How do you surface Power Apps to your users? Are you sending them a link? Asking them to bookmark it maybe? Relying on them to actually do that? Sounds like I can suggest some better approaches 😉
In this post, I’m going to give you 4 better ways to surface your Power Apps to your users than by sending them a link! If you’ve got any more ways of surfacing apps to your users, let me know! I’d love to hear your creative ways of driving user adoption of your Power Apps.
#1 – Microsoft Teams
So, one ‘better’ method of surfacing our app to users is by using Microsoft Teams! Now this comes with some more context (and I mean that in two ways as well…)
The way we use Teams to surface our app to our users differs based on the use case in question. Teams is a great tool for users or team owners to surface an app they have access to and potentially use with their team, by adding it to a chat or a channel. This is a great approach for sharing things with a smaller team or department but potentially isn’t the right approach if we’re wanting to share / surface an app to a huge group of users such as an entire business unit, country or even our entire organisation.
Teams is still a great tool to surface our apps to wider groups of users, but there’s a different approach we can take which isn’t pinning our app to a chat or channel. We can deploy our app to Teams via the Microsoft Teams Admin Centre so that users can install it from the Teams app store or we can even use app policies to pin the app to users app bars by default. This is a better method for surfacing our apps when we’re working with bigger groups of users such as business units, or all of our users.
You can read more about how to deploy to wider groups of users in this post – Deploying Power Apps to Teams on a wide scale – Low Code Lewis
Further, when working with apps that we’re using in smaller teams or across multiple teams where you might pin an app to multiple departments teams, then we can take advantage of some contextual data teams passes into Canvas Apps by default through parameters.
#2 – SharePoint & Viva Connections
A second method we can use to surface apps to users, and my favourite method for wider groups of users is by pinning a linked tile on a SharePoint modern intranet or on a Viva Connections dashboard!
You can further take advantage of audience targeting features in SharePoint here to still only show certain bigger groups of people some apps in comparison to different ones other wider groups of users may need to see.
I find that this is a great way to make apps easy to access and it puts them in a centralised location for your organisation as opposed to in a team for example which more people might have control over. I.e. more people can generally create teams, and just pin apps as they wish if policies aren’t too locked down. With this method, it instils a sense of what’s correct from a leadership point of view and what is being distributed by official content editors etc.
You can also make your links look fancy in some gorgeous modern SharePoint pages 😉
#3 – Edge Bookmarks via InTune
Another method of making apps easy to access for your users is to add them as a managed favourite for Microsoft Edge by using Microsoft InTune. This lets you control a list of favourites your users will see in Edge if they’re using a managed company device with an InTune deployment.
Check out this post from Peter Klapwijk on how to do this! – Controlling managed favorites for Edge with Microsoft Intune – Windows | Peter Klapwijk – In The Cloud 24-7 (inthecloud247.com)
#4 – Power Apps Wrap
Finally, we have Power Apps Wrap! Focused on Canvas Apps, Wrap lets you create mobile applications using Power Apps and low code tools. We can take multiple Canvas Apps and link them into one which we then surface in a mobile application users can have natively downloaded on iOS and Android devices.
Check out more about Power Apps Wrap here – Overview of wrap – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn