How I migrated my Access Web App to PowerApps - Part 1

[darogael]

4 years ago I had written a TechNet Guru Award in the SharePoint category for writing an article on 'SharePoint Online: A no-code Solution to Create and Customize Access Service app using Access 2013'. Now I am going to migrate this Access App to PowerApps.  There is some urgency when it comes to migrating Access Apps because Microsoft has already stopped creation of new Access-based apps in SharePoint Online one June 2017 and will shut down any remaining apps by April 2018. For more information you can refer to the 'Updating the Access Services in SharePoint Roadmap'. You can also refer to the 'Introduction to PowerApps for Access Web Apps' developers document.

This will be a multiple-part series on how the migration occurred. In this section I will demonstrate the Access App and then migrate it to SharePoint Online.

Access Web App

The Access Web App was built to be used for a Photography sales store. This app stored information of the employees, customers, inventory and Orders using tables. Let's take a closer look at it.

Migrating the content to SharePoint Online

Prior to rebuilding the Access Web App we need to migrate the content to a different location. In this scenario we are going to migrate it to SharePoint Online. One of the main reasons to choose SharePoint Online is because a content migration feature is already available i.e. it will export all the tables structure and it's content over to SharePoint. In addition, it will automatically create a subsite in the same site collection where the Access App existed.

Closer look at the SharePoint lists

In the Access Web App we had only four tables as shown below.

In Orders, we also had Order details had information such as Product name and Order number which were lookup values from the other tables.

This data was also successfully migrated to SharePoint as a separate list called Order Details. In addition, this list has several lookup columns similar to the table in the Access Web App. Take a look at the screenshots below.

 

Hence you can see the 'Export to SharePoint list' option does a remarkable job of maintaining the relationships that existed in the Access tables and migrating them as lookup columns in a SharePoint list. A job well done by the team who built this solution!

Video

Take a look a this video which walks you through all the steps described above

 

In the next blog we'll look at how we can take each section of the Access Web App i.e. the Employees, Products, Customers and Orders and rebuild them in PowerApps.

Helpful links

How I migrated my Access Web Apps to PowerApps - Part 2

How I migrated my Access Web Apps to PowerApps - Part 3