News Blog /

What is Microsoft Dataverse?

by Spanish Point - Jan 4, 2021
What is Microsoft Dataverse?

Common Data Service, the sophisticated and secure backbone that powers Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, has been renamed to Microsoft Dataverse. This low-code data platform is rapidly changing the way organisations around the world build apps and innovate business processes. A fresh name is just one part of a broader effort to introduce the power of what Dataverse can do to individuals and organisations around the world.

Dataverse lets you securely store and manage data that are used by business applications. Data within Dataverse is stored within a set of tables. Dataverse includes a base set of standard tables that cover typical scenarios, but you can also create custom tables specific to your organisation and populate them with data by using Power Query. App makers can then use Power Apps to build rich applications that use this data.

Dataverse

Why use Dataverse?

Data is at the centre of everything a business does today and powers the insights that can drive what it should do tomorrow. To thrive and grow, businesses need to capture, analyse, predict, present, and report data and do it all with a high level of agility.

Building out the data infrastructure to enable business insight can be both time consuming and expensive. The data originates from a variety of devices, applications, systems, services, and software as a service (SaaS). This large and growing number of sources often consists of multiple data technologies that store different types of data, expose different APIs, and use a mixture of security models. The developers needed to create these technologies can be expensive and hard to find. Developers often must have a deep understanding of how to deploy, configure, manage, and integrate these different data technologies.

Dataverse addresses these concerns with an easy to use, easy to manage, compliant, secure, scalable, and globally available SaaS data service. Dataverse empowers organisations to work with any type of data and any type of app, and use the data within it to gain insights and drive business action.

As part of Microsoft Power Platform, Dataverse requires no or little code to be written, so it can easily be used by everyone from knowledge workers to professional developers. Knowing that it’s built on Azure, organisations choosing Dataverse can be confident that it’s globally available, compliant, scalable, and secure.

Icon

Whether you’re evaluating business needs, looking for packaged industry solutions, or need help getting started with PowerApps, Spanish Point will guide you every step of the way.

Want to Get Started?

Work with any type of data

Dataverse is designed to work with any type of data and incorporates all the major categories of data technologies that your organisation needs—relational, non-relational, file, image, search, and data lake. Dataverse includes a set of visual designers to create, edit, and interact with data. This makes it easy to quickly define the tables, relationships, business rules, forms, and workflows that represent your business.

With the easy-to-configure integration features built into Dataverse, deep integration with Microsoft’s cloud services such as Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365—plus access to many connectors in Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps—Dataverse can connect to the devices, apps, systems, services, and popular SaaS offerings that contain the data for your business.

As a result, a wide range of enterprise integration scenarios—from retrieving data sent in a spreadsheet as an email attachment to emerging scenarios like using Dataverse data in a blockchain network—can be achieved with ease and with little to no code required. Integration efforts that previously were measured in days and weeks can now often be measured in hours and minutes.

Work with any type of app

When an organisation wants to create a new app, it can realize additional productivity gains by using Dataverse with Power Apps. Power Apps understands the rich metadata included in Dataverse and uses it in multiple ways to help you rapidly build great-looking apps that are secure and scalable, and make them available across desktop, web, mobile, and Microsoft Teams.

For organisations that want to integrate Dataverse data into existing apps or write new apps by using custom code, Dataverse provides a powerful REST-based API, a developer SDK, and a growing list of samples for common scenarios. You can also use Dataverse in bot-based apps that deliver intuitive, interactive dialogues with employees, partners, and customers. Whether they’re embedded within Power Apps or custom code, bots can be built quickly by using Power Virtual Agents and powered by Dataverse data.

The goal of Dataverse working with any app means it should also work with the tools that knowledge workers and professional developers use. To help them be even more productive, Dataverse is integrated into popular tools such as Excel, Outlook, Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps, Power BI Desktop, Power Query, Azure Data Factory, Data Export Service, and SQL Server Management Studio.


Event Powerapps

Get started with a Power Apps training.