Safely hyperscale low-code apps with ease using Microsoft Dataverse

Data is synonymous with work in the modern day. For developers it’s the foundation of any app, website, bot, or more that they build. For organizations, data is critical to make decisions that reflect the needs of their clients and grow their business. To build the most efficient and impactful technical solutions and make the soundest business decisions, developers and knowledge workers alike require clean data.

Low-code is a key component in saving developers time and capital to help them build business-critical applications that drive efficiency for themselves and their organization. For organizations to maximize low-code, having clean, secure, and accurate data is imperative.

At Microsoft Build 2023, Microsoft Dataverse has further enabled organizations to rapidly build data-driven applications and business processes that are interconnected across Microsoft Cloud in a secure and compliant manner. Try Microsoft Dataverse today with the Power Platform Developer Plan.

Unlock a new age of AI-enhanced productivity with enterprise data 

Dataverse is making it easier than ever for professional and citizen developers to build apps on their enterprise data, generating increased efficiency. Dataverse is continuing to improve developer time to market with the introduction of Excel to app, powered by Copilot in Microsoft Power Apps and the introduction of custom plug-ins in Dataverse built using Microsoft Power Fx.

Excel to app is just that. Excel to app enables citizen developers to build an app on their Excel data by dragging and dropping or copying a link to their Excel spreadsheet into Dataverse. From there, Copilot in Power Apps assists in analyzing data to provide suggested table structures, column names, and data types in a Dataverse table. Excel to app then generates an app on top of data, which developers can immediately start to customize. Get started today with Excel to app in preview.

Dataverse-enabled features like Excel to app are helping Microsoft cloud customers—ranging from those who use Microsoft Power Platform to those who use Microsoft 365—organize, store, and use their data for increased efficiency.

Chevron is one of those customers, as they’ve used Microsoft Dataverse to maximize their Microsoft data estate.

“We want to make it easy to do the right thing when it comes to data architecture and reducing data duplication, and Microsoft Dataverse helps make it possible. Not only does it eliminate complexity associated with virtual tables, it helps modernize data that needs a home by liberating and protecting stranded data traditionally stored in Excel files.”—Tavia Prouhet, Product Owner of Low-Code and Automation, Chevron.

Two months ago, we announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, a revolutionary new way of working that uses AI to enable users to get answers and perform tasks using natural language prompts. Available now to early access customers, Copilot combines the power of a large language model, Microsoft productivity and business apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before, just by telling it what you want. For example, give Copilot a natural language prompt like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it generates a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.

We’re excited to announce that now Microsoft 365 Copilot can incorporate your Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data stored in Dataverse, all in an easy-to-use, unified experience. By replacing dozens of steps in multiple apps and constant context switching with simple, natural language prompts, imagine what your teams can accomplish in minutes instead of hours:

• A sales professional can generate a status update for the top 25 leads based on engagement activity over the past two weeks.
• A marketer can summarize topics and needs from responses and update an email marketing campaign in real time.
• A customer service manager can summarize the top trending customer issues from the past week as an email to senior leadership.   

Microsoft 365 Copilot automatically inherits the native security and governance framework of Dataverse and applies user security and permissions at runtime.

Add the power of your line-of-business and independent software vendor (ISV) apps as plug-ins through more than 1,000 Power Platform connectors when Microsoft 365 Copilot becomes generally available. For example, Microsoft 365 Copilot with the Power Platform connector for Jira Software can enable a project manager to request the status of a Jira support ticket and act based on the response, such as route it for additional approval or start a purchase order for new hardware. Integrate your business processes and data more tightly with Microsoft 365 Copilot and the extensibility of Power Platform connectors and Dataverse.

Extend your low-code apps using Power Fx in Dataverse

To build business critical apps with low-code, integrating extensible components is crucial. Microsoft is making it easier for developers to extend their apps by building custom plug-ins in Dataverse using Power Fx.

Plug-ins in Dataverse are reusable, real-time business logic workflows that allow developers to execute a set of specific commands, called from web services, like the Dataverse connector or a web API.

For example, if a developer wants to automate their organization’s “thank you” emails to customers, the developer can use plug-ins in Dataverse to automate the distribution of “Thank you for your order” emails whenever a new sales order is submitted.

These plug-ins are multifaceted as developers can build plug-ins that can perform Dataverse CRUD operations, access other data tables in their Power Apps environment, generate instant actions that can accept input and output parameters, call other actions, and more.

Brian Hodel’s, Principal Developer, Power Platform, T-Mobile use of plugins in Dataverse is a great example of building enterprise-grade apps with plugins and Power Apps. “Dataverse accelerator allows you to easily develop custom sets of Dataverse plugins in a simple, familiar interface. This is a huge step forward in optimizing performance in Canvas Apps as you can delegate even more of the processing to Dataverse. It also helps to simplify code and further make use of Fusion Teams as those functions are available in apps and flows just like any other function call in Power Fx.”

Plug-ins in Dataverse are in preview, so get started today.

Hyperscale your low code applications on Dataverse

To call an application enterprise-grade it must be able to handle thousands of users and should have the ability to scale seamlessly as users and records grow. At Microsoft Build, Dataverse is further enabling enterprise-grade development on Power Platform with the announcement of elastic tables. An elastic table is a data table managed by Dataverse designed to handle large volumes of data in real-time. With elastic tables, developers can import, store, and analyze large volumes of non-relational data without scalability, latency, or performance issues, even automatically scaling to ingest and read tens of millions of rows every hour.

Try elastic tables in preview today to build your enterprise-grade low code applications on Microsoft Dataverse.

Build secure apps faster than ever on Dataverse

The foundation of any enterprise-grade solution is security and Dataverse is enabling even more granular security in Microsoft Power Platform with new IP access management and managed encryption key features.

As such, Microsoft Dataverse is announcing the first phase of Microsoft Sentinel Solution for Power Platform (a premium offering), allowing customers to detect various suspicious activities such as Power Apps execution from unauthorized geos, suspicious data destruction by Power Apps, mass deletion of Power Apps, and phishing attacks made possible through Power Apps. Sign up for the preview here: Limited Public Preview Sign Up Microsoft Sentinel Solution for Power Platform.

As organizations continue to adopt and build a multitude of solutions on Dataverse, it’s increasingly important to restrict access to data to the right users at the right times and in the right places. As such, Dataverse is enabling IP restrictions with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) continuous access evaluation and IP firewall to govern user access in real time.

Azure AD continuous access evaluation automatically blocks a user’s access in near real-time if suspicious activities are detected. Critical events like user account deletion or disablement, or IP location change, are monitored continuously. When an event that requires restriction of user access occurs, enforcements take effect in almost near real time to deny the user access.

Couple these near real-time access IP enforcements with an IP firewall that can restrict user access if the computer IP isn’t a part of a trusted network and threats like insider data exfiltration or token replay attacks can be mitigated for all business processes running atop Dataverse.

In addition to improving granular security access, Dataverse made storing sensitive customer data safer by integrating Microsoft Azure Key Vault customer-managed encryption keys in Dataverse environments.

Mercedes-Benz has found success with customer managed key (CMK) and the security investments in Dataverse overarchingly, as it’s made it easier for them to build more complex solutions on their enterprise-data.

“Preventing other parties from accessing data stored in the cloud has been a key concern for Mercedes-Benz from the beginning. This became even more important as we embraced the “cloud first” paradigm striving to make the most out of cloud capabilities. We deem the risk so severe, that we do not allow confidential data to be stored in the cloud if that risk is not mitigated properly. This made the use of Dataverse and the low-code / no-code capabilities complex using the Power Platform. Microsoft’s new security features help a lot in this regard, CMK being the key aspect but not underestimating the rest like IP based cookie binding and IP Firewall, subnet delegation and others. While the features in itself are changing the game, the support, consulting and help implementing these are a constant boon for our security efforts and just one more reason why we place our trust in Microsoft’s Power Platform.”—Patric Liebelt, Lead Center of Enablement, Microsoft Power Platform, Mercedes-Benz.

As demands for secure enterprise-grade applications continue to mount, low-code becomes increasingly necessary for developers to add to their toolkit to help them produce high quality solutions in a fraction of the time. Microsoft Power Platform is one of the most comprehensive low-code platforms available with a best-in-class data platform designed to support and scale enterprise applications.

Learn more about Microsoft Power Platform

• Get started with Microsoft Dataverse using the Power Apps developer plan.
• Watch the Microsoft Power Platform Build 2023 keynote.
• Watch the Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse Build 2023 discussion.