Summary
In this module, you learned that Power Apps provides a simple user interface so that every business user or professional developer can build custom apps. This module examined how to build Power Apps that meet your exact business needs and integrate and interact with your business data.
Power Apps is a cloud-based suite of apps, services, connectors, and data platform. It provides organizations with a rapid application development environment to build custom apps that address their business needs. By employing Power Apps, users can quickly build custom business apps. These apps can connect to business data stored in the underlying, built-in data platform (known as Microsoft Dataverse). They can also connect to various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Excel, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).
In this module, you learned that Power Apps dramatically accelerates how business apps are built. It can reduce time to solution from weeks or months to minutes. It also balances power between IT and business users. It does so by arming those users closest to the business with the tools and services necessary to envision and implement the solution. Power Apps "democratizes" the custom business app building experience. It enables users to build feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code. Power Apps also provides an extensible platform. This design lets professional developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.
You also learned that data is at the core of most apps, including those apps that are built in Power Apps. Data is stored in a data source, and app creators bring that data into their apps by creating a connection. The connection uses a specific connector to talk to the data source. Connectors act as a bridge from the data source to the app or workflow. This design enables information to be transported back and forth. Connectors are essentially wrappers around the APIs provided by cloud and on-premises services. These connectors enable Power Apps to easily interact with those services.
You also learned that Power Apps supports over 275 connectors for popular services and on-premises data sources, including SharePoint, SQL Server, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Twitter. Microsoft Power Platform also provides the option to build custom connectors.