Business apps and business process automation
Creativity and teamwork are essential to transforming business processes. Most processes center on content – files and data. SharePoint offers tools to gather and manage data in lists and libraries.
Microsoft 365 provides connections to a range of third-party systems with Power Automate and Power Apps. Power Automate lets you automate business processes, and Power Apps lets you create great forms and mobile apps based on SharePoint files and data. Both Power Automate and Power Apps feature intuitive visual designers, so anyone can craft forms and screens using a convenient interface.
Power Automate
Using Power Automate, you can create workflows through an easy-to-use visual designer that will guide you through each step and help authenticate your accounts.
Select from dozens of pre-made templates to start automating your app’s usage. Here are just a few applications of these templates:
- Create a new record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM when a new list item is added to a SharePoint list.
- Copy new members from MailChimp lists to SharePoint lists.
- Move files to different folders after they’re approved in SharePoint.
- Create a new item in SharePoint when a new order is added in Salesforce.
- Route finished documents to a team for approval.
Whether you start with a template or begin from scratch, using Power Automate to create automation features is intuitive.
Power Apps
Using Microsoft Power Apps, you can create apps with a point-and-click approach to app design. Options include using automatically-generated, pre-made templates, or customizing the tool to fit your more specific needs. After your app is complete, you can instantly publish it to Windows, the web, iOS, and Android.
Classic mobile and web apps typically required separate coding for each platform, which can be costly and time-consuming to do—especially with developers in high demand. Instead, Power Apps simplifies the process so anyone can do it. Its easy-to-use, browser-based visual designer helps you rapidly build custom business apps without having to write any code.
By connecting Power Apps to your existing systems and data, you can quickly build reports, forms, and workflows, and then publish your app instantly to all users in your organization.
Power Apps also lets you easily customize the form for a SharePoint list. For example, with custom forms, you can:
- Show or hide certain fields.
- Reorganize those fields.
- Change the layout of a form.
- Add formatted text and graphics.
When you publish your changes, the form is embedded within the SharePoint list for use by all of its users.
Cross-tool functionality seamlessly moves your data from one operation to another. With SharePoint being a core component of the Microsoft 365 suite, your data easily integrates with tools like Excel or Power BI reporting. And because it uses an Excel-inspired expression language, these tools talk with each other, using formula language you already recognize and understand to integrate your data from one function to the next.