Plan and prepare for Microsoft Dataverse in 2025 release wave 1

Important

The 2025 release wave 1 plan covers new functionalities that Microsoft plans to deliver from April 2025 to September 2025. In this article, you see the product overview and the new and planned features for Microsoft Dataverse.

Overview

Microsoft Dataverse is a low-code data platform that makes it easy to build scalable and interconnected Copilot applications, automations, and agents. Here are some of the key capabilities of Dataverse:

• Do more with your data: Easily use data and metadata from different sources for generative AI workflows and Copilot applications.
• Enrich your Copilot experience: Integrate, search, and act on the data you use daily. Create dynamic prompts with grounded enterprise data using Azure OpenAI large language models (LLM) and connect to external sources.
• Build custom actions: Build custom connectors, plugins, and custom APIs that package business logic and services into your business processes.
• Proactive data security: Assess, act, and safeguard your data with advanced security features.
• Fully managed and fully integrated: Get built-in support for enterprise application lifecycle management across the Power Platform ecosystem.
• End-to-end security: Protect your data with a robust security management infrastructure that provides critical security and compliance capabilities, including advanced encryption, rich access control, and deep integration with Microsoft Entra ID. Build trust with advanced security features and interoperation with Microsoft Sentinel.
• Compliance capabilities: Get audit logs for all AI data access with Microsoft Purview.

Updates to Microsoft Dataverse 2025 release wave 1

Investment areas

Activate enterprise data in Copilot
Activate your organization's enterprise data with copilot capabilities by using more than 1,000 Power Platform connectors, Power Automate flows, AI plug-ins, and actions from Dynamics 365 applications such as Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service, and finance and operations. You can use the activated enterprise data in different copilots, including Copilot for Microsoft 365 apps (Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams), business applications copilots that are native to each Dynamics 365 app, and custom-built copilots. With Microsoft Dataverse, you can collaborate on enterprise data without switching between applications, whether you're sending or receiving emails, creating or joining Teams meetings, or linking Teams chats to records.

Build your low-code hyperscale backend on Dataverse This semester, you can accelerate low-code experiences for apps built on Dataverse. Makers can create reusable low-code business logic in Dataverse and catalog it so other makers in the organization can discover and use these apps. To increase the value of maker investments in the organization, use these reusable actions by copying and pasting Power Fx logic from a canvas app into Dataverse actions. You can also call connector actions directly to run external business logic. You can use these actions across Power Platform.

Data workspace
When you start using copilot, enterprise data plays a key role in adopting reliable copilot-enabled applications.

With data workspace features, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform customers can use the AI-assisted mapping feature to simplify integrating external data into existing Dataverse tables. This feature enhances the data management process. It offers assisted mapping for standard dataflows and lets you bypass business logic. These capabilities make data migration faster and smoother. The consolidated experience for loading data from Excel directly into a Dataverse table simplifies your data import strategy. Integrating Fabric OneLake as a data source with a no-ETL, no-copy approach simplifies your data export strategy.

The product also provides integrated experiences to upgrade from Export to Data Lake. It maintains security role privileges for better ALM solution imports. It allows you to mask sensitive data with column-level security. Security features prevent data exfiltration with app access and user-level controls. You can scan files and attachments for viruses and malware. These features ensure robust protection. Modernizing sharing apps and data access, along with the ability to share system views with security roles, reflects a focus on collaboration and accessibility.

Extend your copilots with knowledge and actions
Microsoft Dataverse lets you extend your Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and custom agents you create in Microsoft Copilot Studio. Use Copilot plugins for tools (formerly actions) and add enterprise knowledge sources to improve the reliability and quality of responses.

You can extend your Copilot by adding tools and specific knowledge. Connect external systems, write specific instructions, or set up specific references. Plugins are the most popular version of an action. Use existing plugins available in Copilot Studio or create your own. Set specific descriptions for these plugins to help Copilot call them. To change how you or your users interact with Copilot, create prompts. Give specific instructions in prompts. Use prompts to ground Dataverse data into Copilot.

In Microsoft Copilot Studio, the knowledge center powered by Dataverse is the central place to add and manage all your data sources and knowledge sources across all three clouds with your copilot:

• Operational data (Dataverse)
• Productivity data (Microsoft 365)
• Analytical insights (Microsoft Fabric)

Copilot Studio includes built-in Dataverse. Dataverse connectors and plug-ins expose APIs or use an MCP server. Dataverse connectors and plug-ins use two distinct plugin systems. These systems differ in architecture and purpose.

Copilot plugins use APIs to extend the conversational abilities of AI copilots and agents. In contrast, Dataverse plug-ins are C# components that run in a sandboxed process within Dataverse. Use these plug-ins to enforce business logic directly within Dataverse.

By using simple configurations and natural language, you can use the knowledge center to connect all your Copilot experiences to the knowledge sources you choose. This connection helps you get more value from your enterprise data. Besides Microsoft data sources, you can also provide other knowledge sources like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk to the custom Copilot.

Finance and operations cross application integration
Unified management experience in Power Platform admin center

When you use the Power Platform admin center, you get a unified experience for managing users, roles, licenses, and storage for finance and operations apps environments. You don't need to go to finance and operations apps separately. This enhancement gives you a cohesive management experience in the Power Platform admin center.

Key benefits:

• User and role management: Manage finance and operations apps users and roles directly in the Power Platform admin center.
• License compliance: Efficiently manage licenses to meet licensing requirements.
• Storage insights: Get detailed insights into storage consumption and take necessary actions to manage storage.

This update gives you a unified and streamlined management experience.

Enhance the Copilot Studio ecosystem for enterprise scale
Microsoft Dataverse is the backend engine that powers Copilot Studio. To meet customer needs, the ecosystem needs to support reliable and scalable onboarding, customization, and management. The Dataverse ecosystem brings these capabilities to Copilot Studio through catalog, security, solutions, and virtualization. Customers who start their agent journey with Copilot Studio benefit from this ecosystem.

Use catalog features to discover and install all publicly hosted agents and locally hosted agents into Copilot Studio. After you install catalog features, you can easily move catalogs between environments in the same tenant. Use catalog features to manage prebuilt vertical solutions or add-on agents.

Use security features to secure and control all agents you install in Copilot Studio. As an administrator, you decide who can see specific data and what privileges they get.

Use solutions to manage all assets in Copilot Studio. You can easily handle continuous updates, upgrades, installs, uninstalls, and transport tasks.

With virtualization, connect to external data sources and enable external data as knowledge for your agents and agentic offerings.

Improved enterprise experiences in Power Platform By improving the experiences for building apps, flows, and solutions with templates and standard components, as well as improving the way you connect, map, and use data, enterprise organizations discover more delightful experiences across Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse.

Microsoft 365 collaboration
Microsoft Dataverse powers many collaboration capabilities, including integrations with different Microsoft 365 products like Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and Teams. Dataverse enables users to collaborate with colleagues across your company without the need to switch between applications when you're sending or receiving emails, creating or joining Teams meetings, or linking Teams chats to records.

For more information about the capabilities delivered in this release wave, see the release plan for Microsoft Dataverse:

See the release plan

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience that the release automatically enables
Application administrators review user-impacting features. This review process helps manage release changes and supports onboarding new capabilities. For the complete list, see all features tagged Users, automatically in the release plan.

Features that application administrators enable
Administrators, makers, or business analysts enable or configure features in this release wave. To make these features available for users, see all features tagged Users by admins, makers, or analysts in the release plan.