How suitable are Power Apps for enterprise office forms?

[BarvoDelancy]

I've been working at Power Apps development for a couple of months now and have been asked to evaluate them for enterprise office forms. We have around 40 office forms, some of which will have approximately a thousand users.

The immediate complicating factor I've found is that our security standards means that a lot of information going into these forms is "need to know". Users can input data, but cannot have access to the back-end table. As far as I can tell, this is not native behaviour for Power Apps as the write access is on the part of the user, not the app.

Another option is to produce and send pdfs. However, none of this looks particularly simple and I am very cautious about trying to scale up something that may be technically complicated.

So in short - is this a good idea? Is Power Apps the right tool for this kind of mass centralization of our office forms, or should I be looking at a different use?

[HSheild]

Hi @BarvoDelancy 

Enterprise companies do use Power Apps at scale for scenarios that you are describing.

For securing data access, the Security Roles of the Common Data Service allow the ability for a user to create their own data and not see anyone else’s.

Creating and sending PDFs is also simple with Power Automate.

To me, it sounds like you need to understand more about the Power Platform. Talk to a local Microsoft Partner or even Microsoft directly - if you have 1,000s of users they will be more than happy to help you do some due diligence.

[BarvoDelancy]

Thanks @HSheild, this puts me in the right direction and I'll reach out to our vendor. The building power apps forums had this question pop up a few times but I realize this was likely specific to SharePoint and the basic licenses rather than using the premium licenses with the CDS. This gives me a clear way forward.

Although power automate certainly allows for creation of pdfs, everything I've seen has pdfs which are hand-coded in HTML. I've seen mention of third-party apps which will allow to push to form fields in a pdf but am unsure of what those apps actually are. Do you have a direction you can point me in?

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I have been using the Power Platform for 3 years now and it such a great tool for quick application building. We are a local government and have roughly 2500 employees and the public community. A lot of the data that is submitted triggers a Power Automate flow to create a PDF. We utilize the Word connector by creating a word doc then converting the word doc to pdf. In this case, you have to create the word template first. Here is an example of a part of one of our flows that creates a PDF.

Here we take and add the data to the Word template.

Then create a word doc in a temp doc library.

Next, convert it to pdf then add it to the actual SP item that triggered the flow.

Then we go and delete the word doc from the temp library. 

Hope this helps some.