Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO & Chairman, during his recent Microsoft Ignite 2022 keynote speech, mentioned that it is now time for organizations to move beyond digital resilience and build their “digital perseverance” capabilities. By doing so, organizations will be better equipped to meet the evolving requirements of the time. It is evident that being nimble and agile is the modus operandi for businesses today as they must react to market changes and fulfill new workplace expectations. Progress towards this vision is often thwarted due to the limited technical infrastructure, resources, and time required to build solutions from scratch.
For organizations leveraging SharePoint (on-premises or cloud), this progression towards “digital perseverance” and modernization of operations is often impeded by their traditional development approaches. Applications are a big part of SharePoint’s appeal. However, even today, many organizations rely on the traditional coding approach to create new applications and customizations on SharePoint. This is a complicated process consuming much time, effort, and money and requiring multiple rounds of iteration. No-code application development solutions deliver a mechanism for organizations to build apps and automate processes on SharePoint on-premises and online without any coding.
Organizations that utilize modern web apps can empower business users to build applications and simplify their work. It can enable organizations to maximize their SharePoint investment and deliver a modern workplace experience to employees. Moreover, businesses adopting the No-code approach to SharePoint custom app development can promptly stay ahead of the curve by addressing their business requirements. Even though the No-code SharePoint development trend, utilizing Web Apps, has existed for some time now, many organizations are still hesitant. So, we thought of helping our readers understand the value of web apps and some of their most discernable benefits.
What Is a Web App?
Custom web apps are small, easy-to-use, stand-alone business apps that empower organizations to perform tasks or address specific business requirements beyond the capabilities of their existing application. Users can integrate these apps with their existing business application to customize it or to interact with the database to retrieve and display information whenever required.
Benefits of Custom Web Apps for SharePoint for Modern Business
As the demand for SharePoint-based business applications is constantly growing, the pressure on SharePoint developers and IT departments is increasing. To mitigate these challenges, businesses across industries have started embracing custom web apps and unlocking the benefits below.
- Round-the-Clock Accessibility: Today’s workforce demands flexibility – to work anytime from any corner of the world – and seamless access to real-time data to operate efficiently and perform crucial actions. Custom web apps make that possible through their 24X7 accessibility. Leveraging web apps, users can quickly access business-critical data from SharePoint sites and site collections, glean insights, and take necessary actions anytime.
- Increased Efficiency: Traditional business processes, such as managing and accessing data manually through spreadsheets or documents, are exhaustive, error-prone, and ineffective. They impede scale, waste precious man-hours, and create inefficiencies that derail performance and profitability. Web apps help significantly increase process efficiency and business performance as they allow the automation of repetitive yet business-critical processes and avoid plenty of human errors. Additionally, by leveraging web apps, organizations can manage their data at a centralized location, retrieve it quickly, and visualize it in the form of tables, charts, and graphs whenever required for better visibility across different business segments.
- Easy-to-Customize: Adopting off-the-shelf software can be tricky for organizations as they are complicated to use. Custom web apps, as the name suggests, are easily customizable according to the business requirements. Custom web apps are code-free, meaning no complex coding is required to customize the applications. Business users or citizen developers can quickly build or customize complex business applications up to 80% faster using simple point-and-click configuration instead of custom coding.
- Short Learning Curve: Generally, software or application development requires complex coding. As custom web apps are a No-code solution, users (even non-technical) can build business applications much faster without long hours of complex coding.
- Easy Integration: Custom web apps bring data together from all your LOB applications that are ODBC compliant. It can connect to multiple external sources like SQL Server, Oracle, Web Services, etc., without manually copying the data. Therefore, organizations can quickly adapt and implement custom web apps with their existing legacy applications and IT infrastructure to maximize ROI.
- Quick Installation: Custom SharePoint web apps are installed on one of the web front-end servers. It does not have to be installed on all the servers in the SharePoint farm.
Maximize Your Technology Investments with QuickApps
Leveraging SharePoint solely as document management and an Intranet platform is not enough to optimize your SharePoint investment. QuickApps, as a No-code solution, enables organizations to swiftly develop use case-specific web applications in SharePoint that can help organizations gain a competitive advantage.
Download the 30 days free trial to see the innovative solution in action. You can also download the Trial version from Microsoft Appsource.