Power Platform | The Controversy on Dataverse

Not sure, if you´ve seen the Power CAT team recently publishing another video around easily moving from SharePoint to Dataverse, a discussion between Phil Topness and Sultan AlSharfi, Customer Success Manager – which kind of backfires the controversy ongoing around Dataverse.

I thought, why not sharing some insights from recent discussions with customers. Customers, typically coming from Microsoft 365 licensing and stepping into the world of low-code. Due to their licensing, many of them crawl and learn running by using data sources like Excel, SharePoint Lists or Dataverse for Teams.

Last one which often times after MVP/PoCs led to a broader discussion of keep using it and being assigned to the Teams channel hosting the app or upgrading to the „big brother“ which of course would cause investing into Power Platform individual licensing.

Due to Creators or Business Technologists mentality – and most of the times in addition their knowledge about hosting and storing data – them not fully being aware of their options. Is it that Business Technologists wouldn´t care? Of course not, they care about their personal data IRL, so why shouldn´t they take care of business data at almost the same level? I´ve often times seen people making assumptions around Creators being „lazy“ on data. If you´re not forcing them to follow XYZ, then you could expect data breaches, leaks and so on.

Assumptions. Talking to Business Technologists and Code-first developers I – so far – did not found a person, not treating data respectfully. Instead they where so much in need of data, that they wished it would become much easier to respectfully treat and work with data, and avoid trapping into pitfalls around treatment of data.

No surprise, in many of my customer conversations, we talked about having or building Collaborative Apps. A category of app type, which outlines the need of data being available to everyone, everywhere. Being combined with business data mainly available in business applications layer, but those being siloed or not easily accessible for everyone. And of course, let´s not forget the action layer to this. Based on insights won from data, taking care of actions after making decisions.

I´ve asked code-first developers why for instance they prefer services like Azure SQL managed instances for hosting their data. They came up with a couple of reasons. I´ve continued asking them why they wouldn´t extend this to Dataverse. Them looking surprised at me, when I teached about Dataverse using Azure SQL Elastic Pools, Azure Cosmos DB, Indexing Service and many more. The obvious question was them asking:

So is Dataverse an Azure service?

Question raised by a Code-first developer

Well, Dataverse is a combo of multiple Azure services being exposed through an API layer to make it easy to request data from it, but also to allow it for being managed via the API layer.

As a reader of my blog, you wouldn´t be surprised me upcoming with above visual that unpeels the Dataverse service from a technical stack.

Wrapping-up today´s article and turning back to the first visual provided that outlines a summary of reasons I collected during customer conversations drilling deeper into this service offer and exploring capabilities and features. Guess, if you haven´t yet explored them it´s your turn now. Until then,…