I’ve been recently working on a small project to support a new business process. Time to market was critical for the customer, to be able to capture emerged businesss oppurtunity. Budget was also tight, to not over-invest before bussiness case is validated.
There was a strong preference from the customer to do the whole data management via Excel to “keep it simple”. Not a surprise preference when you talk to sales people or CEO as in this case 🙂 There was also a need to enrich data with information from 3rd party systems and provide a number of reports.
High level architecture of this small system looks like this:
It was not the goal to avoid coding at all when building the solution, but the goal was to have a low code approach to save time.
The biggest saving was avoiding custom UI development completely, but still having the solution highly interactive from the users’ perspective. Please find below the description of how it was achieved.
Online sign-up form
For online sign-up form https://webflow.com/ was used. This tool allows to create websistes without the need to write any code. The only piece of JavaScript that had to be written was about making an AJAX request to custom API that would pass form data.
“CRM” via OneDrive and Excel
All the accounts were managed via Excel files. One file per parner company. That kind of approach has many benefits out of the box. Let’s mention a few:
- Intuitive and flexible data management via Excel
- Access management and sharing capabilities provided by OneDrive
- Online collaboration and change tracking built-in
Azure Logic Apps – the glue
The core business logic was developed as custom service implemented in .NET Core and C#. This service also had its own database. Data edited in Excel files needed to be synced with the database in various ways:
- changes made via Excel files needed to be reflected in central database
- when data was modified by the business logic (for example status was changed and data generated as a result of the business flow), changes needed to be reflected back in the Excel to have a consistent view
- when a new account was registered in the system, new Excel file to manage it was automatically created in OneDrive
All of that use cases were implemented via Azure Logic Apps. Logic App is composed from a ready to use building blocks. Here’s the example of single execution log of an example Logic App:
In this case, any time an Excel file is modified in OneDrive, a request is made to custom API to uplaod the file for processing the updates. Before the request, an access token is obtained. Processed file is saved for audit, and in case of error an email alert is sent.
Unther the hood Logic App is defined as a JSON file, so its definition can be stored in the code repository and deployed to Azure via ARM.
Power BI to provide data insights
Reporting was the ultimate goal of that project. Business needed to know about the performance of particular sales agents and internal employees for things like commission reporting and follow-up calls.
When comparing to developing a custom reporting solution, Power BI is super easy to create the UI to browse, filter and export data. Once the connection with database is established, data model can be defined to create interesting visualistations with extensive filtering options. All that features available for 9,99$/month/user.
If you know SQL, and relational data modelling, but are new to Power BI, I can recommend this tutorial to get up to the speed with Power BI:
Summary
Thanks to low-code and no-code tools like Azure Logic Apps, Power BI or Webflow, it was possible to deliver end-to-end solution that users were able to interact with, without any custom code to build UI. If that project included also UI and related backend developent to support UI, it would take a few times more to provide similar capabilities. We could imagine simple UI with less effort but it would be not even close to the rich capabilities provided by Power BI and Excel out of the box.
Happy low-coding! 🙂