And the award for the catchiest news title of the year... does not go to the above. Anyway, some of you will be interested to learn that Microsoft has announced "initial Preview availability" of a new feature that allows you to create custom entities based on data from external data sources using an embedded Power Query experience in the PowerApps portal.

The Common Data Service allows users to securely store and manage data within a set of standard and custom entities. That's good if you know what an "entity" is. An entity is a set of fields used to store data similarly to a table within a database. After the data is stored in the Common Data Service users can use Microsoft PowerApps to build versatile applications using this data.

Business Apps Developers using PowerApps can now use the Power Query feature to create new entities and then load data into the Common Data Service based on data from a wide range of external data sources, including on-prem data sources such as relational databases (SQL Server, IBM DB2, etc.), Excel, Access or Text files, Online Services such as Salesforce, Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse, Web APIs, OData feeds and many other sources.

You can find more here. We will also have more information in our September newsletter. If you are not already a subscriber, simply enter your details at the bottom of any SumProduct web page and you’ll get yours very shortly.