>> Are you a SharePoint person?
Have you used Dataverse?
If not, why not?
We're going to be joined by Audrey Gordon on
this episode of the Low Code Evolution and talk
about why you should consider
Dataverse as a SharePoint. Stay tuned.
>> [MUSIC].
>> Hi everyone and welcome to Low Code Evolution,
I'm your host April Dunnam and in this episode,
we're joined by the wonderful Audrey Gordon,
who is a senior Pm on the Power cat Team
here at Microsoft so happy to you have you on our show, Audrie.
>> It's really exciting to be on your show April,
I've always followed you and I've looked at your following.
It's just you have the greatest subscribers and everything so
I'm excited and honored to be on your show.
>> I'm honored to have you on here.
For those of you who may not know
if you have been around [inaudible] for a while,
but I learned everything I know about Power Apps from Audrie.
She's already OG power attics and
power platform people out there that'll train us all out.
I'm really honored to have you on the show.
>> Thank you.
>> We were chatting recently, Audrie and I.
One thing that we have in common is
we're both from [inaudible] background,
I was a SharePoint developer of the day and
I got a lot of SharePoint stuff yourself, Audrie.
But you might have
any more Dataverse side of things
because she actually runs Power Platform.
I'd love to get your take while we have you here
on what made you consider Dataverse,
what is the background,
and what's that dream like?
>> Yes, I brought some journey recommendations for you,
but I want to start by saying
that my heart still is in love with SharePoint.
SharePoint paid my bills for most of my career.
I have been with SharePoint since
its beginning and I still love SharePoint.
I think I want to start by saying that I was
encouraged to add Dataverse to my tool belt.
I have not left SharePoint.
I continue to use it,
but I believe in my heart that you need to use
all the tools that help you
solve problems because that's what we are.
At the root, we are all problem-solvers.
Most of us who are SharePoint experts,
we just love helping people collaborate
and giving them solutions that help them get stuff done faster.
Dataverse, I just added it to my tool belt
because now I could basically leverage that as well.
Now I'm a tell you a secret about me.
I'm a chess player.
Anybody who plays chess knows that
you don't hyper-focus on a single piece.
If you hyperfocus on a single piece while you're playing chess,
you will lose the game.
You must use your pieces in combination.
When I think of all of the services in Microsoft 365 and I
think about all the services inside the Power platform.
I want to use them in combination with one another in order
to get those optimized solutions for my consumers.
This is my key point,
don't throw anything out,
just expand your tool belt so that you can do more.
I have six things I want to share with you today.
May I share my screen?
I have six recommendations as you journey into Dataverse;
One, take a closer look at CDM.
Some of you may know what this means,
others, not, CDM stands for Common Data Model.
Every time you install a Dataverse database,
you get a package of pre-built tables,
relationships, views, forms built in for you.
Imagine that you could and I hadn't seen this anywhere
else where you get this out-of-the-box
infrastructure ready for relationship management.
When I say relationship management,
I'm not speaking technically,
I'm speaking human, we have customer relations,
we have supplier relations,
we have partner relations and the CDM
is built for that type of data infrastructure.
It's really easy and I'll just bounce
over if I can to Power Platform for a second,
when you install a database,
you automatically get all of
these tables and some people get a little overwhelmed by that,
but actually, you don't have to create
a table unless one of these don't work.
For instance, the account table is one that can be
used for any external company reference.
You have a company that you work with,
I'm going to show you a column
I have on here called business type.
Let's see if we can get that in here.
I always forget I can search,
business type, I'm going to hit "Save."
These companies that are in here are customers,
partners, and suppliers.
Basically, you can use one table
for multiple types of companies,
and then you can set up apps, forms,
views that are specific to
those business types and or unite them in some way.
But this is built-in, I didn't have to build this table it
was already there for me and all of its relationships,
columns, views, and forms are there.
So FYI, I didn't do anything,
I automatically have this amazing infrastructure that
I can use for any external relationship,
it's called the Common Data Model.
My first tip is,
get to know it because in many cases,
people are unaware and they just start by creating custom tables,
and although that's often necessary in SharePoint,
it's not really necessary as much in
Dataverse and so you have a lot of infrastructure built in.
Just from your infrastructure,
you can create an app and you'll hear
about me talking about model-driven apps.
Because model-driven apps are the fastest
to build because they are what they say they are.
They're driven by the data model
and so if your data model is good,
your app is ready in two minutes.
It's something I'd like to share with people.
I'm going to keep going, so I don't know that at time.
I'm going to show you the second thing
that I think you should think about,
and that's table logic.
Where you do create your own custom tables
or where you do create your own custom columns,
remember to be smart about it,
because what you want to do is you want to build it once so
that every app that picks it up contains that model.
Give an example at Microsoft we're divided by
country codes and these country codes of four digit numbers.
Yes, HR could take the time to teach all of
us what the country code is for our location,
I happen to know I'm in the United States,
so my country code is 1010,
but nobody wants to teach that to the
200,000 people that work at Microsoft,
so there could be a data model that says,
as soon as you see the location of United States,
so maybe I'm filling out a form.
What country is your Office in,
and I choose United States,
then there could be a business rule
that kicks off that says, okay,
set that company code to 1010.
You don't even have to show me that company code on the form,
it could be something that is even hidden off the form,
but it's going to help us with our Power BI dashboard,
that's going to help us with other things.
We can also have logic such as formulas,
and that's a pretty new thing and that's
just going to give you a peek at that.
If you have preview in your URL,
you will see this.
This is important because this is in preview.
Look for the word preview right between make and
Power Apps and then when you create a new column,
notice I can do that right easily on this landing page,
you will see a new column called
Formula and with the formula columns,
you can just start typing.
>> It will give you IntelliSense.
There's an annual revenue column in here,
so it gives it to me.
I can divide that by two?
That could be my revenue divided by two,
which who knows what I would use that?
I've got some instant formulas and this is part of power fx,
which is going to light up all over the power platform.
You're going to see a lot of capabilities built into the formulas.
I love to use them for alerts.
Two, I will send an alert that says,
if the actual contract value
is greater than 30 percent of the bid.
Then, let's start a process to see if we can check and
see why this actual value was bloating so quickly.
You can do things like that where you
combine what you're using in that averse with power platform,
with the Power Automate platform as well.
Third thing, reuse.
I think I'll keep saying that all along.
Whenever you can build something once
and reuse it for a 1,000 apps, you should.
This will help new makers as well.
If you create a data stewardship model
in your data verse data model,
then you can give makers the opportunity to use that model.
For instance, if there were formulas in my columns for sales data,
I don't really want the salespeople to
have to figure that out on their own.
They might calculate that incorrectly.
I publish that data model out to them and then they just use
the apps and then automatically the algorithms
will be correctly configured.
It's really nice that you can set up a data stewardship model by
providing these data models to the makers.
Always remember that Power Platform
is always going to try to connect.
We want to connect with what you're using.
Again, there's no desire to
move you from SharePoint or move you from SQL.
But if you need data from SQL or
SharePoint or SAP or somewhere else,
then you can incorporate quite a few things.
You can incorporate Dataflow,
which is built into dataverse,
and I'll just point you to this as well.
Dataflows are right here on the left.
Dataflows will help you migrate
data or synchronized data with dataverse.
You also have a zoo or synapse link,
which enables you to create query tables using Spark,
or SQL to build
those tables that you can now leverage in Power BI.
Basically, you can do joins and Burgess and
things like that that you might be used to doing in SQL.
You might be able to do that through synapse in order
to create tables that you can use for analytics.
In addition to that,
you can add custom pages to any app that's a Canvas app.
In other words, like in this case,
I have an app here that's
a model-driven app and maybe in the model-driven app,
I want to have a page that the little fancier or a little bit
different or connecting to a data connection that's not available.
I can connect to SharePoint using
the SharePoint connector and a Custom Page.
This Custom Page is basically like
having a Canvas app inside my model-driven app.
You can have the best of both worlds.
Keep that in mind.
Connections are important to us.
The newest guy on the block is the virtual tables.
Not because they weren't there before,
but we've now got quick
wizard-like provider options that enable you
to configure a virtual table to
SharePoint or SQL or Excel in like three, four clicks.
Now that table will be visible in dataverse.
It can be used for lookups.
It can be used with data logic,
and it combines with your model-driven apps.
In addition to that, I'd want to say,
basically, I think you've figured this out.
Don't think should I do Canvas or model-driven or Teams?
Think, what's your requirements and
then make it against the requirements.
Then lastly, my favorite thing about dataverse that
I didn't have in SharePoint is application lifecycle management.
This is the ability to iterate
because nobody creates a perfect solution.
By iterating and having that solution package,
if you haven't heard about Power Platform solutions, get into it.
They should be your best friend because they
enable you to consolidate all the components that you
want to reuse into a solution package that you can move from
dev to test the prop or just move from this tenant to that tenant.
Lot of capability there,
no more PowerShell scripts for replicating lists.
Instead, you'll have one solution and you'll deploy that using
an application lifecycle management Model that goes from
your first iteration all the way
through deprecation of that solution.
These are the things that I love April,
I hope that made sense.
>> Yeah, it's only so much to back there.
You pretty much covered everything that I could think of.
I love that you showed that the
diverse experience because I don't know about
anyone watching but we haven't looked at diverse a
while it's been like two years or more,
it's changed a lot obviously
yourself from what you just showed us at
some that modern experience for building the tables there.
It's night and day difference.
Being able to use power effects in our column.
Just so much easier to work with the dataverse in tailless there.
On an experience I loved the conversions that you talked about you
separately at a model-driven versus Canvas like we talked about,
custom pages and being able to integrate it all and just making
that choice easier and easier
to really start with the instead are small.
The new functionality, greatness that offers.
I've left a point you need from the very beginning is it's
not an either or it's another tool in your tool power averse,
you should add service.
I still have hope for SharePoint as well [inaudible]
the situations should definitely look [inaudible].
>> Yes. I also brought some some resources for everybody.
These are places you can go to get help,
but also feel free to reach out to me or
to reach out to the Power Apps community,
either one, I'm happy to help you as you manage this journey.
The good news is from Day 1,
you can achieve something great all the way as you grow up to
being a master or a hero in your own tenant,
as you learn to scale data models for your entire company.
I look forward to coming back and talking with you again April,
but I wanted to leave everybody these resources.
>> Also thank you so much, Debra,
check out the resources [inaudible]
you want to get started with the university.
Thank you so much again Audrie for coming on the show.
>> It's my pleasure.
>> Thank you all and see you next time or next episode,
we'll cover
[inaudible].
>> [MUSIC]