Teams ♥ Dataverse for Teams

 About a month ago we had the annual Scottish Summit. It's a fantastic event organised by an amazing crew with support from sponsors and volunteers. The last in-person event was last year before different countries started to head into lockdown due to the global pandemic. This year it was a virtual event and it was fun. I myself did not stay awake for the whole event as I'm in a timezone where it gets late in the night as the event progresses but waking up to see the commotion on Twitter was cool which shows the global reach of Scottish Summit.

This year I presented alongside Daniel Laskewitz, a good friend and Microsoft MVP in the Netherlands, who also has a YouTube channel. We presented on Teams loves Dataverse for Teams, specifically on the Power Apps side.

What we presented

I covered how you can create an environment for a team and create a Canvas app from scratch within teams, including creating your own tables. For the use case I created a simple timesheet entry app. Note the emphasis on simple as this is not something I would recommend if you're an organisation that requires a timesheet entry for your internal and external resources as that's better suited by an enterprise solution. This was merely for the purpose to show you how straight forward it is to create your own tables and Canvas app from scratch in Dataverse for Teams.

Daniel covered how you can get started with the templates that are available today. A couple of weeks before the event, two new templates were released which Daniel did not cover. The Dataverse templates available today are

1. Employee ideas - covered by Daniel
2. Inspection - covered by Daniel
3. Issue Reporting - covered by Daniel
4. Bulletin
5. Milestones

Watch on demand

• Introduction
• Agenda
• Meet Dataverse for Teams
• Cameo appearance of Ryan Cunningham
• Follow Ryan on Twitter
• Why Dataverse for Teams
• What we're going to show you today
• Demo
• How to install Power Apps in Microsoft Teams
• How to create a new app from scratch in Microsoft Teams
• How to create new tables
• Customizing the app
• Creating a new view for the table to use in the Gallery
• Customizing the Gallery layout
• Customizing the form
• Pre-populating fields in the app
• Publishing the app
• The app in action as an end user
• Templates available in Dataverse for Teams
• Employee ideas template
• Issue Reporting template
• Inspection template

Additional notes from me

When I was explaining how to default the current user in the Name field, what I forgot to explain is best practice in applying a variable and condition that checks the mode the form is in. A variable will help with the performance of the app and when defaulting to the current user based on the form mode as explained by Shane Young in this vlog. Shane's YouTube channel is full of great Power Apps content so make sure you subscribe. You won't get bored by watching his videos, he is quite the entertainer 😄

How to learn about the other two Dataverse for Teams templates

April Dunnam, another well known person in our Microsoft community has a couple of vlogs that were published shortly after the two templates were released so I recommend you check these out too.

• Bulletin
• Milestones

Like Shane's, April's YouTube channel is a giant library of content so subscribe to her channel too. Both release weekly videos.

April also recently appeared in the #LessCodeMorePower Channel 9 show with Dona Sarkar and Sarah Critchley in creating Canvas apps in Microsoft Teams which I highly recommend you watch too.

How to keep up to date on what's next for Dataverse for Teams

• Follow Power Apps on Twitter
• Subscribe to the Power Apps blog

Both of these sources will announce when something new and cool has been released for Dataverse for Teams.