Microsoft’s Dataverse has landed, throwing confusion and joy into the marketplace in equal measure! In this article we look at what the Microsoft Dataverse is, its growth as the Common Dataservice and what it really means for businesses.
What is the Microsoft Dataverse?
The Microsoft Dataverse is a model of data storage that allows businesses to have a unified platform to hold all their data in one secure database. A lot of the Microsoft tools, such as Microsoft Power Platform and many of the Dynamics packages, are built on the Dataverse, allowing for seamless integration of those systems. More importantly, Dataverse can be connected to by 3rd party applications to allow you to utilise functionality from the apps that you are already using, as well as extending them with artificial intelligence and automation.
What happened to the Common Data Service?
For those familiar with the concept of Common Data Service (I only just did a presentation a week before Dataverse was announced!!!), Dataverse is the new branding, but the idea is the same. In fact, this is not the first time Microsoft tried to rebrand CDS – a few months ago there was another name, but there was a copyright issue and so that disappeared.
Why use Dataverse?
Mirosoft Dataverse allows businesses to finally create a fully integrated database across all of their application, through standard and custom tables. This is a cloud database at a whole new level – and ready for the modern technologies provided by the Power Platform. There are a lot of benefits to this as a business:
Easy to access and stored in the cloud. You don't need to worry about the details of how they're stored.
Easy to secure – your data is stored in the most secure cloud hosting platform in the world – and users can only access data they get permission to see.
Role based security makes data access easy to manage
Access to Dynamics 365 data, making it easy to build automations, specialist apps and integrations.
Rich metadata – Data types and relationships are used directly within Power Apps.
Logic and validation – Define calculated columns, business rules, workflows, and business process flows to ensure data quality and drive business processes.
Access the data in Excel using add-ins. This makes it easy to get access to your data when required.
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