PowerApps and Flow

PowerApps is a graphical application development environment that lets users without programming expertise create Azure-hosted applications that can present data for viewing and editing. Sample applications perform tasks such as budget tracking and cost estimation. PowerApps could make simple line-of-business applications easier to create and distribute to teams within an organization.

Flow is a graphical workflow automation engine that runs in Microsoft Azure and is based on the Azure Logic Apps service. Flow could benefit power users who want to create lightweight workflows. It has similarities to If This Then That (IFTT), a third-party tool that also offers automation for consumer services.

PowerApps and Flow are available as stand-alone services. However, they are also being integrated into SharePoint Online as the successors to InfoPath and SharePoint Designer, which were deprecated after the 2013 versions but still work with SharePoint Server 2016. (See the illustration “InfoPath and SharePoint Designer Discontinued“.) PowerApps and Flow should be available to on-premises SharePoint Server in a future feature pack.