Power Apps >> Power Apps for O365

Note: this article is certainly not a Microsoft official article and is a pure personal contribution to share my thoughts with the business and technical communities exploring Power Apps.

Have you presumed that you have full Power Apps capabilities within your Office 365 suite ? well, this is not a true assumption. What you have as part of your Office 365 is a seeded license called "Power Apps for Office 365" that enable you to extend and customize Office 365 data sources and tools such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, and many others. This license is seeded in various qualified Office 365 offers such as E1, E2, A5, etc.

Power Apps for Office 365 gives you great low-code capabilities to quickly and rapidly customize and extend your Office 365 functionality with countless use cases. Some of the use cases that can be achieved using the Office 365 connectors for personal or business purposes :

1. Sending a Teams notification when an item of certain condition is added to a SharePoint list
2. Automating deletion of files of certain extensions once added to OneDrive
3. Creating a Power App to view, search, and create SharePoint items or Tasks in Planner
4. Sending approval request when a new item in Share Point is added to respond in the context of the E-mail or Power Automate Teams/Mobile apps and take actions accordingly
5. Auto uploading attachments received on Outlook to a specific OneDrive for Business folder to keep track of specific sender attachments

From a automation point of view, many of those use cases are available as templates that you can leverage and have your Flows running in no time. In addition, all of the Office 365 connectors that can be used in your Power Apps and Flows are articulated in details within docs.microsoft.com/connectors such as SharePoint - Teams- Outlook - Planner - OneDrive - To-Do.

The Power Platform + O365 story empowers you to further optimize your operations and boost your productivity, thus increasing your return on your Office 365 investment. However, when it comes to the others stories, Power Apps for Office 365 can't help you much and this is where the Power Apps license plays a big role.

Even if you have some Power Apps functionalities within your Office 365 package, that should not bound you to the Office 365 architecture when building new ideas just for the purpose of preventing extra costs.

There are a lot of enterprise systems and databases such as Oracle, SAP, SQL, and DB2 that you already have in place since years and you would need to extend and build your applications on top. Also, when it comes to leveraging the Power Platform for new ideas and systems, Common Data Service is optimal for you to put your innovative backlog into brilliant applications the most secure and rapid manner.

Common Data Service (CDS) is optimally designed for you to rapidly create, manage, govern, and secure all of your applications with a full low code approach

To know more about the numerous reasons I favor Common Data Service for building line of business applications, please have a look at a previous article I have wrote on that topic: Why Common Data Service for your Business Apps.

Now, let us start drilling down to the added value of the standalone Power Apps compared to Power Apps for Office 365. I will group my thoughts by the following points:

1. Extra Capability 1: Common Data Service
2. Extra Capability 2: Full Connectivity
3. Extra Capability 3: Environments and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
4. Extra Capability 4: Center of Excellence
5. Extra Capability 5: Power Apps Add-Ons

Capability 1 : Common Data Service

Common data service (CDS) is a cloud-based low-code back-end for your business applications that is available as a "software-as-a-service" with no need to manage networking, redundancy, load-balancing, servers, databases, and much more.

CDS has no standalone license but comes part of your Power Apps license as a default data platform.

To know more about the added value of CDS, please have a look at a previous article I have wrote on that topic: Why Common Data Service for your Business Apps.

Also, keep in mind that with no CDS, you will not be able to leverage the two type of Power Apps other that the Canvas : Model-Driven and Portals. Model driven power apps is highly required when doing departmental, complex, and business process driven solutions. Moreover, Portals is the great tool that allows you to engage external audience that are not part of your Azure AD users. You will find much more on this topic in the above mentioned article as I considered them as part of the added value of Common Data Service to build your LOB apps

Capability 2 : Full Connectivity

Premium Connectivity

Power Apps for Office 365 allow you to leverage standard connectors withing your Power Apps and Flows applications - those connectors include the Office 365 connectors such as the ones mentioned above.

However, the standalone Power Apps licenses will give you further access to the connectors labeled as premium. Those connectors enable you to seamlessly integrate with enterprise data sources such as Common Data Service, DB2, Azure SQL, Azure Blob Storage, Oracle DB, SAP ERP, and many others. Although I recommend the use of Common Data Service for your app modernization and new ideas to accelerate the process, however you might still depend on the architecture of other enterprise sources for a lot of use cases such as surrounding your ERP systems with modern accessible mobile apps.

In addition to those mentioned enterprise data sources, you will have access to important third party connectors that have pre-built actions to help you within your automation such as Docusign, Survey Monkey, Cloudmersive and many more.

On-Premise Connectivity

A lot of the organizations are still relying on various on-premise systems and databases such as SQL, DB2, SharePoint, Oracle, and many others. For that purpose, the ability to connect to on-premise data sources through a secure and robust data gateway that spans Microsoft services including Power Platform ones is essential.

Custom Connectivity

For the moment, the Power Platform offers more than 350 Out-of-the-box ready to use connectors. Despite the huge ecosystem of connectors, this will not guarantee you have a ready made connector for each vendor or in house made system. For that purpose, you will be able to build custom connectors to connect to your standalone systems and extend them with intelligent apps and flows.

To conclude the connectivity aspect, Power Apps licenses enable you with a lot of value when it comes to full connectivity using the Microsoft provided or custom built connectors to on-line and on-premise sources.

Capability 3 : Environments and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

When it comes to building enterprise and organization wide solutions, the below two points are key to govern and secure them.

1- Ability to isolate production components for different scopes

With Power Apps licenses, you are able to create multiple Power Apps environments to isolate your components from each others. Those components could be your apps, flows, connections, gateways, and your Common Data Service database. An environment serves as a container to separate apps that might have different roles, security requirements, or target audiences.

You may need to have multiple environments for dev/test/production purposes, for multiple branches, for multiple departments, etc.

Also, what is great about those environments is the ability to bound its access to specific security groups in your organizations and secure them with security roles and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies.

A multi environment strategy is highly required to manage your apps and flows at scale - I recommend watching the below video that demonstrates how Schlumberger was using environments and their features to roll out Power Platform across its organization.

2-Ability to manage and automate application lifecycle management

Power Apps leverages CDS solutions (A concept inherited from Dynamics 365 CE/CRM as it is also built on CDS) as the mechanism of its ALM process. Solutions help you in packaging your apps, flows, connectors, and your CDS configurations and metadata to move them across other environments.

There is a new great guide discussing ALM with Power Platform, I don't want to repeat all of the concepts here especially that the guide will stay up to date. In the guide you will find the best strategies and tools to deploy your best ALM process.

ALM is great, but automating it is on another level! as an enterprise level platform, Power Platform supports automation of deployments across dev/test/production environments powered by Azure DevOps. For more information on how to achieve that, please check this link on how to leverage the Power Platform Azure DevOps build tools.

Capability 4 : Center of excellence

As you have access to all the of the Power Apps components including CDS, model-driven apps, custom connectors, and others, you will be able to fully utilize the Center of Excellence Starter Kit that can further support your strategy in adapting, managing, and governing the Power Platform across your organization.

The Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps and Power Automate.

COE is not a replacement of the Out-of-the-box administration and governance features but a complimentary set of tools to apply your own policies and best practices in rolling out the platform across your communities. What is also unique about the center of excellence kit is that it's fully built on top of the Power Platform, thus it can be easily and quickly tailored to meet your specific requirements of setting standards, policies, automation, and reporting.

Capability 5 : Power Apps Add-Ons

Other than Power Apps portals that allow you to engage your external audience that are not part of your organization's Azure AD, AI builder is a very interesting add-on that you can utilize to quickly add strong artificial intelligence capabilities with no requirements of machine learning expertise.

When we are talking about AI builder, we are not talking about a model or two, but about a big set of continuously growing models that we can use as part of our apps and flows. You can find a list of the model types, their overviews, and the instructions to set them up here.

It is not easy to imagine how important is AI builder and how much it can boost productivity and help us do much more with less resources. One my favorite model types is Form Processing. For example, imagine a scenario that not all front line workers have mobile devices to interact with Power Apps applications, they can still fill the data on a paper form and have this scanned and sent by e-mail or uploaded to a SharePoint folder. Power Automate will be able to pull that document and pass it to the model to extract all of the fields and create the record in Common Data Service with no need of all of the manual input that jeopardizes productivity and accuracy. You can train and set such a model by uploading some samples and confirming the auto tagged key fields with a very friendly GUI that is totally inclusive to business users with AI background.

Summary

To summarize, there is a lot of added value when it comes to Power Apps compared to the capabilities that are seeded within Office 365. There is an extra cost in getting the full fledged Power Apps platform, but there are much higher costs in staying on your status quo and not supporting your digital transformation initiatives to do more, save more, and decrease risk.

I would like to recommend again not to force yourself with a specific architecture and data sources to save costs instead of focusing on how to fully empower your organization based on best practices to achieve much more.

I have put the below table below to summarize the comparison of the two licenses from capabilities and technologies points of views :