In my first blog post, I was writing about the start of my journey. This time let’s talk about the next steps.
So, where were we? I created my first app for Learning & Development, using static Excel tables.
Luckily this served as my ticket to further learning: attending the App in a Day seminar in London in the Microsoft Office, and going to the Power Platform Summit in Amsterdam with the team.
Honestly, thinking back, I’m not sure if the App in a Day seminar worth few days of accommodation in London and Budapest – London return ticket for the following reasons:
- We didn’t have the same environment (premium licenses for Power Apps and Power Automate)
- The material (and Lab) for the seminar is publicly available and could have been done easily in our office as well
- I have already known some things, so didn’t gain a lot of extra info (other than the stuff, I won’t have a chance to use in production)
However, the Amsterdam conference was really good. It was a great networking opportunity, finally, I met some of the MVPs and Champions, attended great sessions, and got some swag. Overall, it was a great experience, my first tech summit ever. We went back to Hungary full of ideas and use cases.
The next project
I used Power Platform for an internal ordering tool next. The original process used Excel order forms, emails, a bunch of VBA scripts, and took around 2 weeks of manual work to complete.
For the Power Apps implementation, I used Sharepoint lists to store order details, and Power Automate to do some of the automation.
It was a pretty straightforward process improvement with some challenges during development, such as: using a loop in Power Apps to assign stock randomly. This was the base of my loop, quick shoutout to Éric Sauvé – @ZePowerDiver: Loop in a Canvas App – Dive in from a developper into a #lowcode method | Dive in the Power Platform and gain power! (zepowerdiver.com)
Coming from VBA (and other languages), the missing loop was not good. (It’s still missing from Power FX.)
We didn’t have CoE (Center of Excellence) for Power Platform, nor ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), so the first big(ger) testing was during a quarterly internal sale.
Of course, I don’t need to mention that some of the things broke, during testing (I mean, production), but I was able to fix the problems right away. Even with some hiccups, but we were able to deliver a functioning prototype, which brought the internal ordering to the 21st century, and the process has been moved away from Excel sheets, emails, macros, waiting for IT.