u/ivanraddison

Hi,

A few years ago (2021/2022), I led the development of a workflow management application, with a canvas app in Power Apps, and it relied in these resources:

• Dataverse (database)
• Power Automate (automation flows)
• Sharepoint (file repository)
• Approvals (specific approval requests sent by email)
• Power BI (reporting)
• Portal (btw, friggin expensive for the very low usage we give to it!)

It was a very interesting project, quite small but very impactful, and till this day, it's still working relatively well (though it deserved to be continuously improved upon, but that unfortunately did not happen).

I remember one of the main reasons I pushed for using Microsoft's platform was not only because it had the necessary tools (Approvals, Sharepoint storage, these two were the most obvious), but because we were already using M365 (Business Standard), and it made sense to allow the users to have only one set of credentials and make their lives easier, and also from a developer perspective to not have to worry about creating separate parallel authentication mechanisms.

Nowadays things have changed. With AI, more specifically with coding agents, I think that the same citizen developer that Power Apps were catering to, can create robust applications with a ton of features without using Power Apps, and instead can rely on Cloudflare, Netlify, etc. platforms.

I have two questions I would like to discuss here with you folks.

• How are you creating your business applications nowadays?
• For those using AI and external platforms, are you still using anything from Microsoft, for example Authentication, or Sharepoint storage? Is is straight-through to connect and rely on these or are there any hard challenges?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing in your opinion! I'm cooking up a new project in my mind... very early stage.

And to be honest, it was in this subreddit (or the other large one related to M365, I can't recall exactly), that my Power Apps project (the one I described above) and my Power Apps "mini-career", actually kicked off!