3 ms·

I know an agency of 5 people absolutely flat out delivering low-code solutions on the MS Power Platform, mostly for government agencies. The thing is, these so

I know an agency of 5 people absolutely flat out delivering low-code solutions on the MS Power Platform, mostly for government agencies. The thing is, these solutions probably couldn't be delivered by non-engineers, but these people are able to move extremely quick because of the platform.

tluyben2 5y ago
Most apps with the power platform are indeed LoB applications which people here would immediately cry over for bad UX/UI. If you do not care about that (big orgs often seem to not), many many old and new low/no code tools can do the job.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Counter example: MS Flow. It is a nice idea but is completely torpedoed by Microsoft itself. All workflows are executed in a user context and if you want that to change you have to pay thousands of dollars and self-host infrastructure. HTTP is a "premium" feature... Some function don't work with MS own features to block networks by IP. they release their Azure IP range tables, but it still doesn't work. The usability is worse than 2010 SharePoint workflows with the exception that it can interface a range of web services by predefined adapters. Power Apps is quite buggy and quite difficult to implement with questionable design decisions (The programming language changes with regional language, so member selectors like . get translated to ,) that makes code incompatible if you change Power Apps language (yes, really). Not that you can easily export/import projects from one tenent to another. The programming language itself is not less complicated than classic languages, the strength is the platform. What wordpress is to blogs, Power Apps wants to be for mobile apps if you will. Power BI is a lightweight App that basically leverage pivot functions of Excel is a small web app. Quite useful, but there should be no illusions about the capabilities. Nice for quick data analysis with the usual drill down. For a government to use Power Apps means to be extremely dependent on MS. It is rather questionable and very expensive in my opinion. That said, no code workflows and applications builders would help a lot. But current examples are severely lacking in my opinion.

tluyben2 5y ago

Most apps with the power platform are indeed LoB applications which people here would immediately cry over for bad UX/UI. If you do not care about that (big orgs often seem to not), many many old and new low/no code tools can do the job.

raxxorrax 5y ago

Counter example: MS Flow. It is a nice idea but is completely torpedoed by Microsoft itself. All workflows are executed in a user context and if you want that to change you have to pay thousands of dollars and self-host infrastructure. HTTP is a "premium" feature... Some function don't work with MS own features to block networks by IP. they release their Azure IP range tables, but it still doesn't work. The usability is worse than 2010 SharePoint workflows with the exception that it can interface a range of web services by predefined adapters. Power Apps is quite buggy and quite difficult to implement with questionable design decisions (The programming language changes with regional language, so member selectors like . get translated to ,) that makes code incompatible if you change Power Apps language (yes, really). Not that you can easily export/import projects from one tenent to another. The programming language itself is not less complicated than classic languages, the strength is the platform. What wordpress is to blogs, Power Apps wants to be for mobile apps if you will. Power BI is a lightweight App that basically leverage pivot functions of Excel is a small web app. Quite useful, but there should be no illusions about the capabilities. Nice for quick data analysis with the usual drill down. For a government to use Power Apps means to be extremely dependent on MS. It is rather questionable and very expensive in my opinion. That said, no code workflows and applications builders would help a lot. But current examples are severely lacking in my opinion.