Two days ago when we started with Microsoft Inspire, Charles Lamanna published new blog post about Introducing Microsoft Dataflex, a new low-code data platform for Microsoft Teams. But he also announced that Common Data Service has now been renamed to Microsoft Dataflex Pro… and everybody were confused.

What happened with CDS, what is Microsoft Dataflex and what is difference in comparison with Dataflex Pro? Many of people went to Wikipedia and found DataFlex there…

I will try to avoid any additional confusing on this topic and try to be very short and very clear.

First, DataFlex you found on Wikipedia doesn’t have anything with Microsoft Dataflex (& Pro). You can go there and read what it is, but this is not my topic.

As the second fact, Microsoft Dataflex Pro is Common Data Service. Nothing more and nothing less. This is just rebranding. You can see that we still have old URL with common-data-service there. If you know CDS, you will know Dataflex Pro. If don’t, you can find a lot of materials on Microsoft learning site… and I’ll highly recommend starting to learn it if you are doing with Microsoft BizApps.

As this rebranding can confuse, I tried to create one timeline with all these changes. I’m not 100% sure I didn’t miss something, but it will be more then enough to understand what happened here.

And not as a third topic – Microsoft Dataflex (without ‘Pro’). What it is and what it isn’t? This is built-in, low-code data platform for Teams, and it is built atop the Common Data Service (or to use new name, atop the Microsoft Dataflex Pro 😊). This tool will help Teams users to easily build custom apps inside. You will not need to leave Teams and to build everything inside it with really user-friendly UI. You can build apps using Dataflex as environment and together with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. And this is not full CDS… this is just a subset of Dataflex Pro capabilities and usage is limited to within Teams.

As I said I’ll be short, I don’t want to write details about it and I’ll just recommend to read Charles Lamanna blog post about it and to find some good presentations on Microsoft Inspire digital event: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-dataflex-a-new-low-code-data-platform-for-microsoft-teams/.