Sharing PowerApps at scale made easy

[chass]

Last week on the April PowerApps community call one of the viewers indicated the process to share their PowerApps application with ~600 users wasn’t as fast as they wanted.

In digging into what they were doing it turns out they were trying to add 600 people in the application sharing dialog (Note: PowerApps only supports adding 200 identities at a time).  In addition to being slow this a security anti-pattern as typically you don’t grant people to resources; you grant security groups access to resources and add people to the security groups.

Luckily sharing at scale with PowerApps can be simple!

Here are the steps to make your PowerApps sharing experience a lot easier -and more secure.

Step 1. Create an Active Directory security Group.

You can either do this with PowerShell using the New-ADGroup or manually.   Since you don’t tend to create a lot of security groups; including the manual steps below.   Note while this is done through the Azure portal an Azure subscription is NOT required!

1. Navigate to https://portal.azure.com and select the Azure Active Directory Blade.

2. Select Groups

3. Supply the security group details…and possibly add members.  Likely you will find it easier to add your members with PowerShell as it is something you will find yourself doing all the time….particularly after people find out how fun it is to use PowerApps!

Step 2. Share your PowerApp with a security group.

Sharing with a security group is just like sharing with a user…i.e. type in the name of the security group created in step 1. and select the access permissions those users should receive.

3. (Optional) Add members via PowerShell

While you can add security group members directly in the Azure portal, I find it much easier to actually keep track of my members in a dedicated file like CSV – and add them via PowerShell command: Add-ADGroupMember with an example here: 

Using Add-Adgroupmember and CSV Files