PowerApps makes the creation of business applications significantly easier (and cheaper) than the traditional approach to app development. In this post, we’ll give you some tips to help you find your feet in the world of developing with PowerApps.
1.What is PowerApps?
PowerApps is a collection of services that allow organisations to create their own business applications, using the data that they have stored in existing services, e.g., a SharePoint list or Excel spreadsheet, without having to have app development experience.
2. Accessing PowerApps
If your organisation already uses Microsoft 365, you’ve probably got access to create and use PowerApps.
There is more than one way to create your app and here, we’ll look at the simplest way; from a SharePoint list.
You’ll need to create a SharePoint list, similar to below. I recommend creating a new list and using test data to avoid making changes to items in a production list.
2. Next, select PowerApps from the command bar and the select Create an app
3. In the fly-out window on the right hand side, name your app and select create
This will launch PowerApps Studio in a new browser tab.
4. You first app has been created
Now, you’ve created your first app. In the next post, we’ll take a look at the PowerApps Studio and how to use it to make some changes to your app.
Click here to learn how 365 Evergreen can help your organisation make the most of low-code solutions, using PowerApps.
In the previous post, we created and configured a SharePoint team site for storing policy and procedure documents and a list that will be used to track who has and who has not read a document.
In this post, we’ll create a PowerApp that will list documets that are assigned to each user.
Before we start:
upload at least one document to the library that houses your policies and procedures
create a task in the task list and assign it to yourself
Creating the app
Follow these steps to create a simple app that will list a user’s outstanding documents and allow them to complete an acknowledge task.
Go to https://powerapps.microsoft.com and create a new canvas app from blank
Policies and procedures play an essential role in any organisation and it is essential that employees have access to the latest documentation.
By combining SharePoint and the Power Platform, it is quite easy to create a robust solution that can mange the creation and dissemination of these documents, as well as tracking who has
In this series of posts, we will:
create a policies and procedures team site SharePoint
create site columns using the tenant-wide term store
use Power Automate to send notifications to readers and creators
create a PowerApp to allow users to acknowledge that they have read and understood the document
create a policies and procedures hub (using the PnP modern search web parts)
create a Power BI dashboard to show reports
Pre-requisites
The following instructions are written with the assumption that you have exposure to SharePoint and the Power Platform, as well as sufficient privileges, e.g., Tenant global admin, Term store admin, etc..
Create terms
We’re using the term store to provide values for the metadata in the site columns used in the policies and procedures document library.
You can always skip this step and create other types of columns, e.g., choice or lookup.
The beauty of using the term store is that the metadata can be used in sites across your whole tenant, i.e., you don’t need to replicate terms for each site collection.
To learn how you populate the term store using Power Automate, click here.
The SharePoint team site
Now, we’ll create a SharePoint team site to store the policy and procedure documents. This site will also contain the lists that will be used to track the status of documents, e.g., who has and who hasn’t read a document.
The team site we are using is called Polices & Procedures Team (https://TENANT.Sharepoint.com/sites/PoliciesProceduresTeam).
Site columns
We now need to create the site columns (they need to be site columns to make use of the search functionality later on).
Use a good naming convention for the internal name for your columns, e.g., create a column called BusinessUnit and rename it Business unit afterwards. This prevents special characters appearing the name of the column.
The site columns we need to create are:
Name
Type
Business Unit
Managed metadata (use Business unit term set we just created)
Document type
Managed metadata (use the Document type term set we just created)
Document owner
Person or group
Published date
Date and time (Date only)
Next review date
Date (Date only)
Date assigned
Date (Date only)
Assigned to
Person or group
Acknowledgement status
Single line of text (Default value is Assigned)
Content types
Next we need to create the content types and add the necessary site columns.
Name
Parent
Columns
Policy and procedure document
Document
Business unit Document type Document owner Published date Next review date
Policy and procedure task
Item
Assigned to Date assigned Acknowledgement status
Library and list
Next, we need to create a document library (rather than using Shared documents) and a task list. We’re calling our library ‘Policy and Procedure documents’ and our list ‘Acknowledgements’.
To make things easier and repeatable, e.g., to move between environments, we have created a site design that you can download from here.
Next steps
In this post, we have configured the SharePoint team site that will be used to store our policies and procedures, as well as a list that will track who has and who has not read each document.
In Part 02, we’ll use PowerApps to create a simple canvas app that displays a list of documents for a user to acknowledge.
