Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Microsoft Dataflex/Dataverse/CDS - What is it and what does this mean?

NOTE: I updated this today (Aug 5th 2020) after meeting w/ some Microsoft representatives around what we currently know about Dataflex.

NOTE: As of August 12, 2020, it appears this will be renamed from "Dataflex".  Perhaps Microsoft staff used Bing to search for the term instead of Google and didn't realize that trademark was in use.

NOTE: As of November, 2020, they've re-rebranded the CDS to be Dataverse.

Microsoft announced yesterday (July 22, 2020) a new (old-ish) method for accessing/storing data for "Teams apps" which still brings some questions of what in the world a "Teams app" is and/or what is included in what license and what we essentially can do with it.

I don't have a lot of answers beyond what Microsoft has shared to date per Dataflex:
  • it is included in base Teams licenses
  • "Dataflex" is a subset of "Dataflex Pro"
  • "Dataflex Pro" is a rebrand of the CDS ($$$)
And while I have been driving down a road toward divorcing PowerApps and Microsoft Forms from the ultimate data storage repositories and using semistructured data formats (i.e. JSON) for much of my recent recommendations, this seems to be an attempt to truly pin down some of the issues around deploying, supporting, and ultimately governing some aspects of the o365 landscape within Teams.