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.

Low-code/no-code delivery model: NoSQL style JSON storage in SharePoint

I have a dream.

A dream where I can spin up a PowerApp (or Microsoft Form) in a few minutes, publish it out and the SharePoint list will magically be created.  A dream where others will then pick up the baton and perform the data optimizations and connectivity for an array of data sources while avoiding Microsoft CDS licensing requirements.  A dream where I can deploy applications in minutes and over the span of the next few hours, days, weeks, the rest of the work to fully build out the data architecture for the application can occur over a longer timeline w/o losing data or slowing down deployments.

I dream this dream almost every day.

NOTE: It is now June 2025 and any new visitors can read this knowing that I am a master at forecasting the future state and what Microsoft is planning.

Faux Drag and Drop using Hidden Sliders

One of the key features missing from a UI perspective from PowerApps currently is the ability to drag/drop items on the screen.  It definitely limits some of your options in building interfaces and controls that work in a way users might expect.

However, there are notes elsewhere on how to mimic this behavior in some limited fashion using sliders.  This walks you through a common use case of having a Gallery where you can move items into various stages similar to a Kanban board in a manner that will seem intuitive to users.