Exploring the Possibilities

of Low Code:

How Pro
Developers
Can Cook Up
Innovation
Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 2

Who this is for

Software developers who want to maximize

their skills and get recognized for delivering
superior solutions faster. This e-book provides Estimated reading time:
open-ended Power Apps scenarios to explore 9 minutes
and quick design-thinking exercises to prime
the mental pump.

Contents

Why high-skill developers should care about low-code technology 3

Enjoying development more 5

A different kind of cookbook 7

Meat and potatoes: Line-of-business apps 8

Prix fixe menu: Business processes automation 12

Special of the day: Adding intelligence 15

Fresh ingredients: Working with data 18

Plating the dish: User experience innovation 21

Try Power Apps now 24

Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 3

Why high-skill
developers should
care about low-code
technology
Many developers see low code as With growing demand for apps, the efficiency
something that only business users of low code may become a necessity rather
should care about, or as “software than a choice. Five hundred million new apps
development for beginners.” In fact, will be built in the next five years—more
Microsoft Power Apps is designed than in the last 40 years. Yet 86 percent of
to blend seamlessly with code-first organizations need more technical talent to
development and enterprise application build applications. The developers they have
lifecycle management, with features are doing their best to keep up, despite having
such as a powerful component limited time and resources, so solutions like
framework, as well as Power Apps CLI Power Apps that help them streamline routine
and Visual Studio plug-ins. tasks and focus more on high-value, complex
work are especially useful.

You might be experiencing some this increased

¹ IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2020 demand yourself already. Do you sometimes
Predictions. Doc # US 45599219, October 2019.
dread your backlog? Do you find yourself stuck
doing repetitive tasks rather than using your
² Patrick Moorhead, Microsoft goes all-in on
hybrid Cloud and Edge at Ignite 2019, citing best skills? Do you have tons of great ideas but
Indeed survey, Forbes.com, Nov 2019. no time to execute them?

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 4

Envision what satisfaction

looks like

As a developer, what do you What would you do more of

want to do less of? if you had the time?

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 5

Enjoying
development more
You’re not alone. Maintaining quality of life Thankfully, these are exactly the factors that
as a developer will require new tools and a low-code platform can improve as demand
approaches. continues to grow.

One study of 465 software developers The light purple bars represent the
highlighted the most important factors in factors with the biggest gaps between
job satisfaction and the percentage who importance and satisfaction: productivity,
were satisfied with each one. rewards, and using skills effectively.

Factor Ranked importance to satisfaction Percent satisfied

Having a good manager 1 81%

Perceived productivity 2 61%

Appropriate rewards 3 63%

Team culture 4 73%

Skills are well used 5 64%

Impactful work 6 71%

Skilled co-workers 7 85%

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 6

Productivity: We can’t add more hours to your day, but

we can help you save the hours you do
Labor-intensive hand-coding is a
have for work that matters most to you.
proud craft, but it can’t keep up
Let’s get into the low-code kitchen and see
with demand on its own. Low-
what we can cook up.
code platforms can remove some
of the repetitive labor so you can
get more done without constantly
working 18-hour days.

Rewards: Pro-code or
Most business decision-makers low code?
don’t have a finely tuned taste
for elegant code. They do tend to
Why not both?
notice when teams meet or beat
With Power Apps, you don’t
deadlines. Power Apps helps you
have to choose. You can build
ship apps and features faster so you
a full low-code app and extend
can be the hero.
it with custom connectors and
components. Build advanced APIs
Using skills well: and components from scratch in
Visual Studio and then publish
When it’s crunch time, developers
them to your organization for
often have to put time and energy
citizen developers to use. Or
into activities that are more about
create individual features with a
meeting deadlines than experiencing
low-code approach, which can then
mastery. By lifting some of that
be integrated across your portfolio.
burden, low-code development can
You’re always in the driver’s seat.
free up time so you can focus on the
things you do best.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 7

A different kind
of cookbook
Most software cookbooks are collections
of code snippets, but this one’s a Meat and potatoes:
little different. It’s about ideas, not Line-of-business apps
instructions. (Not to mention the fact
that a low-code cookbook filled with
code would be a little ridiculous).
Prix fixe menu:
The recipes are design-thinking exercises Business processes automation
to help you imagine what you could
create with Power Apps. We’ve also
included ingredient lists—Microsoft
Special of the day:
services outside of Power Apps that can
Adding intelligence
help you execute big things.

Fresh ingredients:
Working with data

Plating the dish:

User experience innovation

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 8

Meat and potatoes: 011000

100110

Line-of-business 001100

extensions
Connecting people to line-of-business (LOB) Because they are difficult to update,
apps used to mean writing and maintaining a users might be stuck using a client
fat-client application designed especially for application developed a generation ago
the purpose. in technology terms.

Microsoft Power Platform has allowed us

to break free of the challenges we had with
custom code and innovate quickly on top of
our legacy systems.”
Bob Means
Director of Business Solutions
Coca-Cola Bottling Company United >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 9

Low-code LOB modernization

Today, you can combine low-code

Power Apps with an API-first approach to
Build and secure your API
scale LOB functionality across the business.
This also gives you the agility to adapt
and innovate more rapidly and avoids the
Describe your API and
lock-in that comes from focusing on client
define the connector
applications alone. Power Apps lets you
publish and consume RESTful APIs easily.
Plus, you can expose the APIs to citizen
Use your connector
developers on the platform to integrate
with the solutions they’re creating.

To help you integrate your data and Share your

connector (optional)
business processes, Microsoft has more
than 325 prebuilt connectors for Microsoft
and third-party services and products, Certify your
from GitHub to Salesforce to Twitter. A connector (optional)
connector is a wrapper around a REST API
(Logic Apps also supports SOAP APIs) that
allows Azure Logic Apps, Power Automate,
or Power Apps to communicate with that
REST or SOAP API. To support more tailored
scenarios, you use familiar tools like Visual
Studio to build custom connectors with
their own triggers and actions, and then
publish them to Azure App Service.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 10

Microsoft ingredients

Azure SQL Database >

Use a managed cloud database to simplify

data management and optimize utilization.

Azure Functions >

User serverless compute to surface data

and connect services based on triggers and
bindings rather than hard-coded connections.

Azure API Management >

Expose APIs with a high degree of control and

security and scale them to meet demand.

Connectors >

Integrate external functionality into your

low-code app.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 11

Recipe idea: Three in one

Think of one LOB app in your business What if you could decompose that application
that is tied to a client app. and turn those functions into services?

What are its three key functions? Choose one function from
the list above and quickly
(Example: Enable business reporting) list three new low-code
apps that could consume it.
1

(Example: Help store personnel

2 know what’s in stock)

3 1

Resources
3
Line of Business Extension -
Azure Solution Ideas >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 12

Prix fixe menu:

Business processes
automation
Many developers these days have But in many organizations this kind of
hands-on experience with the power automation doesn’t extend to everyday
of automation. They use DevOps business processes. Developers can apply
approaches such as automated testing their experience to automate tasks for
and deployment to simplify their work. other users and make their lives easier.

Power Apps has a lot to offer even to the most

experienced developers among us.”
James Matson
IT Retail Innovation Lead
Priceline Australia >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 13

Low-code business process flows and automation

Power Automate provides a drag-and-drop A specialized kind of flow, called a business
automation design experience so you can process flow, provides a streamlined user
quickly set up flows to add to your custom experience that leads people through a defined
applications. As a pro developer, you can create series of steps. It uses a role-based approach to
custom process automation capabilities and ensure appropriate security controls. Although
connect them to Power Apps or Power Automate they are relatively simple in themselves, when
flows. Using Azure Functions and Azure API you combine them with other processes and
management, you can enable these automations customizations, they can play an important role
to be called even without and API. You can also in saving people time, reducing training costs,
build advanced automation using serverless and increasing user adoption.
Azure Logic Apps.

Microsoft ingredients
Business process flows >
Easily set up structured business processes to
simplify workflows.

Azure Functions >

Add powerful event-driven functionality to
create new levels of automation.

Azure Logic Apps >

Schedule, automate, and orchestrate tasks and
business processes, and integrate apps, data,
systems, and services using a professional-
grade solution for serverless workflows.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 14

Recipe idea: Day in the life

Think of the most tedious and time-consuming Now imagine that process is automated.
process a typical employee has to endure.

What is a day in their life like? What is their day like now? How
What opportunities do they miss? has it improved?

Resources

Learn about Custom Business Processes >

Create a business process flow in Power Automate >

Compare Microsoft automation solutions >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 15

Special of the day:

Adding
intelligence
AI offers incredible potential to enhance user scenarios, automate complex workflows,
applications and services. With abilities such and help people make sense of big data.
as object detection, category classification, However, custom-coding AI solutions is highly
and entity extraction, it can enable new specialized and can take a long time.

The G&J Pepsi IT team uses AI Builder and

Power Apps to create the next generation of our
Store Audit app, enabling better mobility and
efficiency for our field personnel. AI Builder will help
build an AI model to automatically identify and track
our products using object detection. For our field
worker, it will be as simple as taking a photo and
letting AI Builder do the rest.”
Eric McKinney
Enterprise Business Systems Manager
G&J Pepsi >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 16

Low-code AI

Using AI Builder in Power Apps, you can easily In AI Builder, you can choose from several
build, train, and publish AI models without model types that are suited to different
coding them. Templates and guided processes business scenarios. For example, you can
put custom AI within easy reach of any build custom object-detection models to
developer. You don’t need to be a data scientist identify objects in images.
(but if you are, you can do even more).

Microsoft ingredients

AI Builder >

Build custom models tailored to your needs or

choose a prebuilt model that is ready to use for
many common business scenarios.

Azure AI Platform >

Integrate machine learning, knowledge

mining, AI apps and agents, and more into
your innovations with a fully managed, cloud-
based AI service.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 17

Recipe idea: 3 x 3

Think of three ways an app could deliver value to the business using each of the following AI
capabilities. Now imagine one app that uses all three capabilities.

Object detection Predictive Text categorization All three

modeling
Example: Example: Predict Example: Route An app that predicts
Count items in staffing needs customer customer sentiment
a warehouse requests by analyzing text
and images in social
media posts

1 1 1

2 2 2

3 3 3

Resources

Watch a short video about adding AI to apps using Power Apps and AI Builder >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 18

Fresh ingredients:

Working with data

Many businesses generate so much data they
can’t even keep track of it all, let alone use it
effectively. Bringing it together across systems
often requires major effort, and building
multiple data connections into an application
can be tricky.

The big benefit of Power Apps is that you

can spend less time on the ‘boring’ stuff like
modelling data or building forms and focus on
the areas where there is the most complexity
and—as a result—business value.”
Tijn Tacke
Dynamics 365 Platform Lead
Blackmores >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 19

Low-code data integration

Simplifying data connectivity is at the heart of data in Microsoft Excel workbooks, SharePoint
Power Apps. The most common data sources lists, SQL tables, and many other formats, which
in Power Apps are tables, which you can use you can store in cloud services such as OneDrive
to store and retrieve information. You can use for Business, Dropbox, and SQL Server.
connections to data sources to read and write

Microsoft ingredients

Microsoft Dataverse >

Quickly develop apps, add low-code AI

tools, and identify and resolve duplicate or
conflicting data. Plus, it helps you protect
your data with advanced encryption, rich
access control, and deep integration with
Azure Active Directory.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 20

Recipe idea: Randomizer

Write down five kinds of data used by Randomly select two and quickly sketch
your organization. an application that could deliver unique
functionality by combining them.

Example:
Customer demographics

Resources

Extending the Power Platform

Microsoft Dataverse >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 21

Plating the dish:

User experience
innovation
As a discipline, development has become
increasingly user-centric in the past decade
or so. Today, user experience is an advanced
field, with many technologies and practices to
choose from. It can also be difficult to execute
and optimize in the real world.

Using Power Apps, our business partners are

able to consume data in real time from many
data sources, instantly analyze the data, and
drive to an actionable decision.”
Nipa Chakravarti
Vice President of
Information Technology
TransAlta >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 22

Low-code UX
There are two easy ways to build a user-centric You’re not limited to built-in options, either. Use
Power App. First, you can design and build a your code-first skills in Visual Studio and the
canvas app using a drag-and-drop interface. Power Apps component framework to enhance
Or you can use model-driven design, which the user experience. Add seamless server
is focused on components and can support access via Web API, add new utility and data
complex apps. In model-driven apps, the formatting methods, access device features like
layout is determined by which components you camera, location and microphone, and invoke
choose. If your data is in Microsoft Dataverse, UX elements such as dialogs, lookups, and full-
you can automatically generate model-driven page rendering.
apps as a starting point.

Microsoft ingredients
Unified interface >
Provide a responsive experience across devices
with apps that automatically scale to screen size.

Component framework >

Create code components for model-driven
and canvas apps that empower users to work
with data on forms, views, and dashboards.

YAML >
Extract source code for canvas apps and work
with it in CI/CD pipelines and Visual Studio.

Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools >

Automate common build and deployment tasks
related to apps built on Microsoft Power Platform.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 23

Recipe idea:
If you could choose any app and get it built in
five minutes, what would you choose and why?

If you want to share the results with your team or your

manager, click here to send an email.

Resources
Watch a short video about how to customize the user experience using the
Power Apps Component Framework >

Extending the Power Platform user experience with Model Driven apps >

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Exploring the Possibilities of Low Code 24

Try Power Apps now

We hope this cookbook has provided inspiration for
you to give low-code development a try. It’s easy
to learn, yet gives pro developers like you an open
field of options to explore. It’s about getting low-skill
tasks out of your way so you can do more and ship
features faster. After all, nothing gets a developer
more kudos than beating a deadline.

Try Power Apps free

Experience the App-in-a-Day workshop >

Learn more about how developers can

benefit from low-code >

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