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Telephone Directory

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Posted on by fmourtaza

Hello Folks,

I have got a requirement to develop a Telephone Directory using Power Apps - using the Office 365 connectors, Microsoft as provided many handy connectors such as Office365Users.SearchUser

My challenge is that the app has to work locally - Offline without internet access - means there has to be some local DB who will hold the Company data on each user's machine. In this case what would be the best possible approach? taking in consideration performance and syncing all the properties from the Active Directory...

Thanks in advance.

Regards.

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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 @fmourtaza,

Since you need offline support, I would suggest to leverage Common Data Service (CDS) as the backend and a model-driven app which offers offline capabilities out-of-the-box. You can configure a Power Automate flow to get telephone data from Office 365 and upsert into CDS records.

You can refer to the following guide to setup offline. Even though it says Dynamics 365, it should be supported in CDS:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/mobile-app/preview-setup-mobile-offline

Hope this helps...

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fmourtaza 98 on at

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Hi @EricRegnier

This looks interesting - thanks for sharing.

Using this approach, all the data would be available locally on each user's device (whoever using the app) - right ?

Regards.

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v-jefferni on at

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Hi @fmourtaza ,

Please reference to the official doc and bolg below:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/offline-apps
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/implementing-offline-capability-in-your-app/

In an off-line app, we usually use local collections for data management. As you mentioned, you want to retrieve all properties from Azure AD. If there are a large quantity of users in the tenant, I’m afraid thumbnails would occupy the most of storage and take much time to upload/download which would affect the performance, so you'd better get rid of them.

Also, Office365Users.SearchUser method could get up to 1000 records. Please reference the doc to see limitations:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365users/#known-issues-and-limitations

If you have more users, you could consider to create a custom connector based on Microsoft Graph REST API.

Please reference below blog:
https://gotoguy.blog/2017/12/17/access-microsoft-graph-api-using-custom-connector-in-powerapps-and-flows/

If you have any further details, please let us know. Hope this help.

Best regards,
Community Support Team _ Jeffer Ni
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it.

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EricRegnier 8,720 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Yes assuming you configured those entities to be available offline and the desired data to be available offline. Cheers

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