A simple integration approach

I admit this might not be a sophisticated solution nor is it meant to be an article for tech-savvy Power Platform developers. It is more a story I think is worth mentioning.

Power Platform is often labelled as a No-Code solution, which sometimes attracts employees who have never coded before. Although I am not a big fan of those "let's jump right in and see what we can come up with" approaches, I'd like to dedicate this post to a senior PM who never coded before in his life and came up with a great integration idea.

I recently worked with an external team and the Project Manager was using an old (and fairly outdated) system to manage project resources, timelines and budgets. The organization has just started their transitioning to Microsoft Project, but that transitioning got delayed due to the global pandemic (like many projects these days). Although there was disappointment, the Project Manager thought about minor improvements and came up with the idea to utilize PowerApps to build a few tiny frontend solutions (basically forms) that would ease the daily business until their switch to Microsoft Project was completed.

One of his complaints was, that the proprietary solution he needed to use was not able to create a proper summary of the current status of projects. Well, there was a summary option, but the summary that the tool was able to create, wasn't suitable and couldn't be configured. Luckily, that proprietary tool was utilizing a SQL Server database.

The Project Manager created a form that would allow him to present a great summary of projects during the bi-weekly internal meetings. Connecting to the proper SQL Server table wasn't too difficult (thanks to the great SQL Server connector). However, there was a problem that the Project Manager couldn't solve right away: he was looking for an option to integrate the PowerApps app with the proprietary tool. After some research, he came up with a very hands-on solution :-) He stumbled upon an old article I wrote some months ago about options to pre-populate a PowerApps form (Reference). In that article, I explained how to use the PARAM command provided by PowerApps to retrieve URL parameters (Reference).

Here is a brief description of his solution. He create a PowerApps application, that was able to retrieve data from a SQL Server table and arrange it so it displays the desired project summary. He added a new field to each data set manually. That new field was used to provide the URL to his PowerApps application and a URL parameter which is the ID of the dataset. Basically, the URL added to each data set was looking like this: HTTP://POWERAPPS.COM/<app id>?data=<dataset ID>

Although there was some manual effort required to "integrate" his first PowerApps app with the proprietary software, he managed to create a PowerApps application, that he can invoke with just one click within a proprietary software! The following image shows the high-level architecture of his solution:

Again - this is not a very sophisticated solution to a technical problem. In fact, this is much more a very hands-on solution, but that's not the reason why I created this article! To me, this is a great example of how easy it can be, to utilize Power Platform even if you are not a developer or have ever coded before. With some research and reading through technical documentation and blog posts, this Project Manager was able to create something on his own, that makes his daily business a little bit easier.

I think I must confess guilty because I often focus on perfected technical solutions. Unfortunately, this draws my attention away from solutions that might not be picture-perfect and ready to be published in a shiny tech magazine. I think this is a great example of what a non-technical employee can achieve by using the No-Code Platform PowerApps - and it just took some creativity, curiosity and a clear vision of goals.