PowerApps

Over the years The SharePoint Agency have had many requests to purchase our custom Power Apps that are listed on PowerApps.co.nz . It can be difficult to price an app we have spent many hundreds of hours developing. With this in mind we are pleased to announce the launch of the Power Apps Club..

The Power Apps Club.will provide members with access to The SharePoint Agency's custom PowerApps on a yearly subscription basis. Members can download each Power Apps Solution and install them on their own Microsoft 365 environments.

We have many great Power Apps available including our Inspections PowerApp and a Surveys PowerApp, a simple TimeSheets PowerApp and an Outlook web add in that allows users to Save an email from outlook to SharePoint.

It is our intention to release many more apps over the coming months. Members will be encouraged to check back regularly and download the newest apps as they become available.

Register Online to join the Power Apps Club.

The master class on building performant apps presentation from Mehdi Slaoui Andaloussi, was one of the highlights of the recent Microsoft Business Applications Summit.  Here are some of my notes from the session.

When you load your data is important.

Do not load collections on App Start.  Adding collections on the OnVisible of the first screen will make the first screen display faster and the app will appear to load quicker. 

Preloaders help the user feel the app is working correctly.

Use a preloader, so users can see that data is indeed loading.  This will ensure they don't have to 'panic' and hit the refresh button just in case. 

Don’t load your data all at once

Only load the data you absolutely need in your preloading session.  If you don’t need to load the data immediately, then load this outside of the preloader.  This will make the app appear to load faster.

Create Local Collections

If possible, use Local Collections for data to save on network calls.  Local collections load really fast!  If your data will not change during the use of the app (conference session times, locations, speakers, product names, office locations etc) then you can pull the content into a local collection when you start your app rather than making lots of network calls to the outside data source throughout your app.

Concurrent

User the Concurrent() function.   Concurrent allows data sources to be loaded in parallel rather than sequentially.  This will speed up the load time of you data.

The Concurrent function evaluates multiple formulas at the same time. Normally, multiple formulas are evaluated by chaining them together with the ; operator, which evaluates each sequentially in order. When the app performs operations concurrently, users wait less for the same result.

App Assets

Make sure your app assets (images, logos etc) are web optimized.   Making your images and logos are as small as possible will improve load times on the app.

The Microsoft Business Applications Summit was recently held in Atlanta.  The breadth of content delivered over the week is remarkable.  There were fifty PowerApps sessions alone.

For those who couldn't make it to the event, Microsoft have kindly made the videos from the session available online.

I can highly recommend the session on the new PowerApps AI Builder, and this quick intro on how to build a Powerapps Model Drive App was really useful as well.

The sessions are also available in this PowerApp.

We are pleased to announce The SharePoint Agency has been listed on Microsoft's PowerApps Partner Directory.  

Most of work tends to be in the PowerApps space at present, so it is great to be listed with other New Zealand Partners on the Microsoft site.   More details about our Partner Showcase app coming soon.