Today I'll show you what's next for building business apps for SharePoint without writing code.
where we further deepen SharePoint integration with Microsoft PowerApps ,
Flow and Power BI.
We'll look at creating beautiful pages that weave together apps,
workflows and Power BI visualizations across your devices.
Building custom forms integrated with your data that reflect your business needs.
And go beyond what we could achieve with InfoPath.
And lastly, new ways to integrate your content with business processes
and connect them to other services using Flow.
With the introduction of PowerApps and Flow.
We've been making it easier for you to create custom apps in the tools that you use everyday.
Such as lists and libraries
without the need for developer skills.
I'll begin by showing you what's possible from three different perspectives.
An everyday user, his manager and the user who built the app.
Let's start with the experience of an everyday user in the context of Contoso adventures.
A new division of Contoso clothing
At Contoso, employees can volunteer to go on tours as assistant tour guides
which attracts a lot of college graduates to the company.
Right now I'm signed in as Chris, an employee of Contoso.
I'm looking at a page on the team site
that we use for organizing tours.
And from here I can sign up for the one that I'm interested in attending.
This map here is a Power BI report embedded directly onto the page
and lets me see the tour locations across the globe,
and the availability of tour guide positions.
I can also refer to the list of tours here on the right
along with other useful resources.
These are all available on the page in one place.
By clicking on a link in the list,
I can see an expanded view with more details.
This upcoming trip to Hawaii fits my schedule.
Let's select it.
Notice that the form I see here has been tailored to show specific information about the tour.
It shows me the location of the trip on a map.
And the information about the tour is laid out across two columns.
It even shows me live weather information for the location
Under assistant tour guides,
There's a sign up button.
This is what I was looking for.
I click it and see a sign-up sheet
where I can pick from options present it to me.
I fill in the information requested and agree to the terms of the store.
Once I click sign up
my manager receives a notification to approve the request.
As the employee, my experience was visually rich,
well-formatted and tailored to my needs.
I was able to smoothly navigate through the steps of finding the right tour and signing up.
Before I move on to the manager approval experience,
let me show you how key components of this app were created.
Starting with the custom form.
Now I'm signed in as Karen, the owner of the list.
To start building my app,
all I need to do is to click the "Customize with PowerApps" button.
This take me to the PowerApps studio in the browser.
Notice that this is directly integrated with SharePoint
and I don't need to download another app to my computer.
The studio shows my form in the middle.
My screens on the left and properties on the right.
It uses the same concepts as PowerPoint for moving objects around and
Excel like formulas for working with data.
And actions like adding conditional formatting.
Here are the two screens we saw earlier.
Let's go to the second screen
and expand the list of controls to take a closer look.
I can select the form
and then use the controls on the right
to change the position of the labels
or change the number of columns.
Selecting the driver's license fields,
I can see that it has conditional rules attached to it.
So that it will only show up if the user says he's willing to drive.
I can also create a new rule
by clicking here
and picking the condition and action from this list.
The app also leverages PowerApps ability to easily connect to other data sources.
Under Data Sources, I can see that the app is connected to SharePoint,
MSN weather and Office 365 users
which is Contoso directory.
This is how we could display the weather information for the tour location.
As well as Chris's manager's name when he was viewing the form earlier.
I can use the add connection button
to connect to a number of different Microsoft and third-party services
that are available out of box
or even use a custom API.
One thing to note here is that my apps and flows are governed by the data policies
that my administrator has set up regarding the use of my business data in SharePoint.
This means data can't be passed along to services that are not authorized.
Using PowerApps integrated with SharePoint,
I was able to create this custom form
without needing to write any code as the list owner.
Now let's take a look at what's behind the signup button.
Clicking signup triggers a flow
to send an approval request to Chris' manager
asking her to approve or reject the request.
Let's see the flow in detail in the Flow Designer.
As you can see,
it starts when a new item is added in SharePoint.
And then looks up the manager of the person signing up in the directory.
And then uses an approval action.
Approval are a new type of action that can be added to flows
that let flow designers represent their decision making steps.
The outcome of the approval step can be used to decide which way the flow proceeds,
and what further actions are taken.
In our scenario if the employee manager approves,
our employee gets a confirmation message saying that he's good to go.
And the field is updated in SharePoint.
Now that we've established how the custom form and approval process were built,
let's switch to the perspective of Chris' manager, Patricia.
And look at her approval experience.
As Patricia, I can see Chris' email in my inbox.
Because Flow works with actionable messages
I can simply click the approve option in the mail
and Outlook will send my approval directly to the flow service
without needing to open a new browser window.
Equally, I could have also used the flow app to approve this request from my phone
or use the flow approval Center
to see all of the items that require my attention in one place.
As you have seen
neither Chris nor his manager had to worry about how to make this process work.
The business rules were baked right into the tools that they use for work every day
with a little help from SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow.
Now let me show you some other ways
in which the integration between PowerApps,
Flow and SharePoint can help you to quickly automate business process steps
and share experiences across device types.
Here I have a marketing team site for Contoso.
The marketing team uses the custom app on their devices.
Built using PowerApps.
But thanks for the new PowerApps web parts,
I'm now able to provide the same experience on my page.
So people who visit this page can use the app in the same way they could on their tablets.
The app we see here connects to SharePoint
as well as the common data service.
And lets the marketing team look up social media influencers for a location and reach out to them.
Let's look at who's in Mexico.
I can see we have Garth Fort.
Now let's find some content to share with them.
I'll go into my library that has photos and other artifacts from various photo shoots,
trips and social media posts that our customers have made.
Contrary to perceived limits around scale,
notice that there are over 10,000 items that have been collected here over the years.
Share points new intelligent indexing features
ensure that the library automatically supports large numbers of items.
Let's open the filter pane.
I can easily filter down to customer ready content
and see items generated internally.
And then group items by the source,
and it all just works.
These intelligent indexing features help me build my business apps
without worrying about the size of my lists and libraries.
Finally, it's easy for me to use the power of Microsoft Flow directly from my document libraries.
Earlier we saw an automated flow
that kicked into gear when a user signed up for a tour.
Here I'm selecting a picture in my library.
I can then select from a list of flows
a specific action to trigger.
For example, I can select this flow to send the photo to Instagram,
Twitter and Facebook at the same time with a single click.
I type in my hashtag
and send the photo on its way to Garth.
The flow used here is built to connect to these consumer services directly,
but it may just as easily have been passing the photo
over to another social media management service.
And because the flows listed here are available to the members of this team site,
even if a new member joins the team
they will be able to run this flow by picking it from the drop-down.
this ability to associate
flows with specific documents libraries or lists
and having them shared across the team
helps teams design and then repeat the processes that they want to implement with minimal effort.
As you have seen the journey we started in making SharePoint a great place to get work done
has taken some big steps forward this year.
We will continue to add more capabilities
to make it easy for you to create signup forms,
approval request or any other app that is specific to your business scenarios.
Of course these experiences will be extended to mobile platforms.
You can check out our mobile capabilities in a recent overview on Microsoft Mechanics.
Start building your business apps today on SharePoint Online
And please check out the links below to learn more.
Thanks for watching.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics