUtilize attachments, multi-select fields, and images in your
SharePoint Online driven PowerApps
oEasily embed PowerApps in SharePoint Online pages with
web parts and within Power BI reports
oUse the Rules explorer for easier expression authoring
oTenant-wide admin resource management, app usage
analytics, and package export/import across environments
oEasily connect to Azure App Services & APIM
oUse server-side business logic for validation
rules and easy defaulting
oCreate model-driven apps
oSupport for GDPR compliance
oGovernment cloud deployment
oSQL - Support for stored procs and views
oEnhanced application lifecycle management
with sandbox environments

25. Thank you to our sponsors
who paid for today!