So.. I was working as a developer, working on .net stack. We were maintaining a few (40+) .net applications for between 3 developers. We constantly got revision requests and we used to have zero time between the three of us to manage them. We managed to cut it down by engaging with the customers (more about it another day) . Then came a new request: we needed a new application to track all of the sites we were looking after (100+) plus their divisions (25+).

I was asked to look at potential solution by my manager (I'll name him later with his permission), to whom I suggested I'll have a look and come back.

I explored OutSystems (very clumsy in my opinion), Salesforce (could not get a trial lol), .Net Rapid App Development Tools (still complicated) and Microsoft PowerApps. I was blown away by Powerapps even if it felt a bit under powered compared to its peers.

I figured I could use a teams site to spin up a SharePoint Online (SPO) instance (IT red tape around SharePoint meant a week and two business cases plus five approvals before we got our own SPO instance). Then, I used for SharePoint Online list as a data source after doing some research as it was kinda fast, secure (tenancy settings) and most importantly free and required no additional licences.

I built a prototype in two days along with another colleague and sent it to my manager to have a look at. We ensured mobile friendliness from the start.

One hour later, I got a message in outlook.

“Your big boss wants access to your application”.

I checked with my manager as I was kinda nervous, who said there was no need to worry as the application was quite awesome. I sent a approval email to the big boss who then came back to us asking for the application to be built and assigned us a Project Manager to work with.

In three months, I built the application with the following features:

• 5 different question types based on what the user selected as their site.

• Map visualising the responses in real time

• Task based functionality to log any issues

• Approval workflow where staffs could nominate new users to have access and the application admin could approve and it would start an onboarding process

• Color coded response view with filters

We had an amazing team of 2 who worked on an amazing PowerBI dashboard for execs and meetings.

The application was quite simple, we used basic colors and no fancy animations and we always ensured mobile 📱-first design.

The app was a canvas app of course and did not have any premium licensing because of the SPO list use. We then created an environment for Dev and another for production and then went with deployment. We did 600+ commits and finally the application was ready to be launched.

The week of launch, I was told that each user had to be individually added. I was thinking of active directory groups but that would mean getting additional approvals so we went with a new approach. We would modify the approval process using power automate to bulk insert the users and approve them individually. Once approved, they would get a pdf and a link to the application.

This saved us so much time in user support as I personally onboarded 700 users in a week with only 2 people reaching out for app issues. We had 1000+ users in 2 weeks who were using it 24*7 and were using the application to provide valuable insight to the other team members and the execs.

The launch was a huge success and I felt very proud to have built it. I then realised, I can replicate what I’d done there and kinda make a career out of it.

That's the story folks, will share another story next week.

The week of launch, I was told that each user had to be individually added. I was thinking of active directory groups but that would mean getting additional approvals so we went with a new approach. We would modify the approval process using power automate to bulk insert the users and approve them individually. Once approved, they would get a pdf and a link to the application.

This saved us so much time in user support as I personally onboarded 700 users in a week with only 2 people reaching out for app issues. We had 1000+ users in 2 weeks who were using it 24*7 and were using the application to provide valuable insight to the other team members and the execs.

The launch was a huge success and I felt very proud to have built it. I then realised, I can replicate what I’d done there and kinda make a career out of it.

That's the story folks, will share another story next week.