Two business problems,
solved end to end.
A working sales CRM and a construction-site quality-assurance app — designed, built, styled and automated for Nordstern Projektmanagement GmbH on the tools they already own. Both apps are live and interactive on this page.
What Nordstern needed
A CRM without a CRM
Manage customers, contacts, opportunities and follow-up activities — without buying a dedicated CRM system, and without a big budget.
- One shared source of truth for the whole team
- Nothing slips through the cracks — automatic reminders
- Works on desktop, on mobile and inside Teams
Quality assurance on site
A mobile app for site inspections: capture photos of elements, flag whether a defect is present, add remarks — then produce a predefined, structured report.
- Fast capture that works in a gloved hand
- Photo · defect Yes/No · comment per element
- A professional report, generated automatically
Design decisions — and why
Every tool in this build was chosen deliberately. The guiding principle: solve the business problem with what Nordstern already pays for, and keep a clean upgrade path open.
SharePoint Lists, not Dataverse
Both assignments fit comfortably in SharePoint Lists: they are included in Nordstern's Microsoft 365 licences (€0 extra), the data volumes of a project-management firm stay well inside their limits, and every admin already knows them.
- Lookup columns give real relationships
- Versioning & recycle bin built in
- Honest trade-off: at enterprise scale, Dataverse adds row-level security and richer modelling — the design migrates cleanly when that day comes
Power Apps canvas apps
Canvas apps give pixel-level control, so both apps look like products — not like forms. All logic is Power Fx: readable, low-code formulas the team can maintain themselves.
- Tablet layout for the CRM, phone layout for site QA
- Full add / edit / delete on every entity
- Embeds directly as a Teams tab
Power Automate flows
Reminders and reports are things people forget — so they don't stay with people. Scheduled and on-demand flows run in the tenant, next to the data, on standard connectors.
- Daily reminder flow — built & tested
- On-demand PDF report flow — free connectors only
- No premium licence required for any of it
A sales CRM, assembled from Microsoft 365 Live app
Four linked SharePoint lists behind a Power Apps canvas app — a dashboard, a colour-coded pipeline, an activity tracker and a full customer profile, all on data the team owns.
Switch views in the sidebar · click a customer to open its full profile · advance a deal's stage · tick an activity done — the KPIs recalculate live.
Four lists, properly related
Not four flat tables — a small relational model built with SharePoint lookup, choice, person, currency and date columns. Change a customer once, and every contact, deal and activity follows.
Six screens, one workflow
Dashboard
KPI cards — customers, open deals, pipeline value, activities due today — plus recent opportunities and upcoming follow-ups. The morning briefing on one screen.
Customers
Every account with city, industry, owner and a colour-coded status pill, under proper column headers. One tap opens the full profile.
Customer profile 360° view
The account's home: key facts, every contact with email and phone, all opportunities with stage and value, and the activity history — filtered live by lookup.
Opportunities
The pipeline, colour-coded by stage from Lead to Won, with values in proper German currency format and totals that recalculate as deals move.
Activities
Follow-ups by due date with overdue highlighting — the answer to "what do I owe whom today?" Every item links back to its customer and deal.
Edit forms
Create, update and delete for every entity through Power Apps forms — validation, choice dropdowns and people pickers included. No list-fiddling in SharePoint needed.
What runs by itself Built & tested
Follow-up reminders
Every morning at 08:00, Power Automate reads the Activities list, picks every open item due today or overdue, and emails the assigned owner. Nothing slips.
Tested — reminder emails delivered ✓
The alerting layer
The same pattern extends without new licences:
- Won-deal alert — a deal moves to Won → instant notification to the manager
- New-customer welcome task — auto-create a first follow-up activity
- Stale-deal watch — proposal untouched for 14 days → nudge the owner
- Weekly digest — Monday pipeline summary to the team
The full architecture — presentation, data, automation and reporting layers, end to end.
A field inspection app for the site Live app
Phone-first capture — a photo, a defect flag and a comment per element — feeding a structured report. Add an inspection below and watch the dashboard update.
Tabs at the bottom · filter by status · tap "+ New" to log an inspection — it saves to the list and the stats.
From site to structured report
HTML → PDF Free connectors
The flow renders a styled HTML report — project details, defect summary with counts, one block per element — then converts it to PDF via OneDrive and emails it. Runs on any Microsoft 365 tenant, no premium licence.
Word template Photos embedded
A delivered Word template with content controls and a repeating section — one block per inspected element, including the captured photo in a picture control. The "Populate a Word template" action fills it and converts to PDF. Same flow, richer output.
Both report formats are in the deliverables: a 12-finding Word report template and an interactive HTML report generated from the same live data.
Capture is entered once and flows straight into the report — no re-typing, no lost photos.
Governed, secure, ready to scale
Who sees what
- Everything stays inside the Nordstern tenant — no third-party services touch the data
- SharePoint permissions govern the lists; the apps are shared per security group
- Sign-in is the existing Microsoft 365 account — MFA and conditional access apply automatically
Nothing gets lost
- Version history on every list — every change traceable to a person and a time
- Recycle bin & retention policies cover accidental deletes
- Photos and reports live in SharePoint document storage with the same protection
Grows with Nordstern
- More projects = more list items — no redesign needed
- Delegation-aware Power Fx keeps the apps fast as data grows
- When volume or security demands it: migrate lists to Dataverse — the apps and flows carry over
What was delivered
Everything above exists as a file or a running app — not a concept. The two apps you used on this page mirror the real Power Apps builds running against live SharePoint data.
The first 90 days, if Nordstern says yes
Ready to build
the real thing.
Two solutions, designed and automated on the Microsoft Power Platform — and built to grow with Nordstern Projektmanagement GmbH.