There are a number of great developments coming up for the Microsoft Power Platform. We are very happy with that, because the use of the Power Platform is growing rapidly. More and more organisations are seeing how they can take good steps with innovation and digital transformation with Power Platform. And more and more people are learning to use it. This will only increase when the Power Platform (and overarching Dynamics 365) becomes more integrated with Microsoft 365. Because this is one of the most beautiful developments, we have heard during the Microsoft Ignite event in November 2021. In this blog you can read all about it. 

A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE WORLD OF STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED INFORMATION 

Microsoft 365 is the place where we work productively (together) on a daily basis. We email, chat, edit, and share documents through Teams and SharePoint. We also call this the world of ‘unstructured information’. On the other hand, there is the world of ‘structured information’. This is, for example, a SQL database, or the primary system in which the organisation stores all customers, suppliers and administrative data. Within the Power Platform and Dynamics 365, structured information is stored in Dataverse. Dataverse is a ‘SaaS database’ that can be fully managed from the web browser. Dataverse will gradually become more and more integrated within the Microsoft 365 platform, such as Teams and SharePoint. With this, the world of unstructured information will become more intertwined with the world of structured information, and that is very valuable.

INFORMATION FROM DATAVERSE AND DYNAMICS BECOMES EASIER TO SHARE 

One of the things that will soon be possible is that you can easily embed information from Dataverse, and therefore also from Dynamics 365, in a Teams channel, tab or chat via Microsoft Teams. And the great thing is that that information is available to everyone within the organisation. In other words, you can get a piece of information from Dataverse while you are talking to someone via Teams. A concrete example is that you talk to your colleague about a customer and then you share a customer card from Dynamics 365 and look at different data information from that customer. This way you share all information from Dataverse and Dynamics effortlessly, even with people who do not have a license. Working together is so much easier.

An important use case that comes with this is that we can more easily realise Teams meeting Apps. A Teams meeting app gives you the opportunity to use a piece of structured data (from Dataverse) and share it within the ‘meeting stage’. In the context of a meeting, this means that instead of sharing your screen, you look directly at that piece of structured data with all the people in the meeting and can jointly filter and adjust information there. So you work together in an application!

This functionality also works the other way around. For example, from structured data, Dynamics 365, you use Teams. If you are in a customer card in Dynamics, you can email or start a teams call with that customer, by phone or via teams, with 1 push of a button.

USE THE SEARCH BAR TO FIND STRUCTURED INFORMATION 

In addition, one of the long-raced ‘dreams’ of the Enterprise Content Management professionals comes true: from the search bar, which we now have in Windows 10, and which can be found at the top of all Office applications, we can start searching by keyword. And then it no longer only searches in our documents (OneDrive, SharePoint & Teams), not only in chat (Teams and Yammer) but also by all the structured information made available (Dataverse and Dynamics). This means that you can search for customer information, opportunities, issues, etc. from Microsoft Search. But also that the applications that you build using the Power Platform and the associated data that is shared with certain target groups, will also appear in the search results.

Great developments that allow us to find information faster and to work better together. Do you want to know more about this? Then sign up for this webinar.

Are you curious about the other announcements for the Power Platform? Click here for an overview.

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