At Microsoft Inspire, we introduced Dataverse.

Dataverse delivers a built-in, low-code data platform for Teams and enables everyone to easily build and deploy apps and intelligent chatbots in Teams with Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.

This follow up post provides additional detail on some of the key capabilities in Dataverse as well as some of the differences between Dataverse and the Common Data Service.

Focus areas for this post include data, application and solution development, environments, integration, and security.

Data

Dataverse supports relational data and includes capabilities to find, filter, and sort that data. It includes support for basic data types, as well as complex data types like images and files. Dataverse also includes a version of the currency data type found in the Common Data Service as well as other popular capabilities such as the ability to do roll up and calculated fields.

In Dataverse, the new editable grid will help you quickly create and populate new tables with your data. The included User table is based on the Common Data Model (CDM) and additional support for Common Data Model (CDM) based tables is coming soon.

The Common Data Service includes a host of additional capabilities over Dataverse, including non-relational data (logs), managed data lake, relevance search, and offline data for mobile. It includes support for advanced data types and robust support for the Common Data Model (CDM) today.

Activities and Activity Feed tables are included in the Common Data Service only and were not included in Dataverse as similar concepts were already present in Teams.

Note – At the time of this writing, tables for AI Builder are not currently included in Dataverse. Customers can use or upgrade to the Common Data Service to take advantage of these capabilities.

Application and Solution Development

In Teams, people collaborate around documents in different ways – some you create yourself, some you create in collaboration with teammates, or others you acquire from trusted sources.

Power Platform and Dataverse bring this same model to building and using apps, chatbots, flows, and data. Dataverse includes a solution that is used for developing low code and no code applications directly within Microsoft Teams.

In addition to building your own applications and solutions, you can discover solutions and templates from trusted sources in a gallery, easily install them, and optionally customize them for your organization.  In the future, Dataverse will also support classic import and export of solutions.

With data visualization being a core piece of many solutions, it was important to support graphs and charts in applications. The Common Data Service extends these capabilities even further with support for paginated reports.

In Dataverse, Power Automate is used for the creation of workflows.  It does not include support for business rules or classic workflows found in the Common Data Service.

Dataverse is focused on low code/no code development.  Certain capabilities such as developer API access and plug in support will not be available at launch, but can be found in the Common Data Service.

The Common Data Service and Power Apps currently support model driven apps today and these will be coming to Dataverse later this year.

In addition to use within Teams, the Common Data Service can also be natively accessed in Microsoft Excel, synced with Microsoft Outlook, and power applications written for mobile, web, and desktop.

Environments

In Dataverse and the Common Data Service, data is stored within an environment. Dataverse creates a single environment for each Microsoft Team where you create data, apps, chatbots, and workflows. That environment supports backups, point-in-time-restore, and disaster recovery.  In Dataverse, capacity includes relational, image, and file data. The 2gb capacity provided to a team can typically store up to 1 million rows of data.

To make management easier, the lifecycle of the Dataverse environment is connected to that of the associated Microsoft Team. For example, when a team is deleted, its associated environment is also deleted.

While Dataverse focuses on one environment per Team, the Common Data Service supports both unlimited environments as well as additional capabilities relevant when there are multiple environments, e.g. copy and reset.

Note – for organizations using both Dataverse and the Common Data Service, capacity is managed differently between the two.

Security

As collaboration in Teams happens with people inside and outside of an organization, the security model needed to support this is easy to use.  In Dataverse, access is pre-configured with a security role based on their membership type (Owners, Members, and Guests)

Both Dataverse and the Common Data Service include support for activity logging, e.g. who created a record, while the Common Data Service provides additional capabilities for auditing.

As the Common Data Service is not specific to the Teams environment, it delivers more options for admin and user roles. It also includes a number of additional security capabilities such as customer managed keys, field level security, hierarchical security, sharing, and support for legacy authentication.

Note – Because Dataverse’s environment is specific to a team, it only contains one business unit.

Integration

Enterprise applications often need to integrate with popular SaaS, services, internal systems and data. Dataverse and the Common Data Service both have powerful integration capabilities.

With Dataverse, integration is delivered primarily via connectors.  Support for both standard connectors and the ability to use the Common Data Service connector to connect to a Dataverse for Teams environment are included. Users with Premium licenses have access to the full set of over 350 standard and premium connectors available. This provides the ability to bring data into or retrieve data from tables in Dataverse, execute workflows when data in those tables change, and also use data from tables in workflow logic.

The Common Data Service can also utilize connectors. In addition, it also includes additional built in integration capabilities that can export data to a data lake or publish events to event hub, service bus, or via webhooks. It also has TDS support which provides integration with SQL Server

The Common Data Service can also be used with Server-Side Sync to synchronize with Exchange or Pop3 Servers, and also with Data Export Service which synchronizes data to Microsoft Azure SQL DB.

Note – As referenced earlier in application and solution development section, at launch Dataverse is focused on low code and no code developers and API access is not provided to developers.  If integration via API is required, the Common Data Service should be used.

Summary

This document showcased some of the key capabilities in Dataverse as well as differences between Dataverse and the Common Data Service.

Dataverse is available as part of your Teams license, supports up to 1,000,000 rows and delivers a robust set of capabilities for rapidly building no code and low code applications within Teams.  You can build solutions with confidence knowing that you can easily upgrade for additional capacity or the advanced capabilities in the Common Data Service.

Thanks for you all of your interest in Dataverse and the Common Data Service, we’re eager to see the solutions you’ll build with them.

Note: This post was updated on August 11. A name will be selected which we will share in the coming weeks.

Marc Mercuri

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