Introduction

Microsoft Teams had a flourishing year in 2020 as a result of remote working, with over 115m daily active users and has only continued to increase. It’s no wonder Microsoft are continuing to heavily invest in Teams by enabling more functions and capabilities to increase user adoption.

Microsoft Teams is becoming more than just a chat system, its an operating system where organisations can:

• Chat
• Collaborate
• Access Files
• Manage Tasks
• Schedule Events
• And now… organisations can start building applications all within Teams

To further extend collaboration within organisations, Microsoft have now made it easier for organisations to build low-no code applications, automate processes and deploy chatbots without leaving Teams.

To build an application within Teams, Dataverse for Teams is used as the underlying data repository, holding up to a million rows of data. For context, Dataverse for Teams is a subset of Dataverse which is designed to be the backbone to the Power Platform suite that enables users to store and interact with their data in a secure environment dynamically. Unlike Dataverse, Dataverse for Teams delivers the required capabilities but at no additional cost, making it a very attractive Microsoft product for most organisations who already have the Office 365 license in place.

Since Dataverse for Teams has been imbedded, Microsoft have seen a spike in the number of organisations who are innovating and encouraging their workforce to build applications to solve their toughest challenges using Power Platforms in Teams.

Challenges

Many organisations are now looking to deploy Dataverse for Teams with the Power Platform landing zones that tackle the below common challenges that organisations are now facing:

• Short on developer time and skills.
• Demand for custom and tailored applications are high and costly.
• Slow processes due to no automation.
• Siloed data and multiple data repositories across departments.
• Inability to scale security and under a governance framework.
• No way to control data permissions.
• Gaps between systems lead to errors.
• Limited business intelligence.

Benefits

Microsoft have made the development of applications with a scalable data repository easily accessible and inexpensive.

At risual, we have worked with many organisations that have multiple disparate datasets stored in a number of varied repositories, whether that be SQL Database, SharePoint Lists or Excel. Having multiple repositories only makes the management of data, reporting, governance of data, development and let’s not forget costs that more difficult to control.

Switching from any legacy database system to any new database can be a very daunting experience. However, as with any other strategic decision, organisations are encouraged to carefully look at the costs verses benefits to what Dataverse for Teams combined with Power Platform can bring for your organisation.

Below is a snapshot of the potential that this particular strategic decision can bring:

Governance and security:

Governance and security of data is a top priority for organisations to control. With legislative requirements to protect data, Dataverse for Teams is governed by Microsoft which can be found in the Microsoft Trust Centre. This is one less headache for organisations to manage when it comes to data encryption, security authentication, governance and compliance, data access permissions (role-based permissions) across all interactions with the data.

Storage and Metadata types:

With a large data storage capacity of 1m rows of data per environment at no additional cost (providing you have an Office 365 license), organisations have the flexibility to store data that offers rich metadata capabilities. This allows for relational modelling as well as the ability to work with a range of datatypes including storing images and files. Combine this benefit with a Power App application, organisations can build up very powerful applications and intelligent data.

Rapid application development:

Custom applications are costly and challenging due to higher barriers to development and requiring an extensive coding knowledge. Combining Dataverse for Teams with Power Apps offers a rapid solution to create and deploy low-no code applications, allowing organisations to respond fast to a constantly evolving and changing economy.

Empowered Employees:

With easy user interface to build low to no code applications, employees, with very little developer experience are empowered to build digital systems that works for them. In turn giving organisations a powerful inhouse tool to improve business processes and drive efficiency that is built by those who understand the business.

Richer Business Intelligence:

Business intelligence is powerful to driving decisions. This can be particularly difficulty to obtain a 360 view of the organization with disparate datasets that do not offer relational analysis across datasets. Using Dataverse for Teams as a single repository that connects with all of the business applications can provide extremely powerful insight to organisations.

Next steps

Organisations are constantly discovering new ways to innovate and drive performance, and since Microsoft Teams has had a lot of attention, it made sense for Microsoft to extend the service and make it wildly accessible and feasible for organisations to build apps rapidly on a scalable and secure database, Dataverse for Teams, with no additional cost.

If you would like to learn more, contact us. We will work with you to understand your unique business challenges and find the solutions to support your growth and innovation strategy.