PowerApps Community Plan

Now, this is just awesome. In another move to increase user onboarding, Microsoft announced the PowerApps Community plan – free for users to get ramped up on building solutions with PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and the Common Data Service.

Why is this particularly cool? Users have always been able to sign up for a free trial with their own tenant but that has time limitations. Literally millions of O365 users potentially have access to PowerApps via their organizations, but many of these organizations are hesitant to enable PowerApps in their environments. Regardless of your individual situation, you now have access to a free development environment to not just check out, but dig in and learn one of the most promising tools out there for business solutions.

From a SharePoint user perspective, this is a great way to check out the tool that will both replace InfoPath and extend SharePoint out of box capabilities previously covered by SharePoint Designer, Client-Side Rendering (CSR) and JS Link, and other power user tools. Ramp up on your own and be ready for when your administrator turns PowerApps on in your tenant – OR be the reason they turn it on when you understand it’s capabilities and can demonstrate both your skill and solutions ready for your particular business cases. While SharePoint is, and will continue to be a data source for PowerApps – also check out the Common Data Service. Not all apps should be in SharePoint (really, its not the only tool out there. Smile ).

Be sure to check out the FAQ at the end of the blog post for good info as well. You will be able to transfer apps from your individual environment to another tenant… It’s not a dead-end tenant.

References

  • Sign up for the PowerApps Community Plan
  • Check out the blog post for more details.

Update

Seems worth noting that you create your community account as a part of a business account – which many folks will already have. But not to fear, PowerApps keeps your community account separate from your actual work account by using the same account and password, but creating a new environment. Well done PowerApps Team!

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  • ‘TrecStone (default)’ is, yep – the default PowerApps environment for my account.
  • ‘Demo Area’ is a separate environment created to try out environment functionality
  • ‘Wes Preston’s Environment’ is my new personal PowerApps Community Plan environment

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