I have prepared it for a workshop and thought to share the notes as a blog post.
Microsoft Dataverse is a low-code platform for building and managing custom business applications and integrations in the cloud. Here are some of the key technical reasons why a company might consider using Microsoft Dataverse:
- Data Modeling: Provides a powerful data modelling framework, allowing companies to define and manage their data entities, relationships, and business rules in a centralized and standardized manner. This can help improve data quality, consistency, and compliance across different systems and processes.
- Customization: Microsoft Dataverse provides a low-code platform for customizing and extending the capabilities of business applications. This includes support for custom entities, fields, forms, views, and business logic, allowing companies to tailor their solutions to meet their specific requirements.
- Integration: Microsoft Dataverse integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products and services, such as Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, as well as third-party systems and APIs through connectors and webhooks. This allows companies to create integrated solutions for their business processes and access data from various sources.
- Scalability: Microsoft Dataverse is a cloud-based solution built on Azure, one of the world’s largest and most robust cloud infrastructures. This allows it to scale dynamically to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes, providing a cost-effective solution for businesses that need to store, manage, and access large amounts of data.
- Security: Microsoft Dataverse provides robust security features, including data encryption, role-based access control, and auditing, to help protect sensitive business data. This can help companies meet regulatory and compliance requirements and improve the overall security of their data and systems.
- Development Environment: Microsoft Dataverse provides a development environment that supports low-code and code-based development. This includes a visual editor for building and customizing solutions and a rich set of APIs and SDKs for building custom integrations and extensions.
To explain it in a much simpler way, In today’s business world, Data is everything. It is vital for business to have their data where they can easily access it. The business has different applications to handle different business processes. But each of these systems needs to communicate with each other to pass information. And in some cases, multiple applications might also use the same data set. You might have an application to handle customer orders or one to handle customer inquiries. Both applications need to access customer data.
In the old days, most applications had their database and then did manual synchronization. With that approach, Developers need to create custom APIs or other methods to import and export data from the storage. Each of these applications sometimes has its data model, so the developer will need to understand the data modal in the system if he/she wants to change the integration.
With Dataverse, these issues are resolved. Since Dataverse can be used as centralized data storage, multiple applications can share the same dataset without issues.
Plus, to make things much easier, it already has had out of box schema for entities that businesses need regularly. Still, if a developer is required to add new fields to an existing table or create a new one, that is also possible, making it flexible and extendable.
Since the data is in one place, it is easy to run reports, and dashboards, export data into multiple analytical tools and set security models.
In conclusion, Microsoft Dataverse provides a flexible and scalable platform for building and managing custom business applications and integrations in the cloud. Its powerful data modelling framework, low-code customization capabilities, and integration with other Microsoft products and services can help companies improve their data management, streamline their business processes, and support better decision-making.
Thank you and Regards,
Tharanga Chandrasekara