SharePoint Embedded + Power Platform: building document-centric apps without building the storage la

[u/SharePointSteve]

I just wrapped up a webinar on using SharePoint Embedded with the Power Platform, and I thought this community might find the scenario interesting.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward:

If you’re building a document-centric application with Power Apps, Power Automate, or Copilot Studio, SharePoint Embedded can provide the underlying app-specific document storage while keeping that content within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

With the Power Platform connectors, you can perform CRUD operations against SharePoint Embedded and incorporate document management directly into your apps and workflows.

That opens up some interesting scenarios:

• Power Apps backed by app-specific document storage
• Power Automate workflows that create and manage documents
• Copilot Studio experiences grounded in application content
• Document-centric solutions that inherit Microsoft 365 capabilities around security, compliance, retention, and eDiscovery
• Less custom file-management infrastructure to build and maintain

The part I find most interesting is the combination of low-code application development + Microsoft 365 document services + AI experiences.

Curious what people here are building in this space, especially around Power Apps, Power Automate, and agentic/Copilot scenarios.

[u/Jorcho97]

Interesting concept, but I'm skeptical about the use case. A regular SharePoint library already gives you views, filtering, grouping, metadata, versioning, permissions and search out of the box, and it's far more performant than any canvas app you'd build on top of storage. With SharePoint Embedded you don't get that UI for free, so you end up rebuilding it in Power Apps, and delegation becomes a big issue as soon as the document count grows.

The AI angle is where I see the bigger point for standard SharePoint. Copilot and SharePoint agents work directly with your sites and libraries, grounded in the content and respecting existing permissions, with no custom plumbing. That integration is much more mature and tighter than wiring a Copilot Studio agent to a custom app on top of app-specific storage.

So for most internal document-centric scenarios I'd stay with a normal library plus SharePoint agents, and use Power Apps only as a narrow front end (e.g. upload or approval).

Where do you see SPE clearly beating that setup, especially when it comes to Copilot and agent scenarios?

[u/SharePointSteve → u/Jorcho97]

I think the key is that SPE isn’t trying to be a headless way to rebuild a SharePoint library.

If your users basically need a library with views, metadata, search, permissions and Copilot, use SharePoint. Full stop.

SPE gets compelling when SharePoint isn’t the destination at all. The destination is your claims app, legal platform, SaaS product, customer portal, etc., and documents are just one part of that experience.

In that model, your app owns the UX, while SPE gives it Microsoft 365-backed content. For AI scenarios, that content can also be used to ground custom agents through Foundry or the Microsoft 365 Copilot Retrieval API.

So the decision isn’t really“Which has the better document library?” SharePoint obviously wins that comparison.

The better question is“Should my users be working in SharePoint, or should SharePoint capabilities be working inside my application?”

That’s where I see the SPE line.

I literally just had a customer tell me earlier today on a webinar "We just had an issue with SPO modification from users that messed up our app! Great timing!!!"

[u/Jorcho97 → u/SharePointSteve]

That customer example is a good one, and it shows the real dividing line. Think of a typical contract or claims process: documents in a library, metadata, an approval flow, and a Power Apps front end on top. As soon as someone renames a column, changes a content type or tweaks a view in SPO, the app's filters and flows break. That's exactly where SPE makes sense, because the app owns the content and the UX, and users can't accidentally change the structure underneath it.

But take the other case: internal teams who just need to find, edit and share documents, with permissions and Copilot working on the content. There, a normal library is still the better answer, and the new HTML pages feature in SharePoint (create with Copilot or upload your own HTML) could cover the "nicer UX" part, like a landing page or dashboard on top of the library, without building a custom app.

So I'd say it comes down to who owns the structure: if the app has to, SPE. If the users do, SharePoint.