Microsoft Dataverse Archives - Microsoft Power Platform Blog Innovate with Business Apps Tue, 01 Apr 2025 07:46:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Real-time data warehousing with Microsoft Dataverse and Fabric zero-copy integration http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/it-pro/dataverse-and-fabric-zero-copy-integration/ Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:00:00 +0000 Unlock the full potential of your data with Dataverse—the secure, scalable business apps and data platform behind Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Apps and Dynamics 365—is now natively integrated with Microsoft Fabric, the industry-leading big data and analytics platform

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For too long, organizations have struggled to unlock the full potential of their data. Obtaining relevant insights required building complex data pipelines, managing expensive infrastructure, and waiting for stale reports with limited value. The promise of AI agents that act in the moment, on real-time data has been real but out of reach for many due to cost, complexity, and technical overhead.

That changes now.

Dataverse—the secure, scalable business apps and data platform behind Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Apps, and Dynamics 365—is now natively integrated with Microsoft Fabric, the industry-leading big data and analytics platform. This seamless, zero-copy, real-time integration allows organizations to combine operational and analytical data instantly, without replication or ETL. As your data gets updated in Dataverse, data professionals see latest data continuously updated in Fabric. No need to build and manage complex data integrations.

Fabric + Dataverse Better Together

Copilots in Fabric can create rich reports, discover hidden trends, or re-shape data for even more insights – your employees get to harness the power of data, without requiring the organization to seek expert assistance. 

Organizations can act on these insights immediately by building Power Apps, automating workflows in Power Automate, or creating real-time Fabric data agents to drive decisions and actions across the business. It’s a direct path to operational intelligence. 

There’s no need to invest in third-party connectors, spin up big-budget integration projects, or provision heavy infrastructure, no need for ongoing monitoring and maintenance. Organizations can get started with a fully functional trial, pay only for the data they use, and scale as they grow. Most organizations find this approach to be significantly more cost-effective than exporting data and building data warehouses with data pipelines. 

The feature at the center of this transformation is Link to Fabric in the Power Apps maker portal, which enables real-time connectivity between Dataverse, Power Platform, and Microsoft Fabric without data movement. 

Since launching Link to Fabric in general availability in November 2023, thousands of organizations have adopted the Link to Fabric feature—and it just keeps getting better. Thanks to enhancements in Microsoft’s managed compute infrastructure, we are announcing faster data refreshes for updates in Dataverse in Fabric within a few minutes, delivering near real-time operational insights without impacting critical transactional real-time workloads. This capability will rollout to existing customers in the coming weeks. Businesses eager to participate in the early adoption of this cutting-edge technology can join the forum at aka.ms/FabricLinkforDynamics.

We are also excited to announce Mirrored Dataverse in private preview, a native experience in Fabric which enables data professionals to securely activate Link to Fabric feature in Dataverse from any Fabric workspace, and to combine all their business data with analytical data in Microsoft OneLake. Register for preview at https://aka.ms/MirroredDataverse.

Mirrored Dataverse

Using OneLake as a unified data foundation, an organization can: 

  • Mirror Dataverse into Fabric for secure, instant access—no ETL or replication required 
  • Use shortcuts to automate data assimilation from other clouds, such as Amazon and Google, without physically moving it 
  • Transform data its own way using low-code tools like Dataflows or advanced capabilities like Spark notebooks and Data Factory 
  • Bring SQL skills along for the ride. Fabric speaks T-SQL, so existing scripts and stored procedures are fully supported. 

With Dataverse and Fabric working seamlessly together, business and analytical data are unified, updated in real-time, and available for insights at all times. 

Unlock real time insights and actions with Fabric data agents

While real-time operational dashboards are an important first step, organizations can also harness the power of AI driven data agents to achieve real-time insights and action. Data professionals in Fabric can leverage real-time data integrations and create Fabric data agents (previously known as Fabric AI Skills). These agents act like an AI-powered data analyst—deeply familiar with your unique business data and ready to reason, answer questions, surface insights, or run exploratory research on your behalf. 

Dataverse Data Agent

There’s no need to source, train, or manage models – just select the data (live from Dataverse via Link to Fabric or any connected source) and the agent is ready. It’s a faster track to building intelligence into operations without requiring advanced AI expertise. 

And just like the rest of the Fabric and Dataverse integration, it’s designed for speed, simplicity, and scale. Organizations can launch a fully functional trial in hours, with no upfront cost, and pay only for the data they use. This fully managed experience means no complex configurations and no disruption to existing workloads. In fact, most customers report a modest 10% increase in all-up data size managed after enabling the feature in production—delivering powerful AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of traditional real-time data warehouse solutions. 

Using Link to Fabric feature in Dataverse and Fabric Data warehouse, we simplified setup and configuration process, eliminating the need for multiple tools and streamlined data integration, making it easier to monitor and troubleshoot issues.

The transition also removed several data copy steps enhancing efficiency and reducing processing times from 30-40 minutes to 2-3 minutes. This means, our business gets critical data and reports much sooner, and the reports and tasks run much faster. By consolidating all our services into Fabric, we reduced the costs of our data warehouse by over 50% each month.

Lekha Kannoju, Sr. Manager of Business Intelligence, Global IT | CRC Industries, Inc. 

Take action

With business and analytical data now unified in real time, it’s easier than ever to turn insights into impact. Build responsive Power Apps, automate business processes, and empower teams to act confidently—using the freshest data from across your organization via Fabric OneLake. 

Get started today 

Whether you’re a data professional, a low-code maker, or just curious about what’s possible—there’s never been a better time to explore real-time intelligence with Dataverse and Fabric. 

Learn more

Try real-time data warehousing with Link to Fabric today:  

Join the Mirrored Dataverse in private preview. Sign up now at https://aka.ms/MirroredDataverse

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Transforming Data Management with Dataverse: Moving Beyond SharePoint Lists and Excel http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/it-pro/transforming-data-management-with-dataverse/ Mon, 10 Feb 2025 15:00:00 +0000 Dataverse provides a modern, scalable, and secure platform that bridges the gap between the agility demanded by business users and the governance required by IT professionals.

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Read our Dataverse introduction blog: Agent-Ready Data Management: How Dataverse Transforms your Business – Microsoft Power Platform Blog

Many organizations have a long history of using SharePoint lists and Excel as a starting point to manage data. These tools are familiar, accessible, and widely used across teams. However, as businesses grow and their data management needs evolve, they reveal significant limitations, leaving the business struggling to keep up with modern demands. 

In this blog, we will illustrate Dataverse’s capacity to address these challenges:

  1. Explore a scenario where an organization has established point solutions with SharePoint lists and Excel. 
  2. Demonstrate the progression these systems often undergo, from simplicity to complexity. 
  3. Show how Dataverse can migrate organizations to a modern Power Platform architecture that meets the demanding needs of today’s data-driven world. 

“With Dataverse, we can control data access down to specific roles, making the app more secure and providing a more tailored user experience. Managers only see what they need to see.”  

Dennis Schimmel, Head of Lean goes Digital at ZF.  

Read the full ZF story

Moving Beyond Excel 

Excel is often used as a quick and easy way to store and share data, but this simplicity comes with risks. 

  • Excel lacks granular security controls, making it difficult to enforce who can see or edit specific data.  
  • Access to personally identifiable information (PII) cannot be readily controlled, opening the organization to compliance risks.  
  • Editing rights in Excel tend to be all-or-none, leading to confusion over editing responsibilities.
  • Users can inadvertently make structural changes to a spreadsheet that break dependent downstream systems.

As an organization’s data to support business processes becomes more complex, Excel begins to falter. It isn’t designed to scale for large teams or enterprise-level operations, and its interface, while functional for basic spreadsheets, is inadequate for interactive, user-friendly business applications. Organizations face challenges with version control, where tracking changes becomes cumbersome and error prone. Critical business rules or validations must often be implemented manually, leaving room for human error. Excel also fails to offer built-in application lifecycle management, leaving organizations struggling to manage the development and deployment of tools that rely on this functionality. 

How Dataverse addresses key issues with Excel: 

Excel pain points Dataverse solution 
Lacks enterprise-grade data protection, with no automatic backups or recovery. Ensures enterprise-grade data protection with automatic backups and recovery options, significantly reducing the risk of data loss. Learn more 
Limited real-time multi-user collaboration, with permissions and synchronization issues. Offers robust integration with Microsoft Teams and Power Apps, enabling real-time, multi-user collaboration with controlled permissions and seamless data synchronization. Learn more 
Not built for high-volume data processing, poor scalability for growing business needs. Built on the Microsoft Power Platform, supports high-volume data processing and scales to accommodate growing business needs. Learn more 

SharePoint List Limitations 

SharePoint lists provide added structure for collaboration and security but introduce their own specific challenges. One limitation is SharePoint’s list view threshold, which can impact performance and usability when working with more than 5,000 items. While larger lists are possible, they require additional configuration and management to avoid throttling issues. For organizations managing large datasets, this can create a bottleneck. SharePoint’s access controls meet basic needs but may lack flexibility for more complex security requirements. 

Unlike a relational database, SharePoint does not support native referential integrity – meaning data relationships between lists cannot be enforced. As data volumes grow and complexity increases, SharePoint may throttle high-volume queries, impacting performance and slowing down operations. It also lacks advanced protection measures, potentially exposing sensitive information to compliance and security issues.

Additionally, SharePoint’s design presents challenges for modern business needs. Its limitations in handling complex data relationships, such as the cap on relational lookups and lack of support for model-driven interactions, make it difficult to build scalable solutions. For businesses looking to implement sophisticated workflows or data models, SharePoint may have too many limitations. These structural constraints can affect the ability of organizations to streamline operations or scale their data strategies effectively. 

How Dataverse addresses key issues with SharePoint Lists: 

SharePoint list pain points Dataverse solution 
5,000-item threshold limits dataset sizes, causing performance issues and the need for workarounds. Supports large datasets without such limitations, ensuring smooth performance even with millions of records. Learn more 
No enforcement of referential integrity, leading to inconsistent data across entities. Enforces referential integrity through relationships and data modelling. Learn more 
Infrastructure not optimized for high query and transaction loads, leading to slowdowns. Handles queries and transactions efficiently with optimized infrastructure. Learn more 

Dataverse addresses common limitations with Excel and SharePoint Lists

By addressing the common limitations of SharePoint and Excel, Dataverse positions organizations for long-term success, offering a seamless transition to a modern, efficient data management strategy. 

Other pain points Dataverse solution 
SharePoint and Excel have no role-based security or field-level data protection. Uses role-based security and field-level data protection, ensuring compliance with organizational and industry standards. Learn more 
No native support for business logic, validation rules, or automation. Natively supports business logic, validation rules, and automation through Power Automate, ensuring consistent data quality and operational efficiency. Learn more 
No built-in versioning or effective change tracking. Includes built-in versioning and change tracking, maintaining data integrity and enabling audit history. Learn more  
Lack of modern UI and rich features for app development. Purpose-built for model-driven and canvas apps, offering a modern UI and rich features. Learn more 
Rigid data schema, poor integration for modern app needs. Provides a flexible, scalable data schema and integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products and agents. Learn more 
No support for complex scenarios like multi-language, multi-currency, or offline access. Supports complex application scenarios, enabling businesses to create tailored, future-ready solutions. Learn more 

Streamlining Data Management with Dataverse: Transitioning from SharePoint and Excel 

The Challenge 

Imagine a mid-sized organization relying on SharePoint lists and Excel spreadsheets to manage customer data. At first, its data management strategy worked well enough – but over time, this approach led to mounting challenges. The procurement team used SharePoint lists to track equipment requests, sales managers relied on Excel sheets to calculate performance bonuses, and customer records were stored in a SaaS CRM. As the company grew, cracks began to show. 

Procurement’s SharePoint list started out simple, only containing customer names for dropdown menus. Eventually new needs emerged, necessitating the addition of shipping addresses, then customer classifications and budget thresholds. Meanwhile, the sales department created a separate Excel sheet to track performance metrics, which evolved to include calculations for monthly bonuses. When the sales team needed payroll integration, employee social security numbers (SSNs) were added to the file. 

This patchwork system introduced major challenges: 

Major challenges from fragmented solutions include inconsistent data, systems breakdown, manual effort, and security risks.

It was clear that the organization needed a better solution. 

The Solution 

To modernize its approach, the organization migrated its fragmented systems to Dataverse, gaining a unified, secure, and scalable platform. 

Organization migrated its fragmented systems to Dataverse, gaining a unified, secure, and scalable platform. 

The Results 

The transformation to Dataverse delivered immediate and lasting benefits: 

  • Data Accuracy: A centralized repository eliminated discrepancies between systems, resolving issues like shipping errors and reducing manual maintenance. 
  • Stronger Security: Sensitive data was protected by enterprise-grade security features, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. 
  • Increased Efficiency: Automated workflows saved time and reduced the need for IT intervention. 
  • Scalability: With Dataverse, the organization’s systems now support millions of records and can grow alongside the business. 

Building a Future-Ready Organization 

By transitioning to Dataverse, the organization resolved its data challenges and unlocked new opportunities. IT is now empowered to leverage this centralized data within Copilot Studio, enhancing AI-driven customer insights with a holistic enterprise view and enabling smarter decision making. 

Dataverse isn’t just a platform—it’s a foundation for secure, scalable, and integrated operations that empower businesses to thrive in a data-driven world. 

Moving Forward with Dataverse 

As organizations grow and their data management needs become increasingly complex, the limitations of tools like Excel and SharePoint become undeniable. Dataverse provides a modern, scalable, and secure platform that bridges the gap between the agility demanded by business users and the governance required by IT professionals. By centralizing data, enhancing security, automating workflows, and empowering makers, Dataverse offers a sustainable path to address today’s challenges while preparing for tomorrow’s AI opportunities. 

Whether you’re looking to consolidate siloed data, improve governance, or build innovative solutions without compromising on security, Dataverse is the cornerstone of a future-proof data strategy. It’s time to leave behind the inefficiencies of legacy tools and embrace the power of Dataverse to transform how your organization manages and leverages its data. 

“We realized that we’d hit a bit of a crossroads. We could see that the business was using Power Apps to great effect. But we also saw that there were some future limitations in terms of using Microsoft SharePoint as the data source and not being able to connect to other business applications.” 

Roy Young, Senior Solution Architect at Centrica 

Read the full Centrica story 

Next steps

If you’re ready to revolutionize the way your organization manages data, it’s time to explore what Dataverse can do for you. 

Further Reading: Customer Success Stories 

Explore how other organizations have successfully leveraged Microsoft Dataverse: 

  • ZF Group: Established an enterprise-wide model for citizen developers using Dataverse. 
  • Centrica:  Developed over 800 business solutions with Power Platform and implemented data management using Dataverse. They saw that there were some future limitations in terms of using Microsoft SharePoint as the data source and not being able to connect to other business applications. 
  • Banco de Crédito del Perú: Developed three targeted solutions using Power Platform, Dataverse, and AI Builder, enhancing productivity and customer satisfaction. 

These case studies demonstrate how a shift away from future limiting tools towards Dataverse can drive digital transformation, foster innovation, and improve operational efficiency across various industries. 

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Agent-Ready Data Management: How Dataverse Transforms your Business http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/it-pro/agent-ready-data-management-dataverse/ Wed, 05 Feb 2025 15:41:16 +0000 Microsoft Dataverse is an enterprise-ready data platform designed to simplify how organizations integrate, manage, and access their business data.

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What is Microsoft Dataverse, and why should it matter to you? If you’ve ever struggled to organize and manage business data effectively, you’re not alone. Organizations today generate mountains of information in countless formats, but turning that data into something cohesive, accessible, and secure can feel like a monumental challenge.

From disconnected systems to ad-hoc spreadsheets, many businesses rely on manual efforts to piece data together—often at the expense of accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. The result? Fragmented insights and missed opportunities.

“When we started with Power Platform, we made the decision to jump directly into Dataverse as we saw it as the most secure and reliable way to store and manage our data – especially our mission critical data. It was a natural choice for us and it has worked amazingly well.”

Andreas Fauske, Power Platform lead at Lerøy

Read the full Lerøy story

Microsoft Dataverse: Enterprise Data Platform

Microsoft Dataverse is the enterprise data platform for business apps and agents. Makers can build hyperscale solutions, connect any data, and maintain data protections.

Enter Microsoft Dataverse, the enterprise data platform designed to simplify how organizations integrate, manage, and access their business data. As the backbone of Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse provides a fully managed, secure infrastructure that centralizes and streamlines data management while ensuring enterprise-grade security, compliance, and scalability. It minimizes duplication, maintains data integrity, and enables seamless integration across applications, making it a trusted foundation for innovation. By unifying diverse data types into a structured, future-ready model, Dataverse empowers both business users and IT professionals—offering the agility to build solutions quickly with low-code tools while meeting the rigorous governance and security needs of the enterprise.

But that’s not all. With Dataverse, your data is also agent-ready—primed for AI integration and intelligent automation. By leveraging Dataverse, you’re setting the stage for cutting-edge innovations like AI-powered bots and assistants, ensuring your data is not just organized but optimized for the future.

By connecting data within a unified data platform, organizations can seamlessly integrate AI agents wherever needed, boosting productivity and leveraging their rich data sources more effectively.

Visit the Microsoft Dataverse Overview to dive deeper into its capabilities and benefits.

“Scaling innovation securely is possible, even in highly regulated environments. BCP’s experience with Power Platform demonstrates that digital transformation can be a strategic advantage, fostering growth and innovation while maintaining compliance.”

Ivan Contreras Olortegui, Lead of Cloud Center of Excellence, Banco de Crédito del Perú

Read the full Banco de Crédito del Perú story

Today’s Challenge: Buy vs Build

In today’s data-driven business landscape, organizations face a dilemma: build custom solutions or buy off-the-shelf software. This choice, is made repeatedly across departments, has led to a complex ecosystem of disparate systems, legacy applications, and ad-hoc solutions.

 ProsCons
Build customExactly what you need
1. Tailored to your business needs
2. Limited or no recurring licensing costs
3. Flexible hosting options (On-Premises vs. Cloud)
1. High upfront costs for development, testing, and deployment
2. Longer time to value
3. Ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and support costs
4. Risk of technical debt
5. Potential vendor or key-person dependency
6. Costly to build and maintain
7. Time-consuming to deliver
Buy off-the-shelf software (ots) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).1. Ready to use, out of the box
2. Updates and maintenance handled by the SaaS company
1. Doesn’t meet growing list of needs.
2. Costs become high as usage increases
3. Requires subject matter experts to deploy at scale.
4. Limited integration options and API throttling

Such a fragmented approach to data management and application development creates significant challenges, such as data silos, inconsistent information, limited scalability, and security concerns. There is a clear and urgent need for a unified, scalable, and secure data platform that can be extended to support the organizations growing need to consume data, with the support of AI agents. This is where Dataverse comes in, bridging the gap by providing seamless access to data whenever and wherever users need it.

“Dataverse provides the enterprise security and scalability we need for larger or more strategic apps and gives us the tools to handle complex data.”

Freek Matheij, Global Citizen Development Director at Arcadis

Read the full Arcadis story

Modern Data Platform Architecture

Showing how Dataverse securely manages data from multiple sources, integrates it with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, and is readily available for Copilot Studio.

Showing how Dataverse securely manages data from multiple sources, integrates it with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, and is readily available for Copilot Studio.

Why use Dataverse?

Dataverse provides a secure, unified, fully managed data platform that empowers businesses to:

Key BenefitDescription
Connect and Centralize DataConsolidate information from multiple sources into a single, scalable platform
Enhanced Security and GovernanceLeverage built-in features like role-based access control, data classification, and automated compliance tools
Ground agents in enterprise dataUse enterprise data to give context to your agents for reliable and consistent responses tailored to your business workflows
Streamline OperationsAutomate routine tasks and reduce reliance on fragmented systems, enabling IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives
Empower MakersProvide a secure environment for low code users to build apps and workflows without compromising data integrity or governance
Future ReadyEnsure your data platform is future ready with Copilot/agents components to extend the organization’s ability to access insights

Dataverse for AI agents in Copilot Studio

As AI changes the ways we work, traditional workflows are getting reimagined as business process-oriented agents. However, even as makers are building more apps and agents than ever before, the majority of enterprise data still remains untapped.

To help makers unlock the full potential of their agents, we’ve made Dataverse a native experience in Copilot Studio. Makers can access enterprise data from Dataverse as valuable knowledge to customize and extend an agent’s range of functionality. This includes line of business (LoB) data from Microsoft Dataverse and third-party data from external sources (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow). 

Dataverse a native experience in Copilot Studio.

When incorporating Dataverse as knowledge, a customized agent is created, as demonstrated in Peppermint’s Personal Injury Claims agent demo. By integrating with Dataverse, businesses can accelerate business processes and drive transformative growth. 

See what the people are saying

The following organizations have successfully leveraged Microsoft Dataverse:

  • Lerøy Seafood Group: Implemented Power Platform with Dataverse to improve data sharing and analysis, utilizing the Center of Excellence Starter Kit for structured development.
  • ManpowerGroup: Created a strategic workforce planning tool combining Dataverse, dataflows, and Azure OpenAI Service in just two months.
  • Deutsche Bahn: Deutsche Bahn’s community of citizen developers drives innovation at scale with Power Platform to drastically reduces errors and save enormous amounts of time.
  • PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC): Migrated from a legacy system to a multitenant platform using Power Pages and Dataverse, improving innovation speed and reducing costs.

These case studies demonstrate how Dataverse can drive digital transformation, foster innovation, and improve operational efficiency across various industries.

What’s next?

In our next post, we’ll deep-dive into a common scenario of point solutions developed with Excel and SharePoint, laying out the traditional evolutionary path these systems often take, and how these can be migrated to a modern Power Platform architecture that meets the demanding needs of today’s data-driven world.

If you’re ready to revolutionize the way your organization manages data, it’s time to explore what Dataverse can do for you. Ready to learn more, check out the following resources:

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Dataverse at Microsoft Ignite Highlights http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/it-pro/dataverse-at-microsoft-ignite-highlights/ Thu, 19 Dec 2024 19:51:43 +0000 Sharing exciting Dataverse announcements from Microsoft Ignite to help customers build and customize AI powered apps, agents, and automations for business needs across the organization.

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Happy Holidays! It was great meeting so many customers and partners at Microsoft Ignite. We shared lots of exciting announcements to help customers build and customize AI powered apps, agents, and automations for business needs across the organization. Many of you have started your AI journey with Microsoft Power Platform, which is built on a single, fully managed platform, Dataverse, that scales to meet the data needs of your enterprise. Here is a quick recap on how we continue to improve the platform experience: 

Confidently drive enterprise scale on the managed platform  

In the modern digital era, the opportunity for innovation by leveraging organizational data in AI-driven scenarios is at an unprecedented high. We recently introduced autonomous agents which can operate independently, dynamically plan, and learn over time. These new agents are rapidly increasing in complexity and widely distributed across the organization:  

  • Knowledge: connect to 1300+ Power Platform connectors from the Power Platform ecosystem.
  • Actions: evolving from retrieval only to automatically performing tasks on your behalf. 
  • Channels: published to multiple internal and external channels (beyond the boundaries of Microsoft 365 Copilot). 

As AI-driven scenarios continue to grow, IT admins are architecting the next wave of innovation in their enterprises by embracing managed platform features to meet modern data demands. With the security-first capabilities provided in Power Platform’s managed platform features, the possibilities for your business are endless. 

  • Managed Security: In the Power Platform Admin Center, Security Hub is the one stop shop for IT admins to enable AI-powered enterprise security management at scale. In Security Hub, IT admins can monitor their Security Score, which compiles many of our best practices and recommendations, evaluates how your tenant stacks against our recommendations into a single score, and suggests actions to boost your tenant’s security posture.
  • Managed Governance: In the Power Platform Admin Center, boost innovation while managing risk (Copilot Hub) and getting visibility into usage patterns for ROI analysis (Licensing Hub). Copilot Hub for agent administration is the central location for agent readiness, governance, and usage. Licensing Hub simplifies management of licensing, capacity, and overages. To learn more about Dataverse capacity management, read this blog on how we now enable PayGo for overages.  
  • Managed Operations: In the Power Platform Admin Center (for admins) and Maker Portal (for makers), we have Monitoring Hub to observe and maintain optimal operations by managing changes to production environments, detect and remediate incidents, and maintain business continuity.
Managed platform features to meet modern data demands. With the security-first capabilities provided in Power Platform managed platform including managed security, managed governance, and managed operations

Hear how we manage risk at Microsoft from MS IT. Read the full blog on how Power Platform Admin Center simplifies security and governance experience.  

Customize AI agents with enterprise knowledge in Copilot Studio 

As AI changes the ways we work, traditional workflows are getting reimagined as business process-oriented agents. In the same vein, enterprise data becomes valuable knowledge that agents can use to extend the range of functionality. However, even as makers are building more apps and agents than ever before, the majority of enterprise data still remains untapped. That’s changing with Copilot Studio, which ingests a range of data sources as “knowledge” to customize your agent including:  

  • Productivity data from Microsoft Graph (Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, etc.).
  • Line of Business data from Microsoft Dataverse and third-party data from external sources (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow). 
  • Pro-code assets from Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI Search, and Azure SQL. 
Makers can use knowledge from a variety of data sources to customize agents and extend the range of functionality in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

When incorporating these sources of enterprise data as knowledge, a customized agent is created, as demonstrated in Peppermint’s Personal Injury Claims agent demo. By integrating these data sources, businesses can accelerate business processes and drive transformative growth. 

Automate e-mail, doc, and image processing with GPT with AI Builder

Much of the new, incoming enterprise data is unstructured data from documents (see examples below), emails, images, audio, video, and text that will require analysis. And even today, most of our business processes remain heavily document centric. To address this challenge, AI Builder enables makers to optimize document workflows through process automation so you can gain insights from your unstructured data. 

Most of our business processes remain document centric including Telecom, Financial Services, Supply Chain, and more. Each industry has unique document processing needs.

To manage and process incoming documents, we announced new additions to enhance existing document process workflows (Custom Document with Azure Document Intelligence 4.0) for enhanced performance and confidence scoring.  

Additionally, we announced Document Processing with GPT. GPT can facilitate document processing which eliminates the need to label data and train new models. With AI Builder, makers can build and customize AI Prompts to:  

  • Extract information from documents. 
  • Detect the language used in text.  
  • Recognize text in an image or PDF (multimodality). 
GPT can facilitate document processing which eliminates the need to label data and train new models. Setting up a document processing workflow take hours/days instead of week/months!

And much more. To quickly get started, choose from a variety of prebuilt prompts in Prompt Library. Makers can also customize prompts with enterprise knowledge from Dataverse.  

Watch an end-to-end document processing workflow in:  

  • Power Automate (Customer support demo) to categorize, translate, redirect, draft, and respond to incoming customer service emails. 
  • Power Apps (Lost and Found demo) to describe a lost item based on an image and match that description to a database containing reports of lost items.  

AI Builder powered by GPT has transformed the way makers tap into their organization’s unstructured data by building end-to-end document processing workflows. AI Builder understands incoming documents, uses knowledge from Dataverse, and completes the workflow on your behalf. To learn more, read AI Builder’s announcements Ignite blog.  

Gain direct access to data for AI app development and analytics with Microsoft Power Platform and Snowflake   

We jointly announced an expanded partnership to enable bidirectional access between Microsoft Dataverse, the data layer of Power Platform, and Snowflake. This new Snowflake Power Platform connector enables developers and business users to:  

  • Leverage data in Snowflake directly from the Power Platform. Developers can now build end-to-end business applications with their data in Snowflake, removing the operational burden of managing custom workflows. Users can create a Dataverse virtual table from Snowflake (demo).  
  • Access data in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform from Snowflake to take full advantage of the AI Data Cloud to improve analytic insights and harness the power of enterprise AI.
With the new Snowflake bidirectional connector, makers can leverage Snowflake data in Dataverse. Conversely, makers can leverage D365 + Power Platform data in Snowflake.

See how it works and hear from SKF, a global manufacturing leader, on how they have implemented the connector and are experiencing faster time-to-value by removing some of the operational complexities of data integration. Together, Microsoft + Snowflake simplify data collaboration, enhance business insights, and harness the power of AI for our customers’ business needs. 

Recap 

Dataverse is the enterprise data platform for makers to add grounded enterprise data and make agents actionable. By building on Dataverse, makers can: 

  1. Enable scale and reduce risk through a managed platform including managed security, managed governance, and managed operations. 
  2. Incorporate knowledge from across your enterprise including productivity data, Line of Business data, and pro code assets.
  3. Easily build business process workflows with GPT from unstructured data including documents, emails, images, audio, video, and text.
  4. Tap into 1300+ Power Platform connectors (including the enhanced Snowflake connector) from the growing Power Platform ecosystem.  

Learn more about Microsoft Dataverse: 

Check out other great sessions to catch up on: 

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