What’s new in PowerApps

Ladies and Gentlemen, PowerApps has finally arrived.

Microsoft is a funny beast. How many times have we waited for a Service Pack 1 of a new product? Well, PowerApps has been around for a couple of years now, but it looks like it’s finally ready. Especially for us SharePointers.

We’ve been waiting for an InfoPath replacement for years now. We got briefly excited about Excel forms a while ago, but honestly, third-party tools have taken over as our “go-to” forms solution for SharePoint. I’m a big champion of Nintex, principally for its tight integration with workflow and recently I’ve been impressed with their speedy dynamic forms. However, as of right now, the only reason I can see not to use PowerApps for your standalone forms needs in SharePoint is if you need to add custom JavaScript to a form. Up to now, PowerApps has been tricky to use, you haven’t been able to customise SharePoint Forms and as such it hasn’t really fit into anything we wanted to do.

Today Microsoft announced native SharePoint form capabilities, a considerably easier and more familiar interface and the addition of conditional rules. Along with what looks like very feature rich drag and drop web parts like an image gallery or Power BI viewer, PowerApps looks like it is about to outstrip even the most advanced forms solutions out there.  This means that any organisation with Office 365 will very soon have an extremely valuable tool for improving and customising how users interact with their documents and data directly from within the new SharePoint UI.