One area I get asked about pretty regularly in our Customer Immersion Experiences (CIE’s) is PowerApps. I’ll admit I hadn’t really messed around with it very much until last week, because like SharePoint Online, it’s a bit too open and nebulous for me to really wrap my head around. I find it easier to learn systems and technologies that start with structure and narrow in from there. But then we changed some internal processes that interact with CRM, and in an effort to hammer in those new methods, I needed to explore them in relation to other tech. My head is weird: that’s how I learn new stuff.
So I opened up Flow and built some workflows, which was kinda fun, but I remembered PowerApps and figured I’d see if it could hook into Dynamics CRM. And it does.
Within just a couple of minutes, I had a custom app that was able to natively browse the specific record-type I was looking for in CRM, present it in a list with other relevant data, and have search and drill-down capabilities that I could reference on the go. It was AMAZINGLY simple to implement, but now I have a date-ordered list of all our upcoming events, where they are, and can quickly open them to see what I’m expected to present, who the audience will be, and if any outstanding activities need to be completed prior to the event. And with last week’s introduction of a mobile Planner app, I can check off automatically-generated tasks and manage my entire experience end-to-end without ever touching a PC.