Microsoft Dataverse

In today’s world, data is one of the most valuable resources for any business. Whether it’s customer information, sales data, or operational data, access to quality data is essential to run a successful business. However, with an ever-growing number of systems and applications generating data, it can be a challenge to effectively gather and manage this data. This is where Microsoft Dataverse comes in.

Microsoft Dataverse is a comprehensive data platform that collects data from all applications in the Dynamics 365 platform, making it easy to organize, manage, and share data across the business.

Let’s take an example of a sales department. Sales representatives usually use a CRM application (such as Dynamics 365 Sales), an email client (such as Outlook), and a calendar (such as Microsoft Teams) to interact with customers and perform their daily tasks. Each application generates data that can be valuable to the business. The CRM application allows for recording customer information, sales activities, and pipeline data. The email client contains correspondence with the customer, while the calendar contains appointments and meetings.

By integrating these applications with Dataverse, the company can collect all of this data in one place and create a full picture of their customers and sales activities. For example, CRM data can be integrated with email and calendar data, making it possible to see which emails and appointments are related to a specific customer.

Similarly, Dataverse can also integrate financial data from Business Central and customer service data from Dynamics 365 Customer Service. By collecting this data across applications, the company can have an end-to-end view of their business and customers, which can help improve their decision-making and business results.

Dataverse also allows businesses to define their own data structures and relationships, making it easy to create new applications and workflows based on existing data. This could include creating reports, dashboards, and automating workflows.

Dataverse can provide a centralized platform where data can be collected and organized across different applications. This can help businesses achieve a comprehensive view of their business and customers, leading to improved efficiency and a better foundation for making the right decisions.

Dataverse structures data in tables, and these tables consist of fields that represent specific information such as customer names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

When a table is created in Dataverse, relationships can be established between tables, allowing data to be pulled from different tables and generating reports that provide a more comprehensive view of a company’s data.

For example, there could be a table with customer information and another table with sales orders. By creating a relationship between these two tables, Dataverse can pull customer information when a sales order is created and update the sales order with the relevant customer information. This allows companies to maintain an updated picture of their customers and business activities.

With the large amounts of data that can exist in Dataverse, it is important to present data in a way that provides value to the company. Dataverse also uses the concept of “views” to organize data in a meaningful and easily understandable way. Views are a way to filter, sort, and group data so that companies can view data in a way that makes sense to them. For example, a company could create a view that shows all sales orders created in the past month and sort them by customer.