Meet Microsoft's new software PowerApps: It wants make building business apps easy for anyone

dkpope

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Today Microsoft launched a new service called PowerApps that aims to make it easy for employees to build and share mobile and web-based business apps, without needing to know how to code. ZDNet reports that PowerApps is just available as a preview for now, but Microsoft has big plans for it.

The software will be easy to use and fit in with other Microsoft Office applications such as Word or Excel. Just click, drag, and type to make new apps that wrangle information from different sources. This information can come from cloud data as well as on-premises data sources. While PowerApps is available as a preview, you can build as many apps as you’d like (and share them with anyone) for free.

If you’ve been paying close attention, PowerApps might sound familiar. The software was mentioned by name in a Microsoft job postings months ago, and then quickly deleted after ZDNet reported it. One job posting said, “Our team is chartered to build rich engaging mobile apps that pull together information from across enterprise and consumer sources and make it easy for Information Workers to build and extend such apps.”

PowerApps falls into the application platform as a service (aPaaS) category and is aimed at non-technical types. It also fits in with the Microsoft Azure infrastructure as a service that is a little more technical.

Microsoft hasn’t said what the pricing for this software will be yet, but it has revealed the pricing hierarchy (Free, Standard, and Enterprise.) The charges are based on how many end-user licenses needed, not how much data is used. Once the web, iOS, or Android app is built, share it with a colleague by simply typing in their email address.

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