Plan and prepare for data integration in 2021 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Integrate data into Microsoft Dataverse. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for data integration.
Overview
The data integration team's vision is to democratize data for business users so it's seamless to extract, transform, and load into Microsoft Dataverse and Azure Data Lake Storage from any data source and to allow other Microsoft products to leverage this data.
We are investing in a few key pillars:
Microsoft Power Platform dataflows. Power Query is the industry-leading smart data prep tool and evolves by infusing artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) into data transformations and by extending dataflows to all of Microsoft Power Platform. In 2021 release wave 1, we're enabling the dataflows experience in Dataverse in Teams so that customers can easily populate data and build better applications.
Enhanced data integration by enabling analytics on Dataverse data through the Export to Data Lake in Common Data Model form, new and enhanced connectors, and improvements in the connectivity platform. Other enhancements include Office data integration to enable new insights, extending dual-write for more entities, improving Data Export Service, and enhancing the gateway for enterprises and Robotics Process Automation (RPA).
End-to-end diagnostics so that customers can better diagnose and fix issues in queries or the gateway.
The Common Data Model establishment of industry-wide structure and semantics of underlying data so that customers can reason about that data through various business application solutions, analytics, and machine learning (ML) algorithms.
Updates to data integration 2021 release wave 2
Investment areas
Microsoft Power Platform connectors
A critical part of data integration and the suite of products it supports—Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Query—is connectivity to external data sources. The connector platform has two key objectives: providing a platform that allows partners and customers to develop connectors efficiently and providing a rich set of connectors for customers.
As part of platform investments, we provide a rich set of tools, samples, and documentation to help partners and customers build connectors. We also invest in our certification processes and tools for connectors so that partners can get their connectors certified and make them available on the platform. A key investment here is also geared towards leveraging the larger community by open-sourcing connectors.
Along with strengthening the ISV community's ability to create their own connectors, we plan to continue to invest in enterprise-grade data connectors such as SQL Server, SAP, Oracle Database, and Outlook.
Power Query connectors
Power Query connectors enable connectivity to hundreds of applications, websites, databases, online services, and systems of record, quickly and easily with no code experience. Every connector is built following Microsoft's best practices for seamless integration and use.
Power Query Online
Power Query is the data connectivity and data preparation experience for users across a wide variety of Microsoft products and services, including Power BI, Excel, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and more. For more information, go to Power Query.
Microsoft Power Platform dataflows
Microsoft Power Platform dataflows provide a no-code experience based on Power Query Online for non-technical users to connect, transform, and enrich data from a wide variety of sources into Microsoft Dataverse and Azure Data Lake Storage in the Common Data Model format.
Dataflows provide the building blocks that allow Microsoft to enable out-of-box analytics and AI insights—such as those provided by AI Builder and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—making them a huge differentiator for Dynamics 365 offerings.
On-premises data gateway
The on-premises data gateway is a well-established product that's widely used by enterprises to access on-premises data sources and transfer petabytes of data weekly. Today, gateways are used either with one or a combination of services and applications like Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps, and others. Based on enterprise requests, we plan to continue to focus on making the on-premises data gateway an enterprise-grade product with features such as enhancements to load balancing, monitoring, and integration with additional services in the current milestone.
VNet data gateways
This feature allows enterprises that subscribe to VNet connectivity for their data services in Azure to seamlessly connect to Microsoft Power Platform using VNet data gateways.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for data integration below:
For application administrators
User impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.