How housing associations can get the most from Microsoft Dataverse

When we look at the future of technology for organisations, we know one thing for certain: every organisation will need to integrate digital technology into all aspects of their business processes and functions. The benefits are endless, from improving tenant satisfaction and employee experience, speeding up or removing manual processes, and more. As technology becomes more accessible to organisations, those who don’t adopt a digital first strategy are likely to fall behind and get stuck with legacy systems and processes.  

Microsoft understands this and is investing heavily in its cloud offerings – the products available in Microsoft’s Cloud go above and beyond the competition, with seamless integration with their entire suite – not just select applications and products. 

In fact, Microsoft predicts that by 2025, nearly all digital workloads will be run in the cloud. The rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies presents both new possibilities and challenges for businesses. These opportunities and challenges will depend on where the organisation is in their journey to digital.  

One of their most powerful solutions is the Microsoft Power Platform. 

What is the Microsoft Power Platform? 

The Microsoft Power Platform is a low/no-code platform that allows users to create custom business applications, automate workflows, and analyse data using Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. It allows for easy integration with other Microsoft services such as Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 and can be used to build custom solutions for tasks such as data collection, process automation, and reporting. 

Underpinning these solutions is Dataverse.  

What is Microsoft Dataverse?

Dataverse is a cloud-based data platform that is used to build and deploy custom applications and solutions. Dataverse allows organisations to create and manage data entities, build relationships between entities, and use those entities to power custom applications and solutions. It also includes a set of APIs and connectors that can be used to integrate Dataverse with other systems and platforms, making this a powerful tool for Microsoft users. 

Why should Housing Associations use Dataverse? 

The integration, data management, process automation, and form capabilities of Dataverse provide a cloud application platform that Housing Associations can leverage to implement modern low/no-code solutions to replace legacy applications and enhance and integrate these solutions into their core Housing Management platform. 

Our approach to implementing Dataverse solutions into Housing Associations is built on the foundation that they are IP Free, your solution, your roadmap, your data under your control. And for those who adopt the TSG Partnership model, we can help empower internal IT resources via knowledge transfer, training etc to become less reliant on TSG in the future and become more self-sufficient. 

Dataverse in action 

TSG recently helped Soha Housing solve a problem with the help of Dataverse – the issue was there was no digital mechanism for staff to undertake stock condition surveys and 5000 surveys needed to be delivered quickly, and securely. Furthermore, Soha was aware this couldn’t be a one-off solution – it needed to be a cloud-based ‘evergreen’ platform. A platform they wouldn’t have to worry about going out of date, essentially.  

We proposed a Microsoft Dataverse cloud solution with an iPad compatible canvas PowerApp for recording data in the field.  

We’ve also supported other housing associations such as mhs homes with a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice application that used Dataverse too. Read more about that here.