ExtensionScreen

Introducing BPA Power Extensions on Office 365

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BPA Power Extensions are powerful add-ins to extend capabilities of your existing BPA software on Office 365.

BPA Apps run on SharePoint with Office 365 and natively interface with technologies like Microsoft Teams for instant collaboration, Power Apps for mobile solutions, and Power Automate for process automation. With BPA Power Extensions, organizations will discover the almost unlimited capabilities of Office 365 by using our business applications. We have grouped extensions in 3 groups, by technology:

Instant Collaboration with Teams Apps

Microsoft Teams is used by millions of users for instant collaboration. Teams can be used as “interface” to BPA Apps for accessing or adding data. A new App had been released for searching and sharing business information in BPA Apps while discussing in Teams, without leaving the chat box (view video here: BPA List Search with Teams)

Workflow Templates on Power Automate (Flow)

Microsoft Power Automate, formerly named Flow, is becoming the most powerful process automation tool on the market, bringing a lot of cross-technology automation capabilities and connectors. We have developed prebuilt workflow templates to be plugged in your BPA Apps, like compliance document, nonconformity or audit workflow sets. Process automation brings information to the concerned users on the tools they are working with, productivity is improved and cost is reduced.

Mobile Solutions on Power Apps.

We are working on mobile solutions with Power Apps to give the best user experience and ergonomics for processes like inspection, audit or incident reporting. These mobile apps run on mobile phones and tablets, and can be used by workers on the field or production lines to register incidents or controlling items by taking photos, videos or recording voice.

>> Access the BPA Power Extensions Page

 

CommunityPortal

Building a Community Portal App on Office 365

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Community portal app built with BPA’s no-code app building platform on SharePoint/Office 365.

A community portal is a great way for any organization to centralize communication with their communities of clients, partners, stakeholders, or employees replacing inefficient emails. Portals can be used for different purposes, like help desk/ticketing, customer service, HR or others.

In this example, we have built a community portal app on Office 365 and SharePoint, using BPA’s app building platform. The app is completely configurable and was built in one day with no code!

The community portal app can be used as a standalone solution or can be connected to other BPA apps like CRM or Quality and compliance. At BPA, we are using a community portal since years to better serve our clients, answer tickets rapidly, share tutorials, documentation, FAQ, grant access to software packages and release notes.

With Office 365 and SharePoint, it’s possible to grant a secure guest access to users outside your organization (for example client organizations). External users can access a shared community portal with their Microsoft account or a non-Microsoft personal email with no Office 365 license needed (e.g. using a gmail account). External users will have limited permissions to access the community portal, post requests, view their own requests only, and access shared documentation in read-only.

Once a request is logged, it’s automatically linked with the right client organization and contact person. A discussion can be started between the client organization and the internal support team. Alerts are automatically sent to both parties. Documents or images can be attached to discussions. Internal discussions are not visible to the client organization.

The community portal app is be a perfect match for small and mid-sized organizations running on Office 365. The app will drastically reduce time to answer client requests, improve service efficiency and increase stakeholders satisfaction.

Ask us for an online presentation !

Introducing Contextual Help & Training Add-in for BPA Software

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BPA Solutions entered into a partnership with VisualSP, editor of a walkthrough software for SharePoint and Office 365.

Not only end users will benefit from contextual help to use BPA’s software, they will get online training about quality, risk, GDPR processes and documents to improve quality of the delivered products and services.

Splash screens provide visible instructions to end users, including multimedia content, images or videos. Instructions can point to a specific context or graphics in the user interface, like a navigation link or button. By clicking the help button, users can access contextual help, start a walkthrough tour or view multimedia resources.

In this example, end users who access the compliance document module in BPA Quality can take a walkthrough session by clicking the contextual help button. They will learn about the company document approval process, understand how to search for documents, discover how to accomplish a document training and more.

Example: Contextual help on how to use the compliance document module with BPA Quality.

Once a document is distributed, targeted end users need to get trained about the document content. A different training-oriented walkthrough guides end users to understand the purpose of the document.

Example: Compliance document training walkthrough (HR Procedure).

Once the walkthrough is completed, end users can log training evidence in the BPA Quality software.

These 2 examples demonstrate how the VisualSP add-in brings value to end users, guiding them to use the BPA software and train them about compliance documents and good practices.

The VisualSP add-in is a separate module that can be used jointly with BPA software for quality, risk, GDPR or CRM.

Request for a free trial and discover how BPA Quality and VisualSP work together.

Office 365 App Builder by BPA: Build No-Code Apps in Hours

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What are possible scenarios when developing no-code apps for your most pressing business challenges?


Discover how to build a professional HR recruiting app in 2 days using BPA App Builder.

Most companies still use Excel spreadsheets for storing business data, like incidents, actions, risks, measures, controls, etc. While Excel is very good at advanced calculations and pivot charts, it’s really not suited for effective collaborative work and automated tasks.

Since Access Web Apps have been retired by Microsoft, SharePoint lists is the best way to manage business processes. SharePoint and Office 365 technologies include all tools needed for the modern workspace experience, like emails, calendar, reminders, workflows, mobility, office tools and more. Most of Office 365 plans include SharePoint (Office Essentials starts at 5 USD/user/month).

The BPA App Builder platform includes tools to replace InfoPath, like an intelligent form building solution and tabs to display relational data. BPA App Builder brings unequaled user experience when using SharePoint. It provides intuitive navigation, prefilled data-entry forms, productivity tools, and displays contextual data and documents by topic.

Ask us for a free discovery access today.

Cost Saving

Calculate Your Cost Savings with a Digital Solution

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It’s not easy to deliver engaging, efficient experiences when you’re held back by pen-to-paper-based processes.

A digital solution offers a centralized location where organizations can efficiently store, organize, manage, access, and distribute information.

Cost Saving

For the quality/regulatory department, information typically includes forms (audits, incidents, non-conformances, CAPA, indicators, risks, equipment maintenance, training, etc.) and quality/regulatory documents. By giving collaborators quick and easy access to the information they need anytime and anywhere, digital systems help employees focus more time on their core activities.

What are cost saving opportunities with a digital regulatory compliance solution?

  • Electronic forms enforce collaborators to enter consistent information quickly and easily, reducing errors and manual rework.
  • Automated workflows accelerate the process of creating and distributing forms and documents across devices and platforms.
  • A digital system prevents collaborators to retype data at some point during the process thanks to data relations and automated reporting tools.
  • No paper processing is needed anymore, saving printing, scanning, postage and archiving costs.
  • Users spend a huge amount of time each day searching for information — an average of 37 minutes or 8% of the work day. Digital search tools can reduce search time by up to 50%.

Let’s crunch the numbers to see how much money your organization/department can save with BPA’s solutions.

Build No Code Solutions Loved by Users

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Does your organization hesitate between make or buy decisions for building business solutions? This shouldn’t be the case anymore.

You can never have too much time, money, know-how, or technical resources when building solutions for your most pressing challenges. Unfortunately, those are the components that are most often in short supply.

Many companies are hesitant to build applications for business that only they understand. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need them.

In-house development is rarely your core business. Developing in-house solutions is complex, costly and time-consuming. Hard-coded solutions are not flexible enough to meet continuously changing business processes and become obsolete when developers leave. Understanding business needs is challenging for IT professionals. Mostly, business has no control over IT solutions.

Embrace a No-Code approach to building the solutions with the resources you have today.

With BPA no-code solution builder, business people can create solutions in days, with a great user experience. Give the control back to business people when they need solutions that are quickly available and flexible to evolve with always changing processes. Spend time on business initiatives, not development efforts.

With BPA, you can re-allocate developers to configure, customize and improve solutions instead of starting from scratch and re-inventing the wheel again and again (don’t redevelop the bricks!).

By adopting BPA’s no-code approach you get simplified and streamlined LOB solutions with an efficient user experience. You can focus back on your business and save development cost.

BPA no-code solution builder is built on Office 365, including all the tools needed for scalable, secure and efficient apps to run on any device, anywhere.

BPA Quality and CRM apps are built with solution builder, take a look at our discovery sites.

Build Professional No-Code Solutions With Office 365

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We proudly announce the next coming release of our no-code solution builder for Office 365. In a few weeks, your functional collaborators will be able to build professional business solutions in hours.

Developing with Office 365 is complex, time consuming and expensive. Home-made solutions usually don’t meet user needs on the long term. Developers are not good at designing great UX and user experience is limited.

Build No-Code Office 365

BPA Solution Builder is intended for business users. SharePoint power users can build tailor-made solutions in hours with no development skills needed. It is like playing lego.

The product is non-invasive and behaves like any SharePoint site. It’s easy to create apps, views, columns and relations between apps.

When the lists and libraries structure of your Team Site are ready, build beautiful ergonomics, easy navigation, relational management by simple drag and drop on the page.

The solution remains completely flexible and we guarantee the best user experience.

>> Let us know if you’re interested to know more about BPA Solution Builder for Office 365.

BPA Solution Builder

Business Solutions for any Service & Function

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With BPA Solution Builder, power users can build professional no-code solutions for any service/function in a few hours or days, like contract, asset, human resource, stakeholder, project, meeting or internal control management.

With BPA, you can replace spreadsheets and databases with powerful collaborative solutions and stay aligned with IT strategies to harmonize technologies and reduce costs.

Discover solution examples by function:

 

Risk Details

Fall 2015 Release Brings Fantastic New Features

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Fantastic new features have been developed to match managers needs in the different lines of business like quality, compliance, risk, finance, sales, IT.

As you know SharePoint is not very good at managing recurring events. The way companies work is different than what is proposed with SharePoint. BPA has develop an inline calendar which allows companies to optimally manage recurring events (audits, inspections, tasks, maintenance…) with a user-friendly UI.
Risk Details

 

BPA’s “What’s new” component allows consolidating data from one or many sub sites for a specific period. This is great added value for returning end users or managers to catch important matters at a glance.
BPA Quality 2015

 

The document link component allows viewing parent or child documents related with each document. This is optimal for compliance document management.
Compliance Documents

>> Access our discovery sites now

Mohammeds quote on bpa

SharePoint MVP Explains How BPA Address Developers’ Needs

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“I found BPA website at the beginning by chance, I was searching the web for a complete SharePoint-Based framework, where I can build a business/data-driven solution quickly in a productive way, I tried most of them (I tried 12 vendors’ products)! And honestly I wasn’t impressed or convinced, It felt that these vendor web parts are not tight together perfectly and don’t share the same User experience, BPA web parts gave me the feeling that they are loosely coupled but coherent and works perfectly together and this is what I was looking for, where other vendors provide very useful web parts, but something is missing when it comes to the idea of building a business solution (Data-Driven Apps) like a Lego on top of SharePoint and keeping the user experience persistent and sexy, they miss this attractive and sexy aspect of unified UX”, said Mr. Mohamed Saleh, SharePoint MVP & Independent Consultant.

“I don’t really know how the product management process works internally at BPA, but that’s a great job! The problems that are addressed by the web parts bundle are very common between developers and SharePoint projects, and many of the technical guys don’t even realize or have the ability to describe the problem properly (something that BPA did perfectly)! Especially how the web parts are understanding and dealing with the many-to-many relations model”, said Mr. Mohamed Saleh.

“One of the toughest challenges in building a data-centric line of business application on top of SharePoint is the user experience of many-to-many data relational model, BPA product engineering team tackled this challenge perfectly, all the relational data (where they reside into different custom lists) can be manipulated centrally from a single data entry screen, where the end user can view and edit the main data and all its related data without confusing the end user by navigate between different screens, and this can be achieved by using different BPA web parts (BPA Data Viewer & SharePoint User Interface solves that), and by grouping and categorizing the related data into Tabs in the same screen, and one of the coolest features is the ability to display custom buttons/actions that is related to the data context operations easily, they even took care of the button’s icons in a very sophisticated way using a custom Icon picker that understands the images as a map of Icons”, said Mr. Mohamed Saleh.

“I’ve been there for years, and I was solving these problems by writing a lot of event receivers and nasty custom SharePoint fields code, and it was messy (BPA custom fields and field replication solve that), and then I have to use 3rd party tool to develop custom forms or InfoPath that isn’t sharing the same UX of whole solution (BPA User Interface & Data Viewer/BPA Tabs/BPA SharePoint Forms solve that), then I have to use an open source SP Calendar (BPA Calendar solves that) or a 3rd party one with limitations, then I have to use SharePoint designer workflows to do the document generation/automation (BPA Mail Merge solves that), and when it comes to navigation we usually use JavaScript/JQuery menus and it’s not a pleasant experience at all (BPA Navigation solve that), and when it comes to data importing, we usually do it manually using scripts and copy paste (BPA Import solves that)…, and I have built something similar to BPA Query, but honestly, BPA Query is greater and easier to use than what I already built, something that end users can learn and use easily, I cannot even compare! And I can go on and on regarding other web parts… specially the integration connectors, search, and permissions… and regarding Mobile, I didn’t try the BPA Mobile App yet, but am pretty confident that its perfect considering the quality of other BPA products and the screenshots I saw. When I saw the BPA web parts bundle information over the website first, my first reaction was like THIS IS WHAT I REALLY LOOKING FOR!”, said Mr. Mohamed Saleh.

Mr. Mohamed Saleh
SharePoint MVP & Independent Consultant

Mohammed A. Saleh

Mohammed A. Saleh

SharePoint MVP & Independent Consultant