Let's Talk About the Power Platform Dataverse For Teams

Dataverse for Teams, well, what, urm. This is an interesting one, but lets start at the beginning.

Dataverse for Teams (DVFT) was created in September 2020, if you put 2 and 2 together you can see why. The world was gripped by COVID lockdowns, everyone working from home, and using Teams.

So I suspect Microsoft's chain of thought was:

a) Everyone is remote so apps/flows perfect
b) Everyone is using Teams
c) Can we encourage a) by using b)

Its a good logic, but as with everything made during a crisis/temporary situation, its all short term and no long term.

So 4 years on lets talk about Dataverse Teams.

The Good

There are a few good things about Dataverse, but the main one by far is:

Free Private Virtual Agents/Copilot Agents

This is why most DVFT environments were created (excluding the built in apps, which create one and you don't even know). They allowed you to have a Chatbot, in teams (the best place for one), for free. There was no easier way to start learning about PVA back then.

They are also pretty good to, they can add real value and help sell chatbots benefits.

Free Dataverse Capacity

Every DVFT environment comes with 2gb of Dataverse storage for free, not bad at all considering additional capacity can cost up to £30 per gb.

Simple App Sharing

This one is the other big reason for using DVFT , a Power Apps that can be linked directly to a Teams user group. This makes sharing managing access super easy, add them to the Team, they have access, remove them from Team, they lose access.

Pre Built Apps

Microsoft was kind enough to build out some debatable useful free apps built on DVFT , like Bulletins and Shifts.

The Bad

From a user side DVFT is pretty cool, but from a admin side not so much. Lets take a look:

Administrating Environments

By default, any admin can not see what's in a an environment, and that's because every environment is ring fenced. Security roles are internal to the environment, that means if I want to look inside an environment, the admin has to go in and add themselves as a System Admin. That's right, every single new DVFT environment requires a global admin to activate their PIMS Global Admin role (and if your company doesn't use PIMS for global admins they should), look for new environments (as they can't even see them if not activated), then add themselves.

Now I can see the environment I can't easily see all the apps and flows. One of my favourite admin settings is Default to Solutions, as this allows System Admins and Customizers (and custom roles) to see all apps and flows easily (especially with the Dataverse API).

But DVFT does not have that admin setting (or any of a normal environment), so apps and flows will default to non solution aware, meaning the only way we can see them is in the admin centre. And again we have to make our selves co-owners just to see what the flow does.

Security - Roles

DVFT has a simplified roles, which is good for user, but bad for security.

For starters your Team Owner role is your System Admin role, which sounds like a good idea, except it isn't declared. You don't know when giving someone the Team Owner role, they also get full access to all flows, apps, and data tables. I see it far too often that people get fed up with requests and make others Team Owner so they can do the approving, without realising all the added permissions they have given.

Security roles are needed for tables too, so without the ability to create custom roles you are very limited. You can only give to 3 groups, Owner, Member, Guest, and there is no granularity with roles, this generally leads to over permissive behaviour.

Missing Components

When looking at what you can add to a solution you instantly see missing key components, and the one that shouts out is Connection References. All flows can only use legacy connections, not great for ALM (and I know DVFT are not designed for ALM, but they do have environment variables so go figure why one and not the other).

Also missing is AI Builder/Hub, as none of the models and actions can be used.

Accidental Creation

I have seen tenants with hundreds of DVFT environments, and when you look inside they are empty except for a single app, like Shifts. What happens is a team owner clicks on add app to see what it does, tests it and forgets/removes it. Not realising that in the background a whole DV4T environment was spun up. This is not only a pain for administrators again (polluting our admin centre) it is also a waste of compute/storge, which is not good for our carbon footprint. Microsoft has now started to purge these environments when not used, so at least that is a move in the right direction.

The Future

This one is interesting as well, as it felt to me like DVFT was on the slow march to being deprecated. It hadn't been updated for a while and the CoE Kit was cancelled. But recently after revisiting I had seen some genuine improvements:

• New Dataverse cross environment connectors now work on DVFT environments (the legacy showed that I didn't have permission).
• Custom Connectors are now available (I could be wrong but Im sure this was the case)
• Copilot Rebrand (not that useful I guess)

So maybe DVFT was back, but then the retirement of Teams Workflows happened, with Power Automate replacing it. You would think the ideal place for these flows would be a MVFT environment, but no, they are actually stored in the Default environment. That to me is a big flag saying that Microsoft isn't looking at growing DVFT anymore. I think there plan now is to use it only as a stepping stone into full environments, with people being encouraged/pushed into migrating. So I expect the future to be a path of divergence, new features in full Power Platform, and a seamless process to move out of DVFT.

MS Docs upgrade process

Further Reading

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/about-teams-environment
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/teams/data-platform-compare