Microsoft PowerApps and Flow to be generally available November 1
Microsoft will be making PowerApps and Flow, two of its power-user development tools, generally available as of November 1.
PowerApps is for building web and mobile business applications without coding. Flow, Microsoft's version of IFTTT (If This Then That), is its business-process automation tool.
The November 1 timing is not coincidental, as both PowerApps and Flow are set to be included with Dynamics 365, some pieces of which will be available for purchase starting November 1. The Common Data Model at the heart of Dynamics 365 initially was part of PowerApps.
Microsoft has been testing PowerApps and Flow for a while now.
Microsoft took the wraps off the PowerApps service (which was codenamed "Project Kratos) in November 2015. The goal of the PowerApps service/app was to allow business users to create apps without having to know how to write a single line of code.
Microsoft went public with its Flow event-automation service in April 2016. Flow is the renamed "Logic Flows" feature that originally was part of PowerApps when Microsoft publicly debuted it in 2015. Technically, Flow can trace its roots back even further to the Logic Apps component of the Azure App Service.
With tomorrow's final releases of PowerApps and Flow, Microsoft is adding some brand-new capabilities, officials said.
Microsoft is adding a concept of "Environments" to PowerApps with this release. "Environments are spaces to store, manage, and share your organization's business data, apps, and flows and help manage scale out across the enterprise," officials said. PowerApps also is getting a new centralized admin center, as well as the ability to publish apps to the organization gallery on Microsoft AppSource marketplace for line-of-business software-as-a-service apps.
Microsoft also is adding new capabilities to Flow. Environments can be used for storing flows by geography or team. The new admin center includes the ability to add data-loss prevention policies. And tomorrow's release will add connections to additional services, new as of this month, including: Bit.ly, Campfire, Cognitive Services Text Analytics, Instapaper, and Pinterest.