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Exploring Model-Driven Applications and their Use Cases
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Difficulty
Beginner
Duration
45m
Students
1253
Ratings
5/5
Description

Microsoft Power Apps is a low-code/no-code solution that allows professional developers and non-IT professionals to create powerful applications much faster than with regularly developed applications. In this course, we will look at the core capabilities of Power Apps and how they help businesses automate and enhance repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks.

We will cover canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, as well as their use cases and the differences between them. We'll also walk you through how to build each one. Finally, we'll take a look at the Power Apps Component Framework and how this allows developers to add even more functionality to standard Power Apps.

Learning Objectives

  • Get a foundational understanding of canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, including their use cases and features
  • Use data sources, controls, and formulas to build, share, and publish your own canvas apps
  • Plan, build, share, and publish model-driven apps
  • Create and customize your own portal and monitor user behavior on your portal
  • Learn about the Power Apps Framework and how it can enhance the user experience of your apps

Intended Audience

This course is intended for both IT professionals and non-technical professionals looking to automate and enhance business processes for mobile and desktop users.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course but any computer coding knowledge and even basic Excel knowledge would be beneficial when learning about Power Apps.

Transcript

If we take a quick look at designing an actual Model-driven application, you'll notice there's no way of dragging and dropping controls or customizing how it will look. Basically, you can only change a few aspects of the app. For example, if I wanted to add the account data table to the app, all I have to do is select it and now it will show up in the app. From here, I can add different forms, views, charts, dashboards, and business process flows or even add another data table to my application.

Now let's take a look at what a Model-driven application looks like when I actually play one. You can see that everything is very clean and neat, which is of course good. Right now I'm creating a new contact in a default form that was provided, without me even setting anything up. You can see how quick, clean, and easy it is to enter the data in. We'll look more into these Model-driven applications later on in the course, but I hope you can see how when needing to do simple data entry, run a business process or visualize data, Model-driven applications really do make it easy to set up and create. 

Something important to remember as we continue to talk about Model-driven applications is that Model-driven apps can be used for mobile users as well. So, if you know you're going to be building an app for mobile users, don't be so quick to throw out Model-driven applications as an option. Let's now talk about some of the common use cases for Model-driven applications. Some great use cases are when you have a complex business process that you want to enhance and visualize. So, examples of common complex processes that you may consider using a Model-driven app for might be, onboarding a new employee, tracking a new lead or potential customer, or checking out company assets.

In the next lecture, we'll go over the differences between Canvas and Model-driven applications.

About the Author

Ben is a Power Apps and Power Automate Specialist for Sovereign SP and has been using Power Apps, Power Automate, and SharePoint since 2017. Since then, he has built 100+ solutions using these amazing Microsoft tools. He loves helping others realize what technology can do and how it helps automate and enhance business processes. Most of all, though, he loves how these tools help make people’s jobs easier. The phrase, “This will make things so much easier!” is why he's in the IT business.

Ben Fetters lives in South Ogden, Utah, with his amazing wife and brand-new baby girl. A Weber State University Business Administration graduate, he loves to create businesses and help current businesses improve.