If you haven’t seen it yet, then you need to check out our new video Intro to Power Pages featuring our own Haylee Adamson. In this blog series, we’ll recap the highlights and hopefully whet your appetite for more.
What is Power Pages?
Power Pages is a way to build a website based on Microsoft Dataverse data where you can use a low/no code experience to create your website. Using templates, drag and drop interface, and visual controls to adjust settings, there’s no code you need to write to set up your website. Since it’s built using Dataverse, you can put strict controls on what data you’re exposing, and who can interact with it.
Why should I use Power Pages?
Power Pages is your best bet for allowing users outside of your organization to interact with your data. We’ve encountered some use cases where Power Pages might be your best bet:
Mockup of production solution for user training sites
Collect demographic information from new customers
Collect and provide information to event attendees, such as schedules, dietary preferences, housing selection, and release sign-offs
Create a calculator for customers or sales reps to self-serve a quote
Create a storefront for clients or reps to place orders
Manage service requests
Provide a portal for your resellers
Manage evaluations and auditions
Built on Power Platform
Since it’s built on the Power Platform, if you’re familiar with Power Apps and Power Automate, or even SharePoint, you’ll feel at home creating in Power Pages. You may have created web pages around SharePoint data that you could share with other users in your organization, however, it was impossible to share your SharePoint pages outside of your organization. With Power Pages, you can create externally facing web pages (or ones that customers can view)!
What about security?
Did I mention security? Since it’s based on your Dataverse tables, your users will only see data according to permissions that you place on the data itself. Did I mention how easy it is to begin? Microsoft has provided customizable templates and a cool design studio very similar to what you see in Power Apps.
Intro to the Power Pages solution
In the next blog post, we’ll begin building with Power Pages together, but for now let’s examine what we could achieve. Haylee has developed a “Community Events” hub where users can add events and view a community calendar.
With the ability to “View Events”, a user can see the Community Events on a calendar. Selecting an event shows event details:
The hub also allows users (with the right permission) to add community events, by selecting the “Add Event” button from the header. The link brings up a form experience where the user can input the details of the event:
Recap
To recap, Power Pages is a webpage with a Dataverse data source. That does make it “premium”, in that, there’s a monthly cost for it. The advantage for developers already familiar with Dataverse tables is that you don’t need to create any new data, you can base it on data tables that you’ve already built! You can make Power Pages for audiences external to your organization, which is unique for the Power Platform. You can also use it to harvest data (like Haylee’s “Add event” form), where your webpage users can input data for you.
If you’re looking for inspiration, you can take a look at what other organizations have already done with Power Pages here.
In the next blog post, we’ll look at how to get your experience started!
Resources from PowerApps911
In the meantime, if you’re anxious to get started and you’re new to Power Pages, you can begin with the free Power Pages module (about an hour of content) in our Power Platform 101 course.
You can also sign up for our Power Pages Jumpstart course. This 3-day live course, running from July 16-18, is designed to teach you everything you need to know to build your own Power Pages solution.