My Power Apps learning journey started exactly an year ago, and I have been a fan of this app ever since. The path I followed was to create Power Apps forms connecting to SharePoint Lists (New forms, edit forms) as per business requirements.
Recently, I was asked if I knew what is Power Apps Portals? To be honest, I never came across this term and I instantly knew that I wanted to start reading and explore more on this topic.
In this blog, you will get to see an introduction to the topic Power Apps Portals and how it can be leveraged by external users in an organisation and its capabilities.
(If you are new to Power Platform, you can read more about it in my blog here)
Introduction:
Power Apps makers started receiving more and more requests on how they can share their no-code model-driven and canvas apps with external users?! They had to come up with something powerful as equivalent to already existing Power Apps model-driven apps and canvas apps, that's when Power Apps Portal websites was introduced to share with external users. It was made available to consumers in the late 2019. See more on the releases here.
Earlier to the release of Power Apps Portals, it was termed as Dynamic 365 Portals which only offered an add-on to model-driven apps. It is now available as standalone in PowerApps Portal.
The standalone capability now lets the app makers to quickly create external-facing website and customise it with pages, layout, and content. They can reuse page designs through templates, add forms and views to display data. The data here is now only restricted to Common Data Service (CDS).
Power Apps portals capabilities
Power Apps portals are built on top of Common Data Service. All the differentiating features in modern-driven apps are the features that are part of Power Apps portals apps as well, including the below:
Centralised management
Common Data Model
Roles and permissions
Forms and views
Business rules
Declarative workflows and actions
Plug-in architecture
Integration with other services
Common Data Service extensibility
Audit
Power Apps portals deliver a complete content management system out of the box, with all content stored in Common Data Service (CDS). As a result, content can be edited through the portals studio and also directly by using the Portal Management App. Additionally, the robust Common Data Service security model can help secure the content.
Summary:
We have seen very little in this blog but it's enough to understand the origin and get a gist of the said topic. Let's continue to learn about Power Apps Portal and understand more of it in depth with my next series of blogs. If you have reached till here in my blog, that means you are already interested in Power Apps Portals as much as I am.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
References
Happy Learning!
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