Will #Microsoft365 collaboration tools replace or complement the familiar activities in Dataverse / Dynamics 365? Yesterday the preview of the new Microsoft 365 collaboration controls for Model-driven #PowerApps was released. The announcement and Docs are fairly techy and don't yet provide much context on where/how these should be applied in real life business applications. I installed the solution from AppSource, created a small demo app and added these 1st party PCF controls into an account form as tabs for Tasks and Notes. Tasks was configured to point to a specific #MicrosofTeams team (group id), Notes didn't requrie any config. When I opened a demo account, I didn't see any tasks yet but I was able to create new ones. And just like that, a brand new #MicrosoftPlanner plan was created in the team, with the name of the Dataverse record (the account). Nice! This current feature set has the same limitation as all MS collaboration features introduced for CRM scenarios during the past decade (SharePoint, OneNote). It only supports "add new" but not "connect to existing". Not great for production use in customer specific processes. However, this time I'm a lot more optimistic about the future roadmap. Unlike before, we now have a proper low-code platform that spans across the Office productivity tools and the Dynamics / Power Apps business applications. Enabling the configuration options without writing a bunch of customer specific code should be perfectly possible. There are a lot of interesting scenarios that these M365 controls may unlock. At the same time, it will inevitably bring up the "which tool where" question in relation to the activities tracked from Outlook to Dataverse vs. the (internal) collaboration fabric of Microsoft 365.
One thing I'm confused about is whether the model driven app has to run within the context of Teams - the documentation for the Collaboration controls are currently housed within the Teams developer documentation, but they are added to Model driven apps created outside of Teams, and I'm able to use the Model Driven app outside of Teams. I have found the files control to be very slow at loading, the library only has 3 documents in it so it can't be because of volume. I wonder if existing document locations for the current the SharePoint entity integration will be able to migrate to this new files feature. Also, it appears that you need an M365 E3 or above license to be able to use this feature (as stated in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/samples/install-collaboration-control)
Ahh so cool Jukka Niiranen I am already thinking of the use cases for our internal teams. Even simple use cases for CRUD/data analytic app builds can benefit from this. With use cases being so personal I will be interested in seeing how the enable this. Do you have a link to the articles by any chance?
Thanks for your thoughts Jukka. I too am optimistic on the future of M365 collaboration and the Power Platform. Especially since Collaborative Apps is a focus point of the passed few big Microsoft conferences (and the way Microsoft is internally reorganized) I hope we get some advanced capabilities of tracking tasks in Planner. I love to architect task based work scenario's inside model-driven apps.
Really great feature, I'm really interested to see the next gen SharePoint files setup. The old control didn't support sub folders, from the screenshots on the announcement I think the new PCF does though
Thank you for sharing Jukka! Andreas Seitz something maybe to consider in our current project
great job
Senior Functional Consultant at Stoneridge Software | Power Platform Evangelist & Speaker
1yThis is incredible, and I’m hopeful for the future. The first question any user is going to ask will be around why do they have overlapping capabilities in the Timeline and these new features. I’m guessing they don’t show up in the Timeline? Exciting new possibilities lie ahead as this bridge is built, especially knowing the investment from Microsoft is a large one.