Microsoft Dataverse for Teams is a lowcode development environment for building Apps, Chatbots and Flows in Microsoft Teams. Citizen developers can build applications that are accessed directly from Teams. Dataverse was formerly known as the Common Data Service (CDS), the Teams edition provides a subset of functionality for Teams users without any additional licensing costs.

The security model uses Office 365 Groups (the Group used by the Team) to control access to the Apps and data. Guest users can use Apps, making it possible to build solutions where guest users interact.

In this video I walk through adding PowerApps to Microsoft Teams, how to create a new App and create a table using Dataverse. I also demo one of the demo Apps provided by Microsoft showing how end users will interact.

A few facts about Microsoft Dataverse for Teams:

• Team members have access to Apps and Data.
• Guest users can run Apps and have access to data they created.
• No additional licensing is required to use the Microsoft Dataverse for Teams data source.
• PowerApps in Teams can also use other data sources e.g. SharePoint data.
• The maximum number of Dataverse for Teams environment is 500 per tenant.
• The maximum data size is 10GB + 2GB per Dataverse environment – max of 1TB total capacity per tenant.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies can be used to protect data.
• PowerApps analytics can be used to report on App usage.
• Apps are only accessible via the Teams App or mobile App.
• There is no API access to Dataverse for Teams data.

Microsoft Dataverse for Teams adds a great new capability to bring buisness processes right into Teams. I recommend spending some time creating application and data governance rules to ensure you have good practices in place. Learn how to manage Dataverse for Teams environments.

As mentioned earlier, Dataverse for Teams has a subset of the functionality found in the enterprise version simply called Dataverse. Learn more here ‘Dataverse vs Dataverse for Teams‘.

I look forward to seeing how Dataverse for Teams develops over the coming months.