Power Pizza: Party Time!

We are in the middle of a Power Pizza Blog Series! I am walking through lessons learned while building a Power App to track your Pizza Crawls. This will allow your friends to submit their locations, enter ratings and view the winner. Finally, a scientific solution for finding the best pizza!

It’s Power Pizza Party Time! Here are the step-by-step instructions to throw your own Pizza Crawl. Most importantly, you should use #PowerPizza and tweet about it!

TL;DR – Here is the Pizza Party Solution 🍕

The Important Bits (or Bites or Bytes)

Most importantly you need to find some friends who like to eat! Also pick a date when you can all dedicate an afternoon to enjoying some cheesy carbs.

Before the Party

Let’s set up your Power Pizza app:

1. Create a new Power Apps Trial or add an environment to your tenant that is dedicated to PIZZA!
2. Prior to doing the import you will have to create a database. From the Solutions area, it will tell you that you do not have a database and give you the option to create a new environment. You can create the database as part of this.
3. Import the Pizza Party solution which contains the Model Driven App, Canvas App, and associated items.
4. After Publishing the Customization, check each Flow to ensure it is enabled. You can do this by editing each Flow (which will also make sure that the connections are configured)
5. Use the Pizza Party Organization Model Driven App to set up the Pizza Party record. All you need for this is a title and date.
6. Create your friends as users from the admin center. While creating the users you can specify an existing email to send the username and password to so they know how to login.
7. Share the app with these new users. When you do this, it will ask what role these users should have and you can assign them the Pizza Party Participant role. (You can see that I had not yet realized I had too many Pizza Party labels at this point in the build.)

Now your friends can download the Power Apps mobile app, log in and create their locations. Once those have been submitted you can plan the optimal route for pizza eating!

A potential future enhancement would be to have friends enter the full address of the location and then use Bing Maps or Power BI to plot this and help with route planning. That is a task for another day.

Then wait patiently until Power Pizza Party Time!

At the Party

During your pizza crawl you will want to do the following at each location:

1. Eat a lot of Pizza! On our Pizza Crawl we each selected one location. Then at each location the person who picked it was in charge of pizza ordering and paying. So we got to try a variety of different toppings. Some may find this to be against the scientific method but I see it as reasonable variability that’s not damaging to the goal.
2. Take pictures for your reviews and tweet with #PowerPizza.
3. Rate each pizza place based on the 5 categories: Overall, Taste, Toppings, Crust, and Joy. These 5 scores will also be summed for a Total Score.

Choose a Winner

When all the slices have been devoured, find out which place scored the highest and you have a winner! Crown them as the Best Pizza in Town!

Now it’s time for dessert – Ice Cream Crawl anyone?

Thank You!

Thank you everyone for following along on my #PowerPizza series! Hopefully you learned a few tips along the way. I know I learned a lot!

Big shout out to Todd Mercer for helping me test the app and clean it up for you fine folks. Thank you!

What have you learned along the way? What enhancements will you add for your pizza crawl?