With the advent of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, people are able to choose convenience and instant availability, along with the instant gratification in using out-of-the-box capabilities, leading to readily distributed data. Diverse IT organizations began to succumb to this new reality – after all, they are servicing the business users in their respective organizations.

However, when it comes to mobility, it is very hard to connect to some of the popular enterprise and SaaS applications such as SharePoint and SalesForce, respectively. Business apps exhibit a more gradual pace in getting to business users hands, unlike the rampant pace of consumer apps.

An out-of-the-box instance of PowerApps allows users to connect to services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox, OneDrive and on-premise database systems such as SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle, SAP and others. The Microsoft developer community is busy building as many connectors as possible.

While this is being heavily marketed for its out-of-the-box readiness for usage by business users, this state ignores the many intricacies of data security, IT governance, policy, and so forth. The out-of-the-box capabilities can only be truly leveraged after prudent implementation by IT, and further optimizations and extensions from the developer community. The real success of this platform relies upon the number of connectors that get connected to the platform and, as always, is also a function of the user adoption rate, which has proven to be an uphill battle with these kinds of applications.

This is still in Beta; the Industry is waiting to see the real deal in the business environment.