Introduction
AI-assisted tools and command-line clients increasingly need to read live business data to answer questions, summarize records, or trigger lightweight automation. Wiring each of these tools to Dataverse through custom, one-off integration code is slow to build and hard for IT to govern consistently.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) addresses this gap by giving MCP clients a standardized way to discover and call a defined set of operations against Power Platform data. IT still retains full control over exactly which tables and actions are exposed.
Scenario: Equipment requests in a custom Dataverse solution
Contoso tracks employee equipment requests in a custom Dataverse solution built around four tables: employee, device, request, and allowance. When an employee requests a replacement laptop or monitor, the solution checks the employee's eligibility. An external service reports current device availability, and a coordinator tracks the request through approval and fulfillment.
Contoso's IT team already publishes a governed, read-only Dataverse MCP server over this data, exposing a deliberately limited, allow-listed set of tools. A developer on the equipment-provisioning team wants to connect a supported MCP client, see exactly which tools the server exposes, and retrieve the list of open replacement requests. All of this happens without writing new integration code or touching how the server itself is built or registered.
What you explore in this module
In this module, you explore how to connect a supported MCP client to an already-governed Dataverse MCP server like the one Contoso's IT team maintains. You also inspect the tools it exposes, and invoke a bounded Dataverse operation such as retrieving open equipment requests. You also learn where the governance boundary sits between consuming an existing MCP server and building or registering a new one.
By the end of this module, you can connect a supported client to an existing Dataverse MCP server, and inspect and invoke its allow-listed tools. You can also explain why building or registering a new MCP server falls outside this consumer role.