Solutions like Microsoft’s Power Apps are fueling innovation at thousands of companies around the globe, empowering users to build customized end-to-end business solutions that solve their most pressing issues, from enabling automation and accelerating asset development to fueling business intelligence. As with any technology, however, users encounter limitations that can stifle momentum. For businesses poised to make the leap to the next level of operations, these obstacles can’t be ignored. Instead, limitations must be accounted for as part of a proactive approach to development.
To smooth the way forward for Microsoft Power Apps and Dataverse users, we’ve developed a playbook for growth, How to Grow with Own: Recommended Practices to Use with Microsoft Power Apps and Dataverse. Download the guide for the ins and outs of how to use Microsoft’s product suite with Own to maximum benefit, and read on to learn about some of Power Apps’ biggest challenges (and best practices to overcome them).
Obstacles to Growth in Power Apps
Power Apps offers users a host of benefits, from low-code app builds and no-code automation to business intelligence and optimization tools. Devotees are well aware of the benefits of Power Apps and the Dataverse platform. Our focus, instead, is on helping companies fill the gaps where those technologies leave something to be desired.
Below are the top two constraints of the platform and suggestions for navigating them:
Storage
The licensing tier purchased by your business sets the stage for the user experience, yet it also creates data storage limitations. These complicated models can create major headaches as well as budgetary concerns. Those frustrations can significantly impede growth—particularly when some controls and restores are prohibited at the current tier, but required for compliance and development actions.
One pathway to managing this aspect of growth is to invest in data storage that supersedes Dataverse’s native options at more cost-efficient prices. Long-term storage eliminates compliance concerns and reduces licensing hassles to more practical concerns of performance.
Complexity
Low and no-code development environments open up worlds of possibilities for less technical users to design, build, and leverage the automations and applications they need most for ease and efficiency. Yet, low barriers to access also create potential for human error—and data loss as a result. Human error causes up to 68% of all data breaches and 24% of more generalized data loss and corruption.
Data management and app development become more relaxed when guardrails are in place to mitigate the threat of the inevitable—after all, we’re all human and make mistakes. Automated data monitoring can empower teams to do more experimentation in Power Apps knowing that the system will flag any anomalies along the way. That keeps data safe from human error without hampering human innovation.
Build More, Stress Less
Lack of data storage and the threat of human error speak to a central concern for most modern businesses: data loss. Data loss is bad for business. It disrupts operations, frustrates staff, hurts reputations, and can complicate regulatory compliance. All of these factors can have a damaging ripple effect on growth.
We’ve outlined a few of the limitations that Power Apps and Dataverse users commonly encounter as they develop in the space, but we’ve also compiled a comprehensive list of obstacles in our e–book, How to Grow with Own: Recommended Practices to Use with Microsoft Power Apps and Dataverse.
Inside, you’ll find an in-depth analysis of where the Microsoft suite often falls short for organizations poised for growth, as well as recommended practices for navigating those limitations. Download the e-book here.
