Power Platform | Hidden treasures of Dataverse

If you haven´t been able to catch-up with March edition of Power Platform Virtual Happy Hour, you´ve missed a lovely discussion ongoing with April Dunnam and Paul Murana around Dataverse. Being challenged by both hosts Alison Mulligan and Carl Cookson it was a debate of Dataverse being used when starting with Power Platform or if other data sources like Excel or SharePoint shouldn´t be considered an easier start for „customers“.
Paul mentioned being in the MVP community and communication channels, this Dataverse debates obviously being around due to Dynamics 365, but him having customers not using any of those solutions, in fact looking for integration scenarios with ERP legacy software and pushing or pulling data to Power Platform instead.

When challenged by Chris Huntingford around Dataverse hidden treasures around Governance and Security capabilities pop-up in customer conversations, Paul made a fair statement:

I haven´t had that conversation, because I don´t have customers capable of asking around those…

Paul M. – Power Platform Virtual Happy Hour, March 2022 edition

Chris adding to this depending on his observations in customer talks:

From a strategic perspective of where Microsoft is going with this product, regardless of being lovers of SharePoint, Excel, SQL or any other databases, more in general consensus of people just don´t know what they don´t know and there´s limited blogs talking about it, shouldn´t we start talking about those values?

Chris H. – Power Platform Virtual Happy Hour, March 2022 edition

my motivation for today´s article was born, start talking about the hidden treasures of Dataverse. Many times Dataverse is mentioned in Power Platform conversations, you´ll recognize this being mapped to the data services only (think database) – so immediately being mapped to those capabilities surrounding an app creation process.

To help broaden the conversation and step away from just data services, Dataverse being known for, above visual provides a first overview of hidden treasures, Dataverse also should be known for. As categories makes searching and filtering content a lot easier, those can be found in bold font before each item. As still categories don´t ensure finding content easily, when being used for a search, I am going to highlight those with useful links that I am using in my daily conversation.

1. Environment Lifecycle

What may or may not sound familiar should be part of every company´s strategy. Customers building either canvas or model-driven applications or portals may want to profit from performance improvements shipped. Those (at least two times a year) may got extensions that are commonly known for Release waves. How you want to handle deploying those and informing your users around this, is part of your general environment strategy. Another feature set that mission critical applications being hosted in environments can´t miss from an IT strategy perspective are the Backup, Copy or Point-in-time Restore and Disaster Recovery features. A good way of familiarizing with this, is starting here within public documentation.

In my next episode, I am going to continue on additional categories and this way provide you the chance of even familiarizing yourself with the Power Virtual Happy Hour episode. Until then,…