Power Pages is a powerful technology that enables faster development and the creation of deeply connected business processes to bridge the gap between internal and external parties. The most important thing is to understand the framework and its best application. And this is where we see some customers and consultants struggle. That’s one reason “Power Pages Use Cases and Examples” is among the most popular articles on the Technomancy website.
Another topic we get asked a lot about is “How do we scale our Power Apps and M365 solutions we built for external users, staying within the Microsoft ecosystem?”
As both topics discuss the “external users” involved in the core business processes, it’s not surprising that they’re connected. And this article is the first in the series, starting the conversation about what we call “external user interactions” in the Microsoft 365 world. We will look at some recent scenarios we worked with to help our customers scale. Hope it clears up some of the questions, and if you have more, I am always happy to discuss them as well.
Let’s start with the business needs. In the Microsoft 365 world, the organisation and its staff members reside inside the tenant. As a staff member, you would have a Microsoft 365 license. Within the tenant, you will have access to emails, structured data, and documents via the Office apps, as well as other Microsoft and third-party apps.
As a staff member, you need to engage with the external parties as part of your business process. Pretty much any business will have these types of activities as a part of the engagement:
-
conversations
-
data collecting
-
data sharing
-
document collecting
-
document sharing
Who said “emails”?!
The old, good Outlook is always the first to come to the rescue. It’s a solution. Not the best, though.
In Outlook:
-
Business-critical emails may get lost easily.
-
Emails are out of context for your business, and you have to open apps to make sense of the information.
-
You may need to open multiple apps and type the information from the email.
-
Then go to the SharePoint to save the attached documents.
It’s not ideal, as you may already see: it’s time-consuming, labour-intensive, and costly. If you have SLAs attached to the processes, inefficiency may result in penalties.
So what do you do?
If your organisation has adopted Power Platform, you may have already started using Power Apps to cover some or all of these activities.
Let’s say you have a partner or a customer organisation you want to share some data and documents with. The way to do it with a Power App is to create guest users and assign licenses to them. Then create an app linked to the SharePoint and/or a SharePoint list. Share files by placing them in the SharePoint library connected to the app. Collect data or files from the guest user via the app and save them in SharePoint lists and libraries. This scenario will work perfectly if you have one, two or even five organisations you need to engage with.
In practice, even five organisations can become unmanageable. The things you need to set up are five times as many, and if you make a change to one of the apps, you then need to take care of the other four to roll out the updates. It just doesn’t scale.
What worked for one customer app won’t necessarily work if your other customers want to join the party. Let’s say your business is growing and your customers love to engage with you, not just via email. They want to be included in business processes so it feels like they are part of your organisation, but they are not. As much as you want your external peers to have the best user experience, you also want your data to be safe: you want the customer to see only what’s meant to be shared with them, not other customers’ information or internal information. Also, you don’t want maintenance overhead and a support nightmare.
Is it even achievable? Yes, it’s possible, and you don’t need to go beyond the Microsoft tech stack to support your business growth.
We see the exact scenario I described transformed into a scalable solution. But first, you need to transform the way you think.
There are things you need to rethink:
-
What type of access and licenses do your external users need?
-
Where is your shared data located, and how is it structured?
-
Where is the line to draw for “internal” and “external”?
Power Pages is a part of the Power Platform family designed with the external user experience in mind. It has a strong security model. It’s seamlessly integrated with your internal apps and automations. It allows third-party integrations as well.
By bringing Power Pages, you set up the foundation for your processes at scale. Adding another partner organisation, vendor, or contract is nothing but a configuration step. Another bonus is a standardised process for all your external players – the thing you always dreamed about but never managed to implement.
Before we move to the next step, let’s summarise what we learned.
If you use Power Apps with guest users to share organisational data and documents, the approach works at a small scale.
As the number of external organisations grows, so does complexity, risk, and maintenance overhead.
Introducing Power Pages allows external user interactions to scale through configuration rather than duplication, while maintaining security, governance, and a consistent experience.
In the next article, we will discuss how we helped one of our customers scale the process they shared with their business partners, moving them from apps shared with external users and Power Pages.
Scaling external user interactions doesn’t have to be complex. If this article resonates with your experience, connect with Technomancy to discuss practical, secure ways to support business growth using Microsoft technologies. Email: experts@technomancy.com.au
Website: https://technomancy.com.au/
