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Migration from Dataverse to Dataverse for Teams

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Posted on by Baltner

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Greetings:

I've built an entire app in Power Apps Studio with Dataverse tables as the data source (including two many-to-many relationships). Recently I found out that my company won't support the extra cost of using a Premium connector so I'm looking to move everything in the solution (app and data tables) to Teams, where using Dataverse won't involve extra licensing beyond what we have now.

I've done a little research on this topic and the advice I'm seeing is to first migrate the data using Data Flows to Teams and then export/import the app itself. It's the first step in this process where I am currently stuck (because of my ignorance about Data Flows). After selecting the tables that I want to add to Teams from my default environment and then trying to publish the new tables, I keep getting errors about reserved column names for the alternate key columns. Here's just one example:
Screen Shot 2023-04-05 at 5.22.39 PM.png

I'm getting this error for all the tables I'm trying to migrate, including the intersection tables used in the many-to-many relationships.

What's the right way to avoid the above issue? Do I have to remove the column before publishing?

Also, there's a good chance that I'm doing things wrong in this process right from the start. Is there a good, comprehensive, guide available for moving an app that uses Dataverse from Power Apps to Power Apps for Teams?

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Baltner,

Good question on is there an overall guide to migrate from Dataverse full to Dataverse For Teams (DV4T). I haven't seen anything and typically it's the other way around... On another note, have you tried to contact your local Microsoft representative to get the most optmial licensing cost? Usually they can advise on a best option than just retail. If you have just an app it's as low as $5/month (https://learn.microsoft.com/power-platform/admin/about-powerapps-perapp) and also Power Apps also has the option of pay per use. Anyways, to back to the error, I think it's because you configured the Dataflow to load to a new table. The better option in my opinion is to leverage Excel directly to import data instead of Dataflows. Here's more info on how to edit or create rows in Excel: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/use-edit-in-excel-in-dataverse-for-teams/

Hope this helps!
Baltner 149 on at

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Thanks for the reply. To respond directly to your comments:
My vendor has quoted a price as low as $4.70/month and that is certainly small enough except that the "per app" plan is really a "per app/per user" plan. Since approximately 20 users will hit my app, that's $94/month, which I assessed as a show-stopper and a reason to move to Dataverse for Teams. That being said, I find Microsoft licensing to be terribly (deliberately?) confusing, so I may be wrong about this.
As for using Excel to avoid the "new Table" issue, I read the article you cited but it didn't convince me that this would help me maintain the many-to-many relationships that I have in the the existing Dataverse schema.
It is so unintuitive that you can't use data flows to create new tables without running into this "reserved column name" problem that I gave up on data flows and tried another solution, which was to simply export my solution (luckily my app was in a solution and not standalone) from the full Power Apps environment to the Teams environment. There were some challenges though:
I had some components in a component library that were flagged as dependencies and this prevented a successful import. Luckily there were only a few and I was able to easily add them as "local" components and re-export after removing the dependency.
The data tables were migrated as part of the solution but not the data within the tables. Again, I'm lucky that I had dozens of records to reproduce in this case and not hundreds or thousands.
Most of the 'instant' workflows associated with the app (but not the solution) did not get exported/imported so I have to import them after the fact and I'm still struggling with this issue (the subject of another posting to this community).
Bottom line: I am pleased that it was not that difficult to move back to PowerApps for Teams but more than a little concerned about why it has to be this hard and also about problems that may still litter the path to a final working app inTeams.