Forum Discussion
Publishing a SaaS offer for PowerApps a canvas app in AppSource
Hello,
We have been trying for many months now to publish our PowerApps canvas apps as a SaaS offer, thereby allowing us to have transactable, licensed customers.
Through a lot of effort, we managed to get some support where we were told quite vaguely how to achieve this, but without any meaningful guidance we are struggling as we are a small ISV with expertise in our actual business, and Power Platform. We are not, however, experts in SQL (that's being generous) or in creating APIs which seem to be a requirement to keep track of user licenses and feeding the data to our canvas app.
If anyone here has any info on this, or how they might have achieved it themselves it would be massively appreciated, as we can't seem to get there by ourselves and MS support is very difficult to find.
It does feel as though the app development part is so much simpler than getting it onto the marketplace, which is surely the wrong way round.
Thank you,
Craig
13 Replies
Good Morning Craig, we are in a similar boat and was wondering if you have had any success or any learnings.
We think we've determined how to do the licensing, but ends up being a complicated user experience and requires a DLP policy update.
My biggest issue is on people being able to see our code... we've published a canvas app (in a managed solution) to app source and when downloading via app source into another tenant, I can see everything in the app when going through apps instead of solutions within power apps.
Any idea how to lock this one down? This seems like a major glitch.
- hi Craig,
We have successfuly published 2 SaaS offers.
I don’t think the fact that your product is built on Power Platform should be an issue. SaaS offers are primarily focused on the subscription process, regardless of the underlying platform.
However, you will still need to create APIs to meet the SaaS API Fulfillment requirements. Have you reviewed these resources?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/marketplace-offers/partner-center-portal/pc-saas-fulfillment-apis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_G4pOy0Sdo - justinroyal
Microsoft
Hi C_Carri -
Thanks for your input here. A few questions and comments for you:
Will this app require publishing some binary or the customer deploying some code? If yes, then this likely is not an option for SaaS.
Powerapps is already a natively supported offer type in Appsource:
- Hi Justin,
Thanks for your response.
I don't entirely understand your question but no, I don't think the app requires a customer to deploy any code.
The problem with the natively supported offer type in AppSource is that it only covers model-driven apps, not canvas apps.
We have a managed solution containing several canvas apps, power bi datasets, and dataverse tables. What we are trying to achieve is to have a transactable offer on the marketplace in which we can utilise licensing and also be eligible for Microsoft's co-selling.
What we are told in our technical session was that in order to do this, we needed to create a SaaS offer which is separate from our Dynamics 365 on Dataverse and PowerApps offer, and then utilise APIs to pass the licensing information across to the canvas app in order to regulate whether or not a customer has the required license to use the app.
I have spent the last month working my way through the mountains of documentation we were sent by that consultant, but now that I have hit a brick wall with almost no understanding of what I'm actually doing, I cannot get a response from the consultant, nor from our ISV engagement manager, nor can I find support anywhere else.
Now, if there is another / better way of getting a transactable offer online then I am happy to put my hours of work behind me and go for what is doable. My problem is that I can't find anything or anyone who knows about what we were advised to do. Can you please help point me in the right direction?- justinroyal
C_Carri have you tried to package your application in a package as described here? Set up Dynamics 365 apps on Dataverse and Power Apps offer technical configuration on Microsoft AppSource - Marketplace publisher | Microsoft Learn
- anyone from the MIcrosoft side able to help here? It is really frustrating to get no response from our ISV manager, Partner support, or anywhere...
