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johnbradbury
Helper I
Helper I

Power Apps Capabilities

Evening all.

 

I'm looking for some general guidance before I jump into Power Apps development. I have a particular set  of requirements but I don't know if the Power Apps framework can support this, and I'd rather not go off on a tangent if it can't.

 

I'm wondering if Power Apps (with the right focus obviously) could be used to develop an IT Service Management system (ticketing and case management)?

- Customer portal (internal staff) for logging incidents and displaying a service catalogue (pre-defined requests)

- Customer portal for staff without PowerApps licensing

- Email integration to raise cases through email

- General case management functionality (case statuses, categorisations, ability to update, assign to support teams, add notes)

- The ability to send email updates to customers

- The ability for pre-defined requests to trigger webhooks or PowerAutomate

- Hold customer information

- Hold asset information

- Apply SLAs to cased based on certain conditions

- Dynamic question fields (ie if they select yes, then present another two fields for follow-up questions)

 

Handles around 150,000 cases a year.


There are lots more features too but you get the point. Is this a suitable use case, or is this beyond the framework?

2 REPLIES 2
poweractivate
Most Valuable Professional
Most Valuable Professional

@johnbradbury 

 

I believe a combination of Power Apps Portals and either Dynamics 365 Commerce [ref1] or Dynamics 365 for Customer Service [ref2] could work for you and should be capable of all of the features listed here. Email integration would be out of the box, for anything it might not be able to do though, Power Automate can help make this easier, as well as features like Power Platform integrations. The model of Microsoft Dataverse as well as integrations made possible through Power Platform makes it easy to integrate disparate, disconnected systems, within and outside of Dataverse, and even within and outside of Microsoft systems. 

 

 

- Customer portal (internal staff) for logging incidents and displaying a service catalogue (pre-defined requests)

     - Power Apps Portals can do this

     - It is also possible to do this from Power Automate and Power Apps,

        but I think Portals is best suited for "portal" use cases.

 

- Customer portal for staff without PowerApps licensing

    - Power Apps Portals can do this

     -External users and even anonymous users are supported!

 

- Email integration to raise cases through email

   - Dynamics 365 Commerce [ref1] or Dynamics 365 for Customer Service [ref2]

   - It is also possible to do this from Power Automate and Power Apps

 

 

- General case management functionality (case statuses, categorisations, ability to update, assign to support teams, add notes)

  - Dynamics 365 Commerce [ref1] or Dynamics 365 for Customer Service [ref2]

  - It is also possible to do this from Power Automate and Power Apps

 

- The ability to send email updates to customers

  Dynamics 365 Commerce [ref1] or Dynamics 365 for Customer Service [ref2]

  It is also possible to do this from Power Automate and Power Apps

 

- The ability for pre-defined requests to trigger webhooks or PowerAutomate

    It is possible to do this using Power Automate 

 

- Hold customer information

   Dataverse . Which also means you might lean towards  Dynamics 365 for Customer Service [ref2] over Dynamics 365 Commerce [ref1] - but in some cases you may want to consider both.

 

- Hold asset information

   Dataverse

 

- Apply SLAs to cased based on certain conditions

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service [ref2] over Dynamics 365 Commerce [ref1] - more likely Dynamics 365 for Customer Service [ref2] . You may also consider Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management [ref3]

   

 

Handles around 150,000 cases a year.

   - Should be possible

 


There are lots more features too but you get the point. Is this a suitable use case, or is this beyond the framework?

   - Should work for your case.

 

 

I'd say something like a combination of these products might work for you:

 

Power Apps Portals

I believe there is a free trial to try it out. You would try by starting a Power Apps per user plan trial, I believe.

 

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service

I believe there is a free 30 day trial to try it out. You can check here. (scroll down to Dynamics 365 Customer Service then click 'Try for free").

 

Power Automate to interconnect them in highly custom ways, without needing to write custom bare-metal code but instead using a custom visual low-code/no-code designer. Recommend the per user plan. For this one, recommend you start with the lowest priced plan to gauge your needs. There should also be a free trial to try it out.

 

Power Apps (i.e. "Canvas Apps" as well as "Model Driven Apps") to be able to customize - such as the "lots more features" part. Recommend the per user plan. There should also be a free trial.

 

Dataverse is in-built into the ecosystem, so it is not a separate product for purchase. Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, as well as Power Apps Portals, etc. use Dataverse for the storage, and uses the same one in fact. Since they use the exact same data model and the exact same underlying databases as well, it is easier to integrate them as well.

Check if it helps.

 

 

RandyHayes
Super User
Super User

@johnbradbury 

Just to add on to @poweractivate comments...

We use PowerApps and PowerAutomate with a SharePoint back-end to manage all of our IT Service Management, as well as our Account Management, Project Management, Accounting, Sales, Dispatch, Field operations and a couple other things.

Due to the nature of the PowerApps platform, the apps are always in constant design and change.  Some is due to business changes, and most is just "let's do this more efficiently" changes.

 

The real challenges are more on the business logic aspect of the apps over the design of them.  

We do utilize SharePoint as the back end data because it fit our license model at the time.  So far there has not been issues with it - but you must always design the data with delegation in mind.  This really goes for any data source.  We don't have that level of cases like you, but maybe a quarter of that.

 

So short answer - yes, you can!  But beware, if you are just jumping into PowerApps and looking at it like a development platform, you will quickly find yourself in a mess.  PowerApps is a no-code platform that is built around the Excel model.  If you keep that in mind always, you will get much more traction out of the gate.

 

I hope this is helpful for you.

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